Date: 2013-12-15 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Science Fiction; Anthologies
Description: NINE TALES OF THE DARK CITY KNOWN AS PUNKTOWN Monsters, mutants and maniacs...here, they call them citizens. In the opening story, "In His Sights," shape-shifting war veteran Jeremy Stake (protagonist of Thomas' novels DEADSTOCK and BLUE WAR) is reminded of the last enemy soldier he killed, every time he looks in the mirror...while the concluding story, "Life Work" (Thomas' first novella-length Punktown story), follows a young businesswoman with a secret past and a syndicate hit man with no future. Between these tales one will encounter a wide and wild variety of the lost souls, both human and
Publisher: Dark Regions Press

GHOSTS OF PUNKTOWN

A Collection by

JEFFREY THOMAS

Dark Regions Press 2014

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Taste of Punktown

In His Sights

Relics

A Semblance of Life

Bitter Brains

Disfigured

Imp

The Room

Into My Arms

Life Work

* Another Ghost – Signed Hardcover Exclusive

Ghosts of Punktown

Jeffrey Thomas

Antics and Mechanical Frolic (Cover artwork)

Copyright 2008 by Kris Kuksi

Introduction: A Taste of Punktown Copyright 2014

In His Sights Copyright 2007

Relics Copyright 2014

A Semblance of Life Copyright 2010

Bitter Brains Copyright 2009

Disfigured Copyright 1999

Imp Copyright 2014

The Room Copyright 2010

Into My Arms Copyright 2014

Life Work Copyright 2014

Cover Design by Irina Summer

Editor and Publisher, Chris Morey

Line Editor, Bobbi Morey

Concept and Inception, Joe Morey

Dark Regions Press, LLC

6635 N. Baltimore Ave. STE 241

Portland, OR 97203

United States

DarkRegions.com

Introduction: A Taste of Punktown

1: Why Ghosts?

The theme of this introduction is Food and Spirits. First the Spirits. But why are we discussing ghosts in a collection of stories set in a far future milieu?

A few words about that milieu. Punktown…that city on the planet Oasis, built by colonists from Earth upon a small town belonging to the indigenous people, the Choom. Punktown, famous for its mix of races from other worlds, even other dimensions – and infamous for its high level of crime.

Previously I’ve explored this fantastical metropolis in my collections Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (coauthored by my brother Scott Thomas), Punktown: Third Eye (a shared world anthology, actually) and Voices from Punktown. And then there have been the novels set in Punktown: Health Agent, Blue War, Deadstock, Everybody Scream! and Monstrocity.

Though largely science fictional in setting and in their accouterments, many of my Punktown tales have been flat-out horror stories. And some of those horrors could be considered supernatural in nature. But the ghosts collected here are actually more metaphorical. I didn’t intentionally set out to make so many of my more recent Punktown stories feature a metaphorical ghost, but I do know I was in a particularly haunted state of mind during their writing – a time of much upheaval and personal loss. Whatever their genesis, there is a whole menagerie of unhappy spirits present at this little séance:

The ghost of an enemy soldier, manifested in another man’s flesh (In His Sights). A ghost in the machine (Relics). Ghosts of ancient history, of tradition, of culture (A Semblance of Life, Bitter Brains). A holographic ghost (Imp). A ghost outside time and space (The Room). The haunting ghosts of memory (Into My Arms). A plant ghost (Life Work), and a ghost of one’s former self (Huck, also in Life Work).

Now, a few further words to introduce the stories herein.

In His Sights features Jeremy Stake, the protagonist of my novels Deadstock and Blue War, ten years before the events in those books, and before he became a private detective. I’m proud to relate that in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, reviewer James Sallis (author of Drive) said this story was “beautifully written,” its ending “powerful.”

Relics was in part inspired by a large project combining condominiums and a strip mall that I watched go up near my house, while I was in the process of losing my house. The inception and dissolution of things.

A Semblance of Life features one of the race of clone soldiers I created for Deadstock, who fought alongside Jeremy Stake in the Blue War. It is restored here from its much adulterated first appearance.

Bitter Brains is the new name for one of the stories written for the Ministry of Whimsy anthology Last Drink Bird Head, in which every author’s story bore that title and had to utilize that phrase somehow. My story as it appeared in the anthology was by necessity almost two hundred words shorter even than this short tale.

Disfigured has vexed me for some time, as I have repeatedly considered whether or not to include it in a Punktown collection. It wasn’t written as a Punktown story, just as a weird science fiction tale on its own, but I feel I must finally give in and include it here. For one, I like it a lot, but I do think it fits in with the bizarre fads and cultures at work in Punktown.

Imp was written as part of a surprise anthology that was put together as a tribute to Larry Roberts, of Bloodletting Press, by a number of authors whom he has published (the ringleader of this project being David Niall Wilson). Only one copy of the book, First Cuts, was produced (but a beautiful thing it was!), so it’s safe to say this is the story’s first appearance. It is perhaps my most disturbing Punktown story, but one of my favorites as well.

The Room has nothing to do with the movie directed by and starring the multitalented Tommy Wiseau. Rather, it was inspired by the song Candy’s Room, by one of my longtime favorite musical artists, Bruce Springsteen, as part of the anthology Darkness on the Edge: Tales Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen. As I said in my bio for that book: “What I wanted to get across was this song's approach to love: urgent and immediate, but mixed with promises that it's something that will endure forever. The lines about that love revealing secret worlds -- however dangerous they might prove to be, this being a horror story -- are what ultimately cemented it as my choice. A note: I was happy to sneak in Del Kahn, the protagonist of my "Punktown" novel Everybody Scream!, for whom Bruce Springsteen was partly the inspiration. Frankie Dystopia, on the other hand, is based on Elvis Costello, and he'll have to wait for his own anthology.” While we wait for an Elvis Costello anthology, there is the matter of Nick Cave…

Into My Arms was originally written for a similarly-themed anthology, Up Jumped the Devil: Stories Inspired by the Work of Nick Cave, a project that tragically the publisher canceled due to the “economic climate.” For this would-be anthology I had selected the song Into My Arms to work from, but I also took my inspiration from other songs on the beautiful and haunting CD The Boatman’s Call. Originally, each chapter was titled with a line from one of the songs on this CD, but I thought it prudent to avoid legal issues with its appearance here, and have omitted them. The writing of this story turned out to be a long, difficult process for me, as I addressed some painful issues that were inspired by my own experiences as well.

Life Work, my first Punktown novella, is dedicated to my dear friend Fumiko, who provided the spark for this story by teaching me the distinction between “life work” and “rice work.” Thanks for all your tender, healing vibes, Fumiko! Life Work is also for indie filmmaker Nicolas Huck and author Sabina Marr – two of the coolest friends I’ve met through that alternate reality known as Facebook.

As I mentioned discussing Into My Arms, and the unconscious theme that runs throughout this book, even my most fantastical work often draws upon my own feelings and experiences. But then, all my Punktown stories are based on my experiences -- aren’t they? -- as I’ve now visited there so many times. And one of my favorite things to do in Punktown is…eat. So for those of you who have not traveled to this far city as often as I have, I think it would be a nice idea this time around to share some of my knowledge with you, as a sort of miniature guide – so as to give ourselves a little break from all that darkness and nastiness. Shall we?

*     *     *

2: Punktown: A Gastronomical Sampler

Naturally, the foodstuffs Punktown offers are as diverse as the beings that cook and consume them. And because so many wildly different types of humanoid and nonhumanoid races inhabit the city, no single tribe would care to sample every available cuisine; indeed, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. For instance, there is a creature rather like a cross between a foot-long black cricket and a spiny sea urchin that I’m told is the greatest delicacy a Dacvibese could find upon his plate – but the gray meat within its spiny shell has been known to make more than one unsuspecting human vomit torrents of blood. As it is authored by a human, this very brief guide is geared mostly toward the human explorer (and please don’t bombard the publisher with letters; no prejudice is intended, I assure you!), so in the listing below of some of my favorite eating establishments about town, we will limit ourselves to those that never made me vomit torrents of blood.

BLUE PANDA serves up that junky interpretation of Chinese food that Chinese feed nonChinese, the kind that tastes good washed down with junky beer like Zub, Nickerson or Clemens Light, while listening to people who have drunk too much of the aforementioned brews humiliate themselves at karaoke. If truly good Asian food is your craving (and they have karaoke on Friday night, too), you should instead venture to Pho Paxton -- see below. (See Purple Wings in Punktown: Shades of Grey.)

BURGERZONE is a guilty pleasure; this chain serves up the best junk burgers in Punktown, not to mention their delectably greasy and salty dilkies. The dilky root is the staple food of the native Choom race -- and like many of the tough-fleshed roots and vegetables that form their diet, the reason for the evolution of their wide, heavy jaws. But along came colonists who daringly cooked these roots, and voila, a wildly popular snack for Earther and Choom alike! As the BurgerZone VT jingle goes, “Let’s go grab a burger, a Fishsand and some fries! An extra-large bag of dilkies and a Choc-o-late Surprise!” (See Purple Wings in Punktown: Shades of Grey.)

CAFÉ QUAY on Morpha Street has an artistic atmosphere that greatly appeals to me, and instead of being limited to one ethnic type, its menu ambitiously encompasses the cuisine of as many races of beings as its kitchen can conjure. In this way, Café Quay is as close to a true representation of Punktown as any restaurant could aspire to be. Hung upon the sensuously velvety brown walls in copper frames are moody, often eerie black and white photographs of discarded baby dolls and derelict factory machines, sometimes in disturbing combinations. Again, this mix of beauty and decay captures the essence of the city, for me. At a touch from one’s fingers, the menu scrolls in glowing white letters across the black tabletop, and one can also in this way check out the play-list of the music piped through the sound system. The music menu is as varied as the food! Try some scrumptious Kodju stir-fry, or how about some glebbi, a huge Kalian lizard; it’s surely not for every palate, but I think it’s interesting in small doses. After dinner, sip a hot mustard drink, an old Choom favorite. Ah, Café Quay – highly recommended. (See Monstrocity.)

EL BASHA is my preferred source for Middle Eastern dining, and I must always order my favorite dish on the menu, falafel. I once sat at the next table over from Triad crime lord Ng Yueh-sheng, who was also a loyal patron of this establishment, mere weeks before a rival gang’s bomb blew him to pieces smaller than the diced tomatoes in a tabouleh salad. But don’t worry, it didn’t happen in El Basha. Get thee there, and enjoy! (See Precious Metal in Punktown.)

PHO PAXTON, in the neighborhood dubbed Willow Tree – after a great shaggy tree of that type dominating a traffic island in the vicinity – offers the best Vietnamese cuisine that I have encountered in the city. More importantly, my wife Hong considers it to be Punktown’s best Vietnamese restaurant as well, and since she herself is Vietnamese, her opinion carries weight with me. It’s a smallish place, located at street level in a somewhat worn brick building in the old Choom style, but don’t let the looks fool you; the fare is colorful, vibrant, delicious. One must, of course, try the house specialty: pho bo, or beef noodle soup (pho pronounced roughly as “fur”). It is the quintessential Vietnamese dish. Another favorite of mine is banh xeo, a kind of stuffed crepe. I am also extremely fond of banh mi, the Vietnamese equivalent of a submarine sandwich, but this is fast food and I suggest you head over to the Dalat Sandwich Stop on nearby Meter Street for that treat. But even more heavenly to me than Vietnamese food is Vietnamese coffee (ca phe). It is served in a glass topped by a little metal filter cup, and your saliva will drop in synch with the teasingly slow drip of those savory dark beads. Want it cold? Have ice put in the glass. Hot or cold, I like it best with a thick layer of sweetened condensed milk at the bottom. My wife knows I could subsist on her kisses and ca phe alone, and thus accommodates me in abundance, but when we were first married she was also constantly plying me with tom and ruou. As this is Oasis, not the old Earth that spawned these recipes, sometimes adjustments have to be made. Tom are shrimp, yet in Punktown the Vietnamese often use in their dishes a local breed of crustacean like a very large prawn but with eight weirdly human-shaped feet. Ruou, or specifically ruou can, is rice wine. When shrimp and wine were all but oozing out of my ears, my new bride finally admitted to me that these items were good for ong xa’s (husband’s) “baby.” And whatever is good for ong xa’s “baby” is in turn good for ba xa’s (wife’s) “baby” as well, obviously. But Oasis’ human-footed shrimp can impart properties even beyond the aphrodisiacal. A cousin to the breed used by Vietnamese cooks is used by drug peddlers as the main ingredient in the hallucinogenic nicknamed “kaleidoscopes.” Because these breeds are such close cousins, a local restaurant that shall remain nameless once made a grave mix-up that caused their patrons to imagine such things as the “shrimp” running off the tables on eight little sneaker-clad feet, and the meat on their plates lifting its head and making barking sounds (yes, back on Earth man’s best friend is known to appear in the Vietnamese diet – one must eat what is at hand – but in this city I’ve only seen dog sold as a comestible in the neighborhood of Luzon, and however adventurous my palate may be, dog is something I avoid like I avoid gray-fleshed cricket urchins). In any case, fines were slapped, the restaurant remained in business, and the customers returned to their senses – some of them possibly hoping, in vain, for a second helping.

QUIDD’S MARKET in the upscale neighborhood of Beaumonde Square is not a restaurant, but more of a mall of food. It is a titanic cornucopia, contained within an extensive brick structure in the pre-colonial Choom style, with a majestic central rotunda. Quidd’s is thronged with people, and thronged with food stalls and edible offerings that put even the diverse menu of Café Quay to shame. Indeed, I don’t think there’s another spot in town that in one place offers such a wide collection of foodstuffs. It is a museum of victuals! I have never gone there without wondering at some point what the hell I was looking at – and if I was particularly brave that day, what the hell I was eating. But no matter how many types of food I gorge myself on there, I always follow it up with a cup of ice cream. And don’t even get me started on the assortment of ice cream! (See Deadstock and Health Agent.)

J. J. REDHOOK’S CRAB CABIN serves another sort of local crustacean, this being a large white critter more like a silverfish despite its popular name of “white-crab.” Mr. Redhook’s stilt-legged “cabin” extends partway over the old cooling basin of a discontinued plastic company, and in the waters of said basin Mr. Redhook not only breeds the white-crabs, but a kind of weed that when cooked up resembles noodles (but it has nothing on the rice noodles use in pho, believe me). A nice little place, but the coffee is nothing to write home about, either. Once, when driving my wheeled vehicle along the highway a short distance from this establishment, I ran over something crunchy and stopped to have a look. The white-crabs might not have human feet, but I found that they do occasionally escape from their artificial pond to do a bit of exploration. (See The Palace of Nothingness in Punktown.)

ZEBO’S SAUCER is located within the grounds of the annual Paxton Fair, though in recent years its owner – a small, huge-eyed being named Zebo – is known to move this mobile diner down to the warmer climes of the Outback Colony during the winter. Rumors are that the saucer-shaped diner is in fact the spacecraft it appears to be. Indeed, framed upon its walls are blurry photographs Zebo claims were taken of his craft (later appearing in books and magazines) as long ago as the 20th Century, when he was supposedly part of an interstellar exploration team. The menu consists of comfort foods – but comfort foods of a fair variety of planets, from Earthly burgers to the bland porridges favored by Zebo’s race. I like the place a lot, and Zebo is a great guy, but I often get the uneasy feeling that he’s...observing me, even jotting notes in the pad he uses to take orders...as if maybe he hasn’t stopped doing his research on the human race, after all, this diner business merely a facade. But a tasty facade it is. (See Everybody Scream!.)

And there you have it, just the briefest of introductions to the countless eateries the megalopolis of Punktown has to offer. But tonight rather than venture out into the city (after all, it can be rather hazardous after hours), I suggest you call for a delivery or room service, then sit back in the relative safety of your hotel room and enjoy the buffet that follows. Some of the dishes may be exotic and warming, while others you may find a bit distasteful or hard to swallow. But you did come to experience Punktown in all its diverse flavors, didn’t you?

In His Sights

1

The other young returnees kept looking at him, wondering what horrors were concealed by his mask. The mask looked like several layers of black plastic vacuum-formed to his face, with openings for his eyes, nostrils and mouth. From his eyes, with their epicanthic folds, they could at least tell that he was of Asian ancestry. But what wounding had he suffered? Had he been spattered with hot, corrosive plasma from a mortar round? Sprayed with acid or minced with shrapnel in some Ha Jiin booby trap? The other men – and there were some female soldiers, too – felt pity for him. And also shame, at being relieved that it wasn’t them forced to wear the healing black mask.

But he wasn’t healing. Because he wasn’t wounded, at least not in the ways they speculated on.

He was simply hiding his face.

Though he knew it would, his face shouldn’t have shocked the others in a purely physical sense. After all, this was Punktown. The city had been called Paxton, of course, when Earth colonists had first founded it, but it hadn’t taken long for its nickname to come about, for its predestined character to make itself manifest. Races other than human had come to colonize the city as well, over the decades. Included among the few truly humanoid races that dwelt within the megalopolis were the Choom – indigenous to this world, which the Earth colonists had renamed Oasis. They had frog-like mouths that sliced their faces back to their ears. Then there were the Tikkihotto, who in place of eyes had bundles of clear tendrils that squirmed in the air as if to assemble vision with their sensitive touch. But there were far stranger beings in Punktown. Beautiful, by the Earthly conception of such things, or hideous. In addition, there were mutants of every deformity, corresponding to every cruel whim of nature (nature as distorted through pollution and radiation). So, it would seem illogical that anyone in Punktown would feel self-conscious enough to hide their features by pretending to have been disfigured. But it wasn’t simply self-consciousness that had caused the young man to don his mask.

It possibly went so far as self-preservation.

“Santos, Edgar,” a voice said from a speaker. The name was spelt out on a screen as well, and showed Santos’ military ID number. The man in the black mask looked up and watched as Edgar Santos pushed away the little VT he had been watching, affixed to the arm of his chair. He headed off to one of the offices, its number also displayed on the information screen. Santos. There were a few more names to be called, alphabetically, before they got to the masked man. Stake, Jeremy.

Stake sat in a long row of plastic chairs of a terrible orange color. His row faced a row opposite. Trying not to look at the people seated across from him, despite how they stole glances at him, Stake couldn’t help but be reminded of the first time he had been sent to the planet of the Ha Jiin. The dimension of the Ha Jiin.

It had been over four years ago. The then nineteen-year-old Jeremy Stake had sat with a group of young men and women, humans and humanoids, with no Ha Jiin blood yet on their hands. None of their own blood yet spilled. They had sat just like this, in two rows inside a metal Theta pod, waiting to have their material beings shifted. Smuggled inside a bullet fired through page after page in the closed book of realities, taking a shortcut through infinity. The transdimensional pod had hummed with an almost subliminal vibration under their boots and asses. They had looked at each other’s faces in nervousness. A few of these troop pods had gone missing, taking a wrong turn somehow, perhaps ending up in some alternate plane from which there was no return or maybe just ceasing to be.

Sometimes Stake wondered if he truly had returned to his own plane. Might this be a subtle variation on the world he had left? If so, might some subtly different Jeremy Stake have taken his place in his reality? And if so, had he come back without the need for disguise?

Well, such alternate versions of oneself had not in fact been discovered in any of the realms that Theta research/technology had given the Earth Colonies access to. But extradimensional races had certainly been encountered. There were the beetle-like Coleopteroids, derisively called Bedbugs. The putty-like L’lewed. The more humanoid Antse people, who covered their bland gray bodies entirely in the gorgeous flayed skins of great creatures called flukes. And then, there were the blue-skinned Ha Jiin. One of the most human of races. One of the most beautiful. And deadly.

“Severance, Amy Jo,” called the speaker’s voice. Stake watched a young woman rise to attend her appointment. She was one of those who had come today in uniform rather than street clothes. It was really a personal decision. Maybe she was proud of it. Maybe she was simply still in the military mind-set. Under her arm she carried a black beret, her uniform itself patterned in shades of blue, from dark navy to bright azure to pastel. Stake was in his street clothes, but he had an identical set of camouflaged fatigues among his belongings.

The Blue War, they had called it.

It was over now. Everybody coming home. Everybody being sifted back into a world that would be different for them, whether it was a secretly distorted variation or not.

“Buddy? Hey...brother?”

Stake turned his head, which glistened black like obsidian. He met the eyes of a Choom with a severe crew cut.

“What happened to you?”

There. Someone had overtly invaded his privacy. Someone either too unthinking – or too compassionate – to just leave him be.

Stake had an answer prepared, though. “I was in some caverns, and there were major gas concentrations. A plasma grenade caused it to ignite.” That was what they had been doing there. Traveled so far for, bled so long for. Officially, it was to lend support to the emerging Jin Haa nation. But everyone knew it was really all about those rich subterranean gases.

The Choom made an exaggerated wincing expression. “Ouch. I heard of that happening. You gonna be all right?” He gestured at his own face. “Will it get back to normal?”

“I don’t know,” Stake said. He wasn’t lying about that part. “I don’t know.”

*     *     *

The Veterans Administration worker whose office Stake was directed to was a stern-faced black woman who introduced herself as Miriam Khaled. She was studying her screens when Stake let himself in. She looked up at him in a bit of a double-take, a little surprised by his appearance, but she dropped her eyes to his file again as he took a seat in front of her desk.

“Will you be my caseworker?” he asked her.

“No...you won’t be given a particular caseworker; you can meet with anyone here at the VA about your concerns,” she said as she read from his records. “Corporal Stake. I see you have a very distinguished four years of service. Hm. Assigned to several deep penetration units. You captured an enemy sniper who was quite a local legend to her people.”

Stake’s guts knotted tighter at the mention of her. “Yes.” He saw the Ha Jiin woman’s face on his own internal screen. Her blue-skinned, beautiful face. She had been his prisoner for a while. Sometimes he felt he was her prisoner, now.

“And you have no desire to further your career in the military?”

“No.”

“Okay. Um...” She frowned. “I don’t see anything here about your injury.”

“This isn’t from an injury, ma’am.”

“No?” She looked up, scowling.

“Excuse me,” Stake said, and then he reached behind his head to unseal the shiny black mask. He peeled it from his head like a cocoon. Under it, his short dark hair was sweaty and disheveled. His skin was normally almost olive, but had become so pale it was almost of a bluish, corpse-like cast, as if he had been hidden from the sun for months. He watched Khaled’s face. He saw comprehension dawn there; not of the particulars, but at least an understanding as to why he would wear the mask.

She quickly consulted the files again. “You underwent surgery to perform your penetration missions?”

“No, ma’am. This isn’t from surgery. I’m a mutant.”

Miriam Khaled took him in more closely. The young man seated opposite her was almost entirely a Ha Jiin, just as the Ha Jiin were almost entirely human – indistinguishable except for matters of pigment that Stake’s malleable cells could not duplicate, however crafty they were in their mimicry. Despite its best efforts, his skin was not that lovely, ghostly shade of blue. And the Ha Jiin’s eyes, though black, gleamed a laser red when the light struck them a certain way. Even their black hair took on a metallic red quality where the light made it shine. But there were other effects that Stake’s face had been very successful at reproducing. The Ha Jiin’s eyelids possessed the epicanthus of human Asians. Also, it was not uncommon for Ha Jiin men to mark their faces with scars. Stake had two horizontal raised bars on his right cheek, and three on his left cheek, almost as if to indicate that his age was twenty-three. In fact, the scarification was meant to represent the number of family members a man had lost in war. Maybe when they touched their own faces, or saw their reflections, it helped arouse them afresh in their desire to conquer their enemy and avenge their dead. Were it not for his imitation scars, Stake might have passed for an Earth Asian. But those markings were so distinctive.

Khaled found it in his information at last. “I see. It’s a mutation called...Caro turbida. ‘Disordered flesh.’ Huh. It’s impressive how it works.” She appeared to regret phrasing it that way. “I mean...”

“It came in handy when I was doing my penetration work,” he confirmed. “But I had to have my skin dyed blue for those missions.”

“This happens spontaneously?”

“Yes. If I look at a person or a picture of a person for too long...or too intensely. It can happen in a matter of minutes. Faster, if I’m trying to get it to happen.”

“But why do you look like a Ha Jiin now?”

“The effect can last until I look long enough at another person’s face to trade for theirs. Or, for lack of another subject, sooner or later I’ll revert back to...me. Under normal circumstances, I try not to stare at people too much. I’ve been watching your face more than I normally would. I should have begun looking like you by now.”

“So why isn’t that happening?”

“I don’t know,” Stake admitted. “This has never happened to me before. I’m...stuck.”

“How long has it been?”

“Three weeks now. Three weeks since I took on the appearance of a man I killed in my last field mission.”

“But you really don’t know why that is?”

Stake swallowed. “I, ah, I can’t say for sure.”

She nodded, and gazed at her computer system. Stake guessed that she was studying a picture of his own, natural face. He knew it would appear subtly unnatural to her. In his default mode, as he called it, the mutant had an oddly unfinished-looking appearance. Too bland, too nondescript, like an oil portrait that had been roughed in but never completed. She had probably seen androids that were more life-like.

“I can schedule an appointment with one of our doctors at the VA Hospital,” she said. “Or maybe it would be more helpful if you spoke to one of our counselors...”

“Mm,” he grunted.

“In any case...do you have a family, Corporal? Anyplace to go?”

“My mother is dead,” he told her. She had been a mutant, too. They had lived in the Punktown slum called Tin Town; it held the highest concentration of mutants in the city. As far as he knew his father was still alive, if his drug-addicted state could be called that. “No family,” was all the further elaboration he would give.

“All right, then I’ll extend your temporary shelter in the VA Hospice until you can find an apartment. And of course you have a ten year pension, but frankly it’s limited in nature and you’re encouraged to make use of our resources here in searching for employment.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The mask, Corporal Stake. It’s because you’re afraid to upset the other returnees?”

His stolen face – the face of a dead man, as if grafted on to replace his own obliterated countenance – gave her a sickly smile. “It’s to prevent the other returnees from wanting to lynch me.”

2

“What are the goggles for?” She had smiled nervously when she asked it.

“I damaged my eyes in the war,” he’d lied.

The Blue War. The light of twin blue-white suns beating down through the jungle canopy, a jungle where every plant from tree to flower to the grass itself was a shade of blue. Blue like the flesh of the Ha Jiin themselves.

The military surplus goggles were like those Cal Williams and many other soldiers had worn for night vision, or to see distantly, or to gaze through the walls of Ha Jinn structures. But when it had come time to shoot, it was through the lens of his sniper rifle’s scope that he had peered.

Right now, he had adjusted the spectrum filter on his goggles. Right now, everything he saw was tinted blue.

Cal paced the tiny apartment where he had been staying since his discharge from the VA Hospital. He had been returned to his own dimension a few months before all these others who were flooding back now, but it was being badly wounded that had won him that head start. The last treatment had erased the scars on his chest. They had assured him that everything without and within had been fully restored, but the skin of his chest still seemed too tightly drawn to him. As he paced he would occasionally rotate his arms in their sockets, or stretch them high above or far behind him, as if to loosen his confining, claustrophobic flesh.

He hadn’t been looking for a job; not yet. He had his pension. He would live frugally, draw it out. It paid his rent. And it had paid for the young woman who lay on the bed he kept trying not to look at as he paced.

He wore nothing but the goggles. His bare feet were stealthy as he padded, back and forth, like a tiger in its cage. There was one little window and he paused at it, nudged aside the shade to peek out at the city of Punktown. In the evening light, the hovercars swarming at ground level and helicars that drifted along the invisible web of navigation beams sparkled like scarabs. The lasers and holographs of advertisements strobed and flashed as if the city were full of bombings and firefights. And through his goggles, the entire city was blue, and even darker and more ominous than it would have been, like a metropolis built on the bottom of a deep arctic sea.

Leaning against the window’s frame was the rifle he had bought last week from a black market source, along with the pistol he carried with him when he ventured onto the streets. He lifted the rifle now and couched it in his arms, a familiar and strangely soothing sensation. It was inferior to the one he had used over there, which had been able to fire both solid projectiles and beams. This rifle fired beams alone. And yet, in that area this weapon was a bit more advanced. He stepped away from the window and let the rifle’s barrel hold back the lip of the shade. He could fire a bolt of dark purple light right now, and it would pass through the windowpane without shattering or even scorching it. It was only one of the gun’s tricks.

Through his goggles and through the rifle’s scope, he tracked one helicar for a moment before shifting to another. He increased the magnification, traced his gaze from window to window on the building directly across the broad street. At last, he lowered his view further and zoomed in on a man walking along the sidewalk. He zoomed until the man’s unaware face filled his vision. He was a wide-mouthed native Choom, even if the goggles made his face appear as if his skin were blue.

Lowering his rifle a little, Cal twisted around and glanced over at the bed at last.

The woman was of Asian lineage, with beautiful almond eyes and black hair down to her waist, tiny like the female Ha Jiin, but he had learned quickly not to be deceived by that. They were deadlier than the men.

“What are the goggles for?” she had asked him.

Lying there, staring at the ceiling and smiling a little as if to mock him, she was as blue-skinned as a Ha Jiin woman. Even though she wasn’t one.

Cal dropped his gaze to the blood spattered and drying on his belly and legs. It looked black through the goggles. But then, he became conscious of something for the first time. The realization horrified him, and he almost dropped the rifle in setting it aside. He clawed the goggles off his head.

Through their lenses, his own flesh had appeared blue to him, too.

3

The giant’s head thrust up out of the earth, but Corporal Jeremy Stake knew there would also be an entire body below the surface, its form just as intricately covered in a mosaic of colorful tiles even if no one would ever see them. The giant’s mouth was open wide, and gave access to a metal spiral staircase that wound like a corkscrew down through the titanic body, down into the caverns below the jungle. There, in galleries of stone, writhed the bluish gases that the Ha Jiin worshipped as their ancestral spirits – but which the Earth Colonies had more practical uses for.

Wisps of this vapor curled out of the giant’s gaping mouth like its last dying breath being expelled.

The statue’s flesh was scaled in blue tiles. The eyes were almond-shaped. The way he looked at this moment, Stake himself might have been its model. Before embarking from his unit’s position, he had stared long and hard at a photo of a Ha Jiin that he kept on file in his palm comp. His fellow soldiers had helped him spray-dye his skin blue, and he had changed into a Ha Jiin uniform. One of his comrades had pointed a pistol at him and joked, “I don’t know, Stake...I think you’re one of them pretending to be one of us pretending to be one of them.”

The face on his computer screen had no scars on its high cheekbones. No family members lost yet. But aside from the lack of a metallic red sheen to his dark pupils and hair, Stake had been thoroughly convincing as one of the enemy when he had set off alone into the lush blue forest.

He waited, watching the head of the buried colossus, until he felt fairly safe in approaching it. Stake emerged from the undergrowth, and a moment later was ducking into the head’s dark maw, with its blended scents of earth and dampness and incense, and the subtle taint of the precious blue gas itself. But all of this barely masked the strongest, underlying note: the smell of countless dead bodies secreted deep beneath the forest.

He descended the rust-scabbed metal staircase. In his right fist he carried a Ha Jiin pistol but it had been modified to fire silently, with Earth’s more advanced technology.

At the bottom, copper pipes stained green with verdigris ran across the walls to glass globes, in which gas was burned to give off light. Three passages branched off from this chamber, but their entrances were covered by thick yellow curtains. Stake was very much on edge. Sometimes these caverns were utterly empty, except for the bodies of the dead – slotted into the honeycombs chiseled into the walls, slathered with a yellow mineral that crudely mummified their forms. Other times, members of the Ha Jiin clerical order would be down in the tunnels; maybe a solitary monk, or maybe an entire group. And then other times, the tunnels might have been converted into a base camp for a unit of Ha Jiin soldiers. It was frowned upon by their own kind, to take their battle into these places where only the dead were meant to be sheltered, but the Ha Jiin fighters knew that they were not the first to have desecrated the sacred netherworld. That the only way to protect it sometimes was to desecrate it themselves.

Stake strained his ears beyond the soft hissing of gas through the pipes. A ghostly distant voice. A chant? So...he would not be alone this time.

From his backpack he withdrew two narrow black devices speckled with faux rust, which he clipped to the railings at the base of the staircase. He activated an invisible field that ran across the bottom stair. It was a frequency that would not disrupt the anatomy of Earth humans, but would prove fatal to a Ha Jiin passing through it...either descending into the catacombs after him, or pursuing him should he need to make a quick retreat.

Now Stake moved to the central curtain. A glance at his wrist scanner had told him there was only one person in the vicinity, down this passage. This person would have to be neutralized before he could assemble the teleportation apparatus stored in his backpack, which would allow the gases to be siphoned to the collection and processing station in the allied city of Di Noon. If it were a cleric, he’d flip a toggle on his gun and simply hit him with a gel capsule filled with a paralyzing drug. But if it were an armed fighter...

Just beyond the curtain as he shifted it aside, the tunnel was full of the bluish mist. These days Stake was no longer queasy about inhaling it. At first, it had been thought that the gas had inorganic origins...until it had been determined that it was a byproduct of decomposition. In a way, the Ha Jiin were correct in deeming it the spirits of their ancestors. It was a trace of themselves, surviving them, lingering in the air.

More glowing spheres set into the walls. Stake followed the chant, which wavered as if the person uttering it were underwater. He followed the blip of light on his wrist scanner.

He turned down another branching hallway, ducking through a latticework of tree roots that had grown through cracks in the low ceiling. Peripherally, he kept aware of the holes dug into the walls to either side of him. Men, women, children. Dead for centuries, many of them. But it wasn’t the dead he feared. Some Ha Jiin soldiers wore a wrist device that deflected the probing of scans such as the one Stake used. And Ha Jiin soldiers, lying on their bellies in these honeycombs, had been known to fire rifles at scouts such as himself.

A circular chamber opened beyond, the terminus of this particular passageway. From the threshold, Stake saw a man in a Ha Jiin soldier’s uniform squatting over a body on a wooden slab. His hands were working, working, back and forth with a moist sound. He mostly blocked the body before him, but Stake glimpsed the man’s hands and saw they were yellow. Stained with a mineral solution.

Stake took his first stealthy steps into the room. His thumb paused on the toggle of his pistol. Life or death, at a simple flip of a switch.

The hunkered soldier was not chanting so much as he was sobbing. And it was his heavy accent that had prevented Stake from understanding the word he sobbed, before.

“Sorry,” the man was croaking in English, over and over as he slathered on the preserving mixture. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry...”

Now Stake could better see the body that lay on the slab. Even partially covered in yellow pigment, he could tell that its flesh was not blue. The body was that of a dead Earth female. She had short hair like a boy’s, her features looked Asian, and she must have been about nineteen. Her Colonial Forces uniform lay folded nearby, where the man had removed it. He had undressed her. And in that moment, that was all Stake could think of. With gritted teeth, he stepped closer and pointed the gun.

A pebble crunched under his boot. The Ha Jiin whirled around, his black eyes flashing laser red, and Stake shot him through the front of his throat.

The man pitched back, eyes wide, across the bare legs of the yellow-painted Earth woman. He stared up at Stake, trying to mouth words, but only blood bubbled up over his lips. Stake didn’t need to read lips to understand the word he was mouthing. Over and over.

The man had scars on his face – two horizontal raised bars on his right cheek, and three on his left cheek – to indicate the number of family members he had lost in the war. Family members he might have carried down into this very sepulcher, and coated with yellow mineral as he had been doing to this teenage girl he had killed.

“Sorry,” the man mouthed, dying. “Sorry...”

Stake shot him several times in the face, to erase that haunting visage.

But he had only transferred it to his own. As if the man’s ghost had fled his body in that instant, to possess him.

4

He was well, they assured him. The skin of his chest was not too tight. Was he sleeping all right? Did he need some meds for that?

Cal Williams had looked away from the doctor’s face, unable to meet his eyes. The man’s skin tone suggested some African ancestry in his mix, but his eyes had something of a slanted look, too. It seemed all the eyes of the city were Ha Jiin eyes, watching him, no matter what face they glared out of. Sometimes Cal thought he was still a prisoner, still being tortured, but this time just psychologically. Perhaps he had never been freed, but right now sat in a cell instead of an examination room of the VA Hospital. Maybe this doctor wore makeup to change his skin color. Or maybe they had drugged him, or implanted a computer chip in his brain. Played around inside his mind...

“Do you think you’d benefit from talking with one of our counselors?” the doctor asked him.

Cal stepped down from the examination table, resealing his shirt. “No,” he grunted. “I’m fine. Just like you say.”

He didn’t have a car yet, so he figured he’d buy a coffee from a vending machine in the little cafeteria, and sip it while he waited for the next shuttle to Blue Station. Blue Station, he thought with a smirk. Yeah. How appropriate.

In a nexus of hallways where elevators were situated, Cal paused to look at directional plaques on a wall. Arrows pointed one way for the CAFETERIA. And in another direction, toward PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES. He found himself, almost against his will, drifting down that corridor. Maybe it was the sobbing voice he heard from one of the rooms that compelled him. As it turned out, it was a man sitting in the little waiting room, his face in his hands and his elbows on his knees. The receptionist behind the counter could have been a robot for all the concern she showed him. Another vet was strapped into a cybernetic “pony” with insect-like arms and legs, as his own four limbs were missing, making him look like a swaddled overgrown infant. He met Cal’s eyes with a dazed, or maybe just fatalistic, expression.

The nurse looked up, finally noticing Cal. “Can I help you?” she asked blandly.

“No – I’m...just looking for a friend,” Cal stammered, and then he ducked back into the hall.

*     *     *

Stake left the counselor’s office without his mask on, as the man had suggested. “As long as you wear it, you fortify your need for it. And you fortify your identification with the Ha Jiin soldier. Every time you put it on again, you reestablish that identity. This is a wound that needs its bandage off in order to heal, Jeremy. Don’t look in the mirror. Don’t fret about it. You have to ignore it, which is not the same thing as the hiding you’re doing now. Go about your life. Your mutation aside, there is no physiological reason for you to maintain this appearance.”

Stake had nodded, listening to these words. Normally he wouldn’t have looked too long at the counselor’s face, but he had stared at him intensely, hoping, hoping to see the man’s expression change to surprise as his patient began to mimic him. Yet it did not come.

“But you know,” the counselor had gone on, “the surest way to deal with this is to treat your brain itself with a surgical procedure, in such a way that your ability will be forever inhibited. No more shape-shifting at all. Do you think you’d be interested in that?”

“Maybe later,” Stake had murmured. “Not...not yet.” His ability had served him well during his military stint. Might he make use of it in some future career? And then there was the matter of his heritage. He was a Tin Town mutant, like his mother. He was almost defiantly defensive about that. He didn’t need to be...corrected, like some freak, some abomination.

But as he left the counselor’s office, he couldn’t help but wonder if there were something more masochistic in his choice not to have his mutation treated. Something like punishment involved in that decision.

*     *     *

Cal Williams was waiting for one of the elevator doors to open when he looked to his right and saw the man walking toward him from the psychiatric wing. He wasn’t the only one who’d noticed him. A few other people were muttering. “Is that a Ha Jiin?” a woman said.

“His skin isn’t blue,” her male companion hissed, as if afraid they’d be overheard.

The man with the scarred face stopped behind the whispering couple, waiting for another of the elevators. Cal kept staring at him. He was trembling. If this were all some elaborate facade created by his Ha Jiin captors to trick him, then this one had let his mask slip. Had overlooked a critical detail: those ritualistic scars on his cheeks.

Even though the line he was in was a little shorter, Cal shifted over behind the man with the scars. He stared at the back of his head, so close he could reach out and take his neck in his hands. And as if he could feel those imaginary hands, the man turned around to meet Cal’s gaze. Without being asked, he said, “Yeah – I know. I did this to myself, like they do. I lost five good buddies over there, so I...” He made a slashing movement with his hand.

Why lie about it? Jeremy Stake wondered. But it was easier this way, wasn’t it? Not having to explain his mutation. Or that scene in the necropolis below the jungle floor. This way it seemed he was a good, loyal soldier, grieving only for his own dead. Not conflicted about some enemy who had murdered a teenage girl.

Cal Williams said nothing. But there was more than just the scars. This man’s cheekbones were high and pronounced, his lips full, his eyes slanted, his pupils obsidian black, all like a Ha Jiin. His face wasn’t robin’s egg blue, but it had a bluish pallor.

Seeing that the man behind him wasn’t going to respond, Stake faced around forward again. He felt the eyes of others on him, as well. Yes, easy for the counselor to tell him to go without the mask. And maybe it wasn’t a bad idea, really, to rid himself of that crutch. But he felt it was premature to have removed it here and now.

The elevator arrived, disgorging one group of people and admitting the next. Cal watched the cabin fill up. The scarred man entered, then turned around to face outward. Cal was desperate to plunge inside so as not to lose track of him, but when the man faced him again he could not bring himself to move. The elevator door slid shut between them.

But a moment later, Cal was racing toward the emergency stairwell.

5

Stake’s new flat was on Judas Street, in a brick tenement meant to look like native Choom architecture but merely looking mass produced and cheap. At least the gang graffiti gave all the buildings on Judas Street, whatever their style, a homogenous feel. His bed was narrow, his bathroom tiny, his kitchen little more than a counter, but there was a table near the window where he set up his new computer. It would serve as his phone, his VT, and his means by which to try to find out what had become of his former prisoner. The female Ha Jiin sniper named Thi Gonh, whom her own people had dubbed with admiration the “Earth Killer.”

He recalled her face better than he recalled his own. Yearned for it more, too. He could still smell the scent of her long hair, and of her blue flesh. He remembered the taste of it.

What would all the vets at the VA think if they knew how he had lain with her? Not that many of them hadn’t slept with prostitutes among their allies, the Jin Haa. But this was the enemy. A killer who had trained her sniper rifle on men and women just like them, and pulled the trigger again and again.

And what would her people think, if they knew the same about her? If they knew how she had become...confused, as he had?

Stake had his computer on now, running in VT mode, and the news station he was tuned to reported a seemingly endless list of recent crimes. A Dacvibese had been murdered by a gang right here on Judas Street and they showed a picture of the alien in life, resembling an albino bipedal greyhound. Stake turned to look at it. Had the kids, maybe adolescents, who had ended that life for drug money felt any hesitation, any remorse? He doubted it. Were they more hardened killers, then, in their way, than he was? He thought that the difference between them was that his killings had been sanctioned, encouraged. He had been told that it was right, whereas they did not have to suffer such a moral dichotomy. They knew they were wrong, were evil, and were comfortable wearing that skin.

Stake had bought more than just a computer with the first of his pension money. From the table, he picked up a black market handgun, a big and ugly Wolff .45. He hefted it as he paced his little flat. It wasn’t too light. Lightweight guns were good in the field, when you were laden with gear, but something with more weight definitely felt better at the end of your arm. It was more...there. He would start carrying it when he ventured from his apartment from now on. This was, after all, Judas Street. This was, after all, Punktown.

Well, he hadn’t been able to find out anything about Thi Gonh today. Everything was in upheaval now with most of the troops coming home, except for a security force that would remain stationed in the city of Di Noon. As a returnee, he was not privy to such information. But he would keep trying. Whether she would go on trial as an enemy or be returned to her own people, he would track her down one of these days. If nothing more, it was something to occupy his mind. A mission, now that there was no further need for his services. No more battles to fight.

In that distant dimension, at any rate.

*     *     *

Cal Williams stood across the street from the brick tenement, running his gaze across its windows. He didn’t know which floor the man lived on, but he knew he was there; he had seen him come and go several times by now. That day when he first met the man in the VA Hospital, he had managed to catch sight of him again down the street and follow him to the subway station, and then trail him here to Judas Street. Cal had altered his appearance along the way, by at first going bare-headed, then wearing the hood of his sweatshirt for a while, then removing the cloned leather jacket he wore over the sweatshirt and stuffing it in a balled-up shopping bag he plucked out of the gutter. Luckily, he was a nondescript person. His hair cropped close to his head, like just another soldier.

Yes, the war was over. The Jin Haa had established their small, independent nation within the body of the resentful Ha Jiin’s land, like a tumor they must accept and live with. And in return for the help of the Earth Colonies, the Jin Haa would unthinkably allow them to extract gases from the tombs of their own dead. Now that there was a bitter peace, Earth was working to sway the Ha Jiin to become friendly, too. They had so much more gas than the Jin Haa, after all.

But with the war over or not, it was too soon for a Ha Jiin man to be here within an Earth-established colony city. Oh, he might say he was a Jin Haa ally. With his skin color, he might even claim to be an Earther. But Cal knew better. The man was a spy. Or a terrorist. Right here, camouflaged by the city’s diversity of races, walking amongst these blind fools, and only Cal was aware of it. As though he wore his military surplus goggles, attuned to a wavelength of light that allowed him to see a creature invisible to others, but slithering through the air around them.

There were multiple lanes of traffic thronged with vehicles of every description, hovering or on wheels. To reach the opposite shore, he had to go further down Judas to a subway kiosk, then cross beneath the street and emerge on the other side. He recognized the building – as unremarkable in appearance as he was – by its graffiti, left most predominately by a gang called the Judas Street Hangmen.

Cal mounted its short flight of front steps, and touched a key on its entry panel. The screen displayed the names of the tenants. He was afraid that the man would have opted to remain anonymous, as some of the tenants had. He ran his finger down the list. A mix of human and alien names. He thought he could tell the alien names were Choom, with one Tikkihotto, from the sound of them. Nothing that sounded Jiinese, though from the man’s disguise that didn’t surprise him.

A woman came clicking her shoes up the steps, and Cal stepped away from the panel guiltily to let her buzz herself in. Dark, maybe with Indian blood given that a holographic eye was pasted on her forehead like a bindi. She gave him a sideways look. He hesitated, then asked, “Excuse me, ma’am? I’m trying to find someone...he has scars on his cheeks? He dropped this in the subway and I thought I saw him go in here.” From his back pocket he produced his own wallet.

“Third floor. I don’t know his name,” the woman said brusquely. The holographic third eye followed him distrustfully, and blinked. “But I can’t let you in with me.”

“Oh...okay, I understand.” He didn’t want to alarm her. He backed off some more while she buzzed herself inside. She watched him through the door’s window as she pushed it closed and made sure it locked.

