Implausibly, but inevitably, one of the moons that had crashed to the planet’s surface spontaneously reformed out of space debris and flew back into orbit. Astronomers marvelled, and wrote learned papers calculating the odds against such a thing happening. But, all the same, it happened.
I read an account of new life-forms evolving out of insects in a swimming pool. Such accelerated evolution was of course preposterously unlikely. But the new insects – like wasps with rams’ horns – soon became a summer plague.
I heard, in the bars and street corners, stories of gamblers in the casinos who were able to throw double sixes at Hazard again, and again, and again. But sometimes the dice didn’t land; they floated in air; and their spots vanished, quantum-teleporting into some other parallel universe.
A mood of panic gripped the city. This wasn’t war, this was madness.
But after a month of horror, the nights of chaos became less common. Instead of every night, they came once a week. Then once a fortnight. Perhaps the anciens were, I hypothesised, feeling the effects of their own chaos? Maybe their own food supplies were turning to slush? Or their bunkers were becoming flooded by underground rivers that used to not exist?
Whatever the explanation, I started to feel a glimmer of hope. The normal rules of probability were starting to be restored. Life was returning to normal.
And then I went into my local saloon, and caught a sideways look from the bartender.
And I knew that the hunt was on.
I did not return to my apartment. Instead, I went on the run in the fourteenth Canton. I walked the streets day and night, hid in shadows, skulked in sunlight.
Then one night in a bar, I overheard two men talking: “That may be him,” they murmured, and I left and did not return. Instead I walked to the Dark Side, and assumed a new identity as a former pimp turned evangelist. But one day, talking to a whore, I saw a flash of recognition in her eyes, and I walked out and did not return.
I decided I needed to change my body, so I caught a flying car to the old Industrial Zone. Here, among the designer apartments, was a vast complex which was once a fabricator building, which I had converted into a base of operations. These particular premises were not known to any of my former associates, so I thought I was safe there.
I stared and a piece of warehouse wall opened. I stepped inside and heard nothing and saw nothing, and even my radar sense didn’t alert me.
Then something hit me hard in the back and I fell over.
For a moment, the shock shut my systems down and I blacked out. But then I was on my feet and running.
A second plasma-rifle blast ripped past my ear. I leaped in the air, and turned, and landed with both guns firing. But there was no sign of my assailant. I realised air was passing through a huge hole in my torso, but my backup systems were dealing with it.
My feet ignited and rocket jets propelled me upwards and I crashed through the ceiling to safety. But something had caught hold of my feet, and I was pulled back down.
I crashed to the ground once again, and I saw Sheriff Heath’s blue eyes and his walrus moustache, as he aimed the plasma rifle at point-blank range at my head.
I drew and fired and the Sheriff’s arm flew off, and the rifle clattered to the ground. The Sheriff recovered and pulled out a pistol with the other hand, but I fired, again and again. My bullets blew off the Sheriff’s face, and the old man pitched forward.
I got to my feet. I inspected the hole in my chest where the Sheriff had shot me with his plasma rifle; it was a perfect circle, twenty centimetres in diameter. In my previous body this would have been fatal, because my cybernetic circuits were housed in my torso. But on this particular model, the cybernetic brain was located in the skull. My injuries were inconvenient, but not fatal.
I inspected the Sheriff’s corpse. I felt for a pulse and there was none. I kicked the plasma rifle out of the way.
And the Sheriff’s dead hand caught hold of my ankle.
And the Sheriff pulled himself to his feet. His face was blood and spittle and he had no nose and his throat had been blown to pieces and his arm was severed, and blood was gouting from it at a terrifying rate.
“Almost,” subvocalised the Sheriff, “fucking got you.”
The Sheriff clearly had an oxygen capsule in his brain that was keeping him alive, even though there was no oxygen in his lungs, and his heart no longer beat.
“Why?” I said.
“It was you, wasn’t it? The chaos.”
“It was the anciens. They’re fighting back. I can win though. I can win,” I said, confidently.
“Not,” gasped the Sheriff, “worth it. Better to be a slave race than go through what we do every night. Each and every fucking night!”
“I disagree,” I said calmly, and coldly. “I consider it is a risk worth taking. I will defeat these enemies. I thought you were my ally, but clearly you are not. Have you gone over to their side?”
“No,” said the Sheriff, “but don’t you fucking see, you can’t win! Anyone else would realise that and quit. But I know you, I know you’ll carry on beyond the point of no return, when every man and woman jack on the planet is either dead or fuckin’ Cubist. You have to give in. Now. Give up. Now!”
“Never,” I said, and the Sheriff died.
I now had a choice: I could either download my memories into a new body and hence rebirth myself. Or I could physically remove my cybernetic brain from this existing body and simply rechassis it.
I chose the latter option, to avoid any loss of continuity of memory. And so, three hours later, when I stood proud in a new humaniform body, I was the same person, albeit taller and blonder, with the same consciousness, and the same memories.
And the same regrets.
