Slaughtermatic. Steve Aylett
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to sweat. Though based on Beerlight, the Mall was entirely lacking in detail, which he had to patch in on the run. When they reached the bank, he superimposed the sim he’d created for the heist rehearsal, including demographic glyphs for bank personnel. Beyond this he was newted for ideas and, figuring the cops were here about the heist anyhow, lassoed the fly-by-wire in Rosa’s jetfoil, bringing her in. ‘So it’s hacker shit,’ she said now, having heard the sob story. ‘Freedom in cyberspace’d be fine and dandy if we happened to live there.’
‘Don’t speak ill of the drip-fed,’ said Download, trying to be forceful through a snot-cemented nose. ‘Some of the all-time headmen are inside. Babyface Terrier. Billy Panacea.’
‘We’re on itchy ground here, Chief,’ said the little cop in the sphere.
‘Billy who?’ asked Rosa, looking for a real steamer. She was sick of fair guns and metabolics - Download’s Glock was irreversibly modified for mood amendment. Glancing in a cupboard, she found a microwave pistol jerrybuilt from a cell phone.
‘Burglar extraordinaire. Burgled up a storm a decade ago.’
Rosa found a wedge of six-hour ego patches and applied two, stuffing the rest in her jacket. ‘Listen Jones, I misjudged you - you’re not dishonest, just stupid. I brought the wrong kinda gun.’
‘Count your blessed chickens, Rosa - I nearly flipped my fang when the prefabs burst in.’ As well as the handbuzzers surgically implanted under his palmskin, Jones had a toggle under the first right premolar of his upper jaw linked to a scatterat bomb in his chest. ‘I could have come to a forensically sticky end.’
‘But our concrete actions are unequal to the ideas we hold,’ yelled the big cop.
‘How ’bout them?’ asked Rosa. ‘They come here clean?’ She patted down the nightmaring cops and pulled a Beretta 9mm off the small guy. She slotted the snub into the Approach holster. ‘These clenchers musta heard about the heist on the way in here - they wouldn’ta got to the scene in time anyway, and meanwhile thanks to you Danny’s waitin’ for the pick-up. It’ll be no bed o’ cherries on that roof.’
‘Somethin’ the nature o’ which I may dimly comprehend in the fullness o’ time,’ called the big cop, and the crimewires sniggered despite each other. Download’s face, which usually looked as if it had been thrown together in the dark, was fleetingly natural.
A clank of the monroe grill warned of the brotherhood’s approach, and Rosa drew the snub in time to break four cops like paintbombs against a wall. There was a rear exit and Rosa took it as shots burst off and Download shielded his machinery. Pursued through an underground garage and on to the street, Rosa pelted across traffic into blur-stains of exhaust and neon. Male cops were taught it was okay to shoot a woman in the back, but most still considered this too much of a commitment.
Blince scuttled down a blank reproduction of Scanner Street. Luminescent steam rose from the gratings like a wraith, flickered out, then repeated in an identical pattern. Sodium lights bleached the skullfront of what should have been Britomart and the Vein Arcade. The pagoda roof of Otomo’s Needle Bar was like a crude white plastercast. Blince slowed with a cancering apprehension. He felt as welcome here as a dog at a dance marathon. Did dogs really need eyebrows? He thought. Didn’t those mothers know when to quit?
A low thrumming filled the non-air above his head. The street held on to the walls as if a bomb was going to drop. A giant bug was whirring out of the digital sky. Blince made a face and began to run for the mouth of an alley, covered by a flitting halftone shadow. Crashing through clean trash, he looked back - a towering chrome grasshopper with hydraulic rodlegs came to rest outside the alley opening and lowered a head like a jack-o’-lantern, peering in at him with a solar eye of poured steel. A headcap flipped and sprung a rotary cannon full of ammo and surprises.
Blince saw diversity as a disease and never embraced it. He took one swatch at the mischief engine’s jeweled thorax and raised his Colt. ‘I’m Chief Henry Blince. My soul magnifies the law. I’m arrestin’ you for incitin’ somethin’ the nature o’ which I may dimly comprehend in the fullness o’ time.’
The Demograph blooped like a mudbubble - didn’t have a setting for insects.
An alternator winked in the armour face.
The bug was an inmate who’d changed her identity code, a hack to get her through the day. And she couldn’t believe her luck. Ten years ago she’d been falsely convicted on Blince’s word. Imprisoned by a maze of irrefutable conjecture, she’d come to believe that the trials of this and the actual world were rooted in the delay of Blince’s death. If this delay were foreshortened or eliminated, the way forward would be crystal clear.
Blince watched the texture-mapped machine’s lung inflate and shrivel like a surgical bladder, its gunsighter ranging like the pupil of an eye, the head lock in. His mind too stunned to connect, he saw the cannonfire leap and was instantly looking at Download’s cop-filled basement, the afterimage of doom blooming on his retina. A geek in jestware was being worked over with a cable hook. The cavalry had arrived.
Eyephones hung off Blince’s face like novelty eyes on springs. The enhancer drug cleared like a nightmare as he reached repeatedly for a gun which didn’t exist. Here in actuality there was no such thing as a demographic firearm - the nearest equivalent was the Nafta gun, which killed Mexicans first. As Benny would learn and Blince would never let himself discover, the panicking Jones had armed the cops with copies of the first gun he’d blundered upon in the Mall layout - a virus created by an inmate.
The responsible party was Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire, and back in the Mall he stood atop a virtual building spectating the sad frustration of the bug. It was clawing into the alley mouth like a cat at a rat hole.
When the Blince and Benny borgs popped into the Mall it was the first time in four years Panacea had glimpsed the true enemy. He sat down, turned to the ersatz sky and knew that, in a honeycomb bunker somewhere, his real eyes wept at the hours and years wasted circumventing the interference of the law.
5 IT OCCURRED
It occurred to Dante that midnight in the Mall might not coincide with midnight in the outer world. Waiting had proved nothing. Disarmed by an enormous sense of unreality, he felt more and more complacent about their position. He gazed out of the window, his thoughts dispersing harmlessly. Am I under the influence? he wondered. He’d once seen a wave weapon in action. During a little riot in McKenna Square, a cop flung a crucifixion bomb, which skittered into the plaza. A hemisonic flux affecting the guilt centres of the brain converted the entire crowd to Catholicism. Unable to look each other in the eye, the inhibited mob were fish in a barrel for the brotherhood, who slaughtered them before they could lapse.
The cops on Deal Street seemed inert and bored. A few fired at the entrance and bank front, and someone returned a little. Couple of carshells burned. A mail truck, leadlined against electro-radiation, lay on its roof and smouldered like charcoal. There was a snack stand and situation van.
Dante turned back to watch Corey the Teller reason with the Kid. Trying to buck his ideas up, she was inadvertently undermining the cowardice, laziness and force of habit that had kept his wrists closed for years.
An escaped braincut subject, the Kid was neurally bonded to his gun. When he pressurized the trigger he got an instant flash of his victim’s eye-view and the barrel of his own firearm. Several convicts had been given the Kafkacell implant experimentally, but rather than inhibit firing it sent them on a kill frenzy, their only motive a repeatedly frustrated urge to self-destruction. The Kid also found it improved his aim.
The heist was mining a rich seam of gloom in the Kid. Lacking the perversity so pivotal to the present headcrime, he was racing to waste. Looking as sad and creepy as a pickled alien, he whispered he’d give a medal to the man who could loosen the iron grip of his life. Corey, who had boosted eighty thousand smackers from the register in the confusion of the heist, considered him her ticket. She would have berated him anyway in her professional capacity as a stranger. ‘You’d be surprised