Third floor. Cal activated the display monitor again. He isolated the names of those on the third floor. A few anonymous, but he copied the available male names onto a scrap of paper from his wallet. He would enter these names into his computer, in his own flat, and see what he might glean from them.

As he returned to the sidewalk, staring at the scrap of paper, another woman came near him and said something he didn’t get. Cal looked up, a bit startled, and she smiled at him with long red lips that curled forever. From her scanty clothing he could tell she was a prosty. But she was a Choom, not an Earther, not of Asian blood. That was good. Good for her, and good for him, too. He ignored her when she repeated her comment, hurrying off down the street toward the subway so that he might descend into the tunnels below the city – like those he had fought in not so long ago, among the ghostly ancestors of the enemy he sent to join them.

6

Neither tubes nor buses would make stops in the ghetto of Tin Town anymore, and any cabbie willing to do so would have to be so crazy that Jeremy Stake would have been more afraid of him than the ghetto’s denizens themselves – of which he had formerly been one. So he got as close as he could by hoverbus, and went the rest of the way on foot.

He walked past a series of tenement houses that had all burned into charred skeletons, looking like they’d been bombed. Children balanced along the girders of a floorless second floor as if they were putting on a circus performance. From the hugeness of one child’s head and the weirdly bent figure of another, it was clear they were mutants. Like his mother had been. Like himself.

Under his jacket he carried the Wolff .45. When two large men walking close together approached him on the sidewalk, he became extra-conscious of the holstered semiautomatic. But it was actually one man, with an overabundance of flesh and limbs, and he didn’t even glance at Stake as they passed each other. They were all ghosts of what they had been or what they could have been, in Tin Town.

He located the apartment building where he had last known his father to be living, but he wasn’t there anymore, and the tenant who had replaced him knew nothing of the former occupant. Stake was disappointed – not only because he wanted to see his father again after his four years away in another plane of existence, but because he had hoped that looking into the face of the man who had sired him would give him the jolt he needed to slip the alien mask that had fused itself onto his skull, the way a normal person’s face remained fixed. But that was not normal for him.

The best Stake could do, before leaving Tin Town, was to next seek out and stand before the place where his mother had been living when she died. Maybe the building’s familiar face would urge the shifting of his cells.

Yet, even the buildings were mutated. He passed through an old low income housing project, the buildings all bulging at their middles, and at their summits the plastic of which they were composed had been weirdly affected by pollution, teased out into intricate branches so that it seemed that Stake strolled down a rubble-strewn promenade of baobab trees.

He finally found the building he sought in this now transfigured neighborhood. He stared at the third floor windows through which his mother had once gazed, as if hoping that her face might appear there. As if hoping his own, younger face would appear there. But the restorative miracle he desired was not triggered.

Stake flinched when he heard the chatter of automatic gunfire, a few blocks over. The sky was going coppery as evening approached, and it was best even for a seasoned war vet like himself not to be out in the gangs’ combat zone after dark. So he turned back toward the border of the mutant slum. As he walked, someone called out to him and he paused warily, looked over. A man sat on the top step of a tenement doorway, arched and shadowy like an alcove. In the gloom, long appendages stirred; tentacles? The man gurgled, “Are you a Ha Jiin?”

“No,” Stake told him. “I’m not.”

As if he hadn’t even heard Stake, the mutant said, “You call us Earth people ghost-eaters, don’t you?” And then, without waiting for another reply, the man purposely gave out a long rumbling belch.

*     *     *

Jeremy Stake.

Cal Williams had found him, mostly by eliminating the others from his list. He learned little about the man from the net, but he had supposedly served as a corporal in the Colonial Forces in the Blue War. Oh, there was a picture...yet the man in the service ID photo looked absolutely nothing like the man Cal had followed to the apartment building. That only proved the point. This Corporal Stake had survived the war only to be killed here in his own dimension by the Ha Jiin terrorist, and have his identity stolen. In the more treacherous red tape jungle of bureaucracy, no one had become the wiser.

The man had recently begun phone service to the apartment on Judas Street. And his number was not unlisted.

Now, Cal felt his mission was more imperative than ever. He had to avenge this dead man. This murdered fellow war veteran named Jeremy Stake.

7

Stake had fallen asleep in his chair, seated in front of his new comp system. He had it in VT mode and had been watching a program on the Blue War cease-fire, and the return of most of the Colonial Forces. Vets and their families interviewed about being reunited. He had wondered if the ratings were as good now with the war over as they had been with it on. Some of its battles had been broadcast live, at times from the point of view of the soldiers’ goggles. Not those battles, of course, of deep penetration teams like his, particularly skirmishes in the gas tunnels. No – battles in support of the Jin Haa’s independence.

A staccato burst of automatic fire – from a drive-by shooting, perhaps – awakened him, and he grabbed the Wolff .45 that rested on the desk beside his keyboard. For a moment, he had thought he was back there. Not in the blue-leaved forests, but Tin Town, where he had grown up. Tin Town, from which he had escaped.

Still gripping the big pistol, with his free hand he reached up to touch his face. He felt the raised bands on his cheeks. He did not need to set his comp screen to mirror mode to confirm it. In fact, when he set his handgun down on the corner of the bed and squeezed into his minuscule bathroom to splash some icy water on his face, he could not even bring himself to lift his eyes to his reflection.

An extended beep from his computer system, followed two seconds later by another. Face dripping, Stake turned around. Someone was phoning him. He moved back toward his comp system, drying his hands as he went. Rather than seat himself in front of the screen, not expecting there to be anyone he really wanted to converse with at length, he leaned down over the back of his chair to check on the caller’s ID. It read: ANONYMOUS. In another mood he might not have answered, because it was likely some obnoxious marketer. Then again, what if the person who had taken over his father’s apartment had lied about not knowing him? What if that man had told his father someone claiming to be his son had come seeking him out? And what if his father had got his number, then, through the Veterans Administration?

A too-hopeful, illogical reasoning as he tapped a key to receive the call.

The comp’s screen changed to show him the caller, and to show the caller him. Stake saw a man leaning far back in a car seat, and pointing a rifle at him. He threw himself to one side as a dark purple beam of light launched itself straight out of the screen and burned a deep groove across his left hip.

*     *     *

Another of Cal’s gun’s tricks.

His new hovercar was not new. It had even been slathered with bright yellow graffiti already, last night when it was parked outside his flat. But its comp system worked fine. Before calling the imposter who claimed to be a man named Jeremy Stake, Cal had collapsed the stock of his rifle and its telescoping barrel, to make its use more practical in the vehicle’s confines. He leaned his back up against his door to give himself a bit more distance as he aimed his weapon at the monitor mounted on the dashboard.. His eye was pressed to the rubber cup shielding the scope’s tinier computer screen. His finger, on the trigger...

But his first shot had only grazed his target. The man was quick. And why not? He was obviously a soldier, too.

Cal twitched the gun’s barrel to follow him. He must not get excited. He must keep his cool. He was shooting fish in a barrel.

He fired a second ray bolt through his monitor. And then a third, resisting the temptation to switch to fully automatic. It was an art. He took pride in it. It was what he had been trained to do.

*     *     *

Stake tried to ignore the blazing pain along his hip, as he hit the floor and shoulder-rolled fast to his feet. Peripherally, as he came up, he saw a second bolt flash from the computer’s screen. It passed inches in front of his chest. He dove across his bed. A third bolt followed him, ploughing into the mattress. Before thudding to the floor on the opposite side, Stake scooped up the Wolff he had left on the bed before going into the bathroom.

A fourth ray burned straight through his bed and hit the wall; a blind shot, based on where the caller thought him to be. He was good, too, because the bolt almost skimmed Stake’s shoulder.

“Who are you?” Stake bellowed across the room.

His answer was a fifth beam, that passed so close to his face he felt its heat.

Sure that the sixth or seventh would kill him, Stake popped up from behind his bed with his own gun extended. The bulky pistol fired solid projectiles. And however elusive his unknown attacker was, the computer screen was a stationary object.

One good shot struck the screen dead-on. But Stake shot it two times more, just for good measure.

*     *     *

Cal swore under his breath as the connection was severed. But he had anticipated the possibility. That was why he had bought the hovercar.

He stepped out of it. Directly in front of his enemy’s apartment building. He had hoped not to make a public display of all this, but it couldn’t be helped now. It didn’t matter. He was doing his duty as a soldier. He was protecting this city. And avenging a comrade he had never known.

Cal had left his rifle in the car, but as he strode to the front door he tugged out his pistol. He had loaded it with illegal explosive bullets. He fired at the door as he came. A third blast did the trick. When he reached the decimated door, he kicked it aside, and was through.

*     *     *

Upstairs, on the third floor, Stake heard the three detonations, and knew that his enemy was close at hand.

He also knew he must not allow himself to be pinned down inside his tiny apartment a second time. So he rushed to his door, threw it open, and stepped out onto the landing overlooking the stairs, Wolff gripped in both hands. A woman cracked her own apartment’s door, saw him there, and ducked back inside.

Bluish smoke swirled at the bottom of the stairwell, but Stake saw a dark form darting through it. Starting up the stairs. He didn’t want to kill an innocent, and yet he didn’t even know what his enemy looked like. He couldn’t take the chance to hesitate a moment longer than he already had – so Jeremy Stake leaned over the railing, pointed the Wolff below, and fired shot after shot at the figure as it came racing up the second flight of steps.

He heard a cry. And then he threw himself to the floor as an explosive round took out most of the railing where he had been standing.

Stake lay on his belly, shell-shocked, expecting more of these explosions. But as the seconds ticked on, no more came. Was the man simply waiting for him to poke his head up? When Stake heard multiple voices murmuring to each other below, he realized the situation had changed. He got to his feet and descended the stairs, though he kept his pistol ready.

Another tenant had already taken the gun loaded with explosive bullets out of the man’s hand. He was not dead yet, but he lay on his back in a spreading pool of blood. Stake stood over him, looking straight down at him. And he thought the man looked familiar, though he couldn’t remember where he might have met him before. Then again, he had the close-cropped hair and nondescript look of so many men he had fought beside, not long ago at all.

A woman lay dead beside the bleeding man. From her terrible wounds, Stake guessed that she had been in the vestibule when the assassin had blasted away the door. The dying man turned his glassy eyes away from Stake to look at her. He groaned, and muttered something the others gathered there couldn’t hear. Stake hunched down closer.

“Sorry,” the dying man whispered to the dead woman. “I’m sorry...”

He turned his face to look up at Stake again. Stake expected to see anger there, but instead there was only a kind of bewilderment. And then, he realized the eyes weren’t seeing anything at all. This stranger who had tried to kill him was dead.

“Crazy,” one of the tenants said to another. “On drugs, or something.”

Stake contemplated the man for a few moments more. A tear that had formed before the life went out of him finally unbalanced and sped down the side of his face. The one tear more than the growing puddle of blood troubled Stake, and he rose to his feet. Turned around to face the other tenants, in the hopes that they might enlighten him. But when they saw him, this murderer, they all stepped back with a collective gasp.

Why? Was he the only killer in this city? And hadn’t he only been defending himself?

But then, as they stared at his face, he knew that wasn’t the reason. He reached up to touch his cheeks to confirm that the scars were no longer there. The dead Ha Jiin’s mask had melted away like an ice sculpture.

And Stake knew, without having to look at a mirror – knew, from the reflections of himself in the eyes of these confused tenants – what mask he now wore instead.

Relics

1

The other two buildings that made up the Triplex could be seen from various windows in her family’s apartment, but Cynth had never been inside them. Despite the fact that they were indistinguishable from the building she lived in, the eight-year-old had no particular awareness of them – just as she had no real sense of the many apartments within her building, identical to her own. For Cynth, the two towers that completed the three points of the complex’s triangle blended into the overall skyline that constituted the city of Punktown. The multifarious structures of this colony – established by Earth on the world called Oasis – canceled each other out in their sheer profusion, a brain static that she dismissed as the background of her life. She preferred things simple, individual, one-on-one.

“Don’t dawdle, Cynthia, you’ll be late to school,” said Mr. Moon. Only he called her Cynthia.

“It’s snowing!” she exclaimed as she hitched up her black tights. Snow was a single thing to capture her attention, something she could wrap her head around. Snow muffled the city’s babble, made the too diverse buildings comfortingly homogenous. Snow activated ancestral instincts, nostalgic notions of family and shelter.

“Yes, I know, that’s why you must dress warm today.” Mr. Moon had laid out Cynth’s clothes on her bed while she was still in the bath he had drawn for her.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Don’t you watch me, now!” she teased as she pulled her pajama top off to switch into her blouse.

In the living room of apartment 933 there was a glowing circular plate set into the wall. This and the panel beneath it were the apartment’s control center for Mr. Moon, as Cynth had named him. His greenish face shone from the circular plate: that of a benevolent, smiling moon rendered in an antique style, such as one might see in a fairytale illustration. She had told her father that she wished the face plate could be transferred to her bedroom wall, or that she could use the living room as her bedroom instead. When she lounged on the sofa, watching VT, she liked that the only other light in the room came from that pale lunar face. Her father had showed her how the building’s interactive system could also be accessed from any computer in the apartment, and called up Mr. Moon’s face on the screen of her room’s computer. Now his was the only light when she slept, bathing her in its green glow.

“I won’t look,” he assured her, though his eyes remained unmoving, unblinking. “Are you finished with your breakfast?”

“What do you think?” She gestured at her bowl, its inside stained with the bright yellow remnants of luul, a sweet porridge favored by the indigenous Choom people. She had been reluctant to try luul at first, but her mother had insisted and now it was the only breakfast Cynth would accept. She regretted her sarcastic tone and said, “Yes, please, you can take it now.”

There was a series of tracks recessed into the ceiling, the widest of these being a direct chute to the kitchen. Out of this track, one of the ceiling’s brass colored arms unfolded, silent and graceful, as delicate and intricate as the limb of a mechanical insect. Its fingers lifted her breakfast tray up into the chute and bore it away toward the kitchen.

As she slipped into her crisp school blazer, Cynth again became distracted by the expansive view from her bedroom window. Whatever its transforming properties, the snow was still unable to extinguish the warm brass glow of the metal the Triplex buildings were composed of. Rows of great bolts, in keeping with the towers’ retro industrial style, looked like rivets stitching together the plates of battleships. But it was the flying vehicles that had caught Cynth’s eye, their outlines vague as they swam through the veils of snow like birds above a sea of looming icebergs. A private hoverbus, riding lower to the ground, would be arriving soon to spirit her to the exclusive school her parents had enrolled her in.

Mr. Moon said, “And don’t forget, Cynthia, that you have Lucia’s birthday party to attend this evening.”

Turning from the window, the child huffed, “Like I’d really forget that! Why don’t you stop nagging me?”

There was the briefest of pauses, and then Mr. Moon said, “I’m sorry, Cynthia. Would you rather I didn’t talk with you this much in the future?”

Mr. Moon’s tone hadn’t changed – it never did, and how could it? – and yet to Cynth, it sounded as though she had actually hurt his feelings. She stepped closer to the brass colored wall and placed her hand flat against it. It didn’t matter in what particular spot she placed her hand; she felt his essence everywhere in apartment 933. The metal was warm, not cool.

“Why don’t you sing me a song instead?” she said gently.

“What would you like me to sing to you?”

“How about...um, Blue Blues by Pearl Mason?” This past summer she had seen this performer in person at the annual Paxton Fair, Paxton being Punktown’s true name, and the singer had sung Blue Blues on that occasion.

Without hesitating or balking, Mr. Moon began singing the song. He had sung it before, but he could access the lyrics and tune of any song she requested. Whether it was a thoughtful ballad from Del Kahn or a bouncy hit from upcoming club queen Chandra Shankar, Mr. Moon always sang in the same softly modulated male voice, warm as his brass skin, somewhat deep as befitted his giant’s body. This was not a disappointment, however, but a comfort to Cynth, like the unchanging voice of a parent. And it was when her own parents were both late home from work – which was often the case – that she had him sing to her the most.

*     *     *

Cynth’s parents gave her a lot of freedom – at least, within the confines of the fortress they had made of her life, here in the heart of a city notorious for its level of crime. They allowed her to go to Lucia’s birthday party, five floors below their apartment, unescorted. Actually, she didn’t even care to go; her mother was friendly with Lucia’s mother, if their superficial exchanges in the lobby could be considered a friendship, and Lucia’s mother had invited Cynth during one of these recent chats. Instead, Cynth was tempted to ride up and down in the elevator and talk to Mr. Moon, because his was the elevator’s voice. She considered wandering the other floors, or sitting in the lobby and reading magazines for a few hours, but then what if someone who knew her should relate this to her parents? What if Lucia’s mother asked Cynth’s why she hadn’t come to the party? Cynth saw no way around it. So, a present wrapped in shimmering gold foil in her arms, she set out through the building’s hallways with their riveted brass walls, doors of glossy dark wood, deeply colored carpets and mellow crystal lamps.

As she approached the corner that would deliver her at a row of elevators, Cynth heard a soft but familiar whirring. “Mr. Moon!” she called ahead, quickening her pace.

From around the corner emerged a boxy looking machine that skated along the carpet, sucking up the grit people had been tracking in from the snowy streets. Arms could unfold from it to polish the wooden doors or dust the ornate lamps, though none were extended now. The robot moved toward Cynth to meet her halfway. It was not in the least bit anthropomorphic, with nothing remotely like a head, but from it issued the voice of Mr. Moon. “You look lovely, Cynthia,” he said, though she didn’t know how he was seeing her.

“Well, I should – this is the dress you picked out. You have exquisite taste, Mr. Moon,” she said in a lofty tone.

“Thank you.”

When they reached each other, Cynth clambered up onto the automaton’s back. “Take me to the party, okay? You can be my trusty steed.”

“As you wish, Cinderella.”

The robot extension of Mr. Moon pivoted around back toward the elevators. They entered one, and as the doors closed them in, Cynth eyed the keyboard. “Let’s skip this stupid party, Mr. Moon. I don’t even like that snobby Lucia. Take me to the basement instead.”

“The basement? Why?”

“I’ve never seen it. I want to explore. It’s where all your guts are, right? It’s like your brain and your heart.”

“I’m afraid that’s not allowed. It’s too dangerous in there for a child. And I don’t have a heart, Cynthia.”

“I thought you were my friend.” She exaggerated a pout.

“I’m sorry, but I’m just looking out for you. It’s my job to protect you.”

*     *     *

Lucia was already opening her presents when Cynth arrived, though she was only a few minutes late. Cynth’s gift was the last to be added, the last to be opened, and when the gold foil came off Lucia said, “Thank you, Cynth. This would have been nice if I didn’t already have Sassy 4.5.”

“We could return it,” Cynth said, feeling her face begin to glow.

“That’s okay.” Lucia set the Sassy 4.0 doll aside. It was a diminutive, sexy-cute robot with an oversized head and even larger eyes, that danced to music, responded to easy questions and had a disconcerting habit of exploring the house while you slept, as if looking for a way out. Children had found it fun to go looking for their dolls in the morning, however, as if in a game of hide and go seek. “I can give it to my sister,” Lucia said.

Soon after the opening of gifts, it was time for cake and ice cream. Cynth hung back, on the outer orbit of those who gathered around Lucia, the center of the universe. The lights dimmed and Lucia’s mother carried the cake from the kitchen. As she did so, the guests sang, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.”Aside from Cynth’s father, there was only one other male adult voice that Cynth heard singing along. It was a softly modulated voice, warm as brass, somewhat deep as befitted a giant’s body.

Cynth looked around with sharp, bird-like jerks of her head, until she spotted a glowing circular plate set into the living room wall. A greenish face shone from the plate: that of a benevolent, smiling moon rendered in an antique style, such as one might see in a fairytale illustration.

When the song had ended, Lucia’s mother laughed and said, “Nice singing, Jeeves.”

“Nice job with the cake, too,” the father added.

“My pleasure,” said that very familiar voice.

Jeeves, they called him. But Cynth understood then, really for the very first time, that each apartment did not have its own distinct spirit, its unique guardian angel. They were all the same entity, and he administered to the needs of each apartment dweller equally. One might call him Jeeves. Another might call him Mr. Moon. But who could say what his name truly was, if his designers had even given him one?

She felt stupid for believing in things that didn’t exist. Felt tricked, though whether by those designers or by herself she couldn’t say. More than tricked, she felt – betrayed.

Cynth left the party early, found her mother had finally arrived home from work and complained to her of a bellyache before retiring for the night.

In her room, Mr. Moon spoke from the screen of the computer. “Was the party fun, Cynthia?” he asked.

“You tell me. You were there.” She changed into her pajamas without her usual teasing about Mr. Moon peeking at her bare body, then slipped into bed without bothering to brush her teeth first.

“I heard you tell your mother you were feeling unwell. Should I bring you something for it?”

“No. I need to sleep.”

“Would you like me to sing you to sleep, Cynthia?”

She didn’t reply. And she didn’t ask Mr. Moon to sing to her again for a long time after that night.

*     *     *

It was several months after Lucia’s birthday party, and Cynth’s parents were both late in coming home from work, even though it had long since become dark outside. It was not unusual that they were late, nor was it unusual to hear the harpy cries of sirens in Punktown, but tonight the sirens were louder – nearer – than usual and Cynth found herself drawn to the window that nearly filled one wall of her bedroom.

Every night, the skyline of Punktown dazzled with constellations of lights, a conflagration of neon, holograph and laser. It was beautiful, but removed as she was from it, Cynth did not see up close the sidewalks lit green as if with radiation, an absinthe green under which one’s skin was bleached cadaverous white, while red light leaked its way into alleys like the blood channels grooved into a sacrificial altar. Cynth did not see, from her bedroom window, the people who moved along those streets, some human and others not, nor would she understand the activities that so many of those restless souls pursued in the pulse and flicker of the city’s carnival lights.

The flashing lights she watched now, though, were those of police and emergency vehicles, some floating high off the ground like fireflies while others hovered low, in the triangular park that filled the space between the Triplex’s towers. She did not know that if this were another, less affluent portion of the immense colony city, the response would not be this intense – if there were any response at all.

In the lights from the vehicles, she could just make out small figures racing to the entrance of the building directly opposite, designated Tower 3. The colored lights flashed across the front of her own building, Tower 1, and through her window, alternating red and blue on the walls of her room.

Distracted as she was by all this, Cynth realized belatedly that she had begun to whimper, and when she heard herself whimpering she began to cry. She flinched, startled, when a hand lightly stroked the back of her head. She whirled around, expecting to see her mother there, arrived home from work at last. Instead, she saw a glittering brassy arm that had unfolded from its track in the ceiling, like a large metal spider that had descended on a strand of its far-reaching web.

“Don’t be afraid, Cynthia,” Mr. Moon said in his soothing tone.

“Please...will you sing to me, Mr. Moon?” she sobbed.

He started to sing to her, then, and his arm lowered further so that she could grip his hand. It was large, and enfolded her own like the claw of some imaginary, benevolent dragon.

Cynth’s parents would not tell her, the next day, how two young men had found their way into Tower 3, and then into an apartment on the second floor, where an elderly couple lived. One of the men was a nephew of the couple, and the other was his friend, and both were addicted to a drug called purple vortex. When his uncle tried to evict the men, the nephew and his friend began beating them.

As she sat there on her bed, with the police lights sweeping across her room and her body, and Mr. Moon holding her hand so gently as he sang Blue Blues to her, Cynth did not realize that just then in Tower 3 the police had discovered the elderly couple battered but alive on their living room sofa. They also found the two home invaders, suspended from the living room ceiling in the grip of eight metal hands, some of their parts no longer connected to the rest of their bodies.

2

In the autumn of her twenty-eighth year, Cynth traveled to Punktown from the city of Miniosis a half dozen times for a number of job interviews, and to check on the progress of the condominium she had purchased. Her condominium was one unit of a three story structure that was to have a brick exterior and the look of a converted factory building, to complement its neighborhood of warehouses and places of industry that themselves had mostly been refurbished as apartment buildings or office suites. Over the past couple of decades, most of Punktown’s places of manufacture had shut down, leaving many people – better suited to manual labor than office drone work – jobless, and thus increasing dramatically Punktown’s already alarming crime rate. To Cynth, the building under construction looked as much like it was slowly being stripped down and razed.

Because she had broken off with her fiancé, and because she couldn’t even bear being in the same city with him anymore, as if he were so integrated with that place that its very name concealed his own in code, she was in a dark mood that autumn and took to thinking of the condos-in-the-making as the Mansions of Despair. For a prolonged period the building’s construction had stalled, or at least in her impatience this was her impression. Whatever the case, for several of her visits she’d noted that the outside had been left surfaced in a tarry, charred-looking black material, which she imagined was insulation, except for a middle section that was weirdly yellow instead. When the gaping empty windows were viewed from an angle, the vertical metal supports for the interior walls looked like bars across them. There was to be a high security wall of brick-faced concrete around the condos, but in its incomplete state, with a bristling forest of iron rods jutting up like punji stakes, the wall’s foundation better called to mind a castle moat.

The building was finally finished, however, and by winter not only had Cynth moved in but settled into a new job as well. Still, every morning it was her ritual to steel herself before venturing outside to embark for work. She would stand at her living room window, coffee in hand, to confront the city beyond. Her parents had kept her well insulated from Punktown as a child, but she was no longer that child and her parents themselves remained in Miniosis, where they had moved their family when Cynth was ten. These days, she was only too aware of what went on in the streets that wound like streams through gorges of towering stone. The Mansions of Despair were curious in being so humble in scale, in a city where it often appeared the buildings had rained down from the sky and heaped atop each other wherever they happened to land, in seemingly precarious stacks of palaces atop castles atop fortresses, with metal bridges connecting them or maybe just preventing them from toppling against each other, vines of cable and drooping loops of corrugated pipe slung from one chasm wall to the next, all of it casting the labyrinth of streets below in a perpetual gloom.

Mansions of Despair, Cynth thought this morning as she gazed out upon Punktown once again, again sipped the coffee that had become a prop, an elixir of imagined strength. It’s all the Mansions of Despair.

It was comfortable enough inside her condo, but during the first week staying there she’d had a disturbing dream. On her earliest visit to the site, all there had been to see of the project was a steel skeleton, and it had rained that day so the cavernous interior pinged with dripping sounds. In her dream, Cynth sat up in her bed to find it perched on the third floor of this metal skeleton, seeing only darkness around her aside from the glistening of steel supports, and listening to those echoing drips of water.

She had awoken with her heart sprinting, and for some reason had almost called out for the lights to come on. But the lights in her condo were not voice activated. It was not an interactive structure in that way. As a child, she hadn’t appreciated that not everyone lived in such a building, and for months after they’d moved to Miniosis – into an apartment that was upscale but not interactive, either – it was difficult for her not to ask for the bath to fill itself, or for her bowl of morning luul to magically appear. When her parents were out and she caught herself talking aloud, it was only to herself. No one answered back.

*     *     *

“Synthia, will you please just call me? At least come to the apartment and get the things you forgot when you packed...”

Synthia. It was what Simon had always called her, for no apparent reason except to be witty, subtly mocking for his own secret amusement. Cynth had discovered the text message from her ex-fiancé on her work computer that morning, and so she supposed she came across as stiff or distant to the man seated opposite her now.

She was a client service representative for Jango Auctioneers and Appraisals, and among her duties she accepted consignments for auction after Jango’s evaluation and consideration people, more experienced than herself in the actual appraisal end of things, had had a look at the items. Cynth would then draw up the selling contract and reserve price, the terms of payment for seller and Jango both. The consignors paid Jango a selling commission that was deducted along with any agreed upon expenses from the so-called “hammer price.”

But she also helped bidders register for a numbered paddle, which would be collected for use the day of the auction. The registration process was usually handled over the net, but this man had wanted to do so in person. He had introduced himself as Richard Colores, the curator for antiquities at Punktown’s Hill Way Galleries. He’d asked her to call him Chard. He was of Earth heritage, of course – though his family had likely lived in Punktown for several generations, as was usually the case – small, trim, neatly attractive, with dark hair and a dark suit of Ramon silk.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” he said as he watched Cynth work at her terminal. “Are you new?”

“Relatively. A couple of months. Do you bid at the auctions often?”

“As often as my budget allows. Which isn’t enough, of course, to prevent me from wincing when I see the treasures that get snapped up by private collectors.”

“Well, private collectors also sell off their collections, which helps museums like yours have a shot at acquiring them.” She glanced up at him between the holographic screens and displays that had unfolded and overlapped in the air between them. From the way the man was looking at her, it seemed that he was the one doing the appraising. “Is there a particular item from our next auction that you had an interest in bidding on?”

“There is, and I was planning on having a look at it next. Would you accompany me, Cynthia? Maybe you can answer any questions I might have about it. The catalogs only give so much information.”

She smiled politely. “Please call me Cynth.” It wasn’t that she was trying to become familiar with him, but no one had called her Cynthia for a long time.

*     *     *

Jango not only held their auctions in the same building their offices were located in, but also provided an area in which the consignments were exhibited for one week prior to each auction. Like the auctions themselves, this pre-sale exhibition was open free to the public.

Once this area had been someone’s apartment, but the walls had been torn out, replaced with occasional metal support beams with oversized rows of bolts. Jango would arrange tables, pedestals, showcases – often locked and weapon-proof – in which to display its current array of items. Cynth, smartly attired and a little taller than Colores, strolled with him between the displays, stopping often as he studied and remarked upon them. Was he really all that interested, or just stalling to spend more time in her company? A security guard in a bulky, rubbery black jacket and matching rubbery cap scowled at them both as if ready to shoot even Cynth should she lean too hard on a showcase.

“Would you look at this,” Colores exclaimed, having come upon an article Cynth had found extremely repellant. It was a globular glass lamp filled with a red, gelatinous oil, in which was suspended a fetus of the gray-skinned Kalian race. It held a wick in one tiny fist, protruding through the surface of the gelatin.

“Yes,” Cynth said, much less enthused than he. “Some Kalians preserve the bodies of children born to unwed mothers in these lamps, and burn them to ward off demons.”

“I wouldn’t mind having that on my desk. Quite the conversation piece. Might ward off a couple of demons I work with, too.” They moved on to take in other rarities.

Colores turned from his examination of a stone tablet carved with a tentacle-faced divinity of the Irezk Island Tribe, once native to Oasis but now extinct, and for the first time seemed to spot the object he had come for, though Cynth suspected he’d seen it from the first moment he’d entered the room. “Oh!” he remarked, going to it, with Cynth trailing a little behind.

It would have been easy to spot right away. One might first assume the figure was merely a statue wearing an odd, flat-topped hat atop its lovingly carven hair, but the information sheet posted beside the sculpture identified it as a caryatid – a supporting column in the shape of a person. In this case, as the sheet explained, that person was Lupool, the wife of Raloom, a god worshiped by an ancient sect of Oasis’s native Choom people. Like her husband and the Choom themselves, Lupool might have passed for an Earth human were it not for her mouth, the corners of which ran back to her ears in a smile as serene as a dolphin’s.

When she’d first viewed the statue, Cynth had thought the arms and head had broken off and been reattached, because of the gaps that separated these pieces from the rest of the white stone body. But then she had learned that these were more like the jointed appendages of a mannequin, and the figure had been hollowed inside, the cavity filled with clockwork internal organs.

Colores had said he might need to ask Cynth questions about the item, but he seemed well enough informed already, as he explained, “There’d be two of these framing the temple door, and they’d be aligned to face the sunrise. Their arms would be lowered by night –” the figure’s smooth arms hung at its sides now “– but they were timed to lift above their heads with the rising of the sun.” He demonstrated with his own arms. “And they’d turn their heads gradually over the course of the day to follow the sun as it arced across the sky. Their eyelids would even open at dawn, revealing beautifully painted glass eyes. Just remarkable, isn’t it? Some of these statues are still going through their motions, four or five hundred years after they were created, but obviously this one isn’t. Do you know if the gears are inoperative, or is it just that no one has set the mechanism? It has to be reset about every four days.”

“I’m told it’s rusted and seized up inside.”

“A pity. But that can be cleaned up and repaired. Otherwise, she looks to be in incredible condition! It’s not easy to find one of them intact. As you can see, our lovely lady here is fully disrobed and anatomically correct. This offended followers of the more prevalent Choom religions, who persecuted Raloom’s followers – they hated Lupool more than they hated Raloom himself. So they went around razing the temples and smashing most of these columns. Some were hidden away, thank Raloom.” He grinned at his joke.

Cynth knew enough about the Raloom faith to know it had become obsolete, all but extinguished, and that Raloom himself was always portrayed simply as a head and shoulders, these busts often rendered in metal and sometimes so large they served as temples themselves. Cynth found it telling, and typical, that the male deity should be portrayed as a head, focusing on his mental attributes, while his wife should be celebrated for her sensuality.

“What I’ve been wanting to do at the Hill Way Galleries,” Colores told her, “is frame the entrance to the antiquities hall with the facade of a temple to Lupool, sort of like a dolmen with the two sides upheld by these caryatids. We already have one of these on display individually, and I’ve acquired the lintel for the top, but I’ve been looking for a matching figure. And to get both of them into a state where they can raise and lower their arms, turn their heads and open their eyes according to the time of day –” he clapped his hands together “– sublime!”

“That would be impressive,” Cynth conceded.

“Better than having the figure hidden away in some private collector’s home, huh? Used as a coat rack or something?” He chuckled. “The public should be able to appreciate this lady.”

“Well, I wish you the best at the auction, then.” Cynth’s wrist comp beeped. “Sorry, I should take this.”

“By all means.”

She drifted away to leave Chard Colores admiring the seductive nude figure, leaned against the sill of a large window and raised her arm with dread. To her relief, it was not Simon, but a consignor she had been working with. She accepted the call and his face appeared on the device’s tiny screen. As she conversed with the client, however, she found her eyes lifting to the window, drawn to the scene beyond.

It had been twenty years, yes, but it still surprised her that Tower 1 of the complex formerly known as the Triplex should have gone from its original brass color to a uniform shade of pale green verdigris. The building that contained Jango Auctioneers and Appraisals, formerly called Tower 3, had been kept in a much better state, shone as brightly as when it had faced her own building in her childhood – but then, the property had been sold off and divided over a decade ago. While Tower 3 had been converted into business offices, Tower 1 had remained an apartment building, though its clientele was apparently no longer as upscale as when Cynth had lived there. Sitting at her desk, gazing outside idly, Cynth often took note of the people who came and went through the building’s front doors. Their shabby coats, their furtive or dispirited movements, the sometimes misshapen forms inside the shabby coats that hinted at mutation. The battered vehicles in the lot, making it look more like a junkyard than the shiny showroom it had resembled in her day. Amazingly, there were even parasitic vines growing upon the face of the building that caught the most sun, so thickly that they obscured some of the windows, though these hardy city weeds had turned brown and brittle over the winter, like veins drained of their blood.

Cynth had had no prior experience with auction houses while living in Miniosis, city of unfaithful fiancés. She supposed she had pursued this job as much out of a sense of nostalgia as anything else. At least, knowing that Jango was situated in the Triplex had cemented her interest when she’d learned about the job.

She’d even briefly, wildly considered backing out of her condo and taking an apartment in Tower 1 instead, until she’d come to her first interview at Jango and seen the condition her former home was in.

She concluded her business on the wrist comp, and then with Colores. He let her go ahead of him as they slipped between two of the displays, placing one hand on the small of her back while making an ushering gesture with the other. There was a crash behind them at that moment, and both spun to look, startled.

Cynth hadn’t taken much notice of the robot before; there was a small fleet of them, of various types, that saw to the building’s upkeep. This was one of several Jango used to move the consignments from storage to the exhibition room, to the auction room and eventually out of the building when it was time for the winning bidders to gather their prizes. The robot had bumped the base of a pedestal, causing the Kalian lamp to fall and shatter. The gelatin had broken into quivering chunks, out of which the fetus’s limbs reached. It looked like a miscarriage lying there, or perhaps an unexpected birth.

Cynth switched her gaze to the robot, which had already begun gathering up the broken shards of glass in delicate brass claws. Its box-like body was scuffed and dinged, but she didn’t know whether it might actually be two decades old.

“Hey,” she called to it.

The sweeping arms paused for one or two moments, as if the machine had become befuddled, and then slowly resumed their work.

*     *     *

“Excuse me – do you work here?”

Cynth turned from watching the snow fall outside the exhibition room’s largest window. “Yes?” She was a little unsettled, not having heard the man approach, but then she was distracted from having found a new message on one of her work computer’s virtual screens. It had read, in large letters: “You abandoned me, Cynthia. I am empty without you.”

The man was a Choom, youngish, and because Cynth had lived all her life in Punktown, and a minority of Chooms had even attended her private schools, she was able to consider him attractive. His face had strong cheekbones and a broad jaw to accommodate the rows of molars hidden behind his ear-to-ear mouth, his eyes gray and his hair cut short and spiky as most Choom males wore it. He looked disheveled in his snow-dampened raincoat over a comfortable-looking old sweater over a T-shirt. He clutched the latest glossy Jango catalog. “My name is Mendeni. I’m a professor of anthropology at Paxton University. I had some questions about item number twenty-eight?”

“Ah,” Cynth said. “Our statue of Lupool.” She stepped closer to the man, who stood several paces from the stone automaton, which still slumbered though it was well past noon. Maybe the snow had lulled her? “A very popular item, I guess.”

The Choom looked wary. “How so?”

“There was a curator from the Hill Way Galleries in to see it yesterday, though it’s actually not very professional of me to talk about that.”

Mendeni looked warier, or more nervous, by the moment. “No, please, please tell me – it was Richard Colores, wasn’t it? I was going to ask you about that.”

“Yes. Mr. Colores was here, and expressed a great deal of interest in item twenty-eight.”

“Damn him,” Mendeni hissed, flicking his hot gaze toward the caryatid as if Colores might have vandalized it somehow. “I was hoping his budget would be exhausted. Well, maybe it is...maybe he’s hoping to get it for a song. But then he’d know better, wouldn’t he? He knows her value.”

“He did mention what a rare and important piece it is.”

Mendeni turned to her again. “Can you tell me what the reserve price is?” This was a consignment’s minimum selling price, agreed upon with the consignor, the so-called “floor price” below which no bid would be accepted.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t; the reserve price is a confidential matter between Jango and the seller. And I can’t reveal the seller to you, either, as he wishes to remain anonymous.”

“You don’t have to,” Mendeni said. “He’s a Kalian businessman named Darik Stuul, who found himself in a lot of hot water with the controversy over Alvine Products and the crazy cult that was behind it, him being one of the owners and the cultists. He wants off Oasis and he’s had to sell off his very impressive collection.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I have some connections. I know about Richard Colores, too. He was appointed as Hill Way’s curator of antiquities recently, though he’s been with them for over ten years, and he wants to shake things up to put the spotlight on himself.”

“He seemed to me to have an enthusiasm for your people’s history, and a desire to restore the facade of a temple for his museum.”

“Restore?” Mendeni practically screeched. “He’s raped major archeological sites and broken up valuable collections to assemble displays like what he has in mind! He’d chop the head off Michelangelo’s David and put it on a rotating pole outside the museum’s front door if he thought that would increase ticket sales! I’m the one who wants to reconstruct a temple devoted to Lupool – in its entirety, and on its original site! Colores knows this all too well. If he had a true love of history he’d be supporting our project, but instead he’s been discrediting us to whoever will listen.”

“It could just be that you actually want the same thing, to restore a valuable piece of history, but there’s only so much material to go around. Isn’t it just possible you resent his efforts because he’s not a native to your world?” Cynth regretted this speculation the moment it was uttered. Very unprofessional of her. But then, she excused herself as still being disturbed by Simon’s latest message.

Mendeni drew in a long breath. “Did you ever see Hill Way’s art exhibit called ‘Through the Eyes of Raloom’? A lot of contemporary artists were invited to paint very iconoclastic, one might say very blasphemous images of Raloom. It was a nice bit of controversy that sold a good number of tickets. Well, Colores was the chief organizer of that exhibition. He has no love of history, Choom or otherwise, only of creating his own grand history.” In an increasingly shaky voice, Mendeni went on, “My paternal grandfather belonged to the Raloom faith; it was a tradition carried down for generations in our family, and it ended with him. If he had ever gone into that ‘Through the Eyes of Raloom’ exhibition...”

“Look,” Cynth said in a soothing tone, “on the day of the auction, you’ll have your chance to bid on this statue, and it may well end up in your hands.”

“Our budget doesn’t compare to Hill Way’s.”

“You said yourself, their budget might not permit it at this point.”

“Even if it didn’t,” Mendeni sulked, “some other rich monster like Darik Stuul will snatch her up.”

Maybe it was the guilt, but Cynth actually felt herself sympathizing with the man. His emotion was real, and barely in check. “I was just on my way to lunch, Mr. Mendeni. Would you like to accompany me? While we eat I can register you for a bidder’s paddle, if you haven’t done so on the net already.” She tapped her wrist comp to show him how this could be accomplished.

Mendeni’s wide mouth spread a little wider in an apologetic smile. “Look, I’m sorry I’m so excitable.”

“We’ll call it passionate.”

“I didn’t get your name, I’m afraid.”

She told him, and he shook her hand. “Nice to know you, Cynthia.”

She was about to ask him to call her Cynth instead, when something occurred to her. Cynthia, Simon had called her in today’s message.

“You abandoned me, Cynthia. I am empty without you.”

But Simon only ever called her Synthia.

*     *     *

Walking from Tower 3's parking lot to the building’s front entrance the next morning, Cynth again noted the verdigris tint of Tower 1, that made it look covered in lichen. Like the building that housed Jango Auctioneers and Appraisals, Tower 2 retained its polished brass exterior, only somewhat tarnished by the years. She stopped for a few moments to look between Towers 1 and 3, and recalled again the night the emergency vehicles had descended on the building she now worked in. She turned her face up toward the rows of windows in the building she had once lived in, at this angle black and staring down at her like myriad empty skull sockets. She felt the impulse to cut across the triangular park between the three buildings and enter Tower 3's front lobby, where she had often sat to read magazines...

The beeping of her wrist comp jostled her out of her reverie, and she lifted her arm to study it. The call was from her supervisor, Mr. Rosetta.

He was the first to inform her that item twenty-eight had been stolen from the exhibition room.

*     *     *

There were two of those security guards now, identical in their rubbery black attire and surly scowls, plus city law enforcers in uniform and street clothes. Cynth hung back a bit until Mr. Rosetta was free for her to approach him.

“Nothing else was taken,” he told her.

“Thank Raloom,” Cynth said, more to herself. “There was no guard on duty at the time?”

“Only during the hours the room is open to the public, between ten and five. After that, it’s locked.”

“What about cameras?”

“They were down! We don’t have anything after five-thirty.”

“Oh my. So someone disabled them?”

“So it would seem, but they appear to be operating correctly again now.”

Cynth excused herself at the earliest opportunity and hurried to her office, where she went into her files for the personal contact numbers for Mendeni and Chard Colores. As she waited for Mendeni to answer, her eyes lifted to the blank white panels of the ceiling, identical to those that covered the ceiling in the expanded exhibition area. She wondered if the brass insect arms she remembered, folded into their grooves in every ceiling of the three buildings of the Triplex, had been removed or simply covered over under new dropped ceilings. She was certain that those nimble limbs were not administering to the needs of the low income families, mutants and junkies who appeared to be the inhabitants of Tower 3 now.

At last, Mendeni materialized on one of her floating screens. “Cynthia, hello! I was meaning to call you today and tell you how much I enjoyed our lunch yesterday. Any chance –”

Cynth cut him off. “The statue of Lupool was stolen last night, Mendeni.”

“What?” he screeched. “Stolen by who?”

“You tell me.”

“What do you mean, you tell me? Are you accusing me of this?”

“Sorry; I only meant, your guess is as good as mine.”

“Is that what you meant? And so that’s why you called me?”

“I thought you’d be interested to know.”

“I’m sure Richard Colores would be interested to know, too – have you called him? Or is it only me you think is a criminal?”

“I am not calling you a criminal, and yes, I was going to call Colores next. Don’t worry, I didn’t mention to the forcers or even my boss about you two coming to view the piece, and how intensely you both want it.”

“So what if I want it intensely? That doesn’t make me so lacking in intelligence or sanity to do something like this!”

But you are lacking in cash, Cynth thought. “Well, whoever did this would be as intensely interested in the piece as you two are. Look, calm down, I just wanted you to know. Maybe you’ll hear of something, someone else who might have wanted the statue enough to do this. In the meantime, like I say, I need to tell Colores, too.”

“Yeah, you do that,” Mendeni said, apparently as shaken by Cynth’s not-so-subtle accusations as he was by news of the theft itself. “Keep me informed.” Then he signed off.

Colores, when she called him next, was clearly stunned but maintained his composure. If he was aware of Cynth’s suspicions, he didn’t mention it or appear defensive or resentful. “This is terrible, just terrible – and so perplexing! Why only that item? I wonder if it could be a Raloom cult; there are still a few of them here and there on Oasis, you know. But I also know of a young man named Mendeni, at P.U., who very much wants that figure, too. And I happen to know his family were Raloom worshipers going way back. You might want to –”

“I know Mr. Mendeni,” Cynth broke in.

“Ahh. Well, if you know him, then I need say no more. But I hope you mentioned him to the authorities, so they might talk to him.”

Cynth didn’t say whether she had or hadn’t. All she would say was, “I’ll let you know if I hear anything. Please do the same, Mr. Colores.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, so preoccupied with worry now that he forgot to remind her to call him Chard.

*     *     *

Cynth wouldn’t have answered the call from Simon were it not for what he said. He seemed shocked to see her face come on his own screen. “What are you saying, Simon?”

“Well, so it speaks at last.”

“I asked you what you’re saying.”

“And I ask you, what was the idea of having me come to Punktown? You can’t really be living in that dump. I should have known from the outside before I even went in, which was stupid of me – I could have been mugged or killed. But maybe that was your intention, huh?”

“Will you please tell me what the hell you’re going on about, Simon?”

“About the text message you sent me, damn it! Asking me to bring your stuff to your new apartment.” He gave the address. He even gave the apartment number: 933.

“Oh my God,” Cynth said under her breath. She fumbled with her thoughts. “You didn’t go in? Inside 933?”

“I rode up the elevator, looked into the hallway, and turned right around again. That is, I tried to ride back down, but the elevator wouldn’t even work again. It almost caught my arm in the doors! It was a joke, you sending me there, wasn’t it? A cruel joke?”