Sheriff Heath, I mused, had been a flawed and an arrogant man, but nonetheless, a good man. And he had clearly believed that I was a danger to humanity. By declaring war on a race of superhumans, so the Sheriff had posited, I ran the risk of causing the deaths of every single human on Belladonna.
Was that, in fact, a risk worth taking?
I considered the question.
And what made me so sure that I had the right to take such staggering risk on behalf of a billion human beings, without consulting any of them?
I considered that question too.
I loaded the Sheriff’s corpse into a flying car and drove it to the hospital. I authorised a resurrection, but after triage, it was discovered that the Sheriff was registered as DNR – Do Not Rejuve. He was too old for any life-prolonging gene therapy. And without that, without a bracing dose of rejuve in his system, his brain could not be revived. The Sheriff was true-dead.
I felt the pain of his loss intensely.
A week later, the anciens struck again; it was the worst Night of Chaos so far.
For a whole night, from sundown to sunrise, reality was insulted, distressed, humiliated, and undermined. Thousands died, and panic spread through the streets. I saw cannibals eating their prey openly: a lust for human flesh was a rarity among human beings, but it was possible.
That night, four thousand people were killed by lightning strikes, and one thousand of those were true-dead, their brains literally fried alive by electricity.
That night, a small volcano erupted inside a rock club on the Dark Side, and was snuffed out by robot firefighters. The burning lava oozed its way out through the doors on to the moving walkways, and into the bars and brothels nearby.
That night, an infestation of tapeworms sprang out of nowhere and children and adults spewed out two-foot-long serpents that had eaten most of their intestines.
That night, twelve dozen men suffered heart attacks, after a freak blockage in their aortic arteries. All the men, by a massive coincidence, were called Carl.
That night, it rained, and the rain fell up.
I watched it all through my army of dragonflies, but still I kept my resolve.
The anciens were playing a dangerous game, for they knew as well as I
did that too much unreality could spell the end of –
Reality itself.
I continued to bitterly regret the death of Sheriff Heath.
I also regretted, bitterly, the many deaths of innocents as the nights of Chaos continued.
I also, bitterly and wretchedly, regretted not seeing Aretha any more, except via my dragonflies.
I had watched her via my dragonfly spies the day the Sheriff died, when she attended the mortuary to ID the body. It was clear to me, as she nodded her head to confirm his identity, and as tears streamed down her face, that she was angry as well as emotionally distressed.
Later, she swore and ranted to close friends of Heath – a blend of coppers, martial arts enthusiasts, and hard-core numetal fans – and blamed it all on that “fucking cyborg.” I wished I could have been there to explain why I had done what I did.
But I dared not show myself.
For I was a target now, and anyone who spoke to me was a target. I was sure that the anciens were paying spies to keep an eye on all my known associates, and Sergeant Aretha Jones came into that category.
My big fear was that the anciens would capture Aretha and torture her in order to find out my whereabouts.
I could afford no friends. Not any more. Mine was a solitary war. And yet, through my computer networks and camera eyes, I saw everything that happened on the planet, and I knew the name of every single citizen. I witnessed every birth and every death; I saw quarrels between lovers; lovers making up; children rebelling against their parents. My cybernetic consciousness had expanded to such an extent that sometimes I forgot I was just hardmetal and hardplastic in a humaniform skin coating.
And I saw so much, about so many, that it was becoming hard to care about what happened to specific individuals, however terrible those happenings might be.
Aretha, however, was and always would be special to me.
I longed to see Aretha, and I did see Aretha, and I devoted as many husserls of consciousness to her as I did to the rest of the planet put together.
Every night, the highlight of my day was to watch her get into bed, and slowly drift off to sleep. I loved to watch her dream, her eyes moving rapidly under closed lids, her breath coming fast. She was still a noisy sleeper, still groany, and she still snored! But these days, she also talked in her sleep – little mumbly commands and interjections – “Oh Christ no!” or “Oh fuck! oh fuck!” I found it enchanting.
Every day, I spent a disproportionately large amount of time watching her at work, dealing with the human consequences of the war between myself and the anciens. She was a fierce and formidable cop, and yet she had compassion. I admired that enormously.
And every evening, I watched her in her apartment, sipping first-rate red wine, and reading, with her lips moving along to the words cutely and anachronistically.
I realised I was locked into a pattern of obsessive behaviour regarding this woman, but I found myself unable to kick the habit.
I also, as a matter of routine, kept an eye on Macawley. I was anxious that she too would be tagged as one of my associates. But so far that hadn’t happened.
She had, however, been highly distraught at the death of the Sheriff. The two of them had developed a kind of friendship, based on mutual mockery. He had, I knew from my surveillance of her, started inviting her to his weekly poker games, where she generally won. A few times, they went to ball games together. It would not be unreasonable to say that Macawley had become like a daughter to the old man.
But now the Sheriff was dead, blown to pieces by her supposed friend the Galactic Cop, and Macawley found it hard to cope with that. She experienced, I noticed, a period of profound depression. She listened to loud music, at excessive volumes. She took uppers and downers and moodchangers. She mixed with friends who were highly promiscuous, and semi-suicidal, and obsessed with death cults. And her general approach was more cynical than it had ever been before.