“It was a prank, sort of, but not by me.”

“Who, then? Do you have a new boyfriend? Someone trying to do me harm?”

“Someone who thinks they’re looking out for me,” she muttered. “Are you still in Punktown now?”

“Yes!”

“Don’t go back to that apartment again. You’re right – it isn’t safe there.”

*     *     *

Riding down in one of Tower 3's elevators, Cynth thought back now over things she had only half noticed since beginning work for Jango. The odd gurgling of what she figured was a water pipe behind one wall of her office. The way the office was hot as a sauna one day, icy cold the next. She had even complained of this, and maintenance people had looked into the problem; it hadn’t recurred so she’d assumed it had been resolved.

The elevator took her down past the second floor, where the two home invaders had broken in all those years before. It didn’t stop there, but continued on toward the lobby. After speaking with Simon, though, Cynth had this fear that when she arrived, the doors wouldn’t open, that the elevator would keep her as a prisoner inside.

It didn’t, however, and she left Tower 3 to cut across the triangular park, along a path through the snow that one of the service robots had plowed.

Walking toward Tower 1, which loomed over her as if it might topple, cold in its giant’s shadow, Cynth remembered the last day her family had been inside the structure, inside apartment 933, before they’d left for Miniosis. Alone in her room, emptied of all her belongings except for the bed she had outgrown, ten-year-old Cynth had spoken softly to the air, as if partaking in a séance. “Good-bye, Mr. Moon.” She had been brave, had held back her tears. Barely. “I’ll miss you.”

For the first time ever, Mr. Moon did not reply to her. At the time, she hadn’t been sure if –  because they were leaving – the computer mind felt it was no longer imperative for it to attend to its former masters. Or was it, instead, that Mr. Moon was at a loss for words?

She entered the spacious lobby of Tower 1 and found it not much warmer inside than it was outside. The carpet was worn, tracked with mud. The interior metal of the walls and ceiling were not the green verdigris of the exterior, but were still tarnished almost black. A man lay mumbling to himself in uneasy sleep on one sofa, and on the other side of a low table strewn with old newspapers and ragged magazines, an elderly Choom woman slouched deeply in a once plush but now fungus-like chair. She and the sleeping man had gray hair and skin that looked leeched of color, or even life force. Glancing at the woman again, Cynth couldn’t tell if she were not so much elderly as very unwell, but the gray woman’s eyes followed Cynth with a bright curiosity as she made her way across the lobby to the elevator. Cynth had called for the lift, and it was taking an extra long time to arrive, when a voice rasped behind her, “Don’t you go down to the basement, now.”

Cynth turned to see the faded, wrinkled woman smiling a huge Choom grin over the back of her chair, like the disembodied head of a mummified Cheshire cat. “Excuse me? What’s wrong with the basement?”

“A terrible old man lives down there. I think he’s a ghost.”

The elevator door hissed open behind Cynth, startling her.

*     *     *

When she entered the hallway, it was to find half its ornate crystal lights extinguished, so that it looked like an endless tunnel carpeted in moss. She walked between its riveted walls and somber dark doors until she came to one labeled 933.

She was about to command the door to open when she felt a gaze upon her, and looked around to find a man watching her from the doorway of another apartment. In the gloom, his face appeared oddly distorted but she couldn’t be sure if he were a mutant. She called over to him, “Do you know if anyone lives in here now? In 933?”

“No,” he said, very brusquely. “Who would want to live in there?” And then he withdrew into his flat and shut the door after him.

Cynth faced the door again, and this time decided to test it first herself. Unlocked, it opened at her touch. She stepped inside, closed the door behind her with a stealthy click.

“Lights,” she whispered. No lamps came on, but a weak gray sunlight entered through drawn, translucent curtains. There was only one source of light in the living room, already on, but it was wan and flickered. It was the greenish glow of a circular plate set into the wall, bearing the features of a benevolent, smiling moon rendered in an antique style, such as one might see in a fairytale illustration.

Cynth stood where she was for several moments, watching that fluttering light, as if she expected the fixed eyes to shift in her direction. Then, having steeled herself, she crossed the living room floor, quietly as if afraid to rouse a sleeper. As she came further into the apartment, she noticed an unpleasant smell and followed it. It reminded her of algae growing on the surface of stagnant water.

She poked her head into the bathroom, and in the dimness saw that the water filling the tub looked very dark. But it was not red with blood, as she had imagined it before entering. Chard Colores – lured here as Simon had almost been – did not lie in the tub, as she had for some reason pictured him, drowned in the redness like the baby in the Kalian lamp, with metal arms pinning him down in the water after having burst through the lower, secondary ceiling. The ceiling was water stained but unbroken. A thought occurred to Cynth, and she stepped into the bathroom to touch the surface of the water. It was scummed in black slime from long unused pipes, but the water was almost hot, as if someone had filled the tub for a bath only minutes earlier.

Cynth turned back into the hallway, and continued on to her old bedroom. She found its door open, inviting her, and she passed across its threshold.

Again, for some reason she had expected – had dreaded – to find Mendeni here ahead of her, after having received a message supposedly from herself. He was not. But there was another figure standing before her in the gloom of gray light.

It was the naked figure of a woman, who stood before the closed curtains of the window as if she longed to gaze at the city beyond but could not open the drapes with her own hands. Instead, the statue’s rigid arms had been raised above her head in an open, beseeching gesture.

Cynth’s heart beat wildly. At first, because she had thought it was a person, and then because she recognized it – even with its arms forced into a new position – as the likeness of Lupool, wife of the god Raloom. And thirdly, because in an intuitive way, the way one can anticipate the behaviors of a friend or loved one however ailing or aged or distressed, because she knew the caryatid was not so much meant to depict Lupool anymore, as herself.

She dropped her eyes to a bowl containing a steaming substance, set on top of her old built-in desk unit. She knew it was supposed to be the sweet Choom porridge called luul, but there was something off about the smell. Still, it lay there like an offering left to a stone idol.

She drifted further into the room, watching the back of the stone idol as if fearing that its head would creak around to look back at her with its now open glass eyes. In this murk she couldn’t tell whether the human-shaped column were any the worse for wear after one of the Triplex’s service robots had transported it here.

And why was it here? To cheat the two men of this treasure, the men who had coveted it so avidly? Had he mistaken their passion as lust for her, the treasure’s temporary keeper, instead? Not that Cynth hadn’t been able to tell that both Colores and Mendeni found her alluring. Mr. Moon had sensed it, too. Of course he had. He was a ghost haunting not one but three buildings, omnipotent like a god himself.

Or was it an offering to her, secreted in this shrine they both had preserved? Or even a gift to himself – a replacement for her, a clockwork effigy better suited for his longing, synthetic heart?

“Synthia,” Cynth said softly to herself.

She moved to the nearest wall, and flattened her hand against its tarnished surface. It didn’t matter in what particular spot she placed her hand; his essence was everywhere in apartment 933. The metal was cool, not warm.

“Mr. Moon,” she said aloud. “A long time ago I had to leave here, but the decision wasn’t mine. I loved living here. I was sorry to go.” She stopped to swallow heavily. “I’m sorry...”

She continued, making her voice louder, firmer, but still soothing. “You never said good-bye to me that day when I left. Mr. Moon – it’s time for you to say good-bye to me now.” She waited in silence for nearly a minute. “Please, Mr. Moon. It’s time for us both to go.”

From no discernible source she detected a small, rasping sound. A drawn out little croaking, like some badly distorted and slowed down recording of a song.

She didn’t tell it to stop. She let it play itself out until it dwindled away, and went silent, on its own.

3

It was Mendeni who, of the two of them, seemed a bit uneasy with their relationship at first. She would tease him that on some level he harbored resentment for the race that had colonized his world, buried one of the Choom’s own cities under what was to become Punktown, so that only the barest remnants of that earlier city could now be distinguished. He told her it was just that he was more comfortable, at times, with things than with people, with the past than the here-and-now. She had to concede that she had often felt that way herself.

She helped Mendeni get over the fact that Chard Colores had successfully outbid him at the auction, and walked away with the caryatid representing Lupool, wife of the deity his grandfather had once worshiped. Cynth told him he had actually been the luckier of the two, in that it was he who had won her, and at a fraction of the price.

Mendeni had moved with her into the building that once upon a time she had called the Mansions of Despair.

And two years after the statue of Lupool had been auctioned, shortly after which Cynth had left Jango to work for a larger auction house, she heard that the Triplex was to be completely razed so that a new, more up-to-date office complex could be built on that site.

A Semblance of Life

It didn’t really matter to him whether people addressed him as LeBlanc, which was the first name he’d been given, or Jones, which was the last name he’d been given. His last name couldn’t be considered a surname, however, as LeBlanc was a clone. Because the ID pin he wore on the jacket of his neat gray suit read L. JONES, his partner – who was not a clone – called him El Jones. This moniker he didn’t care for, but then he didn’t care for his partner.

LeBlanc hadn’t liked Miter since the first time they’d met, two years earlier, when the seasoned guard had laughed, “Hey, don’t go in the museum’s courtyard garden or I’ll never find you.” He was referring to LeBlanc’s appearance. The clone was from a particular sub-series of soldiers, who for a bit of variety from other lots had been given identical African features. But

Miter’s comment had to do with the fact that these military clones had been designed for combat in the blue-leaved jungles of the planet Sinan. As such, LeBlanc’s entire body – from his hairless head to his feet – was patterned with blue-toned camouflage pigmentation.

“The usual drill, El Jones,” Miter instructed tonight, at the start of their after-hours shift. “You take floors two and three, and I’ll take the first floor, lobby, gift shop and café.” He listed all these areas as if they were located separately, instead of all being on the first floor. Of course the senior guard would take this territory for his rounds; not only was it half that of LeBlanc’s allotment, but Miter could sit for an hour or more at a time in the café, drinking coffee and munching snacks from the dispensers, or even with his head down on his folded arms at one of the tables, snoring.

LeBlanc had complained to his supervisor about Miter’s naps, after one night during which the older security guard had slept in the café for three hours straight. The supervisor had said he would talk to Miter about it, resulting in Miter angrily confronting the newer guard. LeBlanc had held his own temper, and had never reported the other man’s activities or lack thereof again. He didn’t want any trouble. He craved only serenity, for his nights to float by in a placid walking dream. This, if anything, was his stipend for whatever service he had performed in years past. After steaming jungles of blue foliage, insidious booby traps, ripping fusillades of solid projectiles and flashing beams from ray weapons, the silent after-hours halls and rooms of the Hill Way Galleries were the very mansions of Heaven.

“Okay, chief?” Miter said, starting away from the lobby’s security desk in the direction of the café, and the first of tonight’s succession of coffees. He gave LeBlanc a salute, no doubt a sarcastic nod to his service in what had been called the Blue War. But that war had ended a dozen years ago.

LeBlanc didn’t return the salute, only nodded, gave an affirmative grunt, and turned to leave the lobby. On his way he glanced at the windows that fronted the reception area. Beyond them lay the enormous city of Paxton, best known by its own moniker of Punktown, built here on the planet Oasis by Earth colonists but peopled by an extensive variety of sentient beings. The art and culture of many of those races were reflected here, in one way or another, in the exhibit halls of the Hill Way Galleries.

Through the glass, the city, massive as it was, looked as distant, cold and unapproachable as the stars that its constellations of windows and advertising lights resembled in night’s blackness. LeBlanc had lived here ever since he had finished a decade-long stint extracting ore on an asteroid mine, following the end of the Blue War, but Punktown didn’t feel much more like home than the asteroid had. To LeBlanc, home was an alien concept.

*     *     *

Satisfied that no one was lurking in the second floor ladies’ rest room, LeBlanc withdrew, but not before a glance at his reflection in the large view screen (which did not reverse his reflection as a mirror would; not that it mattered to him). His face, swarming with patches of blue in every shade, glared back at him like another clone from his lot, as displaced as himself.

LeBlanc always checked the rest rooms warily. There had been occasions when museum visitors had hidden until after closing time, with the intention of theft, vandalism (some people were roused to destroy pieces they found offensive on political, religious, or moral grounds), or, if they were homeless, just for a warm place to spend the night. LeBlanc himself had ejected a number of homeless people since he had started here, and held more questionable types for the forcers to come and claim.

But it was Miter who had had the distinction of finding three dead people over the course of his career. One of them, in the first floor men’s room, had died of an overdose on the toilet. Another had perished in an attempt to have sexual congress with an abstract mechanical sculpture by a local artist named Teal, whose lover Nimbus had posed for the sensually contorting (and lethally crushing) automaton. And only one week ago, Miter had found what had obviously been a victim of murder.

It had been one of those infrequent nights when Miter had offered to switch places with LeBlanc, taking floors two and three. Had it not been so, LeBlanc himself would have discovered the body, though he had viewed it after receiving Miter’s near hysterical call over their wrist comps. After the rigorous interrogation the forcers had subjected Miter to, LeBlanc was grateful he hadn’t been the one to discover the corpse, knowing that as a clone, a former soldier, and a fairly new employee, he would have less credibility. As it was, Miter had a hard time explaining how he had missed discovering the corpse earlier, when it lay there in the middle of the floor in the large antechamber to the third level’s Hall of Antiquities, which Miter claimed he had passed through several times previously during his shift.

LeBlanc recalled the victim now, as he strolled toward the same antechamber. The memory did not frighten him – he had seen far more violated bodies during his three intense years of military service – but it did make him vigilant. The victim had been another homeless person, a young male junkie, though they didn’t know where he might have been hiding. The theory was that a homeless companion had killed him in a quarrel, and fled. But fled where? Cameras were trained on every entrance to the museum, and while they and all the other cameras in the building (any one of which could be accessed on security’s wrist comps at any time) only viewed and did not record, the entrance/exit cameras were programmed to sound an alert at the sight of any unfamiliar body that appeared in their range out of visiting hours – aside from the guards, whom the cameras would recognize. All the forcers could conclude was that the killer had again hidden away somewhere, then reemerged during regular hours and exited the Hill Way Galleries along with its more innocent patrons.

Miter had found the young junkie sprawled there with his neck and both arms broken. The flesh of his face had been roughly torn, rather than slashed, and both his eyes had been gouged out. They had not been recovered.

*     *     *

In the antechamber to the Hall of Antiquities, LeBlanc was greeted by a huge iron bust of the deity Raloom, worshiped by the ancestors of this planet’s indigenous people, the Choom. The eyes of the great metal head were hollow, fragrant oil lamps intended to be burned in them. Their gaping emptiness again called to LeBlanc’s mind the image of that junkie with his eyes torn out.

Religion. It was perhaps the last thing he could relate to. There were those who claimed this was because clones had no souls, and LeBlanc could not really protest. He just didn’t know how it felt not to be a clone. He knew he had no sexual desire, had been designed as such, to keep him from being distracted from his duties and perhaps chasing after beguiling, blue-skinned Sinanese women. One thing he could relate to with birthers, as clones called nonclones, was the sensual enjoyment of food. He was currently taking gourmet cooking classes, with half a thought to becoming a chef. Recently his instructor, a man, had kissed him on the mouth when they were alone. LeBlanc had not been aroused in any way, but he had withdrawn from the man calmly, without feeling any hostility either.

LeBlanc moved on, into the Hall of Antiquities, which was actually an extensive series of interconnected rooms. Here, on the walls and on pedestals, on shelves or in showcases, were ancient sculptures, blank-faced mannequins attired in archaic clothing, pottery beautifully intact or in shards, mean-looking weapons and prehistoric tools – spotlighted objects representing a diversity of races, from human to nonhuman.

Every night, LeBlanc was surrounded by other people’s cultures. He, who had no heritage or history, no culture or kin – only related product with the same lot number, the same face. Sometimes he felt as he had when aiding the Jin Haa people in their struggle to win autonomy from the ruling Ha Jiin people, on Sinan. He, who had no politics, fighting alongside those who would die for their beliefs...people passionate for their sense of individualism, of ethnic identity, when he had none. Now, likewise, here he was protecting these venerated cultural icons, that meant nothing more to him than items in store windows that might mildly catch his interest at the Canberra Mall.

Was it just that he had no cultural connection, LeBlanc would wonder, or that it was against his bio-programming to care about such things? Well, he tried to take an interest. He had read the information accompanying every single exhibit in the museum, he wouldn’t doubt. At least, everything on the second and third floors (while Miter had no doubt sampled every item in the food dispensers by now). He had no desire to switch to first shift, when these rooms would be flooded with visitors, swarms of children on field trips, so he did not have to be conversant on the displays as the day shift guards were, but he found reading the exhibit plaques interesting for his own benefit. Having noticed this habit, Miter had commented that if LeBlanc should ever want to become a day guard, “All they’d have to do is feed you some art history in a brain drip, the way they trained you to be a soldier back at the factory, right?”

Ignorant birther, LeBlanc had thought.

Tonight, his attention was attracted once more to the latest additions to the museum’s collection, a good number of items from the private collection of a wealthy business owner, donated by his wife following his recent death. She had then hastily left Oasis for Earth, which lent extra suspicion as to whether her husband had acquired all these treasures in a legitimate, ethical, and culturally sensitive fashion. While the proper authorities were looking into all that, the museum continued to display the items, as they had since acquiring them just a month earlier.

It was LeBlanc’s understanding that the businessman had been found murdered in his home in a ghastly but undisclosed fashion, and that the wife’s swift departure to Earth was still being considered in regard to this, as well.

The items from his private collection were from a variety of planets, so they were not all housed in the same room, but in this room were a number of objects that the businessman had collected from a race called the Antse. Their world existed in an alternate dimension, as did Sinan in fact, and the man had traveled there repeatedly in his business dealings. One of these items was a suit of flesh made from a giant animal called a fluke, which the Antse flayed in a sacred ritual so that they could harvest their skin – a gorgeous mix of green and black like malachite. The Antse made these skins into form-fitting suits that they wore over their own bland, smooth gray bodies and hairless heads. It was the only time they ever wore clothing.

Another item, preserved inside a tall glass showcase lest it decay, was one of the effigies the Antse people hung out in the street during their so-called flaying season, carved from the white inner meat of a fluke in a generally anthropomorphic shape, and then stuck with nails and spikes like some half-formed martyr. Staring at the totem, LeBlanc could only wag his head, mystified. Was he missing out on something vital in not feeling any religious impulses of his own? All he knew for sure was that he would never want to wish damnation on, or wage a crusade or jihad against, anyone who did not harbor the same religious impulses as his own.

Yet another display from the businessman’s collection drew LeBlanc’s attention, and according to the plaque this too had religious significance. On a raised platform crouched three identical figures, each tucked into a  ball, tucked so tightly in fact that one might not at first realize these uneven spheres were meant to be people. Apparently they represented a clerical order associated with an Antse religion that had died out centuries ago. The clerics were said to contort their bodies into balls such as this trio of sculptures portrayed, and remain that way through long periods of meditation. They did not wear the flayed fluke skins, but they did paint their naked gray bodies with a bright yellow mineral. These sculptures were so painted, too, and either this pigment or the stone they were carved from gave them a porous texture like pumice.

LeBlanc stooped down, trying to look at the face of one of the figures, but its head was so tucked in, besides being covered over with its arms, that he couldn’t see it. The fingers laced between its shoulders had dark stains on them, no doubt from age.

Straightening, LeBlanc read the rest of the plaque. The rites of these clerics were so secret that anyone not invited to view them would suffer grave consequences. The usual threats to infidels, LeBlanc thought.

His wrist comp beeped, and he lifted his arm to gaze down at its little screen. Miter was there, and he talked while chewing. “Hey, El Jones, I thought I’d give you a head’s up, even though I might just be going crazy in my old age. A little while ago when I was sitting here in the café, I swore I heard a sound like a bare foot slapping on the floor. So I turned around and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw someone run past the café doorway, but when I went to look I couldn’t find anybody. I’m going to check out the rest of the floor now, so you keep your eyes peeled too, okay?”

“What did they look like?”

“It was just a flash, you know, like you get sometimes looking too quick from a light area into a dark area? So it could just be my imagination, man; too much coffee or not enough. But it sort of looked like someone small, with no clothes. I don’t know, maybe just wishful thinking.” The man snorted. “Just have a look around, will ya?”

“I’ll do that.”

Miter signed off.

*     *     *

LeBlanc checked the rest of the third floor thoroughly, then descended to the second floor. He beeped Miter in the process. “I haven’t seen anything. You?”

“No. Maybe I need a nap, man; I barely slept today, you know? I’m not a young guy like you. How old are you, now...like fourteen?”

“Fifteen.”

“Wow. Be patient, El Jones, and you’ll be able to legally drink in a few years.”

LeBlanc said nothing, but cut their connection.

When LeBlanc had finished his rounds of the second level and returned to the third, he was surprised but not startled to find Miter in the Hall of Antiquities, reading the plaque on the wall beside the flesh scarecrow in its glass case. “Hey,” said LeBlanc, and Miter whirled around fast, a hand going to the pistol holstered under his gray suit jacket.

“For Chrissakes, dung-hole, are you trying to burst my beater? Jesus.” He straightened up. “That’s what I get for coming in here and reading about all this creepy Antse stuff.”

“Did you see someone come up here?”

“No, but I thought I’d have a look around where I found that body last week, you know?”

Miter blew out his cheeks, still shaken, and LeBlanc smirked internally. The older guard had been on the day shift twenty years ago, when the psychotic artist Toll Loveland had terrorized Punktown with his bio-art. Two Health Agents on the artist’s trail had come to the Hill Way Galleries to have a look at Loveland’s art therein, in the hopes of discovering clues. The way Miter told it, he had assisted the Health Agents in their case; one might think that when these men finally defeated Loveland, Miter was right there beside them. The museum had acquired more of Loveland’s art after his death – including a bio-engineered golem of roughly human form, its flesh programmed to once an hour sprout clusters of what looked like little wavering branches or an unraveling circulatory system, before returning always to its original shape. Now that LeBlanc thought of it, this effigy reminded him of the Antse flesh scarecrow. It also had sort of reminded him of himself, sometimes. Was he only a tricky moving sculpture imitating a man? Might he himself be housed in a place like this one day, a mere artifact of the culture that had fashioned him?

“Well I swept this floor and two pretty thoroughly, and didn’t see anything,” LeBlanc reported. “If you’re really worried, we could get the forcers down here to do a scan.”

“I dunno...I’m not too keen on forcers after the way they grilled me last week.” Miter nibbled his lip. “Let’s just do our jobs a bit more and if there is a problem we’ll go from there.”

LeBlanc started out of the room to continue on to the next, which housed artifacts of the Tikkihotto race. “All right, I’ll keep looking. Just don’t shoot me tonight, okay?”

“Then just don’t sneak up on me anymore, forest face.”

Sometimes LeBlanc thought that if Miter had been beside him in the Blue War, and had seen how adept a killer his bio-engineering had made him, he’d never make any of his witty comments.

*     *     *

LeBlanc had just entered a room featuring more relics from here on Oasis, of the extinct Irezk Island tribe of Chooms, when his wrist comp again beeped him. This time when he saw his partner, Miter looked even more alarmed than when LeBlanc had startled him. “Jones, I saw the thing...it ran out of the Kalian room just as I was going in, but I definitely saw it!”

So Miter was still in the Hall of Antiquities, further back. LeBlanc had left the room of Kalian artifacts only five minutes earlier. “And, what is it?”

“I don’t know...it looked like a kid, or maybe an old man. Small, no clothes, all a bright yellow color.”

“Yellow?”

“Maybe a homeless mutant.”

“Did you beep the forcers?”

“Whatever it is, it’s just skin and bones. Let’s try to take it ourselves so we don’t have some smug patrollers laughing at us for the rest of the...hey...hey!
You there!” Miter’s face had jerked out of the frame, leaving LeBlanc with a yawing shot of the ceiling.

“What?” LeBlanc leaned forward on the balls of his feet. “What is it?”

“There it is! It’s looking at me!”

“Where are you now?”

“Dung, man, it’s coming at me!”

The image on LeBlanc’s screen went wild as Miter moved to confront whatever it was he was seeing. Then, LeBlanc heard shots, not just from the wrist comp’s speaker but echoing from back a ways in the Hall of Antiquities. Feeling long unused muscles uncoil eagerly, LeBlanc bolted toward the sounds, pulling his own handgun from its shoulder holster as he ran.

He passed through the Kalian room without seeing either Miter or the person he had reported. LeBlanc kept running, but stole a glance at his wrist comp and was shocked to see a stationary, tilted camera angle of the museum’s floor and part of one wall. Included in the frame was an object LeBlanc recognized: the base of the glass case in which the Antse flesh effigy hung suspended.

LeBlanc skidded to a stop at the entrance to the room of Antse artifacts, hiding around the corner a moment lest the intruder be armed, or Miter prove too trigger-happy. But a peek into the room showed he had no need to fear any panicked shots from Miter. The security guard lay on his face in the center of the floor, arms flung out from him, his gun still gripped. Seeing no one else around the man, LeBlanc rushed into the room and crouched at his side. A corona of blood was spreading under Miter’s head. LeBlanc rolled him over – and even with all his military experience, sucked in his breath when he saw how the man’s face and neck had been raked and lacerated...and his eyes messily scooped from their sockets.

Looking up, LeBlanc saw drops and spatters of a dark liquid trailing across the floor, out of the room through its opposite entrance. The clone rose and moved to the start of the spatters. It was a black fluid with a noxious odor, apparently as thick as sludge. So Miter had hit the thing. LeBlanc was about to follow the trail of what had to be blood when something he had noticed peripherally finally caught hold in his mind. He turned, nerves crackling, toward the raised platform on which the three spheres had rested, the sculptures of Antse clerics coiled into their meditative pose.

The platform was empty.

“Not sculptures,” LeBlanc whispered to himself, and then he turned back toward the trail of long stagnant blood and followed it from the room.

*     *     *

As far as LeBlanc knew, all of the exhibits in the museum were linked to the alarm system, so he wasn’t sure why it hadn’t already been activated by the changes to the three Antse figures on their pedestal – though, being an exhibit themselves, in a museum in which many of the modern artworks were articulated, maybe the system had overlooked their behavior – but when he heard the alarm system come whooping to life now, he knew some other display must have been disturbed. Good – the alarm would go straight through to the nearest forcer precinct house, saving him the call he had been about to make...leaving him free to stay focused on the task at hand. Search and destroy.

LeBlanc passed stealthily into a chamber featuring articles from both the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa people of Sinan. There was a porcelain mask-like wall hanging of a woman’s face with delicately painted blue skin. LeBlanc knew these exhibits well enough to note right away that the face’s eyes had been scratched at so furiously that not only was their paint missing, leaving rough white patches, but the mask was cracked as well. Worse, its companion piece lay on the floor in fragments. A wooden plaque like a religious icon, painted partially in gold flake, hung crooked on the wall, the revered subject of its portrait also with his eyes eradicated, leaving depressions in the wood. And the eyes of a stone statue too heavy to topple and tough to gouge had been slathered with a thick black fluid: the perpetrator’s own blood.

“Great,” LeBlanc muttered. “That’s great.”

He moved on, finding a similar situation in rooms containing works of the insect-like Coleopteroids and the bipedal dog-like Dacvibese. Whether the eye was compound, in the case of the former, or with a goat-like pupil and pink iris, as with the latter, all the eyes the fleeing entity had encountered were marred or expunged.

LeBlanc was racing now, barely stopping to look about the rooms he sped through, wondering how the being could be so fast, even wounded, even stopping to wreak such havoc, that he couldn’t keep up with it. He was rushing so much that he nearly forgot his soldier’s wariness not to blunder into an ambush, and had to force himself to control his advance, remain aware of every surrounding detail. He used his wrist comp to deactivate the distraction of the whooping alarm.

Ultimately, having completed the circuit of the Hall of Antiquities, he found the thing huddled close to the mammoth metal bust of the god Raloom, as if appealing to that unfamiliar deity for protection, hugging its own legs in a fetal-like position but apparently unable to fold itself up into the neat ball it had assumed for untold years. Having spent so much energy and lost so much blood, the thing was shaking so violently that its body almost blurred.

When LeBlanc came to a halt, aiming his gun at it, the creature raised its head. Either naturally or from centuries of desiccation, it was a skeletal thing, with a bare grin of teeth and eye sockets so deeply sunken and shadowed that LeBlanc couldn’t tell if there were orbs within them. Had the yellow mineral pigment covering its emaciated body helped to preserve it in some way?

LeBlanc didn’t wait to find out whether the being could still rise up and attack him. Just as the creature opened its mouth in a wheezing hiss, he shot it once through the forehead. The wall behind it and Raloom’s right cheek were splattered with a more copious amount of that foul-smelling black sludge. The cleric’s two hands spread open, and from one of them rolled the red and half-crushed remnants of Miter’s unworthy eyes.

From behind him LeBlanc heard clapping footfalls, back the way he had come. Another of the trio of clerics. Did it think it could return to its platform, hide again in meditation as it had for so many, many years? Well, this was one infidel who was not willing to let that happen.

LeBlanc dashed back in the direction of the room of Antse exhibits, and up ahead he caught a glimpse of a small, scrawny yellow figure as it passed from one room into another. LeBlanc raised his arm and fired off a chain of shots as he sprinted. He saw the thing veer off suddenly to the left, out of sight. When he caught up with the creature, they were both amongst the Antse displays again, Miter splayed on the floor.

For lack of better shelter, the cleric had ducked behind the effigy’s showcase, and through the glass LeBlanc could see that its left arm had been torn off at the elbow from one of his projectiles. The being opened its skull-like mouth in a hiss, and from the way it tensed its body LeBlanc knew that it meant to throw itself out from behind the showcase and come at him. Before it could do so, LeBlanc let loose another flurry of shots, shooting the Antse right through the glass. The showcase collapsed in a great crash, the meat martyr falling with it, now punctured with bullets and glass shards in addition to its spikes and nails. When the last crystalline tinkle had quieted, the Antse cleric lay dead, buried under the pile of glass like the effigy.

“Hold it! Freeze where you are!”

LeBlanc’s military instincts told him to whip around firing, but he was just able to restrain himself. He lifted his arms above his head. “Are you forcers?”

“That’s right, dung-hole, and don’t you move!” LeBlanc’s gun was ripped out of his hand, and then two men were dragging his arms behind him, to secure them in restraints.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“What are we doing?” Now he could see the two men as they spun him around and trained their own guns on him. They were paunchy, out of shape in their black uniforms; obviously, not bio-engineered to be perfect soldiers as he had been. LeBlanc thought he might be able to take them both even with their guns pointed at him – might even be able to bust these restraints first in order to do so – but again, he reined himself in. One of the forcers gestured at Miter. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

“He’s my partner! We – ” LeBlanc wanted to point out the skeletal form of the cleric under that mound of jagged glass, but the other forcer pointed to it himself.

“And you don’t know anything about all this shot-up artwork either, I suppose? Bet you started with that room of Sinanese stuff back there, huh? Did it give you a flashback or something?”

“Look, there was an intruder...three intruders...well, not intruders, but – ”

The forcer couldn’t resist a hard laugh. “Can’t you even get your hallucinations straight, mad dog?” The man remarked to his partner, “They should have just junked all these psycho-killer war veteran clones for organ scrap.”

Kneeling down beside Miter, the other said, “I don’t need any blue camouflage kidney transplanted into me...better they made these guys into dog meat.”

“I wouldn’t want him in my dog, either!”

“Look,” LeBlanc said, “do you see any bullet holes in him?”

“We heard plenty of bullets on our way up, believe me.”

“Well how about you look again over there...”

Before he could finish, and before either of the forcers saw it, LeBlanc spotted a third skeletal yellow figure bolting toward the room from the room beyond. It launched itself into the air, and landed on the back of the standing forcer, wrapping its hands around his face to dig at his eyes.

The man staggered and reeled, screeching, blood pulsing down his cheeks, while his partner sprang to his feet and looked torn between trying to pull the creature off him or waiting for a clear shot with his weapon.

Meanwhile, LeBlanc had turned on his heel and darted from the room, heading for the stairs that would take him down to the lobby and out of the Hill Way Galleries. He half expected to be shot in the back for his trouble, but by now the surviving cleric should have proved his innocence. He thought he would wait outside until backup forcers arrived and freed him. He thought it might be the right time to give up fine art in favor of the culinary arts.

“Help me! Oh God, help me!” he still heard the attacked man wailing. In years past, LeBlanc had gone to answer that cry many times, without hesitation, with barely little regard for his own safety, without knowing whether the cry came from a birther or a clone. He had dragged wounded men out of the line of fire, men who had been repaired to return home to their families and give birth to sons who might never know they owed their existence as much to him, who could never father a son. And he had won no medal, been awarded no pension. That would be like thanking a gun for its service, wouldn’t it?

Once – maybe even as recently as fifteen minutes ago – LeBlanc might have stayed to help the forcer free his partner, if he would only remove his restraints first, even at the risk of his own life. But he had decided not to bother. Like many matters pertaining to the birthers, he was learning more and more all the time, he had no personal investment here.

As these forcers had only helped remind him, security guard or no security guard, this was really not his battle.

Bitter Brains

Pre’tu was disinclined toward holidays and festivities of all stripes to begin with, but never had one darkened his heart so much as today’s. Holidays reminded one of one’s wifelessness, one’s childlessness, one’s diminishing of parents as time took them and one’s diminishing of money as one had to buy presents and food for those others who – with mocking grins of joy, or at least drunkenness – embraced each holiday only too readily, like certain birds that are enticed by any bright bauble no matter how broken and petty.

This was a Tikkihotto holiday, but with the colonization of other spheres, other dimensions, it was becoming a festivity even more insidiously propagated. Pre’tu lived, as many Tikkihottos did, in the Earth-established colony known as Punktown, on the world Oasis. Oh, if only the merging with other cultures, other races human and otherwise, would dilute and dissolve such ancient and grotesque travesties of tradition and superstition, but it was not so. In the interest of political correctness, schoolchildren who were not even Tikkihottos – Earth children, Chooms, others – were encouraged to recognize the holiday, read about and discuss it, draw or paint or sculpt in clay or in hologram the horrid, gaping, too hungry bird heads.

“Pre’tu! Pre’tu! Pre’tu!” the others chanted, like infant bird heads poking up from a nest, screeching for their glistening worms of pleasure. Birds still without feathers, translucent and frail, their eye feelers groping blindly. It was the prevailing image of this holiday, one of the two principal Tikkihotto holidays. Unimaginatively, one was a harvest festival, and this was a spring festival, celebrating the cycle of rebirth, the emergence of new life.

“I’ll give you lot a worm,” Pre’tu muttered under his breath. “A worm to choke you mindless punch-swillers.”

Cousins, friends of cousins, cousins of friends, priests in their best robes strutting like peacocks, and the homeless invited in for a charitable meal (some of whom weren’t even Tikkihottos, but willing to embrace any culture that put warm punch in their bellies). Pre’tu glared at a Choom, looking like an Earther but for that ghastly ponderous grin stretching right back to his ears. The transient was shaking his metal drinking straw in the air like a little spear, a few drops of fermented amniotic fluid dribbling from its end. “Drink up, ‘Hotto!” he shouted.

He was the last. Of course he was. Hadn’t he always been, all his mercilessly long life? Last child born to his family, subsumed in the wake of his siblings. Last to become married (though first to have his wife desert him; oh certainly, his luck did turn around sometimes, didn’t it?).

And now, because he had been mired – cursing and pounding his console – in Punktown’s traffic (knowing only too well what the consequences would be), he had been last to enter the festival hall. Last to join the celebration. And as tradition dictated, the last must drink bird head.

He approached the great bird, strapped to the table before him as if it might rise from the dead, squawking in pain at the holes punched into its body, made thin-skinned and soft from a special steaming process, like a bag of gelatin in the form of a man-sized fowl. Its eye tendrils hung flaccid. Pre’tu’s own eye tendrils swam in the air, taking in the avian Eucharist. Someone – a child? – had left their metal straw still punctured in the swollen belly, inside which Pre’tu could see the shadowy suggestion of a litter in the womb. He imagined them still alive, gurgling, drowning. Trapped, like himself.

“Last drink bird head! Last drink bird head!”

“Drink from my ass,” Pre’tu mumbled, but what choice did he have? They were a mass, a culture, a system, and he was nothing but a failure in life and the last to enter the room. The fool who must drink the dregs that even the homeless people had managed to avoid.

Pre’tu leaned over the carcass, and inserted his straw into one of the nests of ocular tendrils. The tip pierced the socket, on into the morass that was all the mother beast had left for a brain (she, and everyone else in this room). Then Pre’tu leaned lower, applied his lips to the straw, and sucked.

They cheered his name. Triumphant fool!

And Pre’tu swallowed the blackened and bitter, bitter brains.

Disfigured

Mrs. Kingston's new forehead was high and broad, culminating in a plateau overhung with a close fringe of bangs. Just under the fringe were a few metal clasps, and a long scar ran down her forehead from one of them. Her eyelids were weighed heavily three-quarters shut. Another long scar ran under her jaw, passing over one of the two steel bolts protruding from the sides of her slim throat.

She still lay on the table. Mr. Roy swiveled a monitor screen down to her so she wouldn't yet have to raise the alien weight of her head.

"Oh," she croaked, still drowsy, a small smile emerging. "Beautiful."

Roy smiled humbly, nodded, touched buttons that gave her different angles and magnifications. She hadn't wanted green skin, as he had suggested. She wanted to be partly recognizable. He agreed that that was desirable. Normally he didn't consult with the clients, but some wanted to work along with him, and he had to tolerate such individuals. Normally his clients delighted in his surprising them, and he preferred that artistic license.

For Mrs. Kingston they had consulted a book on old, old horror films. He had steered her easily from her first attraction to the Bride. "Just hair," he told her. "That isn't enough...that won't catch the eye." She had agreed on the Monster. Jack Pierce's design. Roy liked that name. He had briefly considered changing his professional name to Roy Pierce but decided that was too phony. He despised phoniness.

Mrs. Kingston had been inspired to seek out Mr. Roy when she saw his masterful transformation of her friend Mrs. Violet into Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera, shaving her hair back, bulging her eyes and drawing back her lips and making her nose skull-like. Normally Roy preferred not to work so closely from an existing model, another man's art, but it was nice for an occasional change, and he had become intrigued with Lon Chaney. To play a hunchback, Chaney had strapped a huge heavy appliance  onto his back with a harness which prevented him from straightening. For the Phantom he had pulled at the skin around his eyes and lips and nose with a variety of painful means, as in some self-inflicted torture. Roy admired that sense of commitment, but his creations were surgical, were painless, and were not performed on himself.

*     *     *

May couldn't help but steal glances over the top of her magazine at the man across from her. Sometimes she saw only his eyes over the top of his magazine. He was reading a glossy-covered copy of Disfigured!, the soft porn magazine which appealed so to both men and women. It also contained articles, reviews, fashion layouts, but was most famous for its glamorous photo spreads of clothed and unclothed men and women, surgically deformed, maimed, transfigured.

There was still enough to see, however. The man's head was a mushroom cloud of flesh, a bulbous mass hung with lank scatterings of hair. At one point when the man traded one magazine for another May saw how his mouth was twisted into an uneven sneer, and the man caught her gawking. She began to look away, but he spoke to her.

"The Elephant Man," he said. "John Merrick. I was lucky to get rights -- others have inquired since. Normally Mr. Roy doesn't do work based on unoriginal sources but he says he's always been intrigued by John Merrick. He's sworn to make me an exact duplicate. I have only a few sessions to go. How about you?" The man eyed her up and down. May's face was smooth and untouched but maybe there was some amazing work evolving under her clothing which Mr. Roy had yet to complete. Huge warts? A network of distended purple veins? Dozens of moving, blinking human eyes scattered across her body?

"I'm not sure. I guess I want to be surprised."

"Oh, I'm sure that's fun, too," said the man, though not too enthusiastically -- not wanting to seem unhappy with his choice.

"May?"

May looked up at the smiling hostess, who in leaning over her gave May a good look at the deep ragged fissure which ran down the center of her face from hairline to chin. "Mr. Roy is ready for you."

*     *     *

Roy sent Armand Pittman out of his office to the front desk to make his next appointment; the bat wings which had sprouted from the sides of his head could flap, fold and retract, controlled by a chip implanted at the base of the skull, but he had next to have the webs of the wings tattooed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. At his desk in his office, Roy had a few moments to scan the application of May Azul for  the first time on his monitor. There was a long waiting line to this, one of the most renowned offices in the city.

College student. Wealthy parents. There was a photograph.

A knock, and the hostess Iris opened the door to let in May Azul. Roy stood to extend his hand. Iris left May to advance with a shy smile.

His eyes ate up her face like a horde of ants swarming over it, scurrying in and out of hollows, nostrils, through the forest of eyebrows, all at once. He was filled with a dismay he had felt surfacing the  moment his screen unveiled her photograph.

She had shoulder-length auburn hair, with an almost brassy undertone, and green-gray eyes, drowsily  lidded, though not in the manner of Mrs. Kingston's new eyelids. Her face was not "perfect"...her nose was a bit boyishly unrefined and her "bee-stung" lips (he loved that term) were asymmetrical, this more  pronounced with her lopsided bashful smile. But she was immediately striking. Her skin was white and silken, her neck long and thin, her body encased in a tight black sweater falling just to her upper thighs and banded at the waist with a realistic plastic snake (another college fad). Her legs were long in their black nylon sheaths. All this black only further heightened the snowy smooth perfection of her exposed flesh.

"Pleased to meet you." Her hand was small, soft, a little damp in the hollow palm. "Please make yourself comfortable." They both sat. Roy's smile was professional, didn't reveal his discomfort...he was as adept at smiling as at his art. He took in May's profile as she scanned photographs on the walls and his framed credentials in art and medicine. Why should she be so striking? At this time, medicine being what it was, there were nearly no natural deformities. After a fire or accident there was no need to remain scarred. There was no need to go bald, become obese, and shrivel up with age so quickly. Roy had seen perfection for most of his life. That was why people came to him and his kind, in fact. For something different. To stand out, make a statement, express their individuality. Almost everyone who could afford it wanted some kind of embellishment, ornamentation, or full transformation -- young or old, male or female. Business was booming.

She shouldn't stand out to him, but she did. She wasn't perfect. That was it. She was beautiful, but she had a singular kind of look -- that is, he would recognize her again in a crowd. She had features he had seen before but in a fresh arrangement. She already looked individual.

"Do you have any idea what you want, May?" Her application showed three question marks on the line below a similar question.

"Well," her attention came full upon him, "not really. I like the idea of being surprised with an original creation...I'm sure you could think of better things to do with my face than I could. You're the artist. The only trouble is, my parents are a little tight with their money and a little old-fashioned and they told me they wouldn't pay for it again if I don't like what I get."

That was the risk with the surprise approach, but Roy had very few dissatisfied customers come back (or go elsewhere) to have his work undone or converted to something else. As May had just said, he was the artist, he knew best, his clients trusted his decisions, no matter how wild or surprising. And sometimes he really got elaborate -- inspired. He would sweat over one work for eight hours straight, then. The work could be undone, converted (for a heavy extra charge), but usually this was only done for those who came back every year or even sooner than that for a fresh new look.

"Maybe, ah, you should think about it a while longer," Roy told her. "The fads change so quickly, too...I think the more involved procedures will die back down to minor touches soon. If you can't afford to have your look adjusted or returned to normal I'd advise you to think twice about undergoing a major make-over which may become obsolete and which you'll be stuck with until you have the money to change it."

That appealing lopsided smile. "I’ve never met a doctor before who tried to get me to spend less money...I know doctors who'd prescribe me a brain transplant for a headache."

"I'm not a doctor -- I'm an artist. I'm an artist for the artistic gratification first...the money second. I have a compulsion to be an artist. I'm not a doctor, or a mechanic, May."

"I'm sorry." She looked embarrassed.

"Don't apologize -- please. I'm not offended, I'm just making a distinction. Really. So...I'm really not sure what to suggest, either, May...if you're sure you want to do this."

"Oh yeah, I want something."

"What have you seen that you like?"

"Well, like I said, I want you to decide, but my friend Stacee had her head shaved bald with a ring of like glassy balls implanted around it that change color with her moods. A friend of mine, Jhonn, had one arm removed and a tentacle put in its place with a mouth at the end and a tongue." May smiled bashfully at the implications. "Zelda had her ears made pointed and face made a lot like a cat, even with whiskers. I like them all but they're all different." She threw up her hands. “I like old art. I was thinking maybe something Picassoy. You must know Picasso?"

He did. "Picasso. That sounds extreme, May."

"Well, I don't know..."

"I suggest something subtle. The fad will change soon, as I see it."

"Well I can always get the money to change it in the future."

Roy sighed. He stared at the monitor on his desk, wondering if he should have her take a look at his photo file of previous customers. Her photo on the monitor gazed back at him. Striking. Lovely. He didn't suggest the file.

"I'll think of something," he said. "In the price range you've listed your work will be done within two to three hours. Are you ready?"

"Yes. Are you ready?"

She sensed his reluctance. "Yes...of course." He rose.

"What about the man in the waiting room, if he has to wait three hours? Do you have an associate?"

"No. Rhik just likes to come early, read, hang around. He likes it here." Roy could almost keep the bitter edge out of his words. "This way, please."

Picasso. He hated Picasso.

*     *     *

Roy made a big mistake in having had May Azul undressed and  laid starkly, whitely naked like a corpse on his slab. A corpse without bullet hole, wound, mark of violence. It only heightened his confusion. But still, her face remained his focus. He was a portraitist, primarily. A face man.

For a full half hour he paced around the table, coffee in hand, studying her. She was a tree. He was a chainsaw. And she wanted to become a chainsaw sculpture from the tree.

It wasn't easier to do a Mrs. Kingston or Mrs. Violet simply because they were less beautiful than this young woman. Of course that reaction was natural. But his reluctance had grown beyond his dismay at the application photograph -- grown upon talking with her. She was shy...cute...sweet, he thought. It was easy to despise the college types -- they sought the most outlandish expression of his artistic contempt. But she was naive, he told himself, simply giving in to peer pressure. She couldn't really want to look like one of Picasso's excuses for beauty...

Slowly, uncertainly, he set about preparing his pallet, eyes never straying long from that bare canvas.

*     *     *

Still in his lab smock, taking a break from his work on Rhik, Roy went into the recovery room to see how May Azul was doing. Roy had sent Iris in a few minutes ago to revive her, and when he entered May had already swung her bare legs off the side of the bed. She wore a plastic smock. She was already viewing herself in a display of wall screens. Iris stepped aside. Roy's stomach was clenched in a fist of dread.

"Hello, May." Professional smile. "So what do you think?" Light tone.

"Well." She fingered it timidly. His sculpture. Her face. "It's a little subtle. I thought we'd agreed to do a little more ." She had checked the time...it hadn't been any three hours. He'd better not charge her for the three hour range.

"I thought you trusted my artistic instincts."

"I do. But...well." A small red jewel, glowing with a light inside it, was implanted in her forehead. From the corners of her eyes two implanted, thin rounded black plastic strips extended to her temples, then curved down under the line of her jaw to connect under her chin. That was all. "I still look kind of boring."

Boring. With those bee-stung lips. "Did you see this?" He picked up a small device. Touched a key. The forehead jewel turned sapphire. Another key. The black plastic half-frame around her face became white. Pink. Metallic gold. The gem became an emerald.

"Yes," May murmured, only half looking into the screens. "I just...I like it, but I could probably buy jewelry like this and glue it on. I thought from the friends I described, and from the price range we agreed on, you'd do something more distinctive. I  trust your artistic instincts, but this is me ...I'm the one who has to be artistically gratified. Right?"

Maybe she could be bashful and sweet, but she could be cold and bitter also, he saw. "This is what I saw for you," he said emotionlessly. Iris looked uncomfortable. "I 'm sorry you don't like it."

"I 'd like a little more, if I have the money left over."

"You do. But I really don't know what else I might do for you."

"I've seen your photographs on the walls, Mr. Roy! I saw that guy Rhik in the waiting room! What do you mean you don't know what else you can do?"

"Iris, will you tend the front?" She nodded, split-faced, left. Roy moved to a coffee maker and got himself a cup. May declined. His back to May, the artist said, "Why does such a lovely woman want to look like an axe murderer attacked her and a drunken doctor patched her back together?"

"Why are you saying this? Lovely? Nobody looks at me! I don't stand out! I want to make a statement!"

"Those aren't their statements. They're mine. They aren't individuals. They're all the same. Can't you see how beautiful you are? You want me to ruin that? I don't like Picasso, May...I like Renoir." He faced her.

"You're a hypocrite, Mr. Roy. You do things like I saw in your photographs and you act like you disapprove."

"I do." He sipped his coffee grimly.

"Why?" She gaped at him in disbelief.

Roy's eyes were hot in a face that was clean-shaven, somewhat plump and boyish, and devoid of any artistic embellishment. Only now did May notice that. He said, "John Merrick the Elephant Man ached to look like regular men. He dreamed of it...in vain. Never had a wife. Died young, after years of pain. And I have a...ludicrous fool on a table in this other room who wants to look like him exactly! If I could only trade his body with Merrick, but I can't. Can you see the horror in this?”

"What horror? He looked happy to me. He chooses to look like that. Merrick didn't. In our time nobody will make fun of that man or pity him -- they'll admire him and envy him! So what's so horrible?"

Now it was Roy's turn to gape in disbelief, coffee hovering in his hand. "Don't you see it isn't natural?"

"Natural? I don't believe you, not at all! Look at you. Is it natural for humans to wear clothes, jewelry? Is it natural for you to wear deodorant, cut and comb your hair and shave? What's natural? You're  the artist -- why do you do it? Just for the money after all, after your big speech about 'artistic gratification'?" She mocked the words.

Roy set down his coffee. "I didn't lie to you, Miss Azul. I do achieve a great deal of artistic gratification. More so than when I used to repair people who had been burnt or disfigured, making them beautiful again. I love deforming these fools and blathering, mindless sheep who follow the drunken herdsmen of fashion!"

"So you're a poet too, eh?" May hugged her arms, sneering her pouty bee-stung lips at him to hide her nervousness.

"An unhappy poet, Miss Azul. With a talent for working from the black ink well. The dark end of the pallet. I am only too happy to hack the arm off a buffoon like your friend and give him a tentacle instead and take his money. He's a horror to me, a monster. I laugh at him."

"You're sick! You know that? You're sick."

"Oh? But he's happy with his tentacle, isn't he? You don't see me with a tentacle. We're all sick, May."

"I didn't come for a philosophy lecture, Mr. Roy. What do I owe you? I'll go elsewhere for what I want."

"No." Roy dropped his coffee cup three-quarters full into the trash zapper. "I'll finish with Rhik and be right with you -- it will just be an hour."

"I'm not sure I want you now."

"You may have to wait elsewhere for weeks for a session. Go read a magazine. One hour."

"All right," May muttered, slipping off the table, gathering up her belongings. "I just want what I want," she said in a softer tone.

"I know." Roy didn't look at her, and left her to dress although she had lain naked for him to manipulate before...a field of snow inviting the trampling of a herd of mindless sheep.

While Roy finished up with Rhik's session he flipped through books from his extensive collection in his mind. Horror movies. Texts on medical anomalies. A half dozen on circus sideshows of old. Bosch. Maybe a little bit of each?

Mr. Roy was inspired, now.

He sweated eight hours over May Azul.

Imp

The child had the most delicate of bodies, long thin limbs, wispy blond hair, the sweetest of smiles, and her entire unclothed form shone a luminous green, a soft phosphorescence, as if she were being viewed through some sort of device that could see in the dark, though Lawr felt this was maybe the light she had been filmed in – a sickly glow of fluorescents, like lights shining down on a coroner’s table.

*     *     *

Lawr prided himself on having a pretty sophisticated comp system in his apartment, but even with that he still couldn’t filter out every annoying advertisement. Those who designed these things were ever perfecting their craft, in order to slip their imps past just such blocking features as Lawr employed, and subsequently he downloaded fresh barrier software regularly in an ongoing arms race of technology. He was reminded of certain viruses that evolved so quickly through mutation that, even with treatment, the immune system had trouble clearing them from the afflicted body.

No, he couldn’t intercept them all. Just recently a logo for Vita Vitaminjects had floated out of his main monitor and begun to orbit around his room, as if to keep moving to elude him. It would fade away in a few hours; a minor irritation, not like those imps that circled your wrist like a bracelet or followed you around from room to room like a hungry cat slinking about your ankles. To ward off homing imps, one could spray an atomized solution that would disrupt their focus and send them drifting off in a more random direction. Lawr kept a can of this spray on the top shelf of his comp station both at home and at work. But there were still greater nuisances than these simple homing imps. A whole squad of miniature soldiers in pink uniforms, advertising Screaming Pink Nazis breakfast cereal, had poured out of his system last week when his back was turned, scattering throughout his flat and popping up from their hiding places to fire their mock guns at him. He’d gone hunting for them with his can in a counteroffensive, as determined as if his flat had become infested with poisonous spiders, spraying each soldier he found to break the spell that made them fixate on him – after which they wandered away aimlessly as if shell-shocked. An unwelcome distraction, especially when an unexpected last survivor hopped onto the foot of his bed to shoot at him just when he was about to fall asleep.

The most aggravating imp he’d encountered in the past few months, though, had been an advertisement for a horror movie called The Toilet Man, based on an urban legend that had sprung up here in the city that Earth colonists had come to call Punktown. The legend, and movie, concerned an obese middle-aged man who suffered a fatal heart attack while on the toilet – his body discovered weeks later by teenagers breaking into his rundown apartment building – who returned from the dead as a hideous, vengeful spirit. Lawr had entered his bathroom to find his destination already occupied by a life-sized, utterly solid-looking holograph of the Toilet Man, sitting there with his pants around his ankles, horribly ballooned with the gases of decomposition, his skin greasy and blackened, his bloated arms risen as if he hoped people would take hold of them to hoist him off the seat. Lawr nearly succumbed to a heart attack himself, and later on the news he heard complaints about this publicity stunt, especially from parents whose children had been traumatized – some now preferring to wet their beds rather than venture into the bathroom.

Lawr’s spray wouldn’t budge the apparition from his toilet, but thankfully it didn’t turn its swollen head to look at him, or worse, rise up and shamble after him as the ghost pursued its victims in the movie. He simply had to wait for the holograph’s brief life to end, for it to lose its illusory solidity and vanish on its own. But until then, he had shut the bathroom door so that he wouldn’t have to see its bulging-eyed visage again.

*     *     *

On the night that he swiveled in his chair to find the little girl standing at his elbow smiling at him sweetly, Lawr had already been sitting for four hours in front of his comp system.

*     *     *

He often felt guilty when he surfaced from an almost dream-like submersion to realize that he’d just spent hours of his free time meandering about the net instead of pursuing more constructive endeavors, or venturing outside his apartment where he might meet a new woman now that he’d already been divorced for nearly two years – but he justified to himself that his job was stressful, and a man needed some mindless indulgence to claim a little “me” time from a harsh universe. The very aimlessness of his wandering throughout the net was a relaxing contrast to his intensely focused and numbingly repetitive work at the office.

His wandering still took certain favorite paths, however. Yes, he might on impulse look up and play a vid for some song he’d loved as a teenager, take a virtual tour around areas of Punktown he would be afraid to visit in person, or through some other city on another colonized world or even on Earth itself – floating like a wraith through their streets at random – or he might check out news stories that had particularly odd or alarming headlines...but there were certain subject matters he always, inevitably, seemed to find his way around to.

For a while there had been the dating sites, a half dozen of which he’d signed up for last year on one particularly empty weeknight when he should have been sleeping, but he found their free features were so limited that they were ultimately useless; basically he could only browse rows and rows of anonymous faces, send virtual winks and hellos without being able to access any return messages. It was like squeezing a woman’s bottom on a crowded shunt car and getting no further satisfaction than that. He had broken down and paid for membership for two of the sites, however, but only several women had ever expressed enough interest to meet with him. He had felt as uncomfortable with them as they had with him. One woman, considerably younger and larger than himself, had necked and groped with him for a while in his parked hovercar after they had had coffee, but finally they had politely disentangled themselves without pursuing matters to their end, out of an unspoken but mutual disinterest.

Lately, he had favored other types of sites instead. There was plenty of commonplace smut, to be sure, and his eyes had drunk up so many bodies he thought these people could occupy an entire colony world. But one grew jaded with all that, quickly enough. One needed more, and more, never feeling sated, even when one found they were masturbating to these images twice a day. When the sheer quantity of naked flesh didn’t suffice, one turned down odd little alleyways, didn’t they? Explored areas one had never encountered before, hadn’t anticipated or had been too timid to consider.

Tonight, Lawr had watched an unusual vid that had for the most part repulsed him, though a small worm of arousal had squirmed somewhere in his guts. The vid had shown a bound man lying on the floor with his head positioned under a chair, the seat of which had been removed like a toilet, with a clear bowl inserted in the space. A chute ran down from this bowl and was fastened over the man’s mouth. Into the scene had come a pretty teenager apparently of Japanese heritage, wearing a school uniform skirt short enough to reveal that she had a stump in place of a right leg. The long white stocking she wore on her remaining leg made the stump all the more glaringly exposed. She set crutches aside and pushed her panties down as she settled herself in the chair. She must have had an enema only moments earlier, because no sooner had she sat when a gush of brown water had burst into the clear bowl, rushing down the chute into the man’s mouth. He had moaned, as if tortured, but Lawr knew it had more to do with pleasure, a pleasure perhaps unbearable in its intensity, swallowing even the solid feces that were mixed with the broth, one by one. In the end, the girl had even used a brush to push the last of the turds down, giggling cutely as she did so.

Lawr was just curious enough to activate an olfactory simulation feature he’d added to his system, but after only a few seconds of smelling the air in the stark little room he had shut the feature off again. He sat there almost dazed, not masturbating, not sure what to feel. He envied the man’s intensity, though. Had he himself ever felt so acutely, deliriously alive? Would he ever?

He had found the girl cute, at least, and drifted half-heartedly through a few amputee sites (Ampamour, Amputeros), which mildly aroused him, but his interest took him more in the direction of the girl’s youthfulness. A site called Amputeens featured women who were young but obviously above the age of consent, playing up their youthful appearance. There was a particular scenario that drew Lawr, though; a series of stills in which a father was supposedly carrying on with his own daughter, stripping and fondling her, ultimately licking and sucking on the end of her stump. The man and girl bore no familial resemblance to each other, but Lawr was sufficiently inspired to run a search for more incest scenarios, and found sites dedicated to the subject.

At one site he watched vids of fathers and grown daughters, mothers and grown sons, interviewed about how these behaviors had developed, as if this were some serious documentary, before they turned to their erotic demonstrations. None of these people were especially attractive, and maybe some bore a bit of resemblance to each other, so that Lawr thought perhaps these cases were authentic. He found he hoped they were authentic. Well, of course, if one found such a scenario titillating, wouldn’t one hope it was for real? That said, all reality aside, Lawr reasoned to himself that he had never wanted to sleep with his own mother, didn’t find her attractive in a stimulating way at all, no matter how much watching a vid of a mother fellating her son stirred him. He had never had children, never had a daughter, so he needn’t feel guilty for finding these things arousing. Right? Needn’t be ashamed for opening his pants as he gaped into his screen.

It was only fantasy, and wasn’t fantasy by definition the opposite of reality? By its very nature, fantasy was harmless, and therefore wasn’t any fantasy acceptable? It was the concept of having a mother fellate him, the idea of having a daughter sit astride his body. Should he be any more ashamed than he was about the absurdities he dreamed about nightly? He didn’t know these people, was not a party to whatever crimes or iniquities they were responsible for in their own lives; he would never truly meet their eyes or touch their skin. They might have been realistic comp constructs for all he could tell.

But again, all the sons and daughters at this site were above the age of consent. Lawr pulled back as if from a window he had been peeking through, and headed further down a murky little passageway in the network.

*     *     *

The dainty blond child did not move, stood rigid with her arms at her sides as if at attention. Her skin with its green underwater glow was so smooth it looked waxen. There was not the slightest beginning of breasts, and he judged her to be about eleven. Tiny black moles were sprinkled over her body here and there, like punctuation for secret sentences hidden by invisible ink, if not erased altogether. He had at first thought this was a still image, until her eyes – which were fixed on his, seemed to truly see him, eyes as gentle as her smile – blinked their lids.

*     *     *

A page had come up – like many others he had pored over like a menu – that offered a slew of links, with a sample image from each. There was Mutilady, which apparently featured crime and accident scenes of dead women, the sample showing the victim of a traffic accident thrown into, and integrated horribly with, a median rail, her party skirt riding up to show off legs in shredded black hose. There was Suckicide, dedicated to images of suicide victims, the sample being of a woman who had hung herself but apparently not been discovered straight away, her neck being impossibly stretched by the weight of her stiff body but her face still uncomfortably attractive. Then there was Incestykes, and this was the link Lawr found himself positioning his cursor over.

He did feel some trepidation. In the past he had always tried to avoid sites that might feature underage girls, for fear that inviting this material onto his comp might work as evidence against him at a later date, especially if the site proved a trap laid by the forcers themselves. But he had roved this far tonight, farther than he had ever ventured before, and he was not willing to turn back. He had gone down the rabbit’s hole, but it was only a fantasy realm. What did he have to apologize for?

His cursor hovered, uncertain, over the flesh of the model in the sample, a young girl with long dark hair and overripe lips parted in a numb expression, her hands splayed against a shower stall’s tiles while a man of indeterminate age, fractionally seen, pressed against her from behind. She looked younger than what was legal, but could that be so? Why not? Why shouldn’t he be able to find his way to this rumored, dreaded forest, haunted by its sad little fairies and its predatory hairy wolves? He vacillated at its border, its periphery, but with heartbeat suspended he depressed the cursor, and he was through and inside.

The arrayed photos – apparently linked to vids and galleries – dizzied him not only with choices, but with another flush of dread. Yes, some of these models had to be below the age of consent. His comp’s history was stained now, and even his skills might not entirely expunge the taint should anyone care to come looking into its guts. Well, he had already come too far, so he could only go further...deeper...

Or tried to, but he found clicking on any image only brought him to the same page, offering registration for a fee. He felt thwarted, but then he decided not to be thwarted, just as he had once given up and tried membership with a couple of dating services. He paid for a one month trial to Incestykes, hoping that his bank account would be safe from any misconduct. Then, as if he had correctly answered the question of a sphinx blocking his path, he was permitted into the forest’s shadowy heart.

*     *     *

Thank God she didn’t speak, he thought, as she stared at him, smiled at him. He had leapt out of his chair, almost overturning it, and he stood across the room as they regarded each other. She had shifted her body a sideways step or two to remain facing him. His comp’s audio was on, but she made no sound. He was almost afraid her lips would part and she would say his name. Some imps could do that, address you personally. Maybe he could activate his olfactory simulator, though, and smell...what? Her flesh, her breath, her sweat? Scents could be recorded at the time of filming, but even if they weren’t, the simulator would do just that: instantly fabricate scents that seemed appropriate for the images. Though why, with his startled heart still reverberating, should he feel this imp of the perverse to smell her hair, her body? In any case, even though he now knew her for what she was, he was still too afraid as yet to move closer to his comp to act upon this impulse. And more than he wanted a heightened sense of her, he wanted to back out of this link in the hope of banishing her, but he was reluctant to reach out toward his system to act upon this desire, too – lest she reach out for him at the same time.

*     *     *

Lawr stared at a photo of a man with a hairy, swollen belly standing at the edge of a bed. Only the lower body of the girl was in view, her upward-bent legs evincing the baby fat of youth, her pudgy feet so small. She had no hair down there, and it might have been shaved, but Lawr didn’t think so. This had to be the real thing. This man had crossed the boundary of fantasy. Was he a father? Uncle? Friend of the family? Was his face cut out of the frame to protect his identity, or so that men like Lawr could superimpose themselves?

He tried one of the vids, and in this the man’s face was also hidden, but not made blurry as one might expect. More disturbingly, his face was scribbled out with black lines like magic marker that followed his movements. The girl seated before him was a Choom, one of the native people of this world Oasis, human in aspect aside from a mouth as wide as a frog’s. Her sun-browned arms and legs were twigs, and her long hair was bound with a cute something-or-other with the plastic head of a kitten or bear incorporated into it. The man’s contrastingly big, pallid body made Lawr feel a twinge of repulsion – or was it only envy? – as the girl applied that huge, accommodating mouth to him. Lawr began to work his own hardening organ, but was unsettled when the man turned his scribbled face to the camera and spoke in a voice that was made distorted, the audio equivalent of his scrawled out features. His concluding cry of pleasure sounded like some large animal being slaughtered.

Lawr was still stroking himself when he settled on a new photo, this one of a girl with wispy blond hair and a sweet smile, shown bare to the tiny dots of her nipples, so delicate she was almost frail, and filmed in a weird greenish light. Lawr didn’t know if it was a link to a vid or to a stills gallery.

When he pressed the girl’s chest with his cursor, he turned to find that she had left the screen and stood beside his chair instead.

*     *     *

“Very funny,” he said to the girl, as if she had engineered this trick herself. As if this were designed as a prank to startle people rather than excite them – though she was decidedly more appealing than the Toilet Man.

He turned his eyes to the main monitor. Where before the girl had appeared on his screen, now it was black except for the words: SHE’S AN ANGEL. Yes, appropriate given her ethereal prettiness. He finally felt composed enough to approach his system, but when he hit the back button the girl did not return to the screen, the genie to its bottle. He was merely taken back to the menu. The girl remained, unfazed.

“Great,” he said. “How long is this going to last?” The last thing he needed was for someone to give him a vid call and on their own monitor catch a glimpse of the girl to one side, or worse, for someone to come calling in person. Right, but how often did that happen? He couldn’t remember the last time another flesh and blood being had stood in his flat.

Straightening, he returned his attention to her. Now that he was out of his chair, she had turned her face up a little to keep her eyes on his. He saw them blink again. “Angel, huh? Next thing you know I’ll be talking to you,” he said, then cut himself off when he realized he already was.

He circled around her, as much to see what would happen as to see the back of her body, but she shuffled quickly to remain facing him. Was there a way to get her to change positions? A button on the keyboard, an oral command or gesture? What was one supposed to do with her, except sit there ogling her as they pleasured themselves? She couldn’t be physically touched. Maybe her attentive eyes were enough to stimulate those who downloaded her willingly, though Lawr couldn’t understand how he was supposed to have known this was possible, novice that he was to this realm.

If one were set up for the ultranet, instead of merely the net, one could interact only too convincingly with constructs. He had heard sex in the ultranet was better than the real thing, every sense heightened, and he could believe it, though his only personal experience had come from a friend’s system. He had allowed Lawr to play a horror/action game, in which a pack of bluish, dog-like snipes had chased Lawr through the dark, narrow hallways of a decommissioned space freighter his character had stolen into in search of salvageables. That terrifying episode had been more real than reality, too, and Lawr had heard of people actually dying of fright while interfaced with the ultranet. This experience was part of the reason he settled for the basic net, though it also had a lot to do with his meager office drone’s salary.

Lawr found that his erection had wilted, and he refastened his pants as if his visitor made him feel self-conscious, despite her own nudity. It was odd that, naked as she was, she almost looked more pure than she did sexual. But he was beginning to suspect that her beatific smile had more to do with the model having been drugged before being filmed, than it had to do with any true pleasure on her part.

“I have to get to bed,” he told the imp accusingly. “I’ve got work tomorrow.” His flat was small; the living room served also as his bedroom, and if he were to retire now she would no doubt pivot accordingly to watch him as he lay there. How was he supposed to sleep, if that were the case? He’d have to draw the blanket over his head to shut out the green fairy’s glow...and those staring eyes.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he decided, though he usually took one in the morning. He started past her toward his tiny bathroom, but looked back to say, “You’d better be gone by the time I get back.”

She just beamed at him, as if in adoration of a father.

*     *     *

When he returned from showering and brushing his teeth the girl was indeed gone from her place by his desk, without having left any foot depressions in his shaggy, moss green carpet. He felt relieved, though also grumpily cheated of the release he had been working toward before her arrival.

He turned to his bed, and she lay there upon it – on her side, her legs curled and her head resting on one crooked arm, watching him as if waiting for him to notice her, and join her there. Though again, her smile was ever innocent, not prurient.

“Dung!” Lawr hissed, angry for having been startled by this apparition twice in one night.

So the imp was programmed to shift into a new phase, a new pose, and just as the ad for The Toilet Man movie had known how to seek out his flat’s toilet, so this projection had homed in on his bed. But now what was he supposed to do? How could he sleep beside it? Despite what a fetching creature she was, the idea made him too...uncomfortable.

Maybe he couldn’t be rid of her altogether until her allotted existence expired, but if he could at least chase her off his bed like an unruly dog. He took up his can of atomized spray, hoping it would break her attachment to the bed the way it unfocused homing imps that buzzed around one like thirsty mosquitoes. He sprayed her foot to head, but she didn’t so much as blink at the mist he covered her with, just watched him placidly. Yeah, the model must have been doped, but the imp’s expression made her look adoring for his attentions.

“Thanks,” he grumbled, returning the ineffective spray to its shelf. He shut down his comp before moving toward the big reclining chair he had inherited when he’d moved in here. He settled into it, then adjusted it as far back as it would go. “Very nice,” he added, squirming to get comfortable. He glanced over at her. “What are you waiting for,” he snapped, “a bedtime story?” Then he looked away, and closed his eyes.

He had not shut off the light in the room, but this was not an oversight.

*     *     *

Lawr dreamed he was at work, but weirdly, he saw himself from outside his body. It was as though he stood behind himself, watching this more corporeal Lawr as he hunkered in front of his work comp in his cluttered little cubicle, while other drones in adjoining cubicles labored similarly or spoke in vid calls. But Lawr’s eavesdropping spirit grew alarmed to see that what filled the main monitor was a menu of samples for pornographic galleries and vids.

“Hey,” he said, to warn himself before someone could enter the cubicle and notice what he was looking at. “Lawrence!” he said, and reached out to tap his own shoulder.

When he did, the man in the chair swiveled around to face him. His face was scratched out with black lines, as if with a marker.

*     *     *

Lawr woke with a jolt. When he realized he was in the recliner, the small of his back aching from too long a time there, he propped himself up a little to see if the imp had dissipated.

She had not. She was still in the center of his bed, lying atop his covers. But she had been facing outward previously, and now she had rolled over to face the wall. A third phase? He sat up further, and took her in more closely.

She had been thin before, almost fragile, but now it seemed she had become brittle. The bumps of her spine and shoulder blades looked ready to tear through a paper thin skin. Her jutting hip bone was alarming. It was as though the imp were deteriorating, wasting away, instead of merely fading from existence.

Lawr got up from the chair with a groan and approached his bed, moving around to its foot to get a look at the front of her. What he saw made his chest lock up.

Her ribs jutted, her emaciated chest ready to cave in on itself, but most distressing was the girl’s face. Her eye sockets were so black they looked like the empty pits of a skull, and he couldn’t tell if that was an effect of starvation or bruises from a beating. Her cheeks were gaunt, the end of her nose blackened, again like a hole in a skull (and again, from a blow?), her lips drawn back in a pained grimace. The girl was hugging shockingly thin arms across her nonexistent breasts, and she was shivering. Worst of all, her mouth was working, and he could tell she was whimpering – maybe words – but of course he couldn’t hear it.

He thanked God that at least this time her eyes were closed.

“What did they do to you?” Lawr whispered. “Oh my God...what did they do?”

Starve her? For how long? Or infect her, unintentionally or even willingly, with a deadly STD? He now noticed more bruises scattered upon her body, and he found himself wagging his head. He found himself hugging his chest, as she did.

He was afraid, and he was angry. This pollution was into his comp’s memory now, and he might never scrub it out on his own. Feeling sickened, almost light-headed, he lurched toward his computer and dropped into his chair, pawed at the keyboard. He returned to the site where he had inadvertently downloaded the imp. There, he went into the information regarding his new account, and found a link for help questions and technical support. There was no live contact for him to call, but there was a feature that enabled him to send a message. He typed one between glances at the girl in his bed. He was terrified at the idea of looking over his shoulder to discover her propped up, the eyes in those black sockets staring at him – maybe accusingly, as if he had something to do with her suffering – but she remained in her fetal position.

He wrote, “Last night I accidentally downloaded a holographic program called, I guess, SHE’S AN ANGEL from your site. I had no idea that your site featured such filth, and I’m outraged. Please tell me...”

He paused. Tell him what? How to rid himself of the imp? Well, these things vanished on their own after a time, didn’t they? So tell him what – how long that would take? How to cleanse his comp’s memory of every trace of the program? After another glance at the trembling, cadaverous body in his bed, he resumed typing.

“Please tell me when this thing was recorded. The model in this program is in a very dangerous state.”

As if she might still be rescued in time. Even if this had been recorded a week ago, days ago, wouldn’t the girl already be dead by now if her situation hadn’t changed? She looked on the verge of death already. Who was he kidding? He was looking at a corpse. She...

SHE’S AN ANGEL. Oh...yes. So very funny, a joke maybe, but it sent a cold ripple up and down his back on centipede legs. Now he understood the words that had appeared on his screen.

He went on, “This should be called to the attention of the authorities. This is not titillation – this stuff portrays a horrific crime.”

Not titillating? Well, someone had thought so. The person, or people, who had created the program, if no one else.

Lawr finished, “Do the forcers know who this girl is? What happened to her?”

But why was he asking these people? Shouldn’t he be contacting the forcers themselves, to call their attention to this nightmare – assuming they weren’t already aware of it from earlier complaints?

Ha. Yes, sure, call the forcers. He could invite them up to his flat and introduce them to the girl dying virtually in his bed. After which they could introduce him to a nice cell in the nearest precinct house.

Almost absentmindedly he sent his message, then rose from his chair to regard the imp again. Despite the fact that this girl surely had to be dead – perhaps even months or years dead – he felt a mounting urgency, a growing desperation. He tried to reassure himself that the people who had done this might already have been caught and punished. The girl might already be long buried or cremated. Dare he hope that she might even have been released by her captors before she could succumb, their fun finished? Might she be recovering in a hospital now, or even safely at home with loving parents?

SHE’S AN ANGEL.

No...no, she was dead, that was a fact. His houseguest was a ghost. But even if her body had been found, it could be that her murderers had never been apprehended. What if the forcers had never heard about this download? Might there even be clues about the perpetrators accidentally captured in the recording? A reflection of a face in her pupils – in the earlier sections before her torture had begun, when her gentle eyes had still been open – if one could magnify the image enough? Was there anything he himself could do to study the recording, with the discovery of evidence in mind?

He felt so...impotent. An anonymous message to the forcers; couldn’t he do that much, at least?

Outside his windows, the sun was struggling to rise beyond the oppressive, massed towers of Punktown’s cityscape. Lawr hurried to pick up the remote that tinted his windows black, lest some voyeur in an apartment across the street peek into his flat. The city was full of lustful, furtive creatures, wasn’t it?

How could he think of going to work today, even if the imp disappeared before he left for the office? He was in no condition for it; he’d vibrate in his chair until he exploded across the walls of his tiny cell of a cubicle. No, he’d call in sick. They wouldn’t like it, but at this point he didn’t care.

He felt like a man who had awoken to find a living, breathing kidnap victim left on his hands. As if he himself shared complicity in such a crime.

He regarded the girl again, wagged his head again, and muttered to her, “What am I supposed to do, huh? What am I supposed to do about you?”

He made a sandwich and coffee for a quick breakfast, eating it around the corner of his kitchen as if self-conscious about viewing her starved body while he fed his own meaty form. When enough time had elapsed he made the call to his workplace, uncomfortable about his team leader seeing his image on her own screen, the green imp only feet away from him, just out of her range of sight. His team leader didn’t seem too irritated, after all, so he was grateful for small mercies. As he signed off he saw that a new text message had come in, and immediately he recognized its source as the porn site he had joined, in reply to his own message of only two hours ago. So early? But then, perhaps they were in another time zone, if not on another colony world altogether. Whatever the case, he began to read the words that had come from some anonymous customer support tech.

“Hello. In response to your message, we’re sorry that you were surprised to have downloaded the program in question. In the future, you will note that there is a tiny icon in the lower left corner of every interactive holograph link, should you wish to avoid any further accidental downloads. As for the subject matter of the download, sir, one can’t help but ask if you ‘accidentally’ joined our site, as well, without having any idea of the kind of content Incestykes offers to its subscribers...”

“You sarcastic bastard,” Lawr said aloud, blood rising to his face.

“As for the individual in question, I have no information to offer about the outcome of the situation featured in the recording, or her present condition or whereabouts. Our still images and recordings come from countless sources, and we are not on a first name basis with them. We are offered content, we pay for it, and we post it. All we ask is that they confirm that the subjects involved are above the age of legal consent...”

“They lie,” Lawr said. “And you’re lying, too. You know she isn’t...you know.”
And age of consent or not, the girl was dying. Would they claim they took that to be fake? Or murder with the girl’s own consent, her willing participation, perhaps? That the child had filmed her own suicide by starvation, and pummeled herself for good measure?

“I will tell you, sir, that though this might not be ‘titillation’ in your eyes, it happens to be one of our site’s most popular downloads...”

“God,” Lawr whispered.

“But if it’s of any comfort to you, the program will end on its own after its fourth phase...”

Fourth? Lawr thought. He stole a nervous peek at his quivering roommate.

“And sir, it might be rude of me to ask you this, but I can’t help but be curious. Are you new to Punktown?”

“Fuck you,” Lawr snapped, shaking all over as he stabbed a finger into the key that closed the text message.

*     *     *

Lawr didn’t own a car and thus rode the blue line to another neighborhood, to use a public vidphone that would be distant from his home. The tube was crowded and he was pressed close to one of its entrances, standing up and gripping a metal pole. A short, curvy black woman with thick reddish braids stood chatting with a friend in front of him, and as the tube swerved and swayed along its route her body repeatedly tilted so that her back pressed into his knuckles where they gripped the shaft. Then for a prolonged period she remained leaning back against his fist. Surely she knew it was a hand, his hand, indenting her soft flesh. He wondered if she might be savoring the human contact as much as he did, if only unconsciously. She got out one stop ahead of his, never glancing back, and his heart rolled over with sickening longing as if the love of his life had just abandoned him. He realized, in a stunned kind of way, that he was even on the verge of tears. Then the doors hissed shut, and the tube plunged back into darkness.

He reached his stop, at street level purchased a coffee at a ubiquitous chain, sipped it as he made his way to the public phone he had recalled could be found here. In its clear plastic booth, the thicket of graffiti on its walls affording him further shelter, he wrapped his finger in a napkin like a bandage so as not to leave prints on the keyboard.

Back at home he had found the call number for the Paxton Police Force’s anonymous tip hotline. The information at the PPF’s public site had assured him that the call would not be traced, but he wasn’t so sure of that. Supposedly his voice would be distorted, and no vid transmission would be received on their end. He hesitated, his finger poised over the keys. Could he believe them? They wouldn’t dare lie about their methods, would they? Was he really willing to take that chance? And for what – to rescue a dead girl?

He stalled by sipping his coffee, and watching pedestrians through clear spots in the booth’s painted walls, feeling removed in his observation as if he were peeking at them on a screen. A Choom woman in a smart business suit clacked by on shiny heels, her skirt taut and without wrinkles, her legs almost unnaturally shapely and smooth in their hose, like the legs of a mannequin. Her ear-to-ear lips were painted a metallic blue to match her tie, her face like porcelain with either skin treatments or makeup or both. It seemed to Lawr sometimes that people wanted to make themselves look less – or more – than real.

There were men who would lean into their monitors with smiles on their faces, crawling desire in their guts, to see that very woman lying with her skirt hitched up and the hose torn away and her throat gaping as wide as her amphibious mouth. There were men who would not only want to see it, but want to perform it. This megalopolis was filled with such men. One could populate a lesser city entirely with them alone. They didn’t see the woman as a living, breathing person like themselves. She was as good as a comp construct to them, or an android, a character in a vidgame. They were ravenous boys – whatever their age – who wanted to break things and glut themselves and wait for more and more stimulation to come along and relieve them of the boredom and pointlessness that defined their existence. They were sharks; all teeth, no souls. In Punktown, maybe the only souls in residence were those one downloaded into one’s flat, temporary souls that lasted mere hours instead for eternity.

The tiniest, barest of clicks inside him. Lawr set his cup on a little shelf, turned to the keyboard and punched in the number with his mummified finger.

The seal for the Paxton Police Force filled the scratched, partially graffiti-obscured vidscreen, but that was all. A young woman’s voice came over the speaker. “Paxton Police Force tip hotline – your anonymity is assured. How can we help you?”

“Um, yeah, I’m a student attending P.U., and I’m doing my psychology thesis on the subject of incest. In the course of my research on the net I encountered a site called...Incestykes.”

“Yes?”

Lawr cleared his throat, glanced nervously outside as if afraid black-helmeted forcers would surround the booth at any moment. It was beginning to rain. Suffocating gray towers sought to wall up the sky alive, leaving only white chinks showing through.

He fretted about the girl lying alone in his flat – feeling weirdly guilty, as if he had left a sick child unattended. At least he had his palm comp in his pocket, and on its screen he could monitor the girl distantly. Before he had left home he had swiveled his system’s main monitor to face toward the bed, its vidphone feature open for transmission, but only to his portable unit. Or so he hoped – it would be more than unfortunate if someone intentionally or unintentionally intercepted the open signal, but it was a risk he had decided to take. He had stolen a few peeks at her on his way here, but he wasn’t willing to chance a peek now no matter how much he itched to do so, still not trusting that the forcers weren’t observing him surreptitiously from behind their innocuous gold seal.

He briefly described encountering the image of the child, clicking on it, and being startled to find a hologram delivered into his flat. He related that he had been disturbed by the girl’s youth and state of undress, disgusted that she was being used for such a purpose, and that his disgust had turned to horror when the recording progressed through several phases, the third of which clearly indicated the model had been seriously abused.

He went on to report his outraged message to the owners of Incestykes, and the response he had received. As he talked about all this, he found he didn’t have to fake the emotion in his voice; the lies had ended with his initial talk of research. He sounded angry, desperately concerned. He no longer stammered, but raged rapidly and loudly.

“They talk like they don’t know who sends them this stuff,” he ranted, “but they have to know who they’re paying for it, don’t they? They have to have some kind of contact info. They could find out the names and addresses of these people if they wanted to.”

“But they don’t want to,” the policewoman told him patiently, her voice much more composed than his own. “Anyway, the individuals who supply material like this to these sites usually do so through fake names and addresses, security buffers like that, just in case the site gets shut down and someone comes trying to trace them. It’s hard to track them down, because they change these names, addresses and the bank accounts they use all the time. Sometimes they only sell one vid or series of stills and you never see anything from that source again. Yes, the sites themselves are out to make money, but the people who supply these images often don’t make that much – they just want to share what they have. It increases the thrill for them for other people to see it.”

“But when someone like me makes you aware of some particular content you come down on the site, don’t you?”

“Well, since you’re making this report we have to look into it, but the site owners will simply claim ignorance. How do they know the model is really below the age of consent, they’ll say. How do they know the wounds you saw weren’t just makeup or a comp effect? How do they know the girl isn’t a comp construct entirely? We can cross-check the girl against files of missing and endangered children, but if no matches come up it will probably end there. Yes, the recording can be analyzed by tech experts to determine that the girl isn’t a construct, and forensic experts to determine if her wounds are authentic...the site owners could be arrested and brought in for truth scans, and there can be a warrant to seize their equipment, to insure that they truly don’t know the source of this recording...but to be honest it usually doesn’t go that far. There’s too much of this material out there, sir. Our police force is just too overtaxed to pursue criminals through the back alleys of the net. We have tangible dead bodies lying at our feet every day. This is Punktown, sir.”

“So it is,” Lawr muttered, almost hyperventilating though he had ceased his raging. What good was it to rage to a blank screen? “So it is.”

*     *     *

Walking back toward the entrance to the underground, ducking his neck into his collar against the rain, Lawr felt his fury for the people who had made the recording revert to disgust with himself. Faceless abusers, faceless net site owners, faceless law enforcers; in the end, the only face he could confront over this was his own. He didn’t know whether the intrusion of the imp into his life had pointed out the worst in him, or the best in him, or something of both.

As he walked, he slipped his palm comp out of his pocket, flipped it open and thumbed on the remote monitoring feature. When he saw that the girl was no longer in his bed he stopped dead in his tracks, and a woman behind him cursed as she had to quickly divert her course around him. In his dismay, he was unmindful of his fellow pedestrians, didn’t care that they might glance at his little screen.

It took only a moment to spot where she had shifted to.

Fourth phase, the tech support at Incestykes had said.

Only her legs showed at the bottom of the frame, bare skeletal legs that slowly stretched out and were drawn in again one at a time, as if she were exercising on her back on the floor. Had she been a physical entity, her heels would be carving grooves in the carpet right now. They were weak, languorous movements. What was happening to the rest of her body out of frame? Was the last of her breath being strangled out of her? Or was her body giving out on its own, these the weary death throes that followed a prolonged suffering, observed dispassionately by the camera and the man or men behind it?

“Oh God,” Lawr moaned, and he resumed walking, more briskly now. The palm comp remained open in his hand, and he almost dropped it a couple times when he jostled other people also heading for the subway. The escalators were too slow; he hastened down several sets of steps to the platform he needed to return to his neighborhood. When he saw that his tube had already pulled into the station he broke into a run to reach it, and cut off several other people waiting to board as he lunged inside. This time he found a seat, didn’t have to stand, and he cupped the palm comp in both hands and watched it intently as the tube’s doors shut and it started into motion.

Sometimes her legs would go still, and his heart would hang suspended as he expected her suffering to have ended, but then one leg would draw up again. Stretch out straight again. Followed by the other leg.

“Hold on,” he whispered to her. “Please...”

*     *     *

Lawr burst into his apartment as if to save a child from a fire, but he was brought up short just one step over the threshold.

He had dreaded seeing her, lying on her back on the carpet beside his bed, as if she had rolled off and fallen there in her death throes. Would her eyes be turned up to him, locked on his as they had been during the first two phases? And if so, would they be the seeing eyes of the living, or the blank stare of the dead? How much more terribly wasted, wounded, would she appear? He had tried to steel himself for it, and now the released tension nearly made him gag – though not in revulsion, as it turned out. What he saw was more horrible to him than her disfigured, dying or dead visage.

She was gone. Vanished. For a moment, he looked wildly around him. Where in his tiny flat with its combination living room/bedroom, kitchenette and bathroom could she be hiding now? Seated on his toilet, maybe? But then he remembered...

“The program will end on its own after its fourth phase,” the tech support had said.

“God. Oh God,” he whispered, his body sagging. He gazed numbly at the place where she had lain. Not a fiber of the mossy green carpet was stained with her blood or sweat or urine, or crushed down except where he had trod them himself.

He looked up sharply toward his comp system, on a sudden impulse rushed to it and fell into his chair. Quick, nervous fingers brought up the site for Incestykes. The menu of samples...

There she was, restored to the screen: a girl with wispy blond hair and a sweet smile, shown bare to the tiny dots of her nipples, so delicate she was almost frail, and filmed in a weird greenish light. His imp. His ghost. His angel.

This time, as the support tech had pointed out, he noted the tiny icon in the lower left corner that would have indicated to him she was an interactive imp. He moved his cursor over the girl’s chest.

He had been with her throughout most of her ordeal, or as much of it as her tormentors had decided to share. Lawr felt he owed it to her to see her through the very end of it, so that in some way it wouldn’t be like she had died alone except for the presence of her murderers. He would bring her back, his little roommate, his mute companion – resurrect her from the dead yet again.

His cursor hovered there, like a Ouija board’s pointing planchette. But slowly he withdrew his hand.

Tears broke free as Lawr locked eyes with the still image on the screen.

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed to her, not really sure why he should be apologizing. But who else was there to apologize to her? “I’m so sorry.”

Then he shut his comp system off entirely.

The Room

There are two posters on my living room wall. They might seem a little juvenile, clashing with the rest of my Beaumonde Street luxury apartment, but I told the decorator I hired to just frame them nice and never mind the wrinkly-nosed comments. The posters are photos of the music stars Del Kahn and Frankie Dystopia, the acid-tongued Frankie being a long-standing critical darling and Del, of course, being the working class hero of the whole damn Earth Colonies, both of them noted as powerful songwriters. I’d always liked Kahn, but it wasn’t until I met Candida that I really came to appreciate both men’s music.

Nowadays a lot of people call me Wild Bill. The story behind that is, four triggers of a rival syndy once tried to gun down Neptune Teeb at a birthday party for the daughter of one of his captains. The way they tell it, one of Teeb’s rising young slicks, known for his quickness – yours truly – brought down two of those stupid mad-dogs himself with his .55 Scythe. Now, of course I can’t confirm that tale. It’s enough that I’m going to tell you what I’m going to tell you. And that’s something that happened twenty years ago, when I was a kid of twenty-four. Well, that’s when it began, anyway.

Back in those days I was known as Quick Billy. That was because people would tell you things like, “Billy can get that for you right away,” and, “Nobody can get such-and-such for you faster than Billy.” I’d also like to think it was a nod to my smarts, because there are definitely dumber people in my profession (like triggers who crash a party full of syndy boys carrying friends under their tailor-made suits).

I started out as a gang punk, and who didn’t when you lived in a neighborhood like Forma Street? But my quickness of thought and action soon got me noticed and adopted into the Teeb family. To this day Neptune Teeb, despite numerous attempts to take him down, remains the strongest syndy boss in the city of Punktown; on the whole of the planet Oasis, for that matter. To be number one, of course Teeb has to have his hand in all the usual iniquities – drugs, girls, gambling – but he has a certain flair for the black market. And naturally, the black market consists most importantly of guns, but Teeb also has a whole stable of people talented in biotech and other such scientific wizardry. That’s how they attract their higher-end clientele. If you can afford it, they can get you an android made that looks like your favorite VT star. If you die, they can clone you in one of their secret clinics, where your cells have been kept in storage in the event of just such a calamity, and load it up with a recording of your memory, all this despite cloning of private citizens being illegal.

I knew a lot of people, I had real street rapport, and so Candida got my name from some friend of a friend at school. School was none other than Paxton Polytech (Paxton being Punktown’s real name, but only the rich folks who send their kids to Paxton Polytech would call it that). Candida Jaxxon. I tried calling her Jax but she didn’t go for that. She didn’t go for calling me Quick Billy, either. For her, I was always William; she said it with a teasing smile, and it’s my favorite of the various names I’ve worn over the decades.

For me, she became Candy.

*     *     *

I was given directions to her apartment building, a very nondescript little box hiding behind the frilly name Colonial Estates. She was on the top floor, six, and I rode the lift to a gloomy long tunnel of a hallway with a third of its strip lights out and another third fluttering. I counted off the numbers on the metal doors with their blistered beige paint, until I came to the one I’d been given: 30, the last door on the right side of the hallway.

I rang the buzzer, and in moments the vid screen set into the door flickered to life and a woman’s face appeared before me. I knew she could see me, too. “Yes?” she asked, sounding wary.

“Quick Billy.”

I heard the bolts snap back on the other side of the metal door, and when it was hauled open I saw the woman wasn’t at my eye level as she had seemed on the security monitor. She was short but nicely proportioned, with long legs in tight jeans, and her shapeless Paxton Polytech sweatshirt couldn’t entirely hide the shapes within; mm-hm, two soft kids snuggled all warm under a cozy blanket. Her skin was a creamy chocolate, her lips extra full, her shoulder-length hair tied back behind her head. The way she tipped her head up to look at me, and the way her lips pouted, it was like she was thrusting them out at me just to see what I’d do. I found I couldn’t stop watching her mouth.

She smiled, a little shy maybe, maybe a little afraid. Not that I was so scary looking – yeah, I had on my leather jacket but I thought my black beret made me look, you know, poetic, and I still had a baby face back then – but she knew I was a runner for a syndy, and I imagine she’d never had dealings with a creature such as me before. She said in a soft voice, “I hear you can get me some special items I need for a project I’m working on.”

“What kind of project, if I might ask?”

“I’m working on my thesis, and it involves some practical applications to support and demonstrate my research.”