However, on the plus side, Macawley did have a boyfriend – on a non-monogamous basis – a pure-human who was studying physics at the University. His name was Jonjo, and he had great ideas about how he would revolutionise science. And he also had a variety of theories about what was causing the unreality attacks, some of which, I conceded, were fairly accurate.
He and Macawley were good together; they bickered all the time, which I loved to witness and to eavesdrop upon; indeed, sometimes I joined in the banter, though of course they could not hear me.
I was pleased to see that he refrained from nagging her, even when she drank too much, and slept around, and spent too much time daydreaming and talking to herself.
Aretha and Macawley only met once during this period, at the funeral of Sheriff Heath. My dragonflies were there when they cried in each other’s arms. I was there too when they drank a toast to the dead Sheriff, and swigged back neat malt whisky in his honour.
And I was there when they both spat contempt at the evil bastard cyborg killer of this old, true man.
My dragonflies followed Aretha home once more that night. And I was with her when she cried herself to sleep.
And I was with her a month later when her MI buzzed, in the middle of the night, on an urgent disaster alert in the seventh Canton.
And I was with her too when she attended the scene, and found a scene of chaos and destruction. An earthquake had damaged an entire street, and a house had slipped down into the bowels of the Earth. Witnesses confirmed that the house had been occupied when the quake hit. A woman and two children lived there, and were missing presumed dead.
And my dragonflies were watching and listening when Aretha informed a colleague that she knew the house, and its inhabitants. The house was in fact owned by her sister, Deborah. And Aretha also knew the two children who had been living in the house with Debs, and who were now also missing and presumed dead.
For they were Aretha’s children.
As I walked I could smell flowers, and the smell sickened me.
The camera-images of the destruction replayed in my mind’s eye, but I carried on walking. I wanted to experience the scene for myself.
The earthquake had been an astonishing freak accident. There were no tectonic plates under Lawless City, and the planet of Belladonna was rarely subject to quakes of this kind. But a one-in-a-trillion natural disaster had caused the house to literally topple down a vast crack in the planet’s crust.
I saw the fissure and marvelled; it was larger than Belladonna’s largest river. I peered down and saw a vastness below.
This implausible event was, of course, a consequence of the anciens’ war against me. But I didn’t think that Aretha’s children had been deliberately targeted. If the anciens had known how I felt about Aretha, they would have kidnapped her and the children and ransomed their bodies to me.
No, this was simply a dumb, stupid, ridiculous coincidence.
I saw Aretha at the scene, her face pale and tortured. I noted that eleven other houses had been damaged, but only one – Aretha’s sister’s house – had fallen down the crack. I noted too how the huge fissure yawned in the middle of this suburban street. Tendrils of smoke crept out of the hole in the ground, bleakly hinting at the mayhem in the deepest reaches of the planet.
Grief was commonplace these days; appalling disasters were as natural as the dawn. But still, I felt Aretha’s pain as if it were my own.
Via my dragonflies, I saw her with Macawley, discussing the horror, incoherently.
“I thought they’d be—”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“I thought they’d be safe!”
“I’m sorry, Aretha, sweetheart – so – you know – oh what can I say—”
“This is all his doing, you know that. Him. The fucking cyborg! He won’t give up until he’s won. Even if we all die in the process.”
“I know.”
“He killed Sheriff Heath.”
“I know, we both know that.”
“The bastard! Bastard! His fault! My two dar
lings, my two children! I thought they’d be safe!”
Macawley, the child-cat-woman, cradled Aretha, the life-battered uniform cop.
United in grief, united in hate.
I watched it all, and heard it all.
And there was much I wanted to say. I wanted to explain that I did care, that I agonised over all the deaths. That I doubted myself, every day. That remorse consumed me.
That I loved Aretha, just as she had loved her children.
But I did not convey any of this information to Aretha.
My war was too important: I could not stop now. My robot brain would destroy the anciens. Sooner or later, I would defeat their power, with my power.
No matter what the cost.
THE HIVE-RATS
THE COP
Version 46
They came for me in the night.
I never slept of course. But I had decided to start staying in apartments at night to avoid the worst excesses of the anciens’ nightly attacks of chaos. I could not bear to see the pain and suffering that took place every time the stars appeared in the sky and impossible things began to occur.
I knew that the anciens were trying to find me. They paid bribes to informants, they had spies on every street corner. But I was one man in a city of five hundred million, and the anciens didn’t know what this Version of my body looked like.
But they did know I was solitary. They knew I was self-contained. They knew I was troubled with all the burdens of an entire planet. And their shadows swept through the city, for month after month, until they found the 800,000 or so people who matched that psych profile.
And then they killed them all.
I knew I was doomed when the walls of my room began to disappear. I fired my body jets and tried to fly out of the building, but when I crashed through the walls, I found that there was no city there after all. Instead, I was surrounded, from one horizon to the other, by white sheets of snow and ice. I had, it seems, been quantum-teleported into the polar region.
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