“Ahh, right. Anyway, do you have a list or something of what you’re looking for?”

“Yeah, I’ve printed some things off the net to show you, and I have a couple magazines, too. Come in, please.” She stepped aside to let me into her little flat. It was dingy, a bit cluttered but clean enough. Right away I noticed the work station she’d made out of her living room. Against one wall was her desk, covered in expensive computer equipment, a large central screen surrounded by a number of smaller monitors and some virtual screens projected into the air, to boot. Thick black cables snaked down the side of the desk into a power unit she’d adapted to the wall outlet. Did her landlord know about that? I bet utilities weren’t included in her rent.

Turning, I nodded at two posters on another of the room’s walls. “Del Kahn. I like him. Who’s the other guy?”

Candy looked up from where she was digging out that stuff to show me. “Frankie Dystopia. Amazing lyricist. You don’t know him?”

“Maybe if I heard him he’d be familiar.”

“Wait a second.” She moved to her music system, punched a few keys, and started up one of Dystopia’s first recordings, as I later learned. She flashed a smile at me, bright white against her dark skin, and motioned for me to sit on the sofa. She plunked down easily beside me – I guess she was losing the wariness – and spread her materials across our legs. “This is the thing I need the most. Not exactly something I can order out of a catalog.”

“That where you got your other stuff?” I nodded at her busy technical set-up.

“Some of it. Other stuff is borrowed from school.”

I didn’t know if “borrow” meant borrow or “borrow” as in borrow for good, but anyway, I tapped a picture in the magazine she’d opened on my thigh. “And what is this thing, exactly?”

“An antimatter-catalyzed fusion generator.”

I looked up at her slowly. I guess my eyes said more than any words I was trying to come up with.

That bright smile of hers, bigger this time. “Well, they told me you were good.”

“Hey,” I said, regaining my balance, “I’m Quick Billy.”

*     *     *

Those cuddly twins were bigger than I’d first judged them, God bless them, with black nipples like licorice gumdrops. Her skin was smooth, so smooth, and when we were slick with sweat it was like melting chocolate and I wanted to taste every inch of it. She would clench me tight with her legs like she was afraid I’d float away from her if she didn’t hold me down, hold me inside her, and she looked up into my face one time with a kind of urgent desperation that clenched my heart tighter than her legs, and cooed, “William, you make me crazy.”

“You can’t pin that on me,” I told her.

“Don’t leave me,” she said. “Don’t ever leave me.”

Told you I was quick. But I wish I could say that I was smarter than I’d always thought I was. She tried to explain her research project to me as I brought her what she needed over the next few months. Tried explaining quantum teleportation, molecular displacement, suchlike stuff, but it all sounded like magic to me. In fact, the hardest things I tracked down for her – and I can’t tell you how I did it – were a couple of books that sounded pretty magical to me, especially given how old they were. One was called The Atlas of Chaos, by a Choom named Wadoor, and the other was The Veins of the Old Ones by a Tikkihotto guy named Skretuu. These two books were the only things she didn’t try to discuss with me; in fact, she seemed kind of evasive about them. One time I got a little extra curious, but she cured that quick by dragging me by the hand back to her bed.

Since her actual bed was heaped in clothing and piles of books, for us bed meant the fold-out sofa, which we’d open for the night as I spent less and less time at my own place. We’d lie there in the weird emerald green glow coming through the cooling vents of the generator I’d managed to get for her. I’d sold it to her cheaply enough, considering, but I’m not saying it was cheap – not that I spent a cent on it myself, ahem. It was a used super-duper-whatever generator, and one night steam started hissing out of it, giving us both a moment of panic, but she got the thing under control again.

Across the living room from Candy’s work station were sliding glass doors that opened out onto a stingy little strip of metal trying to pass for a balcony. But we’d often open the doors up and lean over the railing, me in my boxers and she in just my shirt, watching neighborhood kids play in the alley. They were one of Punktown’s races that I didn’t know the name for, with skinny white bodies and six long legs, looking like cadavers with an extra set of limbs sewn on. They actually scampered up and down the alley walls like spiders, tossing back and forth four balls – one red, one yellow, one black and one white – like expert jugglers, though I never did figure out the rhyme or reason of their game. Still, it was fun enough cheering them on. One afternoon, squeezing my hand as we watched, Candy pecked me on the cheek out of the blue and whispered, “I love you.”

I was stupid. Always the cynic, but probably it was more to do with insecurity. I snickered and said, “Aw, come on, baby – you’re just slumming while you’re away from Mom and Dad. After you win all these prizes for your project and sell the rights to some mega-corp, you think you’re gonna settle down with a runner for a crime family?”

She let go of my hand and edged away from me. I could tell I’d really hurt her. “Why don’t you give me a little credit, huh? How about a little faith in me?”

I squirmed inside my skin, muttered a little and rubbed her back. Gradually she warmed to me again, but I never did apologize enough for what I said.

Three days later, while I was out looking up some new item for her (I’d stopped taking money for them a long time ago), I tried again and again to reach her on my palm comp but couldn’t get through. So I drove to her flat instead.

Emergency vehicles surrounded the building, even in the alley where the spider children would play. For a minute, I couldn’t find the strength to step out of my car, or even shut its engine off. I just gaped up at Colonial Estates, at its top right corner where Candy’s apartment had once been. Now, that corner of the building was – gone. There was no fire, no billowing black smoke. No debris in the street below. Later, when I managed to pull aside forcers, fire fighters, EMTs to question them, each told me basically the same thing, which wasn’t much. It was like that corner of the building had been vaporized, without so much as a cinder block falling to the sidewalk.

And the apartment’s tenant? Well, they said, unless it turned out that she’d run off to the market or something, then it looked like she’d been vaporized, too.

*     *     *

Three months after the accident...and I still hadn’t slept with another woman. That wasn’t like me at all. I learned something about myself the hard way. I was capable of a love much stronger, truer, and more lasting than I ever would have believed of myself. Candy had said, “Don’t ever leave me.” Well, she had left me – but my love hadn’t vanished along with her.

Three months after the accident...and one night a glow behind my eyelids awakened me in my own little Punktown flat. I opened my eyes to a vivid green glow that filled my room, and with a start I was throwing myself out of bed, almost tangling my leg in the sheets and pitching to the floor, but I managed to stay upright and whip out my pistol from under my pillow, besides.

Floating in the center of my bedroom was an open doorway. A room lay beyond that threshold, two-dimensional like a room reflected in a mirror, and the green illumination spilled out from in there. Though the metal door with the blistered beige paint and the number 30 was itself missing, I recognized the room I found myself staring into. But I didn’t even need to recognize it, because standing just beyond the doorway that hovered a few inches off my ratty carpet was Candy, gaping back at me, looking just as rattled as I must have looked.

I was reminded of the first time we met, standing on opposite sides of this same portal, and peering at each other through the security monitors.

“Oh my God, my God, Candy...” I babbled, over and over. I was unaware that I was still pointing my gun at this vision, this mirage or hallucination, and I found I couldn’t approach it. In fact, I’d backed up until my legs touched my mattress.

“William!” she called across my bedroom to me. Her voice sounded weirdly muffled and far away, almost like it was underwater. Her eyes were wide. She was bundled inside a blanket like a shawl, and I thought I saw her breath wisp out. “William!”

“Oh my God, Candy.” I wanted to ask her if she was dead. If she was a ghost. But I knew it was something even more horrible than that. Behind her, across the room I saw the balcony windows, their drawn curtains washed in the emerald light from the generator I’d found for her. It hadn’t exploded and vaporized her living room, after all.

“I created a displacement bubble, William,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to teleport myself, I only wanted to extend a bubble, to test the field. But I got shifted out of our plane.”

“Shifted where?” At last, my feet made their own decision to shuffle me closer to the doorway into her room-within-my-room.

“I don’t know where I am, but I’m cold.” She drew the blanket around herself more tightly. “So cold...”

“Do you have enough food to eat?” I asked. It seemed like a crazy question, but it was a consideration, wasn’t it? “It’s been three months now!”

“Three months?” Her face twisted. She looked around herself, apparently checking out the time as displayed inside her room. “It’s only been a few hours!”

“A few hours?” My mind knotted up with more questions. “How did you get here? How’d you find your way to me?”

“I knew where you live.”

“I know that, but how?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking about you, and...”

“Oh man,” I cut her off, “why did I ever get that generator thing for you? I knew it was old. Why did I get you all that stuff?”

She gave me the faintest, weariest of smiles, a ghost of the smiles I knew. “If you hadn’t got it for me, we never would have met in the first place.”

“No, baby, this is all my fault,” I groaned. I was very close to the doorway now, and while she talked I reached out my hand tentatively to reach through it.

“Don’t!” she screamed. And then, from under her blanket, a limb emerged. Her right arm was the same beautiful dark color I remembered it to be, but the end of it was a smooth, tapered stump ending at the wrist. “Please,” she moaned, shaking her head, “don’t touch it, William.”

A mist started clouding the doorway, like fog breathed on a mirror glass. It softened the green light, but more than that, it made Candy’s voice more muffled. In moments, I could see her moving her lips but I couldn’t hear a word.

“Candy!” I shouted. Despite her warning, I felt my body coil as if I might try jumping through the rift before it could close.

But then the doorway and its eerie glow – and the woman framed within it – vanished altogether, as if it had all been a waking dream, now dispersed. The only evidence I had that it had occurred was the tears that brimmed in my eyes.

*     *     *

At twenty-nine I guess you could say I was officially no longer a street punk. Teeb himself had taken notice of my work. Now I had runners working under me to buffer me from the actual street action.

In the months following Candy’s visit that night, I had contacted her parents and tried to get them to believe what had happened. In short, they thought I was cruel, and sick, for suggesting such a wild story about their deceased daughter. Even wilder was the suggestion that Candy would have been involved with me at all. Her mother even went so far as to sneer and say something to the effect that Candy’s boyfriends had always been from good, wealthy families, and that was the kind of man she would have ended up marrying – not a scruffy beret-wearing alley rat like myself.

I managed to track down one professor at Paxton Polytech who was willing to listen. I told him just enough about the equipment I’d gotten for her to make him believe me. He instructed that if Candy should visit me again, I best have a camera ready to record the encounter, and he gave me a list of questions to ask her, urging me to call him immediately in such an event.

Together, we visited Colonial Estates, but already the missing section of the building had been repaired. Still, we got the landlord to let us check out the restored apartment, which wasn’t yet tenanted. He had always been decent to Candy and me, and as we strolled around the apartment with him he made a wincing expression and said, “I hate to tell you this, but the workers found something strange one day when they came in. Right there in the middle of the living room floor was...well, it was a human hand.”

I stopped in my tracks, my mouth hanging open, before I managed to get out, “A right hand?”

“Yes. But it was just bones, like something off somebody dead a long time. We figured it might be something left over from the explosion – but then, why didn’t anyone find it before, and why lying there in the middle of a brand-new floor? So I decided it must be a prank. But when we turned it over to the forcers, well,” and now he touched my arm sympathetically, “it was Candida’s DNA. Sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“How long after the explosion was this?”

“Ah, about three months.”

I nodded. That would have corresponded with Candy’s experience of time; for her, just a matter of hours would have passed. Hours into her ordeal, she had tried reaching through the portal. Through a twisted maze of space and time, that part of her at least had found its way back to her point of origin. But bones, the man had said...just bones.

Well, after that I waited. Every night for weeks I lay awake, waiting. But the weeks passed. Months. And five years, before Candy appeared to me again.

I still had the list of questions somewhere, and the professor’s number, too, but when I lifted my head to see that doorway floating at the foot of my bed, all I could do was jump to the floor and stand riveted.

Five years is a long time. I had a wife now, and she sat up in bed groggily, too. When I heard her mumbling in confusion, I whipped around impatiently and convinced her it was only another one of her drug-induced delusions. I dragged her slack body out of bed, shoved her into the bathroom and told her to take a shower to rinse out her brain. I heard her slump down onto the closed toilet seat as I shut the door, and then I turned to see Candy there, gazing across the room at me yearningly. She was still wrapped in her blanket. She looked like she hadn’t aged a day. But when I came close to the invisible barrier between us, I could tell she saw how five years had changed me so much.

I babbled. I told her about her parents, her professor, asked her how she had found me this time when she had never been to this apartment before, but she barely seemed to hear me. She was too agitated, kept looking over her shoulder at the drawn curtains of the glass balcony doors. I could barely hear her trembling voice as she whispered, “Why did I use those books, William? Why did I have you get me those stupid books?”

“Candy, what is it? Why...”

Her eyes were wild, almost crazed, as she looked back at me again and hissed, “They keep scratching at the windows, William! They want to get in! They know I’m in here!”

“Who? Who are they? People?”

“Not people – just arms. I see their shadows out there, through the curtains. Long, long arms like tree branches.” She fought back a sob. “Like tentacles, William...”

The fog was beginning to obscure the doorway already. “God, no!” I choked. “Candy...wait...”

I darted across the room, found my handgun, turned back to the doorway and tossed the pistol toward it. I wanted her to have at least some means of defending herself from whatever was out there in the limbo she was trapped in. But of course, the gun vanished in a blink, never reaching her. I imagined it thumping onto the living room floor of apartment 30 of the Colonial Estates, much to the bewilderment of its current tenants.

The mist was swallowing her. Again, I couldn’t hear her, and so I wasn’t sure if she heard me – even though I yelled with all my might – when I called, “Candy, I love you! I love you, Candy!”

And then she was gone.

My wife staggered back into the room, dripping on the carpet, and grumbled, “Who were you talking to on the phone? Who is this you love, Bill?”

“Shut up,” I said without looking around at her.

I divorced my wife a short time later.

*     *     *

After I, ah, allegedly dropped two of those kamikaze triggers with my .55 at the birthday party, Teeb had made me one of his captains, but it wasn’t just about gratitude. I was good, better all the time, because my work was all that mattered to me. So at the age of thirty-four, Wild Bill was a name known to every hood and law forcer in Punktown.

I lived alone, and so this time I was the only one to see when the doorway reappeared. I’d been awake watching VT, because I was still inclined to sleep during the day. I stood up out of my chair, and she was there, poised at the threshold. The panic in her eyes made me step close, but I knew better than to pull my Scythe out of its holster – even when I saw what was happening behind her.

There was no sound at all. At least that much was a blessing.

The glass of the sliding balcony doors was shattered, and shadows were writhing outside the torn curtains, a seething mass of shadows. Then, a forked black arm slipped through and thrashed around blindly, trying to catch hold of Candy, but so far she was beyond its reach.

She looked into my eyes, seemingly only a few feet from me. I saw her open her mouth to scream, and though I couldn’t hear her, I knew she was calling my name.

And then she jumped through the doorway, as if to throw herself into my arms.

“Candy, no, no!” I cried.

She winked out of existence, but the room remained. Another arm, then another, snaked into the room, like rubbery tree branches. The whipping limbs smashed furniture, and one of them clawed down the poster of Frankie Dystopia. There was a blast of green light that made me bury my face in my shoulder, and an afterimage was burnt on my eyes for minutes afterwards. Either intentionally or accidentally, one of the arms had done something to make the generator blow.

When my vision cleared, the hovering doorway had disappeared.

*     *     *

I’m forty-four now, and plenty of people speculate that Neptune Teeb will pass his crown to his right-hand man, Wild Bill, should he retire before some enemy guns him down.

I still live alone, in my luxury Beaumonde Street apartment, except for the soldiers and servants who live in the two adjacent apartments. I still sit up watching VT at night. Or else I listen to music, usually from the extensive works of Del Kahn and Frankie Dystopia. When they sing of love found and lost, of devotion and desperation, it’s the closest I have to Candy whispering to me as we lay together on her fold-out sofa.

Ten years earlier I’d put out my ears, expecting to hear that a woman’s skeleton – missing one hand – had been discovered on the floor of apartment 30 in the Colonial Estates. But it never happened.

I know it’s a slim hope to hang onto...that she’d made some adjustments to her computers, and opened up another path for herself. That she was lost for a time in that twisty maze, but would eventually make her way out the other end of it. It was a slim hope, that a young girl like her would appear before this aging hood someday, with the same avowals of everlasting love on her tongue.

But maybe not so slim. “Don’t ever leave me,” Candy had said.

So I never have. And never will.

Into My Arms

1

The Scowling Buddha, on Golgotha Street, had been their watering hole come the weekend. Now, without her, it was Swift’s watering hole come almost every night. To reach it, Swift had to take a shunt line – spitting sparks in its wake over the clotted streets of Punktown – from the biotech company for which he worked. That was the point of it; the bar was distant from the clubs and pubs that most of the other employees tended to favor. The two of them had not wanted their coworkers seeing them together, because she had been married to another man.

The harsh violet light in the Scowling Buddha was like the glow used to entice and fry summer insects. They had always sat at the same little table, unless it was already taken, in which case they would sit at a second favorite little table, but now Swift hung over the bar as if it were a beer-sticky bit of shipwreck flotsam. He had a mug of Knickerson beer (“knickers off,” he would toast her) in front of him, and he alternated between glowering fuzzily at the VT and the laughing couple who sat at their primary favorite table. The couple were too loud, too cozy, as if they had been hired to sit there and mock him. They even had a bottle of Merlot between them, and Merlot had always been Talane’s drink.

The bartender had begun an automatic advance through the VT’s endless channels, but had been called away and forgotten, or else he simply liked the effect of the channels changing, the flash and flutter of light, the succession of faces like people remembered in one’s dying moments, the snatches of music and chopped off splinters of dialogue. Swift heard a mere second’s worth of the theme song from a children’s show called Wunderdumpling, but he knew the song well enough to recognize it, and it was like a cattle prod to his sternum.

They had watched Wunderdumpling in bed on a couple of occasions – his bed, in his flat, never her place because she didn’t live alone as he did – and with her long bareness pressed down the length of his side, Talane would jauntily sing the theme song, but change the words to say, “My name is Wunderdumpling, I love to go a-humping...”

That one-second blip felt like a signal to him, a single word spoken at a séance, cryptic but in a familiar voice. It made him feel that he was immersed in memory, as if he were a tiny bug drowned at the bottom of his own glass.

A tiny mechanical bug, he mused. Like the bugs they manufactured at their workplace.

An eruption of laughter made him crank his eyes, hard as billiard balls with the pain of his headache, toward the corner. Two large young men – like Swift, ancestors of the Earth colonists who had established Punktown here on the world Oasis – were having a boozily good time pitching darts. They were regulars like himself, though he had never interacted with them, but he had never seen the alien in the Scowling Buddha before. The alien sat in a high bar chair that had been positioned in front of the dartboard. Swift didn’t know whether it was the men or the alien who had placed the chair there.

The alien had a dart projecting from its flesh, just below its face.

One of the young men had a shaved head and a tattoo in luminous purple ink of a cross on the rear of his knobby skull. Swift snorted. Was this stigmata a proclamation of belief, or just more empty color like the strobing of the VT? Despite his inebriation the man stood just about the standard distance of seven feet, nine-and-a-quarter inches from the board – or in this case, the alien – as he launched a fresh dart. It thunked into the being’s rubbery flesh, further down its torso, if it could be called a torso, eliciting a fresh roar of laughter from the dart players and squirming smiles of mixed revulsion and amusement from other patrons.

Swift sneered with disdain, more so for the alien than even for his two fellow creatures. This type of otherworlder had been dubbed the Bliss. It looked to Swift like a stingray bleached of all color, grafted onto the hind legs of a shaved goat. White to the point of translucence; the glow of a holograph advertising Zub beer showed through one of the flaps of flesh it had where an arm should have been. It had no upper limbs, and its face was just a suggestion of features, as if they’d been punched into that pallid skin with a screwdriver.

They’d been called the Bliss because little was known about them other than the hedonistic impulses that had apparently been the inspiration for their recent influx into Punktown. They were fast generating a reputation for decadent behavior, seeking out brothels, S&M dens, and more dubious institutions of pleasure, such as necrophilia clubs and snuff theaters. They liked their drugs, the stronger the better, purple vortex being a favorite. A week ago, Swift had stepped over one of them passed out or maybe dead in a subway station. Supercharged with arousal, ravenous for sensation, supremely masochistic, they seemed to live only for a heightened state of ecstasy. But should he begrudge them that?

Swift felt he had the right to begrudge anybody any kind of happiness, however heightened or slight. He felt only a heightening of his disgust when the Bliss substituting for a dartboard seemed to sense his gaze upon it, and turned its pancake of an upper body slightly so that its expressionless eyes studied him, in turn.

Talane had believed in God. She’d believed in angels. A woman working for a biotech company, highly proficient at nanotech research, helping to design and program microscopic biomechanical organisms like some kind of deity herself, cleaving to such superstitions. It had been the source of many a debate between them, soon soured into argument. How intolerant, how stubborn he could be when stirred to debate. “You have to win,” she had shouted at him, more than once. “You always have to win!”

But Talane, he thought – contrite though he might be – you aren’t with the angels now, are you? Did she really think she was trading his arms for theirs? She couldn’t have truly believed. She had lived in Punktown; if science couldn’t convince her of her delusions, surely this city should have. It had to have been a denial of reality...an escape. He was only trying to help her lose her dependence on the drug of mindless faith, that did not alleviate the suffering of life but only flew in the face of it.

The Bliss was still gaping at him with its empty little face. There, Swift thought, there’s the closest you’ll find to an angel in this city. This thing with its glowing skin, this thing in its state of continual pleasure, craving its debauchery, its fix of overstimulation, its heaven in the flesh.

An angel? He was reminded more of something he’d seen on the net, a thing called a Jenny Haniver. On Earth, in centuries long past, sailors would cut and carve the bodies of rays and let them dry, until they resembled the mummified remains of devil-faced little imps with pointed limbs, pointed wings, selling these prodigies as souvenirs. A poor man’s devil. A poor woman’s angel.

Why was it staring at him? Did his observation of its pleasure only make the experience more exciting? Add exhibitionism to its mix, then, but Swift was in no mood to be a party to it. He gave the thing a rude gesture as he slipped off the stool indented by his bony rump these past hours. As he turned toward the door, he heard another dart thump home, another round of guffaws.

What do you think you are, he asked the Bliss in his mind, bloody St. Sebastian?

2

Walking to work from his subway stop, Swift was a tall, thin figure with a slouched drooping head: a shepherd’s crook of a body. He lifted his eyes as if he’d been subconsciously counting his steps, to see Camus Organics rising before him. It was a block-like building, unremarkable except for one unaccountable decorative touch: five looming, curved projections like the ribs of some rotted leviathan – or the fingers of an immense reaching hand – that arose from its flat roof. Especially vivid at night, they glowed with purple light.

The security guard didn’t look up at him, or even at his monitors, as Swift scanned himself through the turnstile. He might even have been asleep in his chair behind the counter. One of Camus’s mottos was “Celebrate Diversity,” which had resulted in almost 70% of its work force being of the Dacvibese race, who resembled bipedal albino greyhounds with pink, goat-like eyes. The head of Personnel Resources was a Dacvibese, which accounted for the company’s admirable diversity, and for this security guard being a Dacvibese, too. At least this one wore a uniform; usually they went naked, and peripherally it would appear to Swift that the labs and offices swarmed with bony walking cadavers.

Swift reported to his own work area first, just for the sake of appearances, keeping an eye open for his supervisor. He glanced around at the sprawl of cubicles; inside a half dozen of them, Dacvibese already had their heads down on their folded arms, napping. The personnel chief had explained that they napped frequently on her world. They also expressed displeasure by jetting a foul-smelling mucus from glands in their muzzles, and this was just a cultural behavior that nonDacvibese had to understand and be tolerant of. When one of the emaciated beings lifted its head to blink at Swift pinkly, and caught him staring, it curled its lip to squirt a warning sample of mucus into the air. Then it lowered its head again. Swift had sucked in his breath, and his irritation.

When he felt a prudent enough amount of time had passed, he wandered off toward Talane’s work area. He would have felt more comfortable had he known where his boss was but he still hadn’t spotted him this morning.

Talane had called this her flea circus. Here, her labors had been of the utmost seriousness but also, in stolen hours which she still justified as research, she had developed such nanospecies as the “crab louse,” which she had once managed to introduce into the trousers of a male coworker whose amorous attentions she had been less receptive to than Swift’s.

Swift felt his anxiousness increase as he noted that more of Talane’s materials had disappeared, appropriated by other workers. Not her personal belongings – someone had gathered those up for a sister off in the colony city Miniosis – but the implements of her research. Much of her particular corner of research had been in programming nanomites to deliver information to the human brain. Specifically, memory-encoded long-chain molecules. Normally, these programmed molecules were conveyed via a brain drip. This was the manner in which clones utilized for labor and the military had their training delivered to them whole, but it was also the manner in which the memories of a deceased wealthy person could be transferred into a clone of their body – which was illegal, but might still be arranged with the right contacts.

In the course of her experiments Talane had had her own memories recorded, just as these wealthy people would do at an illicit cloning facility, usually run by the Neptune Teeb crime syndicate. It was okay for her to do this, though. It was all in the name of research.

One month had already passed with Talane gone from the world. It already seemed to have been many more months than that. In the first week, Swift had not touched anything, had not even ventured into her area. Partly, it was because of the wary, knowing way his coworkers watched him. In the second week, he had entered in the hopes of stealing a photo from a partition wall, a forgotten package of mints or a stained coffee mug, but by then all that was already gone. All he found, on the carpet under her desk, was one of her long black hairs. This single, brittle strand released a powerful flood of sensations: the silk of her hair under his palm, the spill of it across his belly, the smell of it against his nuzzling nose. He had twined the strand around and around his finger until it cut off his circulation, unreleased tears capping his eyes like distorting lenses. In this hair was enough of her essence to clone her, he thought, if only he could afford such a thing. And he had the memories with which to imbue that clone. It was so possible. So impossible. He had kept the hair, taped it to a slip of paper and folded it away in his wallet. After that, however, his mind had remained fixed on those recorded memories of hers.

In the third week, on a day when his boss was out, he had got much done. He had accessed the memory file, because Talane had given him nearly all her work-based passwords so that he might avail himself of her data in his own researches. Then, he had transmitted the data to an unprogrammed batch of her nanomites, encoding the long-chain molecules they already carried inside them like waiting wombs. The nanomites had been like blank, undifferentiated cells, now given a very specific purpose.

But he had stored the programmed nanomites, not sure how he might smuggle them out of the company. Would they show up in a security scan? He thought of slipping a cartridge of them inside a lidded cup of coffee, maybe lining the interior of the cup with a sheet of material the security scan couldn’t penetrate. Stupid; wouldn’t this impenetrable mug then appear wrong to the scan?

Now it was the fourth week, and more of Talane’s paraphernalia was gone, but Swift felt relief to discover the cartridge of programmed nanomites was undisturbed. He lifted the little, 1.8 ml glass cartridge close to his eyes. A grayish fluid inside, grainy and glittering, like water filled with the finest of metal filings. Thousands and thousands of creatures, not quite machines, not quite alive – but bearing whatever one could call the life of a human being, apart from the wet mechanics of their fleshly vehicle.

Someone called to Swift across the warren of low partition walls and he looked up to see his supervisor Dave striding across the carpet. Dave was tall and broad, a bit brutish for a man in the field of science. He tended to be gruff with his male workers and ingratiating with the females, his style as subtle as a claw hammer in a latex glove. He had liked Talane a lot, repeatedly offered to take her for a ride on the hoverbike he favored in warm weather, manly beast that he fancied himself to be. Every man at work, every stranger on the street, had been attracted to Talane. Like many a miserable woman, she had been gifted with a kind of magical appeal, a wasted and unprofitable magnetism. Now, seeing Dave approach, Swift felt guilty for having been so jealous whenever he’d seen Talane speak with their boss, guilty for having accused her of welcoming his advances. How could he have imagined she would ever be charmed by this ass? But jealousy and insecurity are unreasoning things, and Swift could be very unreasoning for a man in the field of science.

“When I told everyone today was 5S day,” Dave said as he loomed at the mouth of Talane’s work area, “I meant for us to organize our own work stations, not those of our fellow employees.”

“5S. Oh yeah, that was today.” Swift had nearly forgotten. It was an ancient Japanese method of arranging work areas to minimize the wasting of time and effort. The 5Ss in Japanese were: Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu and Shitsuke. Camus Organics had adopted a set of forced equivalent meanings in English: Sort, Set in Place, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. Camus felt that promoting this philosophy would improve their workers’ sense of organization, or at least of alliteration.

“I realize it’s difficult for you losing your friend, but we’re falling behind in our projects, here, especially now that we’re short-handed.” Swift didn’t like the use of “friend,” though Dave had not put any extra emphasis on it. Swift knew that he and Talane had been fooling no one by going far afield to visit the Scowling Buddha after work. Theirs had been a poorly kept secret.

“Short-handed,” he murmured. “Yeah.”

Dave nodded down at one of Swift’s hands, closed around something in its palm. “I hope you weren’t taking any more of Talane’s things. By the end of the week I plan to have it all properly organized and reallocated.”

“All I needed was this nano remote.” He held up a tiny device. The moment he’d seen Dave coming he had slipped the cartridge of nanomites into the front pocket of his trousers.

“Well,” Dave sighed, “if you really need it, but don’t take anything else until I can have Ramona go over all this.” Ramona Conte was their team leader. Talane had called her Aroma Cunte.

Swift saw Dave poke a finger into his ear and itch vigorously. He had to fight back a smile. It couldn’t be possible, could it? Irritated with Dave one day, about a week before her death, Talane had programmed some “earwigs,” as she’d dubbed them, and left them on the leather biker jacket Dave hung on a rack in his office.

Swift felt a warmth suffuse him, even as he felt his chest clutch with pain. Her influence lingered. It was like she wasn’t entirely gone.

3

Ultimately, at the close of the work day Swift locked the cartridge of nanomites in a drawer of his own desk rather than smuggle it out of the building. At least he had taken that much incentive today. At least he had salvaged that much from her work area – and wasn’t it everything? Everything of her, in a 1.8 ml receptacle, less even than the ashes they had also given to her sister.

“Is cremation Christian?” he might once have argued with her. He could argue about anything. “Or are you a Buddhist now?” Always poking and prodding at her inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, her flaws of logic, like an impatient scientist with a needle-tipped probe. The inconsistency that she would not divorce her husband though she claimed he was psychologically abusive, her hypocrisy that she would not break up with Swift even though she would not go through with divorce, the contradiction in saying that she’d been drawn to Swift because he was so unlike her husband, and then later turning around and saying he was just like her husband, doubting her, questioning her, pressuring her, so where was the logic in keeping two men like that, and if I’m so bad then why do you supposedly love me, what are you doing in my bed right now, oh run away, sure, that’s all you ever do, don’t try to work out the problems in your own life, blame it on me, on him, you like to wallow in your misery, you like it this way, the world’s eternal misunderstood victim, you like to suffer...

As he walked home from the subway, this internal tirade – remembered from no particular occasion; it could have been from any number of occasions – overwhelmed him and he had to pause as if to catch his breath. Swift squinted up into what he could see of the sky through gaps and chinks between the slab-faced towers. His tenement building squatted near the base of a massive apartment block, like a forgotten chunk that had dropped off the titan. He picked out his bedroom window, as if he expected to see the dingy lace curtain draw aside to reveal a ghostly white face peering back at him. The window gaped empty. He drifted forward again.

He had agonized at her vulnerability. And so why had he also been so quick to abuse it? Now, with her gone – with her having again contradicted her religion, by cutting herself, carving her poor beautiful body, her white translucent flesh, like some seaman whittling a skate into a leering Jenny Haniver, a preserved mockery of a living thing – Swift found he understood himself even less than he had understood her. He reflected that he had always been better with the concept of people than he was with people, better at the concept of human interaction, of love, than in its execution. Uneasy abstracts that didn’t fit him the way they had looked in the catalog. Sometimes he had suffocated her, desperately lonely every moment he was without her. Other times, bitter at her confusion and indecision, he had felt she was needy and clinging. Then when he would pull away from her, or she from him, he would feel miserably alone again. There was no happy state for them. And yet after all their fighting and tears, they were drawn together again and again like kindred creatures.

Until she had gone so far away as to never return.

Except...except for the file she had left in her computer. Except for the glitter in the cartridge in his desk, the metallic angel dust that seemed to slither and move, and not just with its medium of water, if you stared at it long enough.

He hauled open the tenement building’s metal front door, and it clanged hollowly behind him. Sparks were spitting from the elevator’s keyboard, so he bypassed it and trudged up the first metal staircase. Each footfall seemed to punch a key, release a jack-in-the-box memory.

“You’re just selfish!” she’d screeched at him once, her heavy kohl running down her face in newsprint tears. “You think it’s all so easy for me, don’t you? You don’t understand how it is for me at all!”

Was there something wrong with him, then, something fundamentally lacking? Had he been bereft of true empathy for her? Did he have the capacity for empathy with another human being at all? Or was that simply human nature, anyway, and the concept of empathy merely an unsubstantiated theory? Maybe that was what they should have been researching at Camus Organics. How to train their clever fleas to carry empathy to the human soul, and there weave it into the fabric with their nimble little claws.

At the head of the stairs to the fourth floor, Swift turned toward his door and found the narrow landing blocked by a broad, kite-shaped figure. It was a Bliss, its punched-in eye holes fixed on him. It was the exact stare of the alien in the Scowling Buddha, but then these things all looked alike anyway, so that you couldn’t even tell if there was more than one sex among them. Still, the immediate impression Swift had was that this was in fact the very same being.

“Excuse me,” he grumbled, edging forward and dropping his eyes from the thing’s face.

It didn’t budge. It hovered there, as if uncomprehending.

Swift looked up at it again, his glare playing over its body for signs of dart wounds. How could he even be sure? In the clinical greenish glow of the landing’s fluorescent lights, he saw that its snowy flesh was marred with countless scars, from apparent punctures to long lacerations or incisions. He thought some of them looked like cigarette burns. In addition, along its lower abdomen and cupped in its groin were a number of orifices of different shapes and sizes, most if not all surgically rendered, some of these ports lined with rubber and one of them trickling a clear jelly. Repulsed, Swift felt his impatience soar. “Get the fuck out of my way, will you?”

Still it lingered, either not understanding or not heeding him.

Swift surged forward, pushing at the armless creature with both hands, slamming its back into the wall. It made no sound, did not resist him or try to turn away. Stupid, Swift cursed himself. It wanted you to do that. It wants you to hurt it. It saw that in your eyes in the bar – that you had enough hatred in you to do someone harm.

Maybe it had even sniffed the harm he could do to a lover.

He wouldn’t give it the satisfaction again. Ignoring it, Swift punched in the code to his door. He muddled it, had to start again. Peripherally, he saw the otherworlder slide away from the wall at last and float past him for the stairs. It began descending, and he cast another look at it now that it was in retreat. Ha. The only thing he found vaguely human about it was that it had buttocks, small and hard like those of an Asian woman. Very white and smooth and not at all bad looking, if you could get past the rest of it. But that was a lot to get past.

Swift didn’t wait to see it disappear down the stairwell entirely, instead turned into his flat and locked his door again after him.

4

“Do you just leave injectors and extractors lying around on your desk like paperweights?” asked Ramona Conte. Swift started; he hadn’t seen her in the threshold of his cubicle. Aroma Cunte, Talane spoke in his mind. A Dacvibese let out a loud snore in the next cubicle over but the team leader’s lumpen, badly made-up face didn’t seem to register it.

Swift glanced furtively at the instruments lying in front of him. “I’m still doing my 5S organizing. I’m not sure where to put them. It’s not easy to standardize each work area, Ramona, since not everybody here is exactly working on the same project with the same equipment.”

“It just has to be neat; do you think you can manage that?”

A strange, poisonous thought unfurled in Swift. That it wasn’t just him who had killed Talane, but – cumulatively – her husband, too, and every last malicious little soul-sucker like this person blighting his threshold. Ahh, but that thought was dangerous, lest he shift blame to more convenient shoulders. Yeah, that was just too easy, wasn’t it? Just too wrong.

When he’d muttered something to satisfy her, and his team leader had retreated to haunt some other rabbit cage, Swift looked down again at the two devices lying before him. He picked one of them up, pocketed it, and slipped the other into a spot that might be considered in keeping with the spirit of 5S. If only everything could be neatly slotted into a labeled, designated space. Everything part of a puzzle, neatly integrated. Everything in harmony.

He unlocked a desk drawer, cluttered inside. A little glass cartridge rolled into the light, sparkling. He pocketed that, too.

There was no security camera in the men’s rest room. Swift locked the metal door and sat on the toilet cover, long legs in a wide stance, body drooping over them, staring at the floor vacantly like a man summoning up the courage to shoot himself in the temple. He sat that way for some minutes. Finally, as if a tiny mechanism clicked in his head, he straightened up, pulled the gleaming chrome injector from his trousers, then the cartridge, and fitted the latter inside the former.

He positioned the tip of the injector over a forked vein in the crook of his left elbow, exposed by his rolled up sleeve. Another hesitation, a clenched breath packed solid in his chest, and then his thumb depressed the plunger key.

He watched the twinkling solution inside the cartridge flush into his arm in one smooth, innocuous motion. Then it was gone, and the cartridge was empty, and it was done. No worries about cartridges submerged in coffee, or inserted in some orifice. The contents were dispersed within him, and if the security scanners should detect that, well, it was all just part of his research. Sorry, a bit unorthodox maybe, but not unheard of. Everything stored in its proper place, right? Everything integrated.

He already had the nano remote he had taken from Talane’s area in another pocket of his trousers. Back at his desk, he had linked the remote to a control program in his computer. With the remote, he had transmitted orders for the nanomites to remain in stasis, a state of inertia. They were on pause, their little legs unmoving, and they would simply drift within his system as the currents dictated, as the beating of his heart drove them, slumbering without dreams of their own, and waiting with the patience of the dead for resurrection.

His heartbeat quickened as he passed through the security booth on his way home that afternoon. The Dacvibese guard was in animated conversation with one of the other Dacvibese workers, both barking with loud laughter. The guard glanced over at Swift suspiciously, his expression souring as if he were contemplating a spray of his odious mucus, but he turned back to his companion and Swift exited from the booth into the parking lot of Camus Organics, its great purple fingers curved threateningly above him. He stepped between the bars of their shadow.

He bypassed the subway line that would take him directly home, traipsed further along to the dock from which he’d ride an elevated shunt to the neighborhood of the Scowling Buddha. Aboard this, he watched the streets rush under him as if he were stationary and they were flooding off the edge of the world, sparks cascading below like molten rain. Staring through his reflection, he caught himself softly singing aloud the theme to the children’s show Wunderdumpling. He transformed the lyrics the way Talane would sing them.“My name is Wunderdumpling, I love to go a-humping...”

She was inside him, in a union more intimate than any act of intercourse, in an embrace that he felt might be unprecedented between lovers.

The Scowling Buddha’s bartender lifted a glass to the Knickerson tap, but Swift stopped him and surprised himself even more than he did the man by asking for a glass of Merlot instead. He had never much cared for wine, had teased Talane that her love of it was another manifestation of her religion; communion, transubstantiation. As he sipped, and found it more pleasing than he remembered it, he wondered if he had made this choice on his own, in an effort to commune with her, or if trickles of Talane were leaking from the molecules the nanomites clutched, despite their state of suspended animation. No, that’s foolish, he thought. They could float through him for the rest of his life inactive – if that was how he wanted it. They would be stored in the archive of his body, not destroyed or forgotten at Camus. Even if he never activated it, her spirit was safe in the sarcophagus of his body.

He drank half a bottle of Merlot before embarking back onto the streets, which listed beneath him as if with the aftershocks of that catastrophic flood off the edge of the world. It was dark now. Even in this state he was wary, because this was Punktown, so it was almost like a sixth sense that caused him to turn around quickly at one point and glimpse a figure trailing him in the shadows. It quickly sidestepped into a recessed doorway, but he had the impression of a whitish body, barely anthropomorphic, like a ghost.

Swift quickened his pace, looked behind him every few moments. He didn’t catch sight of the figure again, but he still seemed to sense it. Or was it only a ghost that slipped stealthily through the convolutions of his brain?

In his tenement house, he mounted the stairs leerily, expecting to find that the white figure had reached his landing ahead of him, waited there to block him. But his path was unobstructed, and he hastened inside, hastily secured his door.

He sat at his little kitchen table with an injector and extractor lying before him, just as he had at work, except that these were instruments he had bought at a medical supply warehouse a few days ago and this time there was no petty little office tyrant to harass or berate him. He was only too thoroughly alone. The injector, well, that had been in case he had smuggled out the cartridge itself. The extractor was in case he injected the nanomites, either at work or at home, and then had second thoughts about it. The extractor was loaded with an empty cartridge to receive the nanomites, should he command them to exit his system, in which case they would obediently dog-paddle out of his veins in their thousands in a neat and orderly manner, not a single stray remaining behind.

If he chose. Draw them out. Leave them inside. Activate them. If he chose.

Choices. They had crushed Talane under their weight, too, hadn’t they? But it had been two hungry, demanding men crowded into her one body, her one mind, and not these delicate little fairies/ferries of memory.

A heavy thump at his door caused Swift to jerk his woozy head up. He rose and stole close to the metal panel. There was a view screen set into the middle of the door, and Swift activated it in such a way that he could see who was out there in the hallway, though the screen on the other side would remain blank.

The face was almost like something carved into a piece of fruit to approximate human features; a jack-o’-lantern thing. Mouth and nostrils like black knife gashes washed of their blood. Mere recessed holes for eyes. It was expressionless, and yet it stared directly into his own face as if it didn’t need him to turn on the outside screen.

Swift stabbed the speaker key and snarled, “You fucker! You fucking freak! You like following me around, huh? You think I’m a freak like you? Bugger off!”

The face registered nothing, did not budge or even shift within the view screen’s frame.

“You want to play games? I can play games.” Swift pushed himself away from the door and stomped to his fridge. First he plucked up a fur-lined glove resting atop it, and put that on before thrusting his hand into cold vapors and taking hold of the gun he kept in the freezer. It was ostensibly a cutting tool with an adjustable beam, but was popularly used  – and perhaps truly intended by its savvy if unethical makers – as a weapon. Swift’s own device was glitched, however, would heat up to the point where it might break down entirely and perhaps in a dangerous manner if he didn’t keep it cold. Swift strode back to the door, and this time he punched the key that would positively enable the Bliss on the other side of the panel to see him. He held the steaming, frost-glistening gun up close to his face. “This will give you more than a couple of dart holes, wanker! Are you sure that’s what you’re looking for?”

He wasted more threats and imprecations, wafted on the reek of wine, without the alien withdrawing. Finally it was Swift who withdrew, to pull up a chair and sit facing the door, facing the screen, with a newly opened bottle of Knickerson in one hand and the cutting gun drooping from the other. He toasted the lifeless face with his beer. “You want to be a voyeur? Enjoy yourself. Finger your holes all you want. Oh, I forgot, you don’t have hands. Well you’ll get no fingering from me, freak.”

He continued to rave to his visitor, until eventually he dozed off. When he awoke just past dawn, he was surprised to find that he had shifted to the sofa. On his way to the kitchen to return his gun – alarmingly hot to the touch – to the freezer, he saw half a dozen empty Knickerson bottles scattered beside the sofa like bowling pins. He was even more surprised when, moving on to the bathroom,  he caught sight of himself in the mirror. When had he lined his eyes with some kohl that Talane had forgotten here, and which he’d kept like a sacred relic? Streaks of it like newsprint tears had dried on his cheeks. It was like seeing Talane’s face superimposed over his own. Was it she who had painted his eyes while he slept, her spirit taking control of her new vessel?

When he remembered the Bliss at last, he stumbled back to his apartment’s door. The security screen was still activated, but sometime during the night the being had finally drifted away.

“Can’t even get you to stay beside me, can I?” Swift grumbled, as if he might actually be insulted or hurt that the creature had abandoned him to suffer his pain unattended.

5

Swift had just climbed to his floor, home from another numbing day at work, carrying more numbing bottles of Merlot in a shopping bag, when the door to the elevator opened – he hadn’t realized it was repaired – and a curious if partly familiar figure emerged. It was the Bliss, but it dragged a bizarre contraption after it. For lack of arms, the alien wore a harness that crossed its body but was mostly buckled around its thighs (obviously with the assistance of a creature better adapted to such a task).

The machine itself was primarily made of black metal, borne on two large rubber-treaded wheels. A few intensely blue lights gleamed or blinked across its surface like stars on a solidified chunk of space, and steam or some other vapor wafted out of a grille in one side. Also, set into a cavity was a glass container of a glowing blue fluid. A rubber tube ran from the machine to the otherworlder’s mouth, into which it disappeared, though it had no lips to pucker around it.

“What is it you want?” Swift growled, hesitating outside his flat. “You selling those gadgets door-to-door, are you? Got a vacuum already.”

“I know you,” came a flat, burbling voice from the grille in the machine. More steam coughed from it in time with the translated words, and the luminous blue fluid bubbled. “I would like you to know of me, as well.”

“What do you mean, you know me?” Swift asked, trying not to seem startled at hearing the entity speak.

“We Sufferers experience empathy almost telepathically. Not the words in your head, but the flavor of your feelings. I have tasted your pain, your self-destructive self-loathing, and I know the flavor of it as akin to our own. We are kindred.”

“Yeah, sure, I knew it was something like that. Well, the hell we’re kindred. My pain is real, not a fucking fetish. You just want to feed off it, don’t you? Not enough pain of your own, you fucking vampire? No, you aren’t a vampire – you’re just a big blob of tofu, aren’t you? No flavor of your own, and you want to steal mine.”

“It is not something I can take from you, only experience.”

“Why should I let you experience my pain?”

“It may be therapeutic for you, not to live your pain alone.”

Swift barked a nervous laugh, less angry now and more disoriented, thrown off kilter, instead. “Oh, so you’re a therapist, are you? Is that what you’re selling door-to-door?”

“We can suffer together,” the thing said simply, its mouth not moving around that tube, but the steam puffing out, the fluid gurgling along with each word.

Finally Swift registered that the being had referred to its race not as the Bliss, but as the Sufferers.

“Suit yourself, if you want to play,” he said, a little bitterly, a little tremulously, as he turned his back on the creature and unlocked his door. But he left it open behind him as he entered his flat...and he heard the two rubber wheels rolling after him.

The entity stood just inside the threshold and watched as he poured himself some of the new Merlot. Glass in hand, Swift started to cross the room again so as to close and lock his apartment door, but before he could do so a single, skeletal black limb unfolded from the Bliss’s contraption, reached out and closed and locked the door itself. Swift stopped in his tracks, but for now took this action as courtesy and not threat.

Considering the otherworlder, he said, “You called your kind the Sufferers.”

“We are aware of the misconceptions you and other races harbor for us. We are not here in Punktown to sin...but to atone for our sins. We perceive our bodies as corrupt vehicles that must be punished until they die and shed their debased matter, so that our liberated essence might move on to the realm of souls. We despise our physical existence, we are miserable and deserve to be miserable until we are purged in death, and this is why we indulge in our humiliations. Our suffering.”

“Well then,” Swift said, absorbing this. “And here I thought you were just a plain old heathen like me. Because there’s one of the big differences between you and me right there, mate. I don’t believe in a soul.”

“Then I suffer for your blindness, in addition to your pain.”

“You don’t suffer for me. You want me to be in pain, so you can lick it up.”

“I relish your pain,” the Sufferer said, “but I wish you no ill will.”

Swift laughed, as he pulled up a chair to sit in. He didn’t offer one to his guest. “You’re the politest vampire I’ve ever met. Aren’t you, my Jenny Haniver?”

The creature did not ask him to explain “Jenny Haniver.” Either it gleaned the meaning through its gift of empathy, or dismissed it as of no significance. Instead, the Sufferer said, “It is very curious, in that I almost have the sense of two presences in your one body. Two souls in a single vehicle...”

Swift sat up straighter in his chair, his cynical smirk collapsing. “You can feel that? You can sense Talane inside me?”

“Talane.” An exhalation of vapor with the word, and it uncoiled like ectoplasm. “Explain.”

And so he did. About him and Talane working together. Then loving together. About Talane’s suicide. The smuggling out of work of her memories, embodied in the nanomites that resided in him like ants preserved in amber. “You speak of empathy,” he croaked, his eyes by now fixed on some spot on the floor beyond his patiently standing guest. “By taking in her memories, I wasn’t so much thinking of remembering Talane as empathizing with her in the way I should have when she was alive. I’d like to activate the nanomites inside me, more and more of them until she eclipses me. Until she is alive again and I am gone. If only I could do that, huh? Take my leave to make room for her alone, so she could live again in place of me...take possession of this sorry vehicle, as you call it. That seems to me to be a fair trade, for the price of my blindness to her soul before. That blindness that you have pointed out to me, Jenny.” He looked up to the being as if remembering its presence at last.

Silent all this time as it listened, Jenny – as Swift had dubbed the sexless being – finally said, “Your suffering is unique. I have never tasted its like before.”

“Yes,” said Swift, holding up a fresh glass of Merlot to the light. “A fine vintage.” His eyes hardened as they returned to the Sufferer, and he got up from his chair. “I think you should leave now, Jenny – I’ve let you inside my head long enough for one day. It’s crowded enough already in there as it is.”

“Let me stay with you a time.”

“No, I don’t need a roommate. Go, please. I’ve had enough of this.”

“As you wish.” The robotic arm from the translation rig reached out to unlock and open the door, then retracted. The ungainly being turned about, dragging the cart after itself. Swift followed to tend to the door. Without looking back at him as it began making its way toward the elevator, Jenny said, “I will know when you are ready to see me again.”

6A

For a second, consecutive day, Swift called in sick to work. His flat felt invaded by the doughy painted face of his team leader, Ramona Conte, on his computer screen. As expected, she told him he’d need a doctor’s note before returning to work if he should be out for a third day, but she was a little more sympathetic than he’d have expected, and she informed him that their supervisor, Dave, had called in sick for the second day in a row, too. In a confidential tone, she added, “I think Dave’s been under too much pressure, but I don’t know if it’s work or something at home – I caught him crying at his desk the other day. He was a wreck, the poor guy.” Then she seemed to think better of sharing this information, set her face in a harder and more typical cast, and muttered a sour good-bye.

Swift couldn’t even picture his supervisor, so afflicted with masculinity, shedding tears at all, let alone sobbing at his desk. An odd speculation occurred to Swift. He recalled Dave itching at his ear, and thinking – hoping – that one of Talane’s “earwigs” still nested there. But what if she had used that same nanomite in her memory experiments, previously? What if that same irritating creature still carried its programmed long-chain molecules, and these had in whole or in part been released somehow into Dave’s system? Swift imagined a weird, spreading plague of such creatures, each bearing some particle of Talane, its own terrorist’s bomb of pure suffering, infecting everyone at work. Reproducing somehow, until all of Punktown sobbed as one great anguished soul.

But he didn’t care for the idea of Dave sharing Talane’s intimate pain, and he hoped it was something unrelated, as Ramona had conjectured. Talane’s pain was for Swift alone.

Yesterday, all day, he had been torn about whether or not to purposely awaken some of the nanomites inside him, order them to release their molecules in the appropriate area of his brain, so that he could experience the information they bore. Live those memories, just as Talane had. Be Talane, if only for a few minutes. If he had the courage.

Today, he had stayed home with the determination – with a suicide’s fatalism – to do it.

He had sent a copy of Talane’s control program from his work computer to his home computer. If this was ever discovered he would claim to have been doing research at home. And wasn’t he? Research into the enigmas of love? Along with his new injector and extractor he had also purchased a nano remote from the same medical supply outlet. He linked this with the control program, and then, sitting at his computer, considered where to begin. What little taste of Talane to start with, a sip of the soup to see if it was too scalding to take in.

What mysteries might be unveiled, what surprises await him in her mind? Just how bad had it really been with her spouse? Sometimes Swift had wondered if she kept things from him so he wouldn’t worry, or seek out her husband for a violent confrontation. Since her death he had several times fantasized that she wasn’t, in fact, a suicide, but had been murdered by her husband in a fit of jealousy. Better that she had died in the name of her love for Swift than from the confusion and despair he had inspired. But he recognized that this was only a fantasy. A pathetic dream of exoneration. He didn’t want dreams, but truth. He wanted to taste the love she had had for him. Live their love from her point of view.

And where to start exploring her memories, but with his own memories?

He thought of times with her that, at least for him, had been the most meaningful. After a few minutes of reflection along these lines, he focused on a morning they had played hooky together, both calling in sick to work and visiting Punktown’s vast Canberra Mall. He couldn’t think of the exact date, only the year, so he did a key search of the memory file instead. Recalling the name of the restaurant where they had brunched, he typed in the year and keywords CANBERRA MALL and THE ARBOR.

He ran the search, and came up with two results. A little perplexing; he recollected only one time they had eaten there, but then they had gone to so many restaurants all over the city that he could have forgotten an occasion. The first result had a core memory of 72 minutes’ duration, the second 55 minutes, but he could section these into smaller units, and decided on limiting his initial experience to 15 minutes, taken from the center of the whole...in this case, the first result from his search.

He transferred the information for the portioned out data  to his remote. Then, after taking in a long shaky breath – and settling back in his chair like a pilot bracing for takeoff – he thumbed a key on the remote, commanding the nanomite or nanomites associated with the memory to arouse from hibernation.

He closed his eyes to make a blank screen of his mind, but soon found this wasn’t necessary. Either his own vision was switched off, as his mind tried to make sense of this influx of another person’s perspective, or he became unconscious of it as the recorded memories blossomed into real time. There was still a bit of an overlap of personas – his did not go to sleep – but Swift receded into the copilot’s seat. He became like Scrooge, he would think later, watching a younger version of himself while he remained an unseen ghost of the future.

He saw leaves, motionless for an absence of breeze. Red as any autumn tree could aspire to, but always this red, and bearing fruit indigenous to Oasis which – while tasting quite like limes – had the circular shape of doughnuts, with a pale green rind. His eyes – her eyes – trailed among the broken ceiling of leaves, with the ceiling of the mall much higher above that, a petrified sky. Her gaze idled amidst the dangling fruit, like rings corroded with verdigris, as a glass was raised to her lips. Swift tasted salt on the glass’s rim, tasted a Margarita. He had never known Talane to drink a Margarita.

Her eyes lowered. The slender but sturdy trunk of a tree grew up through a hole in the center of each table. And across from this table sat Talane’s husband, Laz. He was shorter but fuller than Swift, his face roundish and of a healthy complexion. But his eyes looked a little troubled, wary. Swift had met him in person once at a company function, when he had accompanied Talane as her guest, and they had shaken hands then. Laz had looked less troubled that day. It was before he had suspected Talane of her affair.

“Good, honey?” Laz reached across the table, and Swift felt the man’s fingers close around his own, as their hands had joined at that function. But this time the man’s thumb stroked the top of his hand.

“Good,” Talane said. Swift’s heart, in the background, gave a little lurch at hearing her voice again. But it had an unusual quality to it, hearing it as he did within her own skull. The way her voice had sounded to herself.

Swift withdrew his hand gently, and picked up one of the circular fruit. Had it fallen to the table or had one of them plucked it down? Lowering his eyes from Laz, he saw that the nails of his long slim fingers were painted red. He took up his steak knife, and began cutting away the rough green rind.

“You look beautiful with your hair like that,” Laz said.

Like what? Swift wondered. How was her long black hair different today? Parted on the side rather than in the middle, in a curtain partly obscuring one large dark eye? Gathered up in a bun behind her? Something special for this occasion? What was this occasion?

“Thanks,” she said remotely.

Laz seemed to hesitate, and then asked, “Are you okay? You seem far away.”

Swift raised his eyes to him again. “Please, Laz. I’m okay.” But the man’s face appeared unconvinced. This time it was Swift who reached across the table, to give Laz’s hand a brief squeeze. “I’m okay. Can we order now?”

Laz nodded, and dropped his eyes to the menu screen set into the table. Swift lowered his gaze again, too, his eyes only half focused on the menu’s text as he continued flaying the fruit. Its flesh was delicate and veiny, and as vivid a red as the tree’s leaves.

They discussed what to order, and as they did, Swift felt like a voyeur...an interloper within his own body. He wanted to retreat from them, leave them to each other. He wanted to see no more. But he was helpless, trapped within her, until the preset 15 minutes had elapsed. It was a very long 15 minutes. He wanted to sob to be released, to close her eyes and see no more. But he couldn’t control her actions now anymore than he had when she was alive.

“I love you, honey,” Laz said suddenly. Swift met his eyes again. The man’s seemed on the verge of filling up. “You don’t believe it, but I do.”

“I believe you, hon,” she told him. “I do believe you.” Swift felt the muscles of her face shift into a smile. “Please...let’s not talk about anything today, okay? Let’s just enjoy our meal.”

“Yes, honey. Yes...okay.”

Talane broke a section from the translucent red flesh, and popped it into her mouth. It was both delicious and very sour.

6B

Swift sat in his chair with his head drooping forward, his chin on his chest. Tears crawled down his face.

The wrong memory. Not the one he’d been looking for. No...not the one.

Why hadn’t Laz grabbed her hair in this reminiscence, as Talane had told Swift he had done one time? Why hadn’t he seized her arm, called her a cunt, accused her of fucking this man or that or Swift, by name? Swift, who Laz had once called in a drunken rage? (Swift hadn’t answered.) Why had Laz been gentle, loving, instead? Why did he have to have tears of pain in his eyes?

And why had Swift felt a tightening in Talane’s throat as she fought against her own tears?

The three of them, in tears.

Swift could have sworn that Talane had told him their date had been her first time to The Arbor. If she had indeed said that, then she had lied.

He still felt wet and dripping and half drowned from having been submerged in the past, but he needed to dive right back in, because if he didn’t follow through with his momentum then he might never find the strength to do this again. And because he wanted to banish what he had just witnessed – experience him and Talane together, as he had intended.

He sat up straighter, collected himself enough to tend to the remote. He swallowed with a click, swallowed whatever hesitation remained, then depressed the key that would release the second of the measured out doses of memory.

A skewed moment or two before his identity and hers aligned in a way that satisfied the clockwork of his brain. She was an invader in his mind, or he an invader in hers – host and parasite blurred – but he hung back passively and let her carry them both forward. If this was the day he had been searching for, then he had his own memories of it. But his were not enough.

This time, there was a glass of Merlot in front of her, dark like a chalice of ceremonial blood. This time when she reached to bring it to her lips, Swift saw her nails were painted black.

Swift sat opposite her, and his own voice sounded peculiar to him coming from outside his head. Talking with him was like talking to a mirror that answered back, but did not follow his lead. He said to her, “You two had quite a nice conversation going.” He smiled – Swift knew his own face well enough to recognize the smile held no humor – and nodded in the direction of someone who had just left. Talane didn’t follow the gesture, but she didn’t have to; Swift recalled who it was he had referred to. Their waiter. He recalled that the young waiter and Talane had chatted amicably beyond the time it took for the man to take their orders. The man had barely noticed Swift. “I can call him back if you want.”

“Please stop.” Talane avoided that vitriolic smile by focusing on her salad, probed through it with the tip of her steak knife as if in search of something.

“No, really, if you’d rather spend our short time together with him instead I’ll go and leave you to it.”

“I asked you to stop, okay? For the love of God.”

He felt her shifting foot come into contact with something under the table. She looked down, and Swift saw it was one of the circular fruit, fallen and soggy with rot. Her saw that her toenails were painted black, too. When she kicked the fruit away from her a little, the motion stirred up some gnats that had been feasting on it.

A burst of children’s laughter caused Talane to turn her head. She spotted three mutant children at an outer table of The Arbor, being shooed away by another waiter as he collected the dishes of his departed customers. The mutants had grabbed several uneaten rolls.

This was it – these children – the element that made this memory special to Swift. He knew that in a few more minutes, the children would make their way to this table, and beg for some coins to buy something in the food court. One of them would have a winning smile despite the fact that his hairless head was shaped like a human heart, weird protruding growths like valves and all. After some playful, teasing banter in which Talane would offer to buy them lunch rather than give them the coins (which she and Swift knew they’d use to play games in the mall’s arcade instead), Talane would relent and give them the money but still invite them to join her and Swift for lunch. This time he wouldn’t be jealous for sharing her company. She and Swift and the three boys would joke and mock each other and eat like a strange little family, and it would be fun and different and warm.

But it would be several more minutes before the boys worked their way over here, and in the meantime there was a cold sore on the floor of her mouth that she kept worrying with the tip of her tongue. He didn’t know if it was laziness or masochism that had kept her from banishing it easily with a drop of medicine.

He had been silent for a few minutes while they chewed, but as if he couldn’t swallow his unsavory thoughts, as if he just couldn’t stop himself, he finally continued, “Have you noticed that you’re giving me less and less of your precious time? We used to see each other almost every day. You remember those days?”

“That was before Laz suspected things.”

As if he hadn’t heard her, he continued, “Then it was a few times a week. And now here we are down to maybe once or twice a week, for one or two hours, and –”

“It’s that I’m not fucking you enough, huh?” she asked without looking up at him.

“It isn’t about fucking! Is that all you think I think of you?

“Sometimes I don’t know what you think of me.”

He leaned across the table toward her abruptly, as if he meant to do her violence. “What the fuck does that mean? You love to turn things around on me, don’t you? You know perfectly well what I think of you. That isn’t the question between us. The question is what you think. What you want. How important I am to you, and what you intend to do about it...if anything.”

She didn’t say anything, but one of the gnats floated up past her face, like one of her nanomites come to proudly show off the wings it had grown on its own.

Swift then perceived an odd sensation or impression, like another VT channel’s programming bleeding over into the one he was watching. It was a faint image of Laz laughing. Laz was sitting opposite Talane as Swift sat opposite her now – and it was at The Arbor restaurant, in fact. Swift realized what he was experiencing. Talane was thinking back to that earlier date at The Arbor, with Laz. Had they laughed together before or after the brief recollection of it that Swift had sampled? Whatever the case, he knew she was either comparing that time with now, or worse, even longing for it. A memory within this memory.

“Hello?” the past Swift said to her, and the present Swift cringed at his own words. “Did you hear me? Or maybe you’d prefer if I called our waiter back.” Talane raised her eyes to see him twisting around in his chair and lifting his arm as if to snap his fingers. “Garcon,” he called. “Hey, Garcon!”

“Please stop,” she hissed at him pleadingly. “Please, will you just st–”

...

He didn’t know how long it had been from the time the recording cut off, until now – opening his eyes and lifting his head from his crossed arms to find himself seated at his kitchen table with a congregation of empty Knickerson bottles and his extractor resting before him. His shirt was off, and he was cold, and his head ached as if he had jammed the tip of the extractor into his skull between his eyes...instead of pressing it to his bony arm, and ordering the nanomites – every last one of them – to march out of his system and into the cartridge that was inserted into the instrument. It was still in there. He saw its silvery-gray contents glittering. It was a snake’s poison, that he had sucked out of himself. A snake’s poison that he had been mad to put into himself.

Also resting on the table, like another medical instrument, was the beam-emitting cutting gun he kept in his freezer lest it overheat. At some point in the hours past, he had apparently considered whether this might be a better instrument of empathy. An ultimate kind of empathy. But now as he took it in, he was so reluctant to touch the gun that he didn’t even feel an imperative to return it to the cold.

It was a thud at his apartment’s door that had awakened him. Maybe there had been others preceding it. Another came now. With a groan of pain, Swift pushed himself up from the table, tottered toward the door, leaned against it as he activated the security view screen. He wasn’t surprised at what he saw out there.

“Jenny,” he mumbled.

Through the speaker came a drowned, gurgling voice. “I felt that you were ready for me to return.”

Swift hesitated a moment or two, as if he might take offense to this statement, as if he might protest. But then he opened his door, and stepped aside to let the Sufferer enter.

7

As he closed his apartment’s door, Swift thought he saw the being – who had come to a stop near the kitchen table, having dragged its steaming, wheeled cart behind it – incline its body to take in the articles spread upon the table’s surface. As if to divert its attention from the gun, Swift said, “I removed all the nanomites from my body.”

“Yes – I had sensed that.”

“So I won’t be as unique a brew to you anymore, Jenny. Sorry for that.”

The otherworlder did not turn toward him. The bubbling voice issuing from its cart said, “I would like you to put them into me.”

Swift stepped away from the door and swayed dizzily before he caught himself, though his stomach wasn’t done reeling. His first impulse was to tell the Sufferer to fuck off. This was Talane, her concentrated essence, not some drug for a pain junky to ingest. Did he want this being, with its own mission of self-loathing, privy to her every thought, fear, desire, dream? Everything she had ever felt for Swift, for her husband, for her mother, for herself? From the soft, cloudy consciousness of infancy to the moment when she had recorded this data at her work place? Maybe the Sufferer was of the erroneous assumption that the recording went further than that – to the moment when a sufficient amount of blood cells had trickled out of her body, like an evacuation of nanomites, for her to achieve the oblivion she sought. That had to be the vein of gold his guest hungered for, right there. That final, missing scene.

“If you want to experience her death, it’s not there,” Swift informed it. “The data ends when --”

“I want all of it,” the Sufferer said.

Swift contemplated the back of the creature as it remained turned from him. With its barren white flesh and its lack of arms, and a true head for that matter, it seemed to him like an uncooked cut of meat, like a mass of blank, undifferentiated cells. It looked like an empty vessel.

He had a notion too wild to be called a hope. What if Talane could be perpetuated in something more organic than just a computer file or encoded molecules; what if, furthermore, she could live again, be reborn, by awakening all of the nanomites as the Sufferer requested? But live again as what? Swift had dreamed of merging with Talane in his mind; where before he had been selfish, he had wanted to become selfless. But this way, she would be merged with the Sufferer instead of him. And who was he fooling? In no species of vessel would she ever really live again. She would have no new, original thoughts; there was no true soul recorded there along with the data of memories, no matter how intense and immediate they might feel. But let the Sufferer have them, if intense and immediate was what it wanted. Let it have them if it thought it was a sturdy enough vessel.

“Let me transfer them from the extractor to the injector, then,” he told his guest, moving past it to scoop up the cutter gun and return it to the freezer. “I only ask you one thing,” he said, his back to the alien this time. “Where the recording finishes, I want you to tell me if she still loved me.” He considered asking if she had loved him more than Laz, at that point, but knew how pitiful that was. “I just want to know that she didn’t hate me more than she loved me.”

“I will tell you whatever I can, that you ask of me.”

Swift shut the fridge door, dropped his hand to the lower compartment to withdraw a fresh beer. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

“Please.”

“You’re a braver soul than I, my friend.” Swift turned around to face his guest like an embalmer, ready to fill the veins of the dead with his preserving potions.

8

He awoke with memories he did not want. Memories of his own he wished he could command out of his body like obedient insects.

Some of it, mercifully, was blurred and remote. The injecting of the nanomites. The multiplying Knickerson bottles on the table. Sitting there as if at a séance and asking the alien what it felt...what did it see? But only moans had escaped the translation apparatus, until finally came a few garbled lines of a song. “My name is Wunderdumpling, I love to go a-humping...”

“Is that all you have to tell me, Talane?” Swift had laughed. Laughed with tears slick on his face. “All you can tell me from the great beyond? You can’t tell me if you wanted me? You can’t tell me if you loved me like I loved you?”

An entranced medium, the Sufferer had shuffled a little, turning its body to face him more directly. “Yes,” came that seemingly disembodied voice. “Yes...of course I loved you.”

Swift had lurched up from his chair at the words. “Talane...”

“Ohh,” the Sufferer had groaned then. “There is such...pain. So much pain.” This time, it had seemed the otherworlder was expressing its own sentiments. “This is more...more than I would have expected...”

Somewhere after more beers and more questions – most of which seemed to have gone unanswered – Swift had unstrapped the Sufferer from its harness. They had gone to his bed, and the creature had lain down on its front so Swift wouldn’t have to see what passed for its face. His actions, his desires, inexplicable even to himself, he had undressed and crawled onto the Sufferer’s back. There was a rubber-sheathed port tucked low in the cleft of its human-like buttocks that he inserted himself into. He clung there, lying flat, as if hanging onto a manta ray as it skimmed across a dream ocean. As if riding a magic carpet, dizzying heights above any recognizable terrain.

Its flesh beneath him was not so barren, pure and unfinished, after all. Up close, again he saw the scars it bore, felt them raised against his own flesh. Cigarette burns, long stitched incisions like zippers that he might tear open with his own hands so as to unravel whatever tormented thing it was that this creature called its soul. When he awoke, Swift wouldn’t recall whether it was his idea that they fuck, or the Sufferer’s, or Talane’s, or Swift imagining it was Talane’s. But they rode united through the night, in their conjoined agony and delirium.

He awoke in his bed, nude, his groin smeared with a clear jelly. If possible, his head hurt even more than it had when the Sufferer had appeared at his door. Managing himself into a sitting position, he noted that it was day – and that Jenny was no longer in his bedroom.

He found the otherworlder, though, when he staggered into the bathroom to blast himself with a scalding shower.

This time the Sufferer lay on its back, and lay there alone, not surfing across a phantasmagorical sea but unmoving and leaking a clear, thick fluid from a number of long gashes that had pulled open to yawn deeply. Seeing it there, with its cart toppled on its side beside the toilet, its grille no longer steaming, the blue fluid in its container no longer glowing, Swift could now remember having helped the being back into its harness. But he was certain, certain, whatever else he was forgetting, that he himself had not taken his cutting gun out of the freezer again. The gun was still gripped in the claw of the mechanical arm that had unfolded from the Sufferer’s translation machine.

“Fuck – no!” Swift shouted, falling to his knees beside the body. “God, Jenny, no! Why? Why, you bloody stupid fuck?” He took hold of one of its satyr-like, crooked legs and squeezed it in both hands, lowering his forehead to touch the cold appendage. With his eyes closed, it felt as though he were holding a stiff human arm.

Why, his mind wailed, had he allowed Jenny to shoot up the nanomites? Even if he hadn’t put the gun in its hand, he might as well have done so. Couldn’t he have foreseen that the past could only repeat itself?

“Talane,” he sobbed, his face a clenched fist that squeezed fresh tears from his eyes. They fell upon the stark canvas of the Sufferer’s body, and quivered there in tiny pools as if the flesh might absorb them. “Talane,” he cried – knowing that instead of bringing her alive again, he had only helped to kill her again instead.

Life Work

HANAKO

1

Hanako first met the old woman on the landing between floors three and four of the apartment building they shared, which stood on the border of a good-sized park in Subtown. Subtown was the subterranean level of Punktown, and while it did not extend fully to the borders of the megalopolis above it was still extensive enough. Denied the benefits of rain, the park’s flora had been chosen for its ability to draw moisture from the air, and was nourished by the artificial light of the high, solid ceiling that was the only sky this plant life had ever known.

The underground park had been claimed by gangs, drug dealers and drug-addicted prostitutes a generation before, and consequently the city had all but given up on its upkeep. The trunks of many of its trees were entirely slathered in graffiti, its miniature pond capped by an epidermis of scum, its vegetation riotously overgrown. The locals called it the Jungle. It was the back of Hanako’s apartment building that faced onto the Jungle, and she was grateful there was a tall fence between the structure she called home and the park those others had made their own.

The elderly woman was leaning her back against the landing’s wall, one hand on the handle of a small pull-cart with two wheels, filled with bags of groceries. She smiled at Hanako when they met each other’s eyes, and when Hanako reached the landing she stopped before the woman.

“Oh my,” she said, “have you been dragging that up all these stairs?” But of course she had; the poorly maintained elevator was out of service again, or else Hanako herself wouldn’t be making this climb to her fifth floor apartment.

“I’m almost there, sweetie,” the old woman said. Despite the abundance of alien races living in this colony-city on the world of Oasis, the woman was a human of Earth lineage. Hanako couldn’t judge her age, but she knew the woman must have been strikingly beautiful in her youth, with her pronounced cheekbones and vividly blue eyes.

“Let me help you,” Hanako said.

“Oh no, my dear, please,” the woman chuckled, “you’re too small!”

At 4’9”, Hanako could understand why the woman should take her for a child, regardless of her businesswoman’s metallic gray, custom-tailored jacket and skirt, and expensive high heels. “No, please, I insist. I’m stronger than I look, I promise you.”

“Thank you -- that’s very sweet of you. You know, two young men passed me on the way up and neither of them so much as looked at me.”

Hanako was not surprised. Very little surprised her about Punktown anymore, and she had only moved here from the larger but less infamous colony-city of Miniosis three months ago. Even in Miniosis, she had been well accustomed to the vileness of the human race. And nonhuman races, too.

“What floor are you on?” she asked the woman, having taken hold of the cart’s handle along with her. Together, they dragged it up step after step behind them.

“Four, just up here,” the woman said, tilting her head. “Which floor do you live on, dear? I’ve never seen you before.”

“Five,” Hanako replied. “I’ve only been here a few months. Plus, I travel a lot.”

“Do you live with your parents?” The old woman looked her up and down dubiously.

Hanako smiled. “I live alone. I’m an adult – I have a condition that has fixed my physical age at fourteen.”

“Oh, my! Well, you’re very beautiful, no matter what age you are. You’re as adorable as a little doll. But you weren’t lying – you are stronger than you look, aren’t you?”

A more uncomfortable smile flitted on Hanako’s face, and she changed the subject. “Can’t you have your groceries delivered to you?”

“I like to shop in person, not order on the computer. Choose my own tomatoes, you know? I don’t want to stay cooped up inside all the time.”

“Of course not. You must be careful outside, though, please.”

“Oh, you need to be more careful than I do, my dear…look at you.”

Hanako considered complimenting the woman on the beauty she retained but thought it might sound insincere, obligatory, so she didn’t. As they dragged the cart up the last step to the fourth floor landing, and passed into the narrow, stuffy corridor that led off from it, Hanako asked, “Which door?”

“Apartment 12, at the far end.”

The old woman punched in her password on the keypad beside the door. Hanako couldn’t help herself from noticing that the password spelled out NURSERY. Unlike the malfunctioning elevator, the door promptly slid back into the wall. On the threshold, the woman turned to invite Hanako inside for a cup of tea. Hanako was anxious to return to her own apartment, having just arrived back in Punktown by shuttle flight from a business trip to the southwestern Outback Colony, but she didn’t want to hurt the woman’s feelings by declining her kind gesture. She supposed she could spare a half hour more before showering and then winding down in front of the VT, on the sofa -- where she would probably spend the night. And that was okay. There was no one to share her bedroom with.

“Wonderful!” the old woman said, and before she led the way inside she told Hanako her name was Sabina.

The moment she stepped into Sabina’s apartment, Hanako was suffused with awe. The air was dense, humid. Either the air circulation was malfunctioning, or else the apartment’s atmosphere was thick with the emanations of the plant life that exploded all around her, from every available space and surface.

“You have a green thumb,” Hanako said in wonder, turning slowly to take it all in.

“I have a green everything,” Sabina joked, already filling an old-fashioned tea kettle with water.

They stole sips of their tea as Hanako helped Sabina put away her groceries, starting with those that required refrigeration. Also, in the midst of this activity Sabina would point out a plant on this shelf, atop that appliance, basking on a windowsill to drink in the faux sunlight of Subtown. Addressing this very issue, Sabina said, “I’ve been lucky with a lot of plants that normally wouldn’t do well with only artificial light. It’s trial and error with plants -- I’ve had many failures. But some of my babies I’ve had for fifteen years or more.”

“Oh my, that’s wonderful,” Hanako said. “I’m very impressed. I really wish I had time for a hobby like this.”

“Hm…I don’t like to think of it as a hobby,” Sabina said, refilling their cups. “I worked in the nursing field all my life, and I made a good living at it. I was the head of the nursing department at Central Hospital for eleven years. Caring for the sick, nurturing so many different types of sentient beings for all that time. Well, when I retired I couldn’t just stop caring for others, could I? Only, these days, these are my ‘others.’” She gestured around the kitchen. “These are my patients, my children, my everything.”

“You don’t have children?”

“No. My husband and I didn’t. Too busy working, both of us. Nicolas passed away eight years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You?” Sabina asked.

“Me? You mean husband, or children?”

“Either.”

“Neither. Never,” Hanako stammered. “Too busy…like you were.” She gave a jerky shrug.

“Oh dear! A lovely girl like you? Do you think men are shy of you because you look so young?”

Hanako wanted to laugh at the woman; how could she be so naïve? It was because of her youthful appearance that men had given her no rest. Instead, she said, “Maybe I’m the one who’s too shy. But I have devoted myself very much to my career, so...”

“So did I,” Sabina sighed, “so did I.” With all the groceries now settled in place, she gestured for Hanako to follow her into the next room – which, from the orientation of her own apartment, Hanako knew would be the living room. “Come on…you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Now Hanako did laugh out loud, but it was a sound of delight rather than mockery. This living room was nothing like her own, which was almost as neat and nondescript as the hotel rooms she had occupied in the course of her business travels. She exclaimed, “It’s like a greenhouse in here!” There were pathways through the verdant foliage that spilled out from every direction, but there were areas of the room she thought one might need a machete to get to. How did Sabina ever water all the plants in the far corners…and did she ever forget to water some of them, in all this chaos? Big pots stood on the floor, smaller pots crowded shelves and little tables and windowsills, or hung by chains from the ceiling. The slowly declining, false light of dusk that slanted through the windows was spattered upon countless leaves, and the room had an overall subdued greenish glow, like the floor of some deep enchanted forest. Just as Punktown’s many races coexisted shoulder-to-shoulder in the chaos outside these walls, and above their heads, so did the flora of numerous worlds thrive here in a kind of botanical microcosm.

Sabina noticed Hanako admiring a large plant close by the doorway, sprouting from a beautiful glazed pot standing on the floor. “Both this plant and the pot are from Sinan,” she explained, but Hanako might have guessed that from the brilliant blue of the plant’s large rubbery leaves. All the plant life on the extradimensional world of Sinan was one or other shade of blue. “It’s a cousin of this plant, but with even longer leaves, that the Sinanese use to wrap up their dead before they bring them to the underground tunnels where they lay them to rest.”

“Such a collection,” Hanako remarked. “You put so much love into this…it must be so rewarding for you.”

“It keeps me out of trouble,” Sabina said, leaning in to blow a little dust off the leaves of another plant beside her. The apartment was less than tidy in other ways – books overflowed from shelves, and were stacked on tables amongst the plants, with more potted plants perched upon some of these book stacks – but compared to the sterility of her own apartment on the floor above, Hanako found it all quite charming. Was it that she was not home often enough, worked and traveled too many hours, or was she herself simply too lacking in this ambiguous “soul” people spoke of to have created an environment of such rich character to dwell in?

“Like I say, this is my life’s work now,” Sabina continued, “but of course I began it before I retired from my ‘real’ job.” She made hooked quotation marks with her fingers at the word “real.” “You must be familiar with the Japanese expression ‘rice work.’”

“Uh…hm?” Hanako said.

“Oh, so you’re not? Well, then, in the culture of your ancestors, the work that puts food on the table is your ‘rice work.’ As opposed to your ‘life work,’ which is the work you truly love. The work that really enriches you.”

“Ah, I see,” Hanako said. She lied, “Forgive me…I’ve never studied my own heritage as much as I should.”

“That’s all right, dear! Anyway, as much as I loved my nursing work, and so many of the patients I came to know over the years, growing plants was always my personal passion. I even had a rooftop garden where my husband and I grew vegetables, right in the middle of this terrible city, before he died and I had to move down here to this smaller place.” Sabina wandered further into the room, and Hanako followed her, fronds and branches and flowers brushing against them both in whispery caresses. “So what’s your rice work, honey, and what is your life work?”

“Well,” Hanako said, and found herself stammering again, “I guess I only have my rice work. I don’t even know what my life work would be.”

Sabina stopped to face the younger woman again, the two of them standing in a clearing at the center of the enchanted woods. “Oh, my cutie,” she said. “Tell me you know yourself better than that.”

Hanako gave another uneasy smile. She felt a twitch in her neck, and hoped it didn’t show – or look too unnatural if it did. She was feeling trapped in her blandly fashionable businesswoman’s jacket and skirt – too tight, too constricting after all these hours. She had not been designed to wear an abundance of clothing.

Hanako hated lying to her kindly neighbor by omission, yet how could she tell Sabina that she wasn’t an adult woman consigned by some medical condition or mutation to forever look fourteen years old…but rather, that she was actually younger than fourteen years old? That she had started her life, such as it was, as fourteen years old?

How to explain that she was not Japanese? Nor even a human?

Sabina put a hand on her arm, seemed to sense the uneasiness in her. “I’m sorry, darling, I shouldn’t lecture you. Come on, come over here and I’ll show you my pride and joy. A mother isn’t supposed to have favorites among her children, but…”

Hanako hadn’t clearly seen the far side of the room before, for all the indoors forest that obscured it, but as Sabina led her through her secret garden Hanako realized that the entire back wall was covered in a dense mat of vines, like ivy but of a deep purple color, with a metallic sheen. It looked synthetic.

“This is a vine native to Ram,” Sabina explained. Hanako had seen vids of Ram, with its feline-faced humanoids. Their ancient warrior caste was often compared to the samurai. “I never know if my plants feel my love for them, and feel anything for me in return. Not that I ask them to demonstrate it to me. But this one is very special, very unique.”

A rocking chair was positioned here beside a little table. Above them, affixed to the back wall, was a shelf. Not only were the wall’s pair of windows covered by the purple leaves (Hanako could only tell there were windows here by slight depressions in their outline, and because they corresponded with windows in her own flat) but the vines had also swallowed up the shelf. And in addition, had apparently smothered a cat, as well. A cat-shape made of leaves rested at the end of the leaf-coated shelf.

“Is that,” Hanako stuttered, pointing, “was that…”

Sabina laughed, and put a hand on Hanako’s arm. “I know what you’re thinking. It was only a ceramic kitty, don’t worry. On Ram, these vines are used to make hedge animals and other decorative forms on the grounds of palaces and temples. But they aren’t trimmed into those forms; these plants are trained to grow that way, by special artisans using ancient techniques I don’t even understand. But my baby here demonstrated a little something of that ability for me, on its own. You see, one day when I woke up I found my ceramic kitty smashed on the floor. The vines had spread during the night and accidentally nudged it off the shelf. I was very upset – the kitty had belonged to my mother. Well how could this plant have known that? Yes, I made some sounds of unhappiness, but I didn’t scold the plant. And yet…the next day when I woke up, this cat was here instead.”

“You mean…you mean, there’s nothing inside this shape?”

“There is something, but more about that in a moment. The ceramic kitty is no more. But that shape you see is the exact same size and shape of the kitty my plant accidentally smashed. It remade it for me. Because somehow, my dear…it was sorry.”

“Oh my,” Hanako said, turning to view the wall of metallic purple leaves with fresh eyes.

“Like I say, there is something inside my replica cat, though. I’ll show you.” Sabina moved closer to the shelf, reached up toward the cat figure and gently parted the leaves with her hands. She reached inside, and delicately coaxed out something like a hidden egg the size of a baseball. The glossy, plum-colored orb was tethered to the interior of the cat as if by an umbilicus, but it was of course the end of a vine. Or perhaps, Hanako considered, the very beginning of all these vines – the first shoot of a bulb.

But this bulb also had a ring of soft spines around its base, and when Sabina set the orb down on the shelf beside the kitty, the spines started moving like the cilia of a microscopic animal. The round, insect-like form slowly crawled back to the cat, and began nudging its way inside. It took several minutes for the egg to be fully concealed once more.

“It’s shy,” Sabina said simply, with a fond smile.

Hanako felt a pleasing sensation of experiencing something new and remarkable. She supposed this was the equivalent of a human’s sense of wonder.

Sabina’s affectionate smile was closely followed by a scowl of discomfort, and she felt behind her for the wooden rocking chair, which she lowered herself into carefully. “I’m sorry, dear.” Suddenly she sounded short of breath. “Please, take the books off that chair over there and sit with me.”

“Are you okay?” Hanako had taken an impulsive step toward the aged woman.

“I think the same company that made our elevator made this poor clunky ticker of mine.” Sabina pressed her palm between her breasts.

“Your heart is artificial?”

“Yes, dear. You’re too young to remember, but my poor husband and I lived in this town back when the pollution made the whole sky rusty red some days. Back when those old pollution suckers used to float over the city. It’s much better now, but the damage is done for so many of us. Maybe it’s best my hubby and I never had children – there are enough mutants already in this city, and with our health problems that’s what we might have faced.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your heart,” Hanako said. She was intrigued that they both possessed an artificial heart, but that they should still be such different kinds of entities.

She also felt true concern for the woman, however. This fact in itself intrigued her. Was this a result of the most recent upgrades she had arranged for herself, or was it a natural if rather unexpected development of her original programming – which had called for her to be sweet, courteous, attentive to the pleasure of others?

Whatever the cause of her feelings, from that day on she not only helped Sabina bring her groceries up to her apartment (which proved easy when the elevator was functioning properly), but she would also accompany her to the market. She bought little for herself on these excursions, of course. Though she could drink and even eat, she did not need to nor have the means of enjoying it, and later would only drain out the tea and pastries Sabina served her after their shopping trips, through a port hidden in her navel.

Did part of her feel obligated, still, to be solicitous toward a human being? Was her caring reaction beyond her control? No…she felt she was more in command of herself than that. After all, on one of her visits to add an illegal enhancement to her system, she had also had the tech heat-seal the openings to her vagina and rectum.

“Here, I want to give you something,” Sabina said in sudden inspiration, when Hanako was about to leave after that first visit. The old woman had regained some strength, but Hanako had suggested she should go so Sabina could lie down and get some proper rest. Sabina moved to a metal floor rack with several shelves, and came back to Hanako clutching a tiny, oddly-shaped orange plant bristling with spines. “This is a Kalian cactus, love.”

“Thank you,” Hanako said, accepting the offering awkwardly. Cupping the little potted cactus made her philosophical; even this primitive organism was technically more alive than she. “But I’m not sure how well I would do caring for a plant. And with my traveling…”

“Relax, dear. It gets moisture from the air. For this baby to die you’d have to kill it on purpose.”

HUCK

1

The sea was hazy with summer heat and humidity. These stimuli were the only aspects of the scene that Huck was not given to experience – after all, some of the poker players around him were already sweating enough without that discomfort, and they couldn’t cool off in the waves like the people Huck sat watching as he sucked at his eighth bottle of Zub.

The haze was so thick that it seemed the ocean began only fifty yards out from the shore, the waves appearing to form from the substance of an opaque white wall. It was an unsettling effect for Huck, who had never stood before an actual ocean, who had never in fact left the borders of the city of Punktown in his life.

It was high tide, and people had waded out far into the waves, which buoyed them briefly. But it was the people on the shore who commanded Huck’s interest. Actually, his focus had narrowed to one person in particular.

This great room of the Paxton Center Casino was circular, enclosing a dense collection of vid poker tables and other card games (physical or virtual). The circular wall was an unbroken vidscreen, showing a live feed of a tourist spot on the shore of the Duplam Ocean, elsewhere here on Oasis. As one looked fully around the room, there was no inland to be found – no view of what lay behind the camera’s perspective, the tourist shops that surely must line the street opposite the beach. What he was seeing was a wraparound view, as if the ends of a long strip of paper had been joined together. Though this was meant to be clever, exciting, to Huck it was another unsettling effect. There was no way to escape this ocean; it surrounded you. You were on an island in its center. Its waves buffeted and pushed the puny swimmers back to shore. Even the sea birds swooped round and round the perimeter of the room, as if unable to break free of an invisible cage. Huck followed a few of them by swiveling in his chair, and the movement made him queasy as if he were seasick. What made him even more nauseous was looking at the place where the two ends of the long stretch of seascape were joined, because of course they did not match up. Waves there were misaligned. On the beach, people walked toward the seam and vanished, seeming to change into different people on the other side. Huck found he had to look away from it, his stomach churning as if it too were buoyed on the waves. But when he spotted a waitress threading her way through the tables, he still motioned her over to order a ninth beer.

His waitress, a statuesque black woman with a gleaming bald head, wore a skimpy bikini with a shimmering blue-green fish scales pattern. He thought this whole ocean motif was simply an excuse for these roving bar girls -- and the female dealers (physical or virtual) at the tables -- to wear such revealing attire. He was cynical about it, but he didn’t object.

Yet these women were sexy for business, undressed for success, not like the girl he had focused on in the surrounding vidscreen. Her sexuality was a kind of purity.

He watched her as he took the first swig of his fresh Zub. Watched her as the sea birds wheeled and cried out, as the children frolicking in the sand or surf cried out, as the waves roared and broke, as even a fabricated smell of the ocean came to him. “Like a million dead women rotting on the ocean floor,” he described this unfamiliar scent aloud to himself, as if this one girl he admired furthered by contrast his contempt for so many others. For all others, at that moment.

The funny thing was, this magic mirror into that distant scene worked both ways. He had no idea what the exact arrangement was on the other side, but there must be some sizable vidscreen on the beach advertising the new Paxton Center Casino. This was apparent from the way a small group of people, always changing, was always gathered in one spot of the circular vidscreen, gazing with curiosity in at the gamblers. Some of these spectators were parents who looked like they’d rather be sitting at one of those card tables, themselves, than sweating on a beach for the benefit of their kids. Often they craned their necks to get a look at the players’ hands of cards, but the tables were positioned in such a way that this was not possible.

So who were the zoo goers, he wondered, and who were the animals on display?

If any of these distant gawkers should single him out in the crowd, Huck would appear to them as a human of Earth ancestry in his late thirties, a bit out of shape, with an unruly burst of black hair and a full beard that could use a trimming. With his pasty skin, it would be obvious he seldom saw the sun, for all the shadows that flooded the streets of Punktown, and because his activities often called for him to work by night, or in the extensive subterranean sector of the city nicknamed Subtown – a neighborhood he also happened to live in. This part troglodyte, part nocturnal creature wore a cloned leather jacket over a rumpled white dress shirt, and the same pair of jeans for the second day in a row. His nondescript, unremarkable appearance was not a ruse; he’d never been one for gangster chic, despite his being one of the top triggermen for the Neptune Teeb syndy.

Another glance at the time display on his wrist comp. Salocin should have arrived in the gaming room ninety minutes ago. At least, that was the intelligence Huck’s bosses had paid for. Huck, at least, had been punctual, but he had expected to walk in a minute after Salocin, do his thing, then promptly leave. No time for even one beer. Well, here it was ninety minutes and nine beers later. He did the math, and snorted. Fuck it; he was here -- might as well make the best of it. At least he was sitting here at the little bar and watching the games instead of joining in one of them. That is, he had been watching the games until the vidscreen had absorbed his attention.

One of the roaming security people was throwing him fretful, disapproving glances. Several of them, including this one, had also been paid off by Huck’s bosses, but they weren’t happy about Huck lingering in the open like this, all this time. Well, fuck them – Salocin’s tardiness was hardly his fault, was it?

Huck raised his beer in salute to the gorilla in his snappy tuxedo, and the man flicked his stern eyes away and scowled.

She was still there, as if waiting for him to continue his admiration. She was far enough removed from him (that is, from the camera) that he couldn’t see her face, but surely it had to be in keeping with the rest of her immaculate beauty. She stood in profile, gazing out at the waves…maybe watching over a younger sibling? A young boy played on a blanket a few paces from her, and were those her parents set back in the general clutter of strewn and basking bodies, partly sheltered by their umbrellas and coolers?

Her hair was a long, thick mass of curls, a kind of coppery blond. Not a natural tint, of course, but that was okay. She had to be -- what? -- fifteen or sixteen? Her hips flared with a tease of precocious voluptuousness, and her bottom in profile was rounded in a way that made the floor of Huck’s chest drop away. Her breasts had not filled out, but it was okay if they didn’t; their slightness helped maintain that precarious girl/woman balance. She wore a white bikini, to display these artless charms. No…she was not business. She was a thing of pure nature, like a nymph that had wandered out of the sea and now wistfully contemplated what she had left behind and could never return to.

Of course there were other attractive females within his view. Those who didn’t come by beauty naturally could often attain it artificially. One of Huck’s past girlfriends, met in another casino, had been a gorgeous blond who could have been a professional model, and he’d been stunned to learn well into their fling that she was seventy-two years old. That hadn’t dissuaded him, however, and the inevitable break-up had been due to the usual dramas instead.

Not everyone could afford such treatments, however. A woman crossed Huck’s field of vision, momentarily obstructing his view of the fresh little teenager, and she too wore a revealing swimsuit. It revealed a blocky, sagging body, a dangling string of fake gems swinging from the navel of her pendulous belly, across her back an animated tattoo of a cartoon dolphin plunging into water, submerging from view, erupting from the surface again, on and on. Huck was disgusted. “Buy a mirror, you painted pig,” he muttered. To be fair, everyone aged. His teenage angel would age. Maybe she’d lose her charms within a decade. But one had to have a sense of dignity, of decorum. Hell, even he understood that – and he wasn’t all that much on dignity or decorum himself.

Following a gulp of his Zub, Huck happened to swivel a fraction in his chair at the bar and there at a vid poker table across the room sat Salocin, top captain of a rival crime syndy, and his little entourage: his good friend, Nibor -- who had sold him out -- two bodyguards, and Salocin’s and Nibor’s mates. They were all of the Torgessi race, and though the colors of the scales that covered their naked bodies could vary widely, these specimens must have been of the same tribe or family – being a metallic orange color with varied splashes of black, like Chinese koi fish, except for the two females who were metallic black with splashes of orange. This source of beauty was offset by their more intimidating features: even the females were muscular and a head taller than the tallest human, and all six of them possessed a head like a cattle skull without horns, but with lidless human eyes set back in their deep sockets of bone.

Fuck – how long had they been there, while he had been distracted? Well, it couldn’t have been too long. He saw the hulking Nibor (that was Nibor, wasn’t it? – these Torgessi all looked the same to him) glancing all around the room, pretending to be checking out the vidscreen but obviously wondering who amongst these casino patrons would be the assassin on Neptune Teeb’s payroll.

The black waitress was near. Huck considered ordering a tenth beer. He had become so relaxed, so enticed by the vision in the vidscreen, that now all his readiness was dulled by a haze similar to that which masked the Duplam Ocean.

“Fuck it,” he said with something like the weary sigh of a man rising from bed to get ready for work. A sigh that sounded almost fatalistic. He rose from his chair, and in the same motion reached into both sides of his open jacket. As he started forward, he drew two handguns. One was a Thor .93, the other a Panzer, both semiautomatics equipped with a built-in silencing feature.  Both guns were loaded with AE gel capsules. He had only taken several steps before he opened fire with both guns, held out at the ends of his extended arms, and he kept firing as he kept walking toward the poker table at which sat the party of six Torgessi.

Though they were all unclothed, as this was Punktown they were not unarmed. The males wore leather harnesses, crisscrossing their immense chests, which openly supported holstered side arms. (Given the number of citizens who carried firearms, the casino had decided it was too daunting a task scanning guests and assigning their guns to storage – and it might dissuade a percentage of customers, too.) Salocin and the bodyguards were up from their seats immediately and reaching for their own weapons. Nibor bolted up, too – he obviously had to act convincingly for the sake of appearances.

But already the gel projectiles were striking the rising Torgessi. The capsules did not penetrate their tough scales, but merely breaking against them was sufficient to release the autolytic enzymes they carried. These were a mutant strain of the same enzymes that caused a body to decompose upon death. Instantaneously, the enzymes started the Torgessi’s cells, where they were contacted, to disintegrate in a process called autodigestion. And the enzymes’ effect spread rapidly from the site of the initial wound.

Huck fired wildly, unafraid of accidentally striking other casino patrons seated at the table or behind his victims. The enzymes in AE bullets were tailored to react upon one race only. A human or other alien race might be injured, and a gel cap might even penetrate them, but the enzymes would be harmless against their systems.

One of the bodyguards, struck several times in the head, had already sunk down out of sight behind the long lozenge-shaped table. The other had managed to draw his gun – it looked to Huck like a shotgun sawed off at barrel and stock -- from its holster, but he was making an ungodly sound like a bull being tortured, a number of huge holes in his upper body widening rapidly, and then becoming one gaping pit.

So far, no one had got a shot off at him in return, but even if they did he had at least a measure of defense: lining his leather jacket was a bulletproof gel padding that could disperse blunt trauma and also prevent most ray beams from piercing him. It would even withstand weak plasma rounds.

But a human man came rushing at Huck from the side. An off-duty forcer, without his gun? A patron trying to impress a casino whore? A good Samaritan – in Punktown? Whatever he was, without facing him Huck turned the Panzer toward him, shot him once in the belly, and then trained the Panzer on the Torgessi again. Peripherally, he saw the human go down clutching his middle. Whether or not the bullet had entered him, that should hopefully discourage any further acts of bravado.

Huck had not stopped advancing on the Torgessi’s table. Both his magazines were already almost empty, though they carried sixty capsules each. Without weapons of their own, stunned to inaction at first, the black-scaled females had surged out of their seats at last. One threw herself to the floor behind the table (Nibor’s woman?), but the other (Salocin’s mate?) vaulted up onto the table and bunched her body in a prelude to springing at him. The Teeb family held to certain rules of etiquette, and one was that harming the wives and children of enemies was not allowed. But what was he to do when a seven-foot monster was seconds from crashing down upon him? Huck didn’t hesitate – fired the Thor right in her face. She went crashing backwards instead, and fell off the table to buck and thrash on the floor, making that tortured bull cry. It tapered off to a gargling noise, and then ended altogether, in mere seconds.

Only several paces from the table now, Huck stopped advancing but continued pulling the triggers of his pistols. Struck repeatedly and having dropped his own gun, the syndy captain Salocin had begun wandering away, shuffling like a zombie, one arm hanging by a few cords and all of his cattle skull face missing below his glassy eyes. Huck shot him a couple times in the back of his head, and he collapsed in a heap.

Now, all the Torgessi except the woman who had dived for cover were dead.

All…

Huck moved around the table and peered at the sprawled bodies. “Momfuck,” he muttered to himself. Sure enough, Nibor was dead too, his deep-set eyes bulging in surprise. “Fucking things all look the same,” Huck grumbled. There was another directive of the Teeb syndy blown to bits: don’t kill the other clan’s turncoats, or in the future no one will trust the Teeb family enough to turn to them again. Not to mention that Nibor was to have merged the Torgessi crew into the Neptune Teeb family.

But Huck could not delay for self rebuke -- it was time to find the exit. The room’s security men couldn’t look like they weren’t doing their jobs forever.

As he turned away from the foul-smelling carnage, his eyes slid dizzily across a smear of commotion; women screaming, men shouting, ducked behind or cowering under the varied gaming tables. A holographic card dealer attired like a scintillating mermaid stared at Huck blankly, which somehow annoyed him. But something annoyed him more. His bleary gaze had fallen on that spot of the surrounding vidscreen wall where beachgoers had stopped to peer in at the casino, via its own vidscreen advertisement. Because of the shooting, the knot of people there was quickly swelling to a crowd. And among those gathered gawkers, Huck recognized a familiar figure. A young girl in a white bikini, short but prematurely voluptuous through the hips and bottom, with a head of coppery blond curls. Up close, his nymph’s face was just as cute as he’d imagined it would be. That is, if she hadn’t been scrunching up her face in an expression of profound revulsion.

Huck did not take this as disgust for the gruesome killing she had witnessed, and the ongoing swift decay of his victims. He took it as disgust for himself.

Before he continued on toward the exit, he lifted his Panzer one last time and fired a few shots at that part of the vidscreen. To his amusement, the crowd of beachgoers scattered immediately, shrieking and shouting just like the casino patrons.

But it was the girl in particular he’d been aiming at.

HANAKO

2

Hanako was relieved that the elevator was working; she could tell by watching the indicator by the keypad that it had just begun descending from the top floor, which was the ninth. She was pulling her suitcase by its handle, on the way to the shuttleport for another short trip to Miniosis, and so the elevator was more convenient than the stairs -- though by now she was used to dragging Sabina’s grocery cart down the stairs empty and back up them full.

She was not lacking in strength. She worked for a Kalian-owned company, because they had not looked closely into her personal history. (She never traveled to Earth on business, or offworld at all – kept strictly to Oasis -- afraid for her ID to be scrutinized.) They were progressive Kalians, because she knew how they traditionally treated their women as lesser beings who must remain modest, and generally remain home with their children. Nevertheless, alone with her immediate manager in his office, early on, he had impulsively embraced her and kissed her on the neck, murmuring how he could help her further her career if she was “sweet” to him. Hanako had gripped his wrist and twisted it in such a way that the man went down on his knees with a startled cry of pain. With her other hand, she had hooked her fingers into his eye sockets just above the eyeballs and bent his head back to look up at her. Calmly, she had told him that she would not kill him if he forgot this incident – she would do likewise – and they could continue with an amicable professional relationship. Her manager had gushed that he was sorry, he’d forgotten himself, and she let him up.

She had been prepared to kill him if he’d come at her then, but he didn’t. Her original programming would never have allowed her to act in such a way, but even by that time she had undergone some intense upgrades. When her only role had been to pleasure amorous men like her manager (and she had pleasured Kalians before – they tended to be abusive, bullying, even sadistic), she would not have reacted in self-preservation. She could not feel pain, but she had been programmed to cry and whimper or even scream, as if in fear or agony, if a client acted in a way that seemed injurious to her body. After all, what good was tormenting or torturing a young girl if you couldn’t savor her terror? Before her enhancements, she would have endured such treatment without struggle.

Her only act of self-defense, back then, had been to escape – and seek out those first illegal upgrades that would make her more capable of existing as a free entity.

Did she feel rewarded, even proud, to have carved out a successful career for herself without having to pleasure men with her body? Well, she felt a kind of satisfaction. Hanako was not sure she was happy that she existed, but as long as she existed her aim was simply to make that existence as…comfortable…as she could. Wasn’t that a primal instinct shared by even the lowliest animal forms? So she didn’t contemplate the question much.

The elevator was close now to reaching her floor, the fifth.

She had checked in with Sabina before readying herself for her trip, just to be sure the old woman didn’t need anything. Hanako had told her she would be back in three days. Sabina had touched her cheek and said, “You’re so sweet.” Sweet. Hanako felt okay being “sweet” for Sabina. Sabina asked nothing of her but her company. Their interactions gave Hanako a kind of satisfaction, as well. Might she even consider their relationship pleasing, she who had given so much pleasure but never understood such feelings before?

The elevator made a little “ping” sound to indicate it had reached her floor, and its doors parted open. Peripherally, Hanako noted there was one other occupant inside as she pulled her suitcase into the cabin, and turned to face the doors as they once again closed.

That is, the doors started to close, but suddenly froze in their tracks about halfway there. Their mechanism emitted a strained humming sound.

Behind her, a voice slurred, “I’ve seen you around before.”

Hanako did not turn around, but in the jammed elevator doors she saw a blurry reflection of the man behind her. Bearded, scruffy, wearing a leather jacket. She thought she’d seen him in the apartment building before, as well. She could not smell his breath, having no olfactory sensors, but she could tell by his voice that he’d been drinking. Cradled under one arm was a fresh six-pack of beer, too.

She reached out, tapped at the key to close the doors. They didn’t respond.

Leaning against the back wall, as if afraid to fall if it didn’t support him, the man made no effort to come forward to examine the problem. Instead, he went on, “You’re a Little Gravure model, aren’t you? Which one? Meiki?” With a grunt he finally pushed himself away from the back wall, stepped up closer behind her and bent around her a little to study Hanako’s profile. “Hm…no, I’d say you’re a Saaya.” He took a deep inhalation, close to the back of her neck. Hanako stabbed at the key again, as much to prevent herself from turning around and crushing the man’s throat in her hand as to attempt to close the faulty doors. The man said, “Mmm…love that silicon smell. You’re all toy, not a cyborg. Definitely a Saaya. That’s okay – why do you think they didn’t try to make your skin smell like flesh? Connoisseurs of good toys, like me, like that smell.”

“You’ve been drinking,” Hanako observed coldly, keeping her back to him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I do. Among my other responsibilities for the, ah, company I work for, I used to be a bouncer at an android whorehouse. I became very familiar with the staff. Very fond of the staff indeed.”

“I don’t know of such things,” Hanako barely murmured. She held her finger on the OPEN button for a prolonged time.

“I might believe you come here to service a favorite customer…but I don’t think so. Look at you, dressed so respectable and all, with your cute little suitcase matching your tailor-made suit. You really live here. You’re a rogue, huh? You might even have run away from the same whorehouse I used to work at.”

Hanako let her arm lower to her side. She stood motionless and silent. The doors still hummed.

“But you’re probably too young to be one of the girls I used to know. They tend not to live too many years. All that wear and tear. If ‘live’ is the right word, huh?” He spat an ugly little laugh.

“I shouldn’t like to have to find a new apartment,” Hanako said in a chilly, even voice. “I hope you will not bother me again.” With that, she reached out both hands, took hold of the jammed elevator doors, and forced them all the way open again. The humming turned to a buzzing protest, but she ignored it as she stepped back out into the hall, with the intention of finding the stairs.

The man made no move to follow her, as if he were content to remain inside the cabin until such time as a service technician might come, but he said, “Oh-ho-ho! Sorry if I hurt your feelings…except you don’t have feelings.”

Hanako paused, looked back over her shoulder a little and replied, “You’re the one with no feelings.”

HUCK

2

He was roused from nebulous dreams by the tip of a steel-toed boot striking his shin.

Huck had dozed off on a park bench, six empty bottles of Zub strewn around his feet in the grass like victims of a multiple killing he couldn’t remember committing. He sat up with a start. Somehow, he expected to see an open sky above him – whitely overcast, with sea birds wheeling and dipping – but instead he confronted a high ceiling along which ran conduits, pipes, networks of cables, with lamps to simulate sunlight. And, closer to him, a cluster of young, grinning faces.

The face of the youth who had just kicked him was speaking. “Just checking if you’re still alive, Mr. Derelict sir.” The speaker was maybe twenty, thickset and shortish, with his head shaved bald except for a patch of hair in the shape of a lightning bolt.

Behind the young men were more young men – a group of maybe thirty altogether. Most of the tribe looked Latino, but they were hardly exclusive. There were whites, blacks, a few Asians and Chooms, one Tikkihotto and even a number of mutants. What they all had in common, however, was that they were clearly imbued with the essence of their city. They were its multitude of faces. They were its absence of a soul. They might be homeless and living in the park they called the Jungle, or they might come from good homes. Maybe a combination of both. Huck had found that such details didn’t really make much of a difference.

They did share one physical characteristic: they were all shirtless, so as to show off the large identical tattoo each wore on his chest. It was a vid loop, playing on the fine invisible mesh that had been imprinted into their skin. The vid showed a stocky young Latino man bound to a chair (his own body covered in more traditional tattoos, perhaps collected in prison), in the process of being murdered by men in black hoods. Presumably, these very boys, executing a traitor or rival gang member. Huck watched, mildly engaged, as one man sliced open just the front of the prisoner’s neck to let out a controlled profusion of blood down the front of his chest. Then, his head was tilted back and the man with the knife started sawing, in an effort to behead him. Huck had seen some very adept beheadings in his time – in vids and once even in person – by butchers who could work the blade between the vertebrae and get the head off with an ease that spoke of terrible familiarity. These were no such butchers. When sawing hit resistance, a second knife-wielder stepped in to chop at the victim’s neck bones. All the while, even with his head half off, the prisoner’s chest heaved as he sucked down his own blood instead of air (Huck could imagine the inevitable wheezing-gurgling). At last they got the head off, and rested it in the man’s lap. It toppled to the floor. They picked it up and set it on his thighs again. Huck had to smirk.

The boy with the black lightning bolt atop his head like a jagged crack in his skull followed Huck’s eyes down to his chest. “Enjoying the show, old-timer? Pretty, ain’t it?”

All the tattoo vids were in sync except on one boy’s shaven chest, where some glitch had caused the image to stall with flickering lines streaked through it, the victim seemingly damned to gasp for air with his head half off for all eternity.

“Ain’t ain’t in the dictionary, my friend,” Huck mumbled, looking around at others to the sides of him.

Though bared to the waist they surely could not be without weapons. Most of them favored baggy fatigue pants, in the blue camouflage pattern that had been used in the Blue War, with an abundance of roomy pockets that bulged with handguns, maybe even grenades. Some of them openly carried machetes, though that might be more for hacking their way through the most thickly overgrown areas of the Jungle than for battling enemies – or threatening potential victims.

“You know,” slurred Huck, returning his attention to the boy who had kicked him awake, and gesturing at his chest, “a beam cutter knife would’ve been a lot easier. You can get ‘em in any hardware store.”

“Hey, thanks, I’ll remember that next time -- you ugly momfuck waste product. But a real blade is more sporting, don’t you think? More honorable.”

“Sporting? Honorable?” Huck chuckled. He looked down and poked at his collection of Zub bottles with his toe, to see if any might have one last swallow overlooked inside.

The boy with the lightning bolt, who must be the pack’s leader, swept the bottles away with the side of his foot. He missed one, but stooped down, picked it up and swung his arm back as if to smash the bottle down on Huck’s head. Huck did not duck, bury his head in his shoulders, dive to the side, or even blink. He just stared up at the boy…waiting to see how this would go.

The chieftain barked a laugh, tossed the bottle away. The others all burst into roars and whoops and guffaws as well, lunging at Huck and shouting, “Boo!” and less comprehensible exclamations.

“You know,” he said to them when their noise had settled down a little, “you guys don’t have to hit me or anything. Just gather around a little closer and your body odor should do the trick.”

The leader wagged his head in disbelief. “You must be absolutely blasting crazy, you smelly old loser.”

Huck let a slow smile spread within his beard. “My fine young punk, you can learn one thing from this smelly old loser. The last person you ever want to dick with is the person who doesn’t give a shit about a goddamn thing in this world.”

The kid snorted. “Heh. You obviously don’t, from the look of you.” But was there something in Huck’s unblinking eyes, or the smile he still held, that made the leader start to turn away – and motion for his comrades to do the same? Over his shoulder the boy laughed, “I like you, you crazy fuck. You’re my hero. I want to be just like you when I grow up.”

“If you’re not careful,” Huck said after him, still smiling that smile, “you won’t grow up.”

The tribe’s chieftain paused, held Huck’s gaze for several beats, then continued leading his boisterous pack away.

Huck leaned back against the bench and spread both his arms along the backrest, with a groan that spoke of cramped muscles. This action caused his leather jacket to open, revealing the guns holstered against his ribs. The retreating pack did not witness this.

“Old-timer,” he murmured, but he felt it. Rolling his head to work a kink out of his neck, he glanced over at his apartment building, visible from here. Its back wall was almost pressed right up against the high fence that bordered the park. He scrunched his face as he noticed for the first time – at least consciously – that a thick growth of vine like ivy, but of a deep color that might be purple or even black, had grown down the side of the building, partly obscuring some of the windows. It reached all the way to the ground. Well, at least it didn’t extend up to the ninth floor, where he lived, to obstruct his own view.

He thought of the poor little android he had met in the building’s elevator, so smartly dressed and on her way to somewhere else. He half-wished that, for the first time ever, he was on his way out of Punktown with her.

“Fuck it,” he said.

Huck had turned back around to continue watching the tribe saunter and swagger off to another section of the Jungle, still distantly hooting and hollering like lunatics, when his wrist comp beeped. He didn’t need to look at its screen to know it was the call – and the summons -- he had been expecting.

*     *     *

When Phlone had called saying he wanted to meet with him, Huck had told the Choom he could find him at the restaurant Pho Paxton, which served Vietnamese fare. A public place…not that Neptune Teeb’s people, including Huck, hadn’t hit people in public places before. And that was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

Like Huck, Phlone worked directly under the man they called Wild Bill, right hand and heir apparent to the Neptune Teeb crime syndy. Wild Bill in turn had always called Huck -- half-jokingly – Mad-Dog Huck. “Wild Bill and Mad-Dog,” he would tell Huck. “We should be a movie.”

Phlone, on the other hand, was known on the streets less romantically as Squash, which as a mutant his head vaguely resembled with its elongated form and yellowish color. A partly rotten and wrinkling squash at that. As both a Choom and a mutant Phlone was one of the least nondescript gangsters in Punktown, but then again there wasn’t exactly a shortage of nonhumans or mutants in the city.

With Phlone never having tried Vietnamese food before, Huck helped him order. Their waitress was a slim woman wearing a white blouse and tight black slacks that clung to a small spherical bottom, her long hair shimmering black and face severely beautiful. Her manner was chilly, however, all business; when Huck had said, “Hello, Hien,” the woman had acted as though she hadn’t heard him. As she began walking away from the table Huck shook his head and remarked loudly to Phlone, “I used to date Hien, and now she won’t give me the time of day. You see that? A woman sucks every last drop of blood out of your bank account and then she flicks you away like a snot. I’m not saying every Vietnamese girl is a low-class childish whore who’d sell her mother’s soul for enough money to buy a designer handbag – just every one that I’ve known.”

As she passed into the kitchen, Hien threw an even more severe glance back at their table, and Phlone warned, “Man, she heard that, you know. You want her to spit in your food?”

“I’ve traded spit with the bitch before,” Huck said casually, stirring his thick, super-sweet coffee. “I’m sure she did worse to my food when I was fucking her.”

“Same old Huck,” Phlone said. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “And good old Huck got the job done at the casino…but what a mess, man, what a mess.”

Huck sucked a film of sweetened condensed milk off his spoon, and meeting the mutant’s eyes said, “I know what this is about, Squash, so you don’t have to draw it out. You’re giving me the axe.”

“Not me, Huck. Wild Bill.”

“Right, right. So now you’re going to give me a severance package.”

“Yes. And a generous one.”

“Of course. And then, a month from now, or six months from now, I get my head severed as an extra bonus.”

“Huck.” Phlone leaned toward him across the table. “You know Wild Bill. He’s not disloyal, and he’s not ungrateful.”

“But he’s not stupid. He sees me as a loose cannon. A risk.”

“He just sees you as a good worker who’s reached the end of his useful employment. He doesn’t forget what you’ve done for the family. Teeb himself won’t forget what you’ve done for the family.”

“Why am I so special?” Huck sipped his ca phe sua. “Mad-dog psycho killers are a dime a dozen in this town.”

“You’re a king among psycho killers, Huck.” Phlone tried to make a joke of it to change the other man’s brooding, distrustful mood. “What was your secret, anyway?”

“Part of my secret is never get personal, but seeing as this is my retirement party and all, I’ll tell you my life story.” Huck set down his cup, sat back and smiled crookedly. “I don’t give a mutant’s last shit about anything, Squash. I spent most my childhood in ‘care centers’ that were glorified kennels, tended by robots. I spent my teens on the streets, and you could go gang or lone wolf and I went lone wolf ‘cause it made me less dependent. So I have no love for anybody. As far as I’m concerned, I had no parents. I have no siblings. I have no friends. I’ll sell myself to the highest bidder, and that was always Neptune Teeb. If it had been someone else, I’d be taking my severance package from them, now. I guess you could say I like you, Squash, as much as I’ve ever liked anybody, but if our pretty waitress comes back here now and hands me ten thousand munits to kill you…well, you won’t leave this restaurant alive.”

Phlone chuckled uneasily. “You’d do me for just ten thousand munits, buddy?”

“Five thousand,” Huck reconsidered, not blinking as he held his colleague’s stare. “I’m lowering my rates, now that I’m unemployed and all.” Now it was his turn to lean across the table with emphasis. “Tell me, Squash…Wild Bill could have gone two ways with this. He could have killed me, because he’s afraid of me, or he could have let me live because he’s afraid of me. But he is afraid of me, isn’t he?”

“Huck, come on, friend…you shouldn’t talk like that. It’s disrespectful. And you know Wild Bill – he’s not the type to be afraid, or he wouldn’t be where he is today.”

“And I wouldn’t be sitting here with you today taking a severance package from Neptune Teeb if people weren’t afraid of me.”

Phlone’s wide Choom mouth, made wrinkly and sunken by his condition, grimaced unattractively. In a lower tone of voice he said, “Of course he’s afraid of you, Huck. Who isn’t?”

Huck leaned back in his chair again, as if satisfied by the meal that hadn’t arrived yet.

“Listen,” Phlone went on, “this is a juicy severance. Get yourself a nicer apartment, up here in the sunlight. Get yourself a couple new sexy girlfriends like this one.” He hooked a thumb toward Hien, who was taking an order at another table. “Enjoy the fruits of your labors. Travel, whatever. Just do what’s right, that’s all: don’t listen to the other families if they come knocking. Don’t draw any more attention to yourself -- keep a low profile. Keep your snout clean. Hang up the guns.”

“Hang up the guns,” Huck repeated to himself, watching a young couple who were seated nearby, swapping smiles and touching hands. They were as alien to him as those two Dacvibese sitting at another table. Hang up the guns…and yet, for the past twenty-something years, the only way he had been able to define his life was by stopping the lives of others.

“I’m impressed with you, how reasonable you’re being about this,” Phlone continued.

“How else could it be?” Huck muttered, averting his eyes as his cynical smile momentarily faltered. “Even I know I went too far this time.”

“Well you’re being a good boy now, and it’s appreciated. Keep it up, and enjoy your life. It’s a new life for you, man! Hey, I envy you. You’re getting out young. You’re getting out alive.”

“Right. And you be a good boy, too, Squash.”

“How’s that?”

“Don’t you come knocking later on, either, with second thoughts about that bonus I mentioned before.” Huck’s restored grin seemed almost as big as the Choom’s split-head mouth. “Or I’ll do you for nothing.” He held his right hand up in front of his eye, fingers curled in the shape of a zero – or a rifle scope.

HANAKO

3

Returning from her trip to Miniosis in the early evening, Hanako did not stop in to say hello to Sabina, but after she had showered and changed into more casual clothes she gave the old woman a call. Sabina did not answer, but Hanako thought that she might have retired early, and didn’t call again until the next morning. Again Sabina did not answer. Hanako had to go to work, but she tried phoning at her lunch break. Once more, no reply. This was the day of their weekly shopping excursions, once Hanako had come home from work -- but she didn’t want to wait for that.

She made some excuse to her manager about going home early. He didn’t protest; he’d been the perfect gentleman since the day she had thought she might have to kill him. (Whether or not he suspected she was not human she didn’t know.)

Hanako did not own a vehicle herself (again, afraid to have her background checked), so she rode public transit down into Subtown, and to her neighborhood…walked briskly the rest of the way, the high heels that added a little to her 4’9” frame clicking sharply against the pavement. As she neared her apartment building, passing a section of the park they called the Jungle, she heard the rustling of vegetation and wet smacking sounds, and looked to her right. Behind the fence, several faces peered out at her from parted foliage, between the bars like animals in a zoo. They were young men, making kissing sounds at her and lapping at the air. “Hey, little girl, come here a minute,” one of the Jungle savages called.

She faced forward again, picked up her pace a little and clicked up the front steps of her building, on into the lobby. She didn’t even waste time checking on the elevator (maybe that scruffy man in the leather jacket was in there yet, still propped up by the wall), and danced up the staircases to the fourth floor instead.

At the far end of the hallway, Hanako buzzed the door to Apartment 12. She waited a few moments, buzzed again. Finally, she pounded the heel of her fist on the door. Still, no one responded to her summons. She stood contemplating the door, then, her arms hanging at her sides, trying to compute the possibilities. Maybe Sabina had gone on her own little trip? Perhaps she had relatives or other friends she hadn’t told Hanako about?

Her eyes settled on the keypad, and she called to mind the password she couldn’t help noticing the first time Sabina had invited her in. She reached out her hand, and punched in N…U…R…S…E…R…Y.

The door slid open, and Hanako stepped inside. If she had possessed a sense of smell, she wouldn’t have bothered calling out, “Sabina?” as she ventured into the dark, secret garden within.

There was a creaking noise ahead. Hanako recognized it as the sound of Sabina’s wooden rocking chair in motion. Relieved, she felt an unwilled smile come to her face. “Sabina?” she said again, making her way to the back of the living room. “I’m sorry I let myself in…”

Hanako saw Sabina silhouetted in her rocking chair against an open window. From outside came the sounds of traffic; hovercars close to the street, lesser numbers of helicars coasting higher. But immediately this scene registered as wrong to Hanako. In all the times she had been in the apartment, this window had been completely covered by the dark purple vines of Sabina’s favorite plant.

“Sabina?” Hanako said, and when she advanced a bit closer two things were revealed. These incongruous revelations made her stop in her tracks so that she might clearly observe them, try somehow to assimilate them.

Sabina lay on the floor near the rocker, her body having been obscured before by the fronds of a large potted plant. Hanako did not know how to judge such things, but she might have guessed that Sabina had been dead for several days – might even have expired the same day she had left on her trip. Her eyes and mouth were open, and she looked older than she had in life – as if some vital component had been extracted, leaving just a husk like a chrysalis. A flesh mannequin.

The Sabina that rocked in the chair was formed of tightly woven vines and leaves of a dark purple color. It was a perfect sculpture; Hanako could even recognize the subtle shapes of the old woman’s face, with the pronounced cheekbones that spoke of her youthful beauty. If she looked closely enough she could see that the feet of wound vines were flexing ever so slightly, enough to keep the rocker in motion.

“Did you do this to her?” Hanako asked the golem. She looked around her, and noticed that a few small plants had been knocked from their shelves, one large potted plant now tipped over and its soil spilled across the floor. The shards of a decorative plate lay scattered amongst the patches of spilled dirt. A splayed magazine, a shattered tea cup – maybe one that Hanako herself had lifted to her lips after one of their expeditions to the market.

She drew closer to the open window, carefully stepping around the old woman’s corpse. Now she noted how the window had been wrenched open, tearing the vines that had cloaked it before. Clumps of the vine lay about the floor here, where they had been torn free – apparently by human hands. She even spotted some gashes in the window frame, as if some heavy bladed instrument had been used to hack at the thick web of vines.

Hanako leaned out the window, and for the first time took in how the vines had actually grown out the window and down the back wall of the apartment building, reaching to the ground. Sabina must have left the window open just a crack to allow the vines to spread – that, or they had nudged the window open themselves. Either way, the window had obviously not been locked. And Hanako could see how the vines growing on the outside wall were damaged, as well. Damaged, she deduced, by whoever it was who had climbed up the vines like a rope ladder, all the way up here to the fourth floor of the apartment building…then forced open the window, hacked and torn at the vines…and entered into Sabina’s apartment.

A distant whoop, like the call of a wild animal, caused Hanako to lift her eyes and stare into the depths of the overgrown park. She scanned the clumps of trees, then shifted her gaze when she detected movement in a field of grass grown taller than a man. Vague figures moved through the elephant grass. She followed their progress until the figures emerged at the edge of the pond, covered by its thick green membrane of algae. They were a half dozen youths without shirts, wearing blue camouflage fatigue pants. Two of them carried machetes.

Slowly Hanako withdrew, back into the apartment, and regarded Sabina again. Then turning, regarded the rocking doppelganger. Softly, she said to it, “You didn’t kill her. You only miss her.”

She considered reaching her hand into the figure, taking hold of the insect-like bulb she knew would be hiding within – as if it were the sculpture’s heart – but decided to leave the little entity here with its dead master.

“You loved her,” Hanako stated. “You wanted to make her again. But we can’t, can we?”

The rocking figure did not reply. The two effigies merely shared each other’s company for a short while.

*     *     *

Several forcers came first, in their black uniforms and intimidating full-head helmets, but then a pair of plainclothes detectives arrived. One of them was a human, very tall and thin, lost in his rumpled suit, his gaunt face very pale and with black hair falling almost to his waist. He stood gazing moodily out the open window as if contemplating a lost love, or suicide, rather than the cause of Sabina’s death. His partner was a Fekah, wearing a badly fitted suit and a red-tinted fishbowl helmet. The tinting was to protect the Fekah’s sensitive eyes, but the helmet was mostly to protect other races from the strangely loud and disturbing sound of his respiration. The Fekah had something of the appearance of a bipedal giant frog, all white, with the feathery gills of an immature salamander. Maybe that was why some referred to the Fekahs as “Hellbenders.” This one was the senior of the two detectives, so it was with him that Hanako talked. Besides, the other one seemed too lost in his own tragic thoughts.

His translated voice coming to Hanako via a microphone, the Fekah asked her, “What was your relationship with the deceased?”

Hanako said four words, then, that she had never thought she would utter. “She was my friend.”

“You told the officers that you let yourself in with the deceased’s password. Why did you know it?”

They weren’t suspecting her, were they? Hanako lied, “She gave it to me in case something ever happened to her, and she couldn’t come to the door. She was in poor health.”

“Do you know if she has family…next of kin?”

“I don’t really know.”

“All right – that’s something we’ll be looking into.”

Hanako glanced behind her, at the spot on the floor where Sabina had lain. Her body had been removed a few minutes earlier. “Do you think she was murdered?”

“Every possibility will be considered.”

“I’m sure one or more people climbed up the vines outside, and came in through the window here. The window was completely covered by vines the last time I was here. They had to have come over the fence, from the park.”

“My partner is working on that possibility right now, miss.” The Fekah gestured one webbed hand toward his moody colleague. “He’s a mutant, with PSI ability. He’s trying to call up what transpired.”

“Oh my,” Hanako said, impressed. She added helpfully, “I think it was some young men I saw out the window, in the park. They had machetes…and I think you can see chop marks on the window frame. They must have wanted money for drugs or such. Can you check to see if they took money from her?”

“As I say, we’re looking into every possibility.” Though uninflected, somehow the Fekah’s synthetic voice still managed to sound annoyed. “Just let us do the detective work, okay?”

Hanako knew, from watching the news on VT, how overworked Punktown’s police force was – how impossible their task of investigating and solving all of its crimes. Still, she was about to persist when she heard a little sob from the man at the window, and turned to see him covering his eyes with one hand, his shoulders slumped disconsolately.

“Do you have something, Wilbur?” asked the Fekah.

“Not on the woman…but a little girl was killed in the park, just right down here, about ten years ago I’d say. I can see the case was already solved, though.”

The Fekah sighed – a sound that might have deafened a man had he not been wearing his helmet – and explained to Hanako, “It’s an inexact science.”

“Will you look into those young men?”

“Yeah yeah…I told you, miss, just let us do our jobs.”

“Will you call me when you have more information?”

“You can call us…but give us a chance, will you?”

Hanako nodded helplessly. She felt an impulse to sigh, herself. Not for the first time, she settled her gaze on Sabina’s wooden rocker. Upon its seat, and on the floor in front of it, was heaped a shapeless mass of vines. When she’d returned to the apartment with the first forcers, she had found the vines this way – the effigy of Sabina fallen away. There was no sign of the glossy purple bulb. Hiding…somewhere in this forest.

“Who will care for her plants now?” Hanako asked, looking all around her now as if the full impact of Sabina’s absence was finally coming home to her. “Many of them will die if they’re not watered soon.”

“I told you,” the Fekah said testily, “we’ll be looking for her next of kin. That isn’t your concern.”

HUCK

3

The girl in his apartment building’s elevator had put the brothel where he had once functioned as a bouncer into the forefront of Huck’s mind, and so after his lunch with Phlone he had decided to shoot his helicar over there. He didn’t know if he were acting upon Phlone’s insistence that he should pursue the recreations of a retired man…if he were acting on anything other than another of his body’s hungers that needed fulfilling. Or maybe what he needed was a better-looking conversationalist than Phlone. Who was he kidding – the staff of prosties at this whorehouse was entirely made up of pleasure machines. But sometimes he had liked them better than the real deal. No artificial woman had ever sneered at him, slapped him, spat on him.

The helicar was a big old Albatross model, pearly white and with flared fins and chrome trim. The brothel was up here, in the city proper, and Huck lifted the car high enough that he broke from the deep shadows that drowned the streets, up into the blaze of the sun he sometimes didn’t emerge to witness for weeks at a time. Squinting, he tapped a key to tint his windshield a darker shade. The establishment was not far from Pho Paxton, and he alighted on the rooftop parking lot. A smiling attendant in a trim, snug uniform stepped forward to greet him. Her blouse was cut especially low. She was of Asian design, as were all the models in this particular brothel. There were pleasure houses of every style, catering to every desire, in abundance throughout Punktown: offering humans, androids and cyborgs, aliens and mutants, males and females and combinations of the two. Many establishments were illegal – such as those that catered to pedophiles, necrophiliacs and animal lovers, of course -- though this one was licensed…actually, one of the legitimate business assets of syndy lord, and Huck’s former boss as of today, Neptune Teeb.

It had been some years since he’d been here, and he couldn’t tell if any of the girls he encountered in the front lounge -- whether cyborgs sheathed in human flesh or totally synthetic androids, like the girl in the elevator – were among the same prosties he would have been familiar with back then, but they all smiled at him brightly when they made eye contact with him. Some of the androids, even with their synthetic skin, were so convincing -- right down to occasional moles and the subtle textures of their faces -- that even on close inspection they could pass as human, while others were intentionally less realistic, smooth as children’s dolls, some even with slightly disproportionate heads and extra-large eyes. Even the more realistic models, when they greeted him, held their eyes open wide and blinked with deliberate slowness, designed to imitate the cute kawaii look of girls in manga and anime. Many real human girls practiced the same mannerisms, after all. Robots imitating komikku girls that were an imitation of real girls, who in turn imitated the komikku girls.

Huck spotted one girl frolicking with some middle-aged businessmen in a pool in the center of the lounge, which dominated the building’s ground floor, who wore a skimpy white bikini. She looked so like the girl in the elevator that he might have believed it was the same person, had she been a person. He considered motioning for her to come out and meet him, but instead settled on an older-looking girl (she might even have passed for a woman of twenty-five) of the Hikaru model.

But when she had stripped and lowered herself to the bed, smiling up at him with those too-wide eyes, he had found it difficult to maintain an erection. He didn’t know why this was. When the smiling girl offered him a pill to rectify the matter, he only became irritated and swept it out of her hand. When he did this her smile never faltered, but again recalling the girl in the elevator, he wondered if there might be secret workings underway in this entity’s mind. When had the girl he’d confronted decided to go rogue? How long had it taken, and what had she experienced – what had she learned – that had culminated in her decision? What made one robot act upon such an impulse, when another would never consider it? A different model brain? A glitch or virus in the system? Was it a kind of accident of evolution, as with biological life?

In the end, he couldn’t look so directly into her eyes, and instead stood beside the bed holding her ankles and rubbing himself between the wrinkled soles of her pretty feet. This finally aroused him, but chafed him, and he finished off by ordering her to roll onto her front, climbing onto her back, and rubbing his sore cock in the crease between her soft, silicon buttocks.

Skipping a shower, when he’d returned to the ground floor he sat in the lounge, drinking alone – snarling at any girl, or overly cheery customer, who tried to open conversation with him. Downing his Zubs, he watched that tiny, sweet-faced girl -- her sleek black hair plastered to her shoulders and her scrap of a top barely containing her oversized breasts -- as she splashed in the pool like a naiad. Despite his having satisfied his needs, she still inspired a vast hollow ache inside him that was terrible to experience and yet exhilarating, too. But when the girl caught him staring and grinned at him shyly, wiggling her fingers in a wave, he turned his gaze from her.

Night had fallen when he returned to Subtown, and fortunately most of the rush hour traffic of workers returning home had ebbed. Making a swooping descent through one of the ramps that led down into the subterranean sector, several times Huck almost scraped the Albatross’ belly across the roofs of the hovercars crawling along closer to the ground. One mutant, or species of alien he had never encountered before, glared up at him through the bubble dome of his odd little vehicle. Huck laughed wildly and only sped forward more quickly, swerving in and out between other helicars.

“Fuck you!” he yelled at the angry driver of another helicar, whom he had almost forced into the wall of the ramp’s tunnel. “You too!” he laughed at a hovercar’s driver, who was glancing up at the Albatross’ belly nervously. “Fuck you all!” Huck roared.

Down in the streets of Subtown, now…the Kalian sector…along the length of Morpha Street B. At Forma Street’s B level, he encountered a sudden knot of choked traffic, and ascended higher above it with an abrupt surge. So abrupt, and such a surge, that he leveled off too late, and there was an ungodly screech as he scraped the top of his beautiful old Albatross against a low-hanging pipe affixed to the ceiling. He even saw a spray of sparks go bouncing off his windshield and hood. Shaken, Huck took the Albatross down fast (but not too fast), and alighted on the flat roof of a derelict warehouse.

He stepped out of the helicar, thrust his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket (to hide their shaking from himself?), and walked to the edge of the roof. He felt nauseous, as if with vertigo, as he watched the bustling activity of the streets from this vantage point…feeling unaccountably conflicted, like a man contemplating throwing himself to his death.

He felt cut free, but he didn’t feel free. He felt like he no longer had any purpose.

Worse yet – he felt that he never had.

HANAKO

4

Hanako did not go to work the next day, did not even call in sick. She sat on the sofa of her sterile apartment, staring unblinking at the orange, spiny little cactus that rested in the center of her otherwise empty coffee table. Though she knew it drew all the moisture it needed from the air, she still felt an odd impulse to water the cactus…to tend to it somehow.

Sabina had been a nurse…had cared for countless people. If the people who’d killed her had been her patients back then, she would have cared for them as well. The concept of injustice, of unfairness, crystallized in Hanako’s mind just then, more so even than when she had suffered abuses as a pleasure machine. More so even than when she had made that first decision to escape.

She hadn’t called work, but she had phoned the local police precinct house and asked for the Fekah detective. “Did you find out how she was murdered?” she’d asked him.

“There were no signs of violence, so we can’t say yet that she was murdered. She had an artificial heart, and it seems to have malfunctioned.”

“But there was a break-in – couldn’t her heart have given out from fear and stress?”

“That’s possible – I’m not a physician. Or a mechanic.”

The detective went on to report that it couldn’t be determined if money had been taken, since they had no idea what amount the woman might have had in her apartment. Maybe some objects of value had been stolen, but unless Hanako had noted any missing items then there was no real inventory of the woman’s belongings to reference. The Fekah reiterated that next of kin were still being sought, but Hanako felt that if there were any, surely some computer would have called up their names in seconds. What would become of all those plants, and the other belongings that had defined Sabina’s life? Would they simply be destroyed, to make room for Apartment 12’s next tenant?

The detective insisted that the investigation was still underway. But even as he signed off, Hanako could hear a burst of gunfire in the distance, outside her windows. Another killing. Another morning in Punktown. She didn’t expect the investigation to be a top priority. There was no way of erasing this blotch of cosmic unfairness. There was no way of gaining real justice.

Was there?

After hours of sitting in the same position -- her apartment utterly silent, with not even the VT running for company -- Hanako arose stiffly, pivoted, and walked to the two windows at the far end of her living room. Like the corresponding windows of Sabina’s apartment, on the floor below, they faced onto the park locals had dubbed the Jungle. Hanako stood there a long while, her arms at her sides, eyes still unblinking because there was no one here to appear human for, her chest not rising and falling because she required no breath.

What did she require, then?

She required her friend. But her friend was gone.

She watched, and watched, until she saw a rippling wave like a breeze, or a pair of stealthy tigers, passing through the elephant grass. At last two figures appeared from its border. Between them they dragged the beaten and barely struggling body of a shabby homeless man. They dumped him onto one of the park’s paths, then bent over him to perform some further mischief or other. Hanako saw him dig his heels at the cracked pavement in renewed agitation. Surely he had no money for them to find. This must simply be their daily routine. This was their life work.

Hanako turned away from the window, and looked across the room at the little cactus again, which rested at the center of the large, too white, too empty room like an irritating grain of sand lodged inside an oyster. But such a piece of grit was the seed of a pearl.

Had she had one upgrade too many? Was there a grain of sand in the workings of her mind?

She had wished to live as a human. It had not been her goal – consciously at least – to become a human. What she was feeling…what she was contemplating…it made no kind of logical sense. This was the way humans behaved. It was irrational. It went against everything she had striven for. Order, comfort, anonymity. A quiet life of…of what?

She wasn’t ready to consider the word love, but Sabina had taught her friendship. And thus, had also taught her loss.

And those boys down there – they had taught her another kind of feeling altogether.

Without a nod, a sigh, any outward sign that a decision had been reached, she padded across the room, fitted her feet into her shoes with their stiletto heels, and then clicked across her too barren floor for the door to her apartment – as if to go to work.

*     *     *

She clicked down the sidewalk, alongside the tall fence, through which fronds and branches and long grass strained as if to reach for her, but no faces appeared at the bars to call out to her. She turned the corner, walked along the next street’s sidewalk until she came to one of the entrances to the park. She passed through a kind of archway in the fence, and continued clicking onto one of the park’s many labyrinthine paths.

Right away, inside the park for the very first time, she was reminded of Sabina’s apartment. Life bloomed everywhere, life without constraint, exuberant and heady. She regretted that she could not smell it, but she had sensors in her hands and ran them through bundles of leaves she passed as they spilled at her like foamy ocean waves. Here and there, wildflowers spattered their colors through the chaos. It was all like one vast painting nearly overflowing its frame. Could the park have been any more beautiful in its early days, when its lawns had been closely trimmed, its hedges neatly shaped?

Hanako stopped walking suddenly, having heard indistinct voices somewhere off the path. She waited for more, but didn’t catch anything. Bending, she removed her shoes and set them down in the shadows under a bush. Then, barefoot, she stepped off the pathway, parting the tall grass with her arms and slipping within…a first time swimmer, diving into the very heart of the dangerous but life-filled sea.

Pressing on through the grass, which grew to almost twice her height here, she came to another species of plant life that arrested her attention, causing her to stop and study it. The elephant grass had given way to closely grown tubular stalks, tall as the grass. At the head of each stalk was a crown of fronds, but what fascinated her was that the tubes were transparent, and apparently filled with an amber-colored fluid or sap. And in this fluid floated tiny dead insects -- flies and beetles. She even spied a small bird wedged down in one of them. She looked up again at the fronds and deduced that there must be a hole in the center of each crown, at the mouth of the tubes. Insects, drawn to some sweet scent perhaps, alighted on the fronds, slipped down them into the holes and then down into the tubes, where they drowned and were digested in the ambery fluid. She smiled. Nature was more ingenious than the cleverest designer of mechanical life.

A murmur of voices again. She turned toward it, and saw wisps of bluish smoke curling between the stalks that she would have smelled before had she been human. She moved toward the smoke, pushing between the glossy transparent tubes, and stepped into a large circular area that apparently the park’s inhabitants had cleared here. The ground in the clearing was blackened as if burnt.

The clearing was strewn with candy wrappers and fast food cartons, crushed beer cans. At its center, as if around a campfire, sat three bare-chested young people, but what they sat around was some sort of hookah. Its body consisted of a clear globe containing bubbling fluid, in which floated a live jellyfish. Hanako wondered if it were an immature specimen of the extradimensional creature called a bender, which she had seen on VT, the poison of which was said to cause hallucinations and expand the consciousness – if it didn’t kill you first.

All three sported a large, identical tattoo on their chests – a film loop of a man bound to a chair having his head cut off, except on one boy’s chest the film was stuck, juddering, with lines of static scored through it. The other male was a mutant afflicted with a fairly common mutation that gave his face the aspect of a piranha, right down to the lidless eyes and pronounced lower jaw overflowing with sharp teeth. The third was a short, thickset young woman with black hair and the profile of an Aztec priestess, her moving tattoo encroaching on her plump, pendulous breasts.

The trio looked up at the tiny intruder in surprised wariness, but the boy with the malfunctioning tattoo quickly grinned and said, “Um, are you lost, Little Red Riding Hood?”

“Little Red Riding Gook,” said the young woman, exhaling a mouthful of blue smoke as she did so, the nozzle of the hookah in her hand. The fish-faced mutant gave a short bark of a laugh.

Hanako walked closer to the trio, so petite she barely stood over them. Her face was blank, her expression unchanging – even when she reached out, slipped her fingers into the mouth of the grinning boy, closed her hand and wrenched his lower jaw off.

On the ground beside the stocky young woman rested a machete with a thirteen-inch curved blade like a kukri knife’s. “What the blast!” she blurted, as her friend started making wet, inhuman sounds of surprise and pain, and lifted his hands to his gushing face. She snatched up the big knife, started pushing herself to her feet and swinging the machete in one movement. Hanako turned slightly, caught the gang girl’s arm in both hands and gave it an abrupt twist. The machete dropped and a white spear tip of bone jutted from the young woman’s weirdly bent arm. Still holding her wrist in one hand, Hanako switched her right hand to the woman’s howling face. She hooked her fingers into its eye sockets and thumb into its mouth, squeezed her hand into a fist, and tore much of the front of the face off. Hanako then pushed the woman away from her – as eyeless, wide-mouthed and raw red as a freshly damned soul plummeting away into the abyss – and pivoted to confront the third gang member, the boy with the piranha face, who had already launched himself to his feet. Already jerked a pistol out of a pocket on the outer leg of his combat pants.

Hanako had begun stepping toward him when he opened fire, snapping off shot after shot and roaring in terror at the same time. Struck in the torso and neck, her diminutive frame jolting with each impact, Hanako was finally spun to face the opposite direction by the last few hits. Some projectiles had lodged in her, others passed right through her. A few sparks spat from a wound in her midsection, and a wisp of smoke curled out of the bloodless puncture in her neck. Otherwise, it was as neat a hole as her pleasure openings had been, before she’d had them sealed.

But she was still standing, and she swiveled around slowly to face the boy with the gun again.

“What?” he bellowed, backing away from her and fumbling to reload his weapon with a fresh magazine as the tiny woman strode purposefully toward him. “What are you?”

What am I? Hanako thought -- as she reached out for him, and as he slapped the new mag into the hand grip of his gun. What indeed?

HUCK

4

In his dream, Huck had wandered into the Jungle and come to the edge of its little man-made pond. Under its skin of algae he could discern shifting movement, like a restless sleeper tossing and turning under a blanket. Curious but wary, he drew closer, wading into the overgrown weeds there, until his shoes squished in slimy mud. He bent lower, hands on his knees, peering suspiciously at that troubled dreamer within his dream.

A young girl surfaced with a splash, and seized hold of his right arm with a surprisingly powerful grip. He couldn’t make out her features well, for the coating of slime that clung to her, but her dark eyes were intense and unblinking and she seemed to be wearing a white bikini under that second skin of algae. Huck tried to straighten up, to pull away, but the girl – the naiad, the siren – pulled him off balance instead…and he plunged headfirst into the pond. Still gripping his wrist, she kicked her legs and swam down, down, into the seemingly fathomless depths of the small pond – dragging Huck along behind her, his lungs jealously clutching his last living breath.

He awoke with a gasp, as if he’d kicked himself to the surface of a pool, but he cracked his gummy eyes and saw his familiar bedroom around him. Outside its window, he heard the crackle of gunshots, shouting and screams. It wasn’t that far away, and he figured it was what had roused him from his nightmares. From one nightmare to another.

Artificial sunlight streamed in through the window, glaring in his face. He groaned, but was too tired – or masochistic -- to get up and take a pill that would banish his hangover entirely. Instead, he rolled onto his side, shut his eyes to the light and pulled his pillow up over his ear to muffle the gunfire. With his headache, it was as though the gunfight raged inside his own skull.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept, but when next he awoke the intensity of the imitation sunlight had lessened so the day must be on the wane, evening drawing near. There was no more crackling gunfire, no more shouting commotion out there. What had all that been about?

He swung his legs out of bed and sat there on its edge, hands on his knees, staring across at the window as he had stared into the restless waters of the pond. Staring as if into a mirror that showed him a visage he could no longer recognize.

He considered going out…but go where, and to do what? He considered at least making himself a cup of coffee, but was too unmotivated to even rise from the bed and seek out his kitchen to perform that simple task. When the coffee was in his guts, then what would he do to occupy his waking hours?

A shriek from the street below, so sudden and high-pitched it made his hand jerk toward a gun that wasn’t there. At least the cry had finally inspired him to stand, and he shuffled irritably toward the window, shifted its curtain to peer down toward the street nine levels below.

His bedroom window faced onto the sidewalk that ran along one border of the park, its unruly plant life flooding between the bars. A young woman with long blond hair was fleeing along the sidewalk, away from an arm that had reached out to her through the fence’s bars and the dense underbrush. From this distance it appeared to be the slim arm of a woman or a child, and as Huck watched the straining arm suddenly dropped to the sidewalk and lay there, severed. From the rustling underbrush came whooping, hysterical laughter.

“Stupid wankers,” Huck grumbled. Such were the amusements of Punktown. As a boy playing in a vacant lot he’d once found two human hands severed at the wrists, pressed together and bound with wire in an attitude of prayer. Punks playing with a body part didn’t surprise him much. But as he stared at the little limb lying there on the sidewalk like a dead fish, he noted that it appeared devoid of blood…even its torn end. So not a real body part, then? Maybe the limb of a mannequin?

As he continued watching, a human leg emerged from between the bars, small enough to complement the disembodied arm. Its bare sole slapped the sidewalk, perhaps in imitation of dance though its audience had already fled. It was then withdrawn back into the bushes, to another mad burst of laughter.

He was too removed to have seen it clearly, but the leg had appeared pristine, also apparently not bloodied. Had to be a mannequin, then. Or…

Having turned back toward his bed, he squatted and drew a case out from under it. From this case he lifted a black, Kalian-made sniper rifle called a Whistler, and he carried it back to the window, lifted it and cradled its butt against his shoulder. He thumbed on its little magnifying screen and sighted on the arm on the sidewalk. Now he could clearly see that the smooth limb not only wasn’t bloody, but bore no bruising or discolorations from decomposition. From the chopped stump protruded the ends of some tubing and a glinting nub of metal, not bone.

“No,” Huck hissed to himself. “Don’t tell me that’s her.” Her – the little rogue pleasure machine who’d berated him for his rudeness as she’d left the elevator they’d been trapped in together. She was of the right size and coloring. And she was pretty much a mannequin.

A mannequin whose feelings he’d hurt.

Huck shifted the barrel of the Whistler toward the bushes from which the leg had been extended, thumbed filter keys beside the display screen to cancel out the green hues of the leaves. With the clusters of leaves now rendered ghostly and translucent, behind them were revealed some sheets of gray plastic laid on the ground, but whoever had crouched there upon them had already withdrawn and taken the leg along with them. Too bad. Huck had considered giving the prankster some of his own brand of amusement. He lowered the rifle, returned it to its case and nudged this back under the bed with his foot.

He glanced back at the window over his shoulder.

Huck had killed men and women, humans and nonhumans. He’d killed robots, too – members of the rival Nuts gang. He’d once boasted to Phlone that he’d killed half of the alien races Punktown had to offer, and that was a lot, and that his goal was to kill at least one each of the other half before he retired – or died. Ha. They were really the same thing, weren’t they? Retirement and death?

So with his score of kills, the murder of some pint-sized synthetic whore who’d insulted him should hardly matter much to him, should it? He’d done worse, seen worse, and right now worse was happening all over the city. And tomorrow was another day in Punktown.

“Hang up the guns,” Phlone had told him. Huck snorted. Hang up your life, he might as well have said.

Huck let out a long sigh, and a bitter smile formed in the underbrush of his beard. “Ah, why the hell not?” he said, and reached for his clothing draped over the back of a chair.

*     *     *

Evening was descending in Subtown, but regularly spaced lights came on in the park to offer security to lovers and families who hadn’t dared stroll there for a long time. As he entered it, Huck at first felt like he had the park all to himself.

But gradually the sounds of other beings drifted to him – laughter, boisterous conversations – and he went off the paved pathway to follow them. He was a child of the city, unused to stealth in the forest, but he soon gave up trying to lessen the snapping of twigs and rustling of branches. He entered into a field of grass grown taller than himself, and from there passed into a dense growth of tubular stalks with crowns of fronds. He paused for a few moments when he realized these clear tubes were filled with some ambery-colored fluid in which were suspended the tiny carcasses of various insect species. How long it would take for these plants to digest their prey he couldn’t guess – these bugs might have been caught minutes or days ago for all he knew. A native species, or something from another world seeded in the park? Maybe even a mutant species? Huck smiled to himself when he noted that even the plants in Punktown were killers.

Pushing on through the stalks, shouldering his way between them, he ultimately came to a circular area where the ground looked scorched black, to prevent cleared tubes from growing anew. Here were gathered fifteen people (his experienced eyes had taken a fast head count); thirteen males and two females. All shirtless, all with the film loop tattoo of the prisoner having his throat cut and his head hacked off. Huck parted the last stalks with his arms as if passing through a stage curtain, and stepped into the clearing. Fifteen heads turned his way.

They looked wary; hands went to the deep pockets of their fatigue pants or machetes lying on the ground beside them. A boy sitting cross-legged retrieved a shotgun he had set down by his knee. A boy who was standing hooked his thumb under the strap of an assault rifle he wore slung over his shoulder. But another boy pointed at Huck, split into a grin, and exclaimed drunkenly, “Hey, I know that guy!”

A kind of hookah served as the nucleus of the gathering, its central clear globe containing gurgling fluid in which a live jellyfish floated. Discarded beer cans and the crumpled wrappings of fast food littered the area. And on the ground not far from the hookah, like another piece of trash, lay a small female torso, nude and without head or limbs. The places where head and limbs had once been attached looked messily hacked, where a tough inner support structure had resisted dismantling. Despite its impressive breasts and the indent of its navel – dark and wrinkled like a closed eye -- the little torso was not human. The fact that it was riddled with bullet holes, none of which leaked blood, further attested to this – though a watery liquid, a lubricant or circulatory fluid as green as sap, had trickled from several of the wounds.

Where the limbs had ended up Huck couldn’t tell, but one standing boy with lowered trousers had impaled a girl’s head on his erect penis. He had been laughing uproariously before Huck entered the clearing, moving the head forward and back along the length of his shaft. Another boy with lowered trousers stood beside him, holding out his hands and wiggling his fingers like a child eager for his turn with a toy. This second boy was in the early stages of addiction to the drug called “fish,” as evidenced by his bulging eyes, fixed grin and most telling, the purple pigmentation of his skeletal body. Huck couldn’t see the face of the detached head, but long black hair hung toward the ground.

The grinning boy exclaimed further, “It’s that drunken bum we talked to, Renaldo!”

One seated figure rose to his feet, and Huck recognized him: maybe twenty, thickset and shortish, with his head shaved bald except for a patch of hair in the shape of a lightning bolt. Renaldo stepped forward, chuckling. “Hey hey, it’s my role model! I didn’t recognize you, man -- you look different today.” The clan’s leader cocked his head, narrowed his eyes. “I know why…it’s because you’re sober.”

“Yeah,” joked another gang member, who held the nozzle of the hose connected to the hookah. “That’s why he’s here – he wants to puff our bender!”

“That’s not what I want,” Huck said in a low, even voice. He motioned toward the torso on the ground. “I came here to get my friend.”

Renaldo glanced toward the pathetic object, then back to Huck with a grin that reflected amusement, surprise, and wariness. The wariness was more in the eyes than the grin. “Your friend?”

“Yes. I want her…and I’ll go.”

“You got an interesting friend, there. She can’t be much fun…she’s got no fuck holes.”

“She does now,” interjected another of the clan, pointing at the wounds that peppered the tiny carcass. “Renaldo, you missed it – Carny was fucking her in one of the bullet holes before!”

“This is all the hole I need,” said the boy holding the long-haired head.

No fuck holes? Huck didn’t want to distract himself by pondering that statement just now.

“Do you know what your friend did today, amigo?” Renaldo asked, his grin twitching at the corners as if its moorings might give way. “She walked into our camp here and tore the faces off two of my friends. I had to shoot them myself to put them out of their misery. Yeah…I buried two of my friends right here in the park today, because of your friend.”

“I’m sure her actions were totally unprovoked.”

“They were!” insisted a mutant with the fang-filled face of a piranha, moving up beside Renaldo. “We didn’t do anything to that bitch – she just came up to us and starting tearing us apart! If I hadn’t emptied two mags in her she would’ve got me, next!”

“Seems like your friend might have blown a circuit or two,” Renaldo said.

“I don’t know anything about all that. All I know is I’m taking her with me.”

Renaldo shook his head in disbelief, just as he had when he’d talked with Huck that first time. “Crazy. Drunk or sober, you’re just as momfuck crazy, aren’t you?” He waved his arm toward the corpse, which looked more like something ready to be placed on a pan and slid into an oven. “Hey, take her – she’s yours.”

Huck hadn’t taken his eyes off Renaldo’s since the gang’s chief had come forward. “Thanks,” he muttered, then turned and walked to the body, bent down and scooped it up in his left arm. Having done so, he turned toward the boy who carried the severed head, held out his hand for it.

“I’m not finished, old man,” the boy protested. He wore his hair in a knotted French braid, and if there was a look Huck disliked more than a lightning bolt shaved on your skull it was a male with his hair knotted in a French braid.

Renaldo walked over to the boy, wrapped his fist in the disembodied head’s long black hair and jerked it off his friend’s jutting penis. “Give me that.”

“Ow!” the boy cried. “Teeth, man!”

Now holding the dangling head, its features still obscured by tangled strands, Renaldo turned around to face Huck again. He advanced a few paces to where someone had jammed the tip of a machete into the carbonized ground, so that it stood upright like a poor man’s Excalibur. In fact, it was more a sword than a machete; Huck recognized it as a replica of a classical Tikkihotto weapon, with a cruel spike jutting out of the pommel.

“Here she is, my crazy friend,” Renaldo said, and in extending the head, he brought its stump down on the spike of that Tikkihotto sword – impaling it like a trophy of war. “come and get it,” he said, gesturing magnanimously.

Huck hesitated a moment, then walked toward the head, his eyes remaining on Renaldo, though peripherally he saw one dark eye glinting through the black curtain of hair, and the head’s slack little mouth. He reached out, lifted the head off the spike, and transferred it to his left hand, holding it by the hair while still cradling the body against his side with his left arm. His right hand remained free.

“Thanks,” he said, and he turned his back to Renaldo slowly.

“Hey,” the gang leader said, when Huck had taken a single step.

Huck froze, but did not turn around.

Renaldo came closer to him. His tone was more menacing than amicable now. “I told you – two of my friends are dead because of your little doll.”

“And now she’s dead,” Huck replied. “I’d say you’re even.”

“Even?” Renaldo took another step nearer. “I said two.”

Huck smiled, his gaze for a moment drifting beyond the bushy tops of the stalks that enclosed the crude camp. From here, he could see the face of his apartment building, partly covered in dark vines. As if to himself, he answered, “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

A half twist of his body and he had the handle of the Tikkihotto sword in his right hand. A little further in his twist and the point of the sword came free of the ground. A full twist, and the sword whooshed through the air, and through the front of Renaldo’s throat. The young man’s eyes bulged, and even his blood seemed stunned in surprise for a moment before it burst down the front of his chest and across his tattoo in a dark waterfall, splashing upon his feet. As Renaldo stumbled backwards, his head tipped far back and came half uncapped from his body. His open neck sucked and wheezed, and then he toppled. But Huck hadn’t waited to see any of this. He had already let go of the sword – and the remnants of the little robot’s body. Instead, both hands were slipping under the flaps of his open leather jacket.

When his guns were out – the Thor .93 in his left hand and the Panzer in his right – he swiveled and fired first at two boys in particular, whose positions he had fixed in his head. Before the boy seated cross-legged could raise his shotgun, he took a double tap of metal projectiles from the Panzer, the combined effect splitting his head down to the nose in a gaping V. The Thor was loaded with gel capsules containing green plasma, the strongest variety, and one of these burst against the forehead of the boy with the assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He started to scream, but it degraded into a sputtering mewl as the top of his head liquefied and collapsed in on itself. Within moments, his entire head had dissolved, like a candle melting in time lapse photography. He was still on his feet for another moment more before finally crumpling to the ground, where the green-glowing blanket of hungry plasma continued to spread down his chest.

Huck whirled with arms extended, firing both pistols simultaneously at the standing gang members first – they being in a better position to draw guns from their trousers, or rush him with their machetes. Spent shell casings spewed from the Panzer’s ejector port, and plasma gel caps raced from the muzzle of the Thor as fast as he could pull the semiautomatic’s trigger -- and there were sixty of the latter in a single magazine. Not that he didn’t have more magazines for both pistols in his pockets. Both handguns possessed an internal silencing feature, so they made no loud reports, but there was noise enough from the gang members as they shouted and bellowed in surprise and rage, and wailed and shrieked as they were hit and died.

The others hadn’t been as fixed in his mind’s sights as had the boys with the shotgun and assault rifle, so he only wounded some of them – but in the case of the plasma, even a hit to the shoulder or leg would prove fatal soon enough as it rapidly advanced like luminous green lava. One of the women lay on her back shrilling and staring down at her own body, or where her own body had once been – it was completely gone below the hips.

Three bullets struck Huck in the back. His leather jacket was torn, but its gel lining absorbed the impacts so that it only felt like someone had slapped him several times with an open hand. Huck spun, fired three quick shots of his own. It was the boy who had been violating the android’s decapitated head. One bullet smashed through his front teeth and came out the back of his neck, sending chunks of vertebrae scattering like a handful of bloody dice. Another bullet, also passing through his mouth, even flicked the tail of his knotted French braid. This caused Huck to laugh wildly. He was still laughing when he snapped his head around to confront a boy who was racing at him with an upraised machete. The boy was only several feet away when Huck shot him in the eye with a gel cap, and then he stepped aside to avoid the boy as he went howling face-first into the ground. The boy managed to get to his knees and bring his hands up to catch the hot, drooling gunk that had been his face, but it only caused his hands to swiftly start dissolving, too. Huck kicked him out of his way, as he continued pivoting and triggering both pistols.

A boy making a dash for the encircling weeds took one bullet from the Panzer – Huck wasn’t even sure where it hit him, maybe in the spine or through the heart from behind – and instantly plunged onto his belly. He couldn’t be faking death to avoid further injury…not the way his face impacted with the ground. Huck had seen men punched full of holes take a long time to die, had seen men survive even serious head wounds, while others like this kid died before they hit the ground. Died like a light switch had been thrown. It had partly to do with a killer’s skill, but much more to do with the vagaries of bodies and bullets. It was one of the elements of the unexpected that had kept this game intriguing for so long.

A number of the gang members made it successfully into the towering weeds, some wounded and a lucky few unscathed, but others were appearing from the weeds, having been drawn by the sounds of combat. Huck was not surprised, had been expecting this – he had counted fifteen youths in the clearing, but on his last visit to the park had seen more like twice that number. Some of them may have gone home for the night, if they had homes outside the park, but Huck suspected this was not their only camp within the Jungle’s borders.

He shot one kid in the stomach just as he parted the stalks to enter the clearing, and when the boy dropped screaming Huck noted an interesting thing. The boy was writhing and babbling in Spanish from the agony in his guts, but not only that -- he was also shielding his face from sap that poured from some of the stalks, which had been broken by Huck’s bullets. Again, how long it took to break down the body of a submerged insect he couldn’t say, but the plant’s digestive juice had an effect like hydrochloric acid on human skin. Huck began to laugh again. What kind of idiots made their shelter in the middle of a field of plants that bled acid? If it weren’t for their numbers, it wouldn’t be sporting killing them at all. Huck stepped closer to the boy, and instead of shooting him fired the Panzer into the stalks clustered around him. More digestive fluid spilled and spattered, and the kid’s jabbering turned into incomprehensible howls.

Stupid…he’d let his fun distract him…a hammer blow in the back of his right thigh, followed quickly by a deep hot pain, and he knew that a bullet had pierced him. He turned and crouched at the same time, but several more solid projectiles smacked him in the right side of the chest, and although his jacket’s gel padding protected him it was just enough of a push to send him onto his back. So not all these kids were totally dumb after all – one of them, at least, had been smart enough to hide in the tall weeds and shoot at him from there. As the shooter adjusted his aim to follow Huck to the ground, the hookah was hit and shattered.

Huck had fallen beside the boy with the assault rifle, but now all that remained of him was a puddle of liquefied matter and two legs melted down to the calves. Huck dropped his Thor, reached to the assault rifle and dragged it to him. It was a nice model, actually, a coilgun using electromagnetic acceleration to fire ferromagnetic bullets at a high rate without the need for explosive cartridges. It had an automatic feature, and this was what Huck used as he opened fire toward the concealed shooter. Several more shots from the weeds kicked up dirt near Huck’s head, and he squinted and averted his face but depressed the coilgun’s trigger and strafed it back and forth blindly. The gun hummed, without recoil, fed magnetic bullets from a big box magazine. Huck cut down the weeds all around the shooter, and cut down the shooter, too.

He rose to his feet, grimacing at the burning in his leg. Leveling the assault rifle from his hip, he once again turned in a circle -- firing around the perimeter of the clearing until the box magazine ran empty. He stopped just short of strafing the complete border of the clearing.

Huck discarded the coilgun and retrieved the Thor, but he tucked this back in its holster and instead walked over to the boy who’d been sitting cross-legged, helping himself to the fallen shotgun. A primitive but classic pump model. He lifted it, racked the slide to feed in the first shell, then took a quick survey of the clearing.

Ten dead bodies, and probably a few more in the weeds. Two kids were badly wounded and moaning. Huck walked to one, and then the other, and discharged the shotgun at their heads at point-blank range. Between killing the two of them he passed beside the shattered hookah and noticed the freed jellyfish pulsing in a pool of fluid. He experienced a marginal stirring of sympathy that he hadn’t felt for the wounded boys, and squished the creature under his foot to put it out of its suffering.

Twelve dead bodies now, a few more in the weeds -- and Huck remembered Renaldo saying he himself had had to kill two that the girl had maimed. Some wounded escapees, maybe some kids at home or out on the streets, but there might still be a dozen or more gang members out there in the Jungle somewhere.

Huck limped to that small section of weeds he hadn’t strafed with the coilgun – safely free of dripping acid – and pushed his way into them. So, hide and go seek, was it? Kids will be kids.

An afterthought, overlooked in all the gunplay and pain: Huck glanced back over his shoulder and saw the dismembered remnants of the android’s body there amidst the carnage. He considered going back for at least the head, but to do what with it? There was nothing he could do for his little “friend” now. That is, other than continue with what he had started.

*     *     *

Not far from the clearing – but past the growth of acid-filled stalks – Huck came upon several swing sets and slides, and a large jungle gym, all of which were so encased in vines and lost in bushes that he didn’t realize they were there until he started to trip over a leg of the jungle gym. The jolt to his leg caused him to wince and lean against the metal framework for support. Lucky for him the bullet hadn’t exited, or it might have severed his femoral artery and he’d have bled out in minutes. As it was, though, he was still bleeding heavily: his right shoe was filled, his sock soaked. He had briefly considered bringing some medicated adhesive patches to seal wounds and numb pain -- but had decided not to bother.

Rustling bushes on the other side of the trellis that was the jungle gym.  Huck sank down to hands and knees, and pushed his head through the underbrush, crawled between the jungle gym’s supports like a child at play. A little further, and he was inside the metal structure, which was like the framework of a primitive house. But he wasn’t the first to have considered using the climbing frame as shelter: the bushes had been cleared from its center, a thick plastic tarp laid down. The inevitable trash was strewn around, plus a soggy pair of men’s underwear. Huck waited here, listening as the rustling grew closer, and along with it urgent whispered voices.

Peering intently through the leaves, in elusive fragments he glimpsed a pair of dark figures passing the jungle gym. A mother walking with her child? Two boys come to play catch? Not in this park, unless they were strangers to Punktown. With no further need for identification, Huck lifted the shotgun and fired two jolting blasts. Short cries of surprise, bodies crashing to the ground, and then he was scrambling out from his little tribal hut and forcing himself fast to his feet despite the pain in his leg. Two boys with film loop tattoos, of course, one stone dead and the other flailing in the leaves and yelping and whimpering like a panic-stricken dog. When he saw Huck loom up over him the boy tried to raise his pistol, but one ball of buckshot had shattered his elbow. Huck leaned over him, blew his head apart, and then loped away down the overgrown and nearly obscured paved path the gang kids had been taking when they’d come to investigate the sounds of battle – though Huck traveled in the opposite direction.

He’d only covered several yards when a red spear of light sizzled the air by his head; he actually saw it burn a hole through a leaf the size of a dinner plate on a bush that overhung the walkway. He wheeled around, just as two more streaking red bolts contacted him in the arm and shoulder. They seemed to disappear into his body, but in fact his jacket’s protective lining had shielded him once again. Someone had leaned out from behind a tree, pointing a ray blaster. It was a tall black kid Huck remembered from the clearing, a mutant with just one eye: a shocking white orb like a cue ball jammed in the center of his forehead. One of those who’d escaped the massacre unharmed.

Huck was triggering the shotgun the moment he turned -- two jarring booms. The magazine extension under the gun’s barrel had held seven shells, and now the gun clicked empty. Huck dropped it and drew his pistols again, but he saw that the boy had fallen, sobbing as he rolled in the grass cupping his face in one hand. The shotgun blasts, as it turned out, hadn’t struck the boy fatally -- one had simply gouged up the tree he’d hidden behind, while the other had made a tattered rag out of his gun hand. Not only that, though; the ray blaster had been damaged by the buckshot, and a shard of metal had punctured the mutant’s single eye. Realizing this as he came closer, Huck told the kid, “You see, this is what we artists call a ‘happy accident.’” He then drilled two rounds from the Panzer into the mutant’s heart, through the body of the man being executed in his tattoo. The boy quit moving, though the tattoo went on playing its grisly film loop…as though the man in the chair were Prometheus tied to his rock, having his liver torn out by an eagle only to have it regenerate to be eaten again, and again. Huck supposed his suffering would end only when the electrical impulses of the boy’s body ceased altogether, cutting the tattoo’s power source.

As Huck continued, setting out to further explore the Jungle, another path joined the one he was on. Along it, oblivious to him, a person – presumably a male – crawled on hands and knees with agonizing slowness, leaving a swath of blood behind. The flesh was sloughing away from the individual like meat from the bones of a boiled chicken, and at first Huck thought the person might have been spattered with plasma, but then understood it was acid from the bug-catching stalks – no doubt one of those gang kids who had fled into the weeds, but hadn’t gotten far enough when Huck started spraying the coilgun. The crawling burn victim remained unaware of Huck even when he walked right up and put a bullet through the crown of the hairless, peeling head.

He hadn’t even broken stride when he’d shot the acid-burned kid, walked right on past the body along the main path. Ahead, through a fringe of coniferous trees, he could see the area opened up in a much larger clearing than the camp where he’d killed Renaldo – this spot having been planned as such by the park’s designers, perhaps to serve as a playing field. Huck passed through its border of trees, strode crookedly toward its center. It was quite an open field, this species of grass not grown as wild as the grass in other parts of the park, tramped down yellowish-brown and mostly dead instead. To Huck, the field had the feel of an arena.

At the very center of the field he stopped, and exchanged the handguns’ magazines for fresh ones. He zipped up the front of his jacket – though he hated to wear it that way, since it made him feel too stiff. Then, his arms hanging by his sides, guns in both hands, his leg throbbing with a molten ache but still supporting him, he stood there in the wide circular arena…and waited.

He might have fired his guns in the air, had they not been silenced. Instead he shouted once, “Come on! I haven’t got all day!”

He heard a dog barking somewhere, maybe a feral one living in the Jungle. Above him, he felt the weight of the high solid ceiling of this great sepulcher dubbed Subtown. He watched helicars in the distance, flying above the level of the park’s trees like scavenging sea birds over the vast rotten carcass that was Punktown. And over there he could see his apartment building, his own windows on its top floor. Was a lingering vestige of himself, a trace of him like a ghost, standing at a window even now, watching him and waiting, too? As perhaps a part of him had watched and waited for this day for several decades now?

The dog wouldn’t stop barking. Mad-Dog Huck, his boss Wild Bill would jokingly call him. He smiled. Yeah, sure. And a mad dog didn’t go out lying on a porch getting gray in the muzzle and milky-eyed. A mad dog went out biting.

Then, the bullets started coming. He was far enough from the ring of trees hemming the field that the first ones – directed from his right -- missed, but he felt impacts across his upper back from another shooter behind him. As he whipped around, firing toward both shooters at once, a projectile from a third direction smashed him on the jaw. His mind blacked, though his hands kept firing as if running on their own programs. He shot toward the hidden shooters specifically, but kept turning dizzily, turning, firing, and the green plasma from the Thor – plasma which in its brief flickering life fed on any matter, not only human flesh and bone – seemed to catch the ring of evergreen trees on fire. The green, phosphorescent substance spread rapidly, until branches flared with an unearthly light before turning into a dripping, raining fall of plasma. The shooters gathered around the perimeter of the field, holding back amongst those trees, began screaming in a terrible banshee chorus. Huck continued turning, firing the plasma, and firing solid missiles into that green-lit inferno as well, until – his dizziness overcoming him – he dropped onto his side.

One kid who had been hiding amongst the trees stumbled out into the field, waving arms that had already tapered to stubs near the elbows, his ribs showing through his chest. Lying on his side, Huck reached out almost casually and shot at him with the Panzer, but missed. After a few more steps the kid fell onto his face anyway.

Bits of grass, dirt and pebbles jetted up from the ground in a marching eruption, accompanied by the chatter of automatic fire. The line of bullets stitched toward Huck, then over his body without penetrating. A short, badly overweight young man with question marks tattooed all over his shaved head and face came roaring out of the phantasmal, glowing and melting trees like a berserker, extending a machine pistol with a banana magazine. Drops of plasma were opening small craters all over him, and spreading to join each other in larger craters. Even as he charged at Huck, his nose caved in and joined his mouth to make one huge orifice. He couldn’t sustain his charge after that, plunged onto his belly, but in doing so squeezed off one last burst of rounds. One of these struck Huck’s left hand, and he let go of the Thor .93. The fat boy lay twitching on his face, while Huck pulled his knees under him, and used his right fist with the Panzer in it to push himself to his feet. Once standing, he tucked the Panzer into its holster, tottered toward the dying youth, and with a grunt of agony bent down to pry the machine pistol out of the kid’s sausage-like fingers. The gun was hard plastic, clear with a smoke gray tint, like a toy. But it was fully automatic, and it had that long curved magazine.

Then, like a sleepwalker, Huck began staggering from the center of the field, toward one area of the surrounding trees where the plasma hadn’t turned the trees molten or had already exhausted itself. He was so focused on this spot, shadowed dark like a doorway, that he didn’t hear the boy racing at him from behind, swinging a machete. The blow was aimed at the center of his head yet missed by a fraction, deflecting off the curved edge of his skull but taking his right ear off before the blade was stopped by the leather jacket across Huck’s shoulder. Without taking the time to turn around just yet, Huck bent his arm back and fired the machine pistol upside down over the same shoulder, one short burst. Only then did he turn, almost losing his balance again, saw a Tikkihotto boy lying on the ground with several holes in his body, and gave him several more. Then, he resumed his dragging march toward that shadowed corridor of trees.

Shots cracking behind him, bullets snapping branches and red ray bolts hissing through leaves, but Huck put a little speed into his loping flight and made it back into the forest. Pursuing shouts, forces consolidating, but how many left? Maybe six, he figured, eight tops if none of the gang were outside of the Jungle -- but of those, how many were unharmed enough to still engage him?

He crashed through the riotous shrubbery between the trunks, across a bed of needles red like a carpet of drying blood, feeling his own blood pulse down the side of his neck and under his collar from the wound where his ear had been. His smashed hand he’d stuffed into the pocket of his jacket. Blood was flowing down his throat from the hole in his jaw, and he couldn’t help swallowing it. He gagged, fell against a trunk to vomit blood between his feet until the last retch brought up only phantom glass shards that raked his throat, then pushed himself away from the tree to resume moving…and resumed swallowing his blood. That would be poetic, he thought, wouldn’t it – death by drowning in his own blood?

The miniature forest opened up yet again, and he found himself facing a broad walkway. On the other side of it was the park’s man-made pond, and near that a large gazebo that had been meant as a bandstand for live music. Instead it was thick with graffiti and overgrown with leafy tendrils so that it was largely enclosed. Huck considered finding shelter within it, or maybe he could crawl beneath it, and ambush the remaining gang kids when they appeared. Maybe he could even close his eyes for a while under there…rest…just for a short while…

No. No. His legs urged him mechanically toward some other destination…but as he turned away to skirt the edge of the pond, out of the tail of his eye he caught a metallic glimmer inside the leafy tendrils woven about the gazebo.

The machine pistol leapt up, instincts responding despite their agonizing distractions, and the plastic gun clattered as Huck hosed the gazebo with slugs, back and forth with even strokes as if spray painting it from afar. Wood chips flew, leafy tendrils were shredded, and as the gazebo’s obscuring growth became reduced three figures could be glimpsed inside briefly before they dropped. Huck followed them to the floor of the gazebo until the gun’s long banana mag ran out. He then tossed the gun, drew his Panzer once more, lingered a moment to see if any of the figures stirred. He thought they might be wounded escapees from the opening massacre, who had regrouped here to wait things out, or maybe they had been healthy gangers waiting for him to come closer before they sprang a surprise. Well, they weren’t healthy now. There was no stirring, and Huck continued along the rim of the stagnant pool.

He glanced down to his left at the water, and in an open patch in its thick layer of bright green scum he saw a submerged face gazing back at him. His heart convulsed, as he expected a hidden shooter to burst to the surface then and open up on him. Or were those the eyes of the mysterious naiad he had dreamed of? He had brought his gun up, pointed it at the face, and was about to fire when he realized it was his own reflection.

There was gunfire then, but it came from another – behind him. Wild, frantic shots…poorly aimed…yet one slug clapped him in the right buttock, exiting through his groin, while another bored into the calf of his good leg. Now with both legs compromised, Huck lost his balance in the middle of turning to face his attacker, and fell backwards into the marshy weeds at the very border of the pond.

Water splashed in his face, and he spluttered, tried to sit up but found that the effort crucified him to the ground with countless spikes of pain. Falling onto his back again, his head resting in mud and slime, Huck stared up at the solid ceiling of Subtown high above him. He lifted his gun then – he could do that at least – and fired it at the network of pipelines and conduits, the bundles of sheathed power cables, one of the overhead lamps that in the day would cast bright artificial sunlight but which had dimmed for the evening. His bullets might have found the lamp’s covering yet did not shatter it, did not rupture any pipeline, but he imagined the projectiles punching through the ceiling, and rocketing into the city of Punktown itself above him. Smashing windows, shooting down helicars from the sky to crash into the sides of buildings in balls of fire. He jerked the trigger again and again until the Panzer, and his arm, grew too heavy to uphold any longer and both splashed into the rancid water.

Huck stared straight up, panting between swallows of his blood…and waiting. He didn’t have to wait long before he heard urgent, whispered voices. One voice hissed, “Don’t go near him, man – he’s playing dead!”

“I’m not playing,” Huck croaked, though he wasn’t sure they heard him.

Then without having to lift his head, he saw three figures leaning over him warily, silhouetted against the lamp glow. Two had guns trained on him. One of these was a boy with a row of implanted metal spikes running across the top of his hairless head like a Mohawk haircut. The other was a mutant with the razor-jawed face of a piranha. Accompanying them, without an apparent weapon, was a boy plainly addicted to the drug called fish, his withered skin already turning dark purple. Under one arm, like a soccer ball, this youth carried a disembodied head with long black hair.

“Well well, look at you,” the boy with the spiked crest snarled. “Not so tough anymore, huh, you momfuck psycho?”

“Hi, friend, hiii!” the fish addict squealed in a falsetto, holding the head up for Huck to see and nodding it like it was speaking. A marionette missing the rest of its body.

The mutant turned to the fish addict and jutted his chin toward the android’s severed head. “Why the blast are you still carrying that, you crazy fudger?”

“Two reasons. A – this fucker wanted it so bad, but we’ve still got it…that means we win! And B – she gives the best head I’ve ever had.”

The mutant pretended he was going to backhand his friend with his pistol. “The only head you’ve ever had.”

Ignoring their exchange, the spiked boy hadn’t taken his eyes or his gun off Huck. He demanded, “What is it with you? What did we do to you to deserve all this?”

Huck rasped, “You don’t deserve to live any more than I do.”

“You got that last part right, you crazy –”

Up from the water splashed the Panzer, and the fish addict said, “Hey!”

The Panzer’s muzzle flashed, at the same time the spike-headed boy’s gun barked once -- and in one of those unintentional acts of artistry that Huck would have appreciated, their bullets passed each other in flight and both men were struck precisely in the center of the forehead.

HANAKO

5

“Here, eat some of my candy,” she heard one voice whisper.

“I don’t want that…I want my fish,” another voice whined childishly.

“Shh! You’ll just have to wait for that, you fudging junkie – the forcers are probably still combing the Jungle!”

Hanako’s vision returned after her hearing did. It had been this way; sometimes she heard but didn’t see, sometimes she saw but didn’t hear, sometimes she regained both senses together or else lost them both for unknown gaps of time.

She found she was lying on her cheek, her head pillowed on her own hair, and a large sheet of gray plastic under her. Not far from her, two people sat on another flat piece of plastic. Several of these sheets, probably from a construction site, had been laid down on the trampled grass here, inside a cave-like nook formed from thick vegetation. The two people were a young mutant with a fish-like face – whom she recalled as having shot her many times -- and a scrawny purple-skinned boy whose film loop tattoo was distorted by the wasted boniness of his chest.

“Are you sure they took Viktor, Igor and Alex?” the purple boy asked.

“I saw it myself! Stupid fucks came strolling into the park, right into the forcers’ arms!”

“They must not’ve known what happened here.”

“What, they didn’t hear the gunfire? Half of Subtown must’ve heard it!”

“Then we’re the only two left, aren’t we?” the purple boy said.

“Looks that way, unless they let the others go…but we can’t wait around for that. We’ll lie low until I see the coast is clear, then we’ll get out of here – probably in the morning. We’ll be easy pickings for our enemies if we don’t. The forcers I’m not worried about…they’ll wrap up quick and all will be forgotten. You think they care a whole bunch of gangers got snuffed tonight? They’ll throw a blasting party!”

Hanako’s consciousness blanked for a time after that. When her awareness sputtered back, and her senses with it, she found she was resting upright on her neck stump. She didn’t want to know why she had been repositioned, what had transpired since last overhearing the conversation of the two youths; maybe, she considered, she had even shut down her awareness purposely but now couldn’t recall having done so. Whatever further indignities she might have endured, and had yet to endure, she couldn’t even blink, let alone bite, and she regretted that immobility.

From this angle she could see the purple boy had crawled into the bushes, his back to her, parting branches with his arms to reveal the bars of the fence that surrounded the park. Over his shoulder he giggled to his friend, “I see two little bitchies coming – let’s scare them with the head!”

“Don’t be stupid, fudger! Get back over here before they see you!”

“You thought it was funny with her arms and legs.”

“That was before the forcers came to the Jungle!” the mutant hissed. “I said get back over here! We’re supposed to be lying low, drooler!”

The purple boy sighed heavily like a petulant child, turned around and seemed to meet Hanako’s eyes. He looked unsettled for a moment, almost surprised – as if he had caught a glimmer of her continued sentience – but he broke the contact and stretched out on his side on one of the plastic sheets. The mutant was already reclining, wearing only his boxer shorts and using his rolled up fatigue trousers as a pillow.

Hanako watched them for a long time, but her thoughts had turned to the man who had killed nearly all of their friends – except, apparently, for three the law had picked up. In the clearing where he had begun fighting them – the clearing where she had fought several of them – she had recognized him as the man with whom she had been trapped in the elevator.

Surely he must have had some criminally-oriented quarrel with them, perhaps over drugs. But then, she had heard him claim her as a friend…and he had even carried her head and torso briefly, as if to take her with him, before the fighting had commenced. In the elevator he had explained that he had once been a bouncer at an android brothel, maybe even the very one she had escaped from. Might he have intended to return her? But why? Her body was ruined beyond repair, and her mind tainted by all those upgrades. Only to report her fate to her former owners, then? But why risk his life antagonizing a large group of dangerous gangers for such a thing?

Perhaps, she considered, he had simply been insane.

And where was he now? She hadn’t heard the youths discuss his fate…had been unhearing or unconscious and missed it, if they had. And so, she was left with these mysteries about him. She knew only one thing: that she was not displeased at what he had done here in the Jungle.

The purple boy began snoring, and Hanako returned her attention to the two youths, realized they had been quiet for some time. Both had drifted to sleep.

Her consciousness did not blank again, though it felt that way as several silent hours passed. The sound of traffic passing in the street beyond the fence, and reverberating hollowly against the ceiling throughout Subtown as a whole, was a subliminal susurration like an ocean surf.

But then there came a more immediate rustling, though very soft and stealthy…perhaps mice or some other vermin stealing through the underbrush. The sound became a little more pronounced, if never loud, and persisted. Hanako watched the surrounding bushes, within her range of vision at least, expectedly. Eventually her observation was rewarded.

With insinuating slowness, a number of leafy tendrils wove their way through the surrounding flora…darker than the surrounding flora…a dark purple hue. The purple vines inched along the ground, their progress seeming unhurried unless one considered the normal rate of growth for most plants. More of these vines with their metallic purple leaves followed, slinking up and over obstacles. They crawled or slunk like the long bodies of insects, centipedes perhaps, or the tentacles of some large creature unseen as a whole. Their advance was deliberate but patient, and Hanako was patient too as she watched.

The vines coiled gently around the ankles and legs of the fish-faced mutant and the purple boy. Twisted so lightly around their wrists and arms…crossed their bare chests so delicately that the mutant only brushed at his skin briefly, as if flicking away a tickling ant, and grumbled a little. The purple vines continued twining around the two gang members, until they encircled both boys’ necks.

The mutant boy’s saucer-like fish eyes bore no eyelids, and so he had slept with his eyes open, but if he had possessed lids they would have snapped open in startled confusion as the vines suddenly, visibly tightened around him. Bound his limbs, restrained his torso, and constricted across his throat. At the same time, the vines squeezed the purple boy, too, like the coils of a huge jungle serpent.

The two of them tried to thrash, tried to cry out, but more vines came…much more quickly this time…to fortify the hold of the first lest the boys snap them and break free. Ropy tendrils wound around their heads, across their eyes like blindfolds, across their mouths like gags. The young men were being cocooned.

The writhing cocoons grew less human-like in form, went from resembling men struggling in straitjackets to squirming larva-like creatures. But eventually, the larvae stopped squirming and lay inert. Eventually, not even the most muted, muffled sound came from within them. As they became still, so did the purple vines go still as well.

Then, as Hanako went on silently observing, an insect-like creature crawled up over the top of one of the large chrysalises, just as purple and glossy as the tendrils’ leaves, a ring of soft spines around its base wavering like cilia. It was not an insect, however, as Hanako knew. The end of a vine – or the beginning of the very first vine – was tethered to the purple bulb…and as it crawled down the other side of the chrysalis and to the ground, this tether was stretched taut. With an inaudible twang, the tether snapped free. Now unmoored, the egg-like bulb continued crawling, past Hanako and back into the forest from which the vines had come. Within a minute, it had disappeared, and Hanako heard no further rustlings from it.

Had it only been her imagination that, while it had briefly perched atop one of the encased bodies, the bulb had paused to regard her in turn? Ah, but it was a human trait to anthropomorphize things. Things such as plants and machines.

Inasmuch as it was possible that the Jungle, and Punktown, could sleep – they slept.

Hanako didn’t know how long it would be before her system shut down entirely. An hour, a month, a year? If an extended measure of time, she didn’t mind. Her only real ambition had been to make her existence as comfortable as possible, and this was a quiet place, a peaceful place -- like a secret garden.

About the Author

JEFFREY THOMAS’s other books set within his world of Punktown include the novels DEADSTOCK (finalist for the John W. Campbell Award), BLUE WAR, HEALTH AGENT, EVERYBODY SCREAM! and MONSTROCITY (finalist for the Bram Stoker Award), and the short story collections PUNKTOWN, VOICES FROM PUNKTOWN and PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY (coauthored with Scott Thomas). His Punktown stories have been translated into German, Russian, Polish and Greek editions, and Miskatonic River Press has created a role-playing game based on the Punktown universe. Thomas lives in Massachusetts.

Dark Regions Press

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Table of Contents

- Introduction: A Taste of Punktown
- In His Sights
- Relics
- A Semblance of Life
- Bitter Brains
- Disfigured
- Imp
- The Room
- Into My Arms
- Life Work