Moral Zero (14 page)

No writer or poet could describe the expression on her face. Her eyes as she saw the camera turned off as she died. I will not try. You can imagine and you will fail.
He took away from all he could take at her final moment, at the moment of her dying, her living. In this girl’s eyes, he took more than it is possible for anyone else to take, more than anyone has ever taken from her before in all her years. You could see her soul shred.

This man
, if he could be called that, this thing, was masturbating as he stole the last dream this girl could ever have. As he began to cum, huffing and sweating, his mouth open and his eyes unfocused, I moved fast up behind him and pushed my own knife into his back. I twisted it. He made a strange, racking noise. Not a scream. Shock flooded his body before any pain. His penis died and shrivelled in his hands but continued to pump its diseased load over his stubby fingers. I twisted the knife and asked him if he felt it and I told him it was the world ending. I withdrew my blade and I pulled him back and he looked in my eyes but did not see, and I stabbed him in the heart. I pulled out and blood trickled down to mix with his semen. I smiled at him and I saw something pass across his face, and I knew he knew. He knew that I had taken his dream as he had taken the girl’s. But the chain stopped there. It was the perfect moment of ruining the perfect moment, but this was not my dream. This was not a murder. He had nothing in him that could be murdered. This was a robbery.

Johnny
stopped, and closed his eyes.

Mr White said nothing but closed his eyes also. Red
took a deep breath in and out and seemed weary, as if listening to the anecdote had stolen something from him, and not the people in the story. He finished his drink.

So y
ou’re the same as the man then? said Mr White, his eyes still closed, where Johnny Black’s sudden hard gaze could not penetrate. And still it did, boring through his eyelids.

No.

I think . . . I think I am beginning to understand you.

Y
ou are beginning no such thing.

Mr White let it go, turning to Red as he sl
ightly wobbly got to his feet.

Red held up his hand as if to
hold back any questions. Bar.

In the early hours of
the fourth night Red and White were woken by Johnny kicking in Red’s door. Mr White put on some clothes as fast as he could and ran into Red’s room to see Johnny standing over Red as he sat up naked in bed, mercifully by himself.

The fuck? Red was yelling. The fuck?

Listen Kidd, just listen, commanded Johnny, not looking around as Mr White came up behind him. They all did so. They could hear the familiar buzz of the drones. The sound was thick, as though a pack of them. The noise was close enough as to come from inside the hotel. Echoing along the dank stone corridors.

Get him dressed,
barked Johnny, and Mr White realised he meant him. We have to leave. They’re after us.

A
fter who, I ain’t done nothin.

Between us we just about done it all
. We’re outta here, just get dressed and follow. Leave anything you can’t pick up right now.

Mr White
rushed to help Red, who grumbled but quickly sprang into action as the noise of the drones increased. He shoved his sockless feet in his cowboy boots and Mr White ran back into his own room to gather the essentials and put on his own shoes. He was back in Red’s in thirty seconds. Red had a sleeveless shirt hanging open and his belt was unbuckled. He was throwing bottles and cigarettes and packets of tobacco and sex toys into a plastic bag and Johnny, who was the only one completely dressed, was roaring at him to stop fucking about.

Where did you get all this
? Mr White said hopelessly, watching Red chuck a double ended dildo that looked unwashed into the bag, a sticky and purple ribbed cockhead rising out the top like it wanted a front row seat to the chaos. You never had this when we last jumped ship.

Girls,
muttered Red.

In the end the bag was left
, thanks to Johnny pulling Red through the window after him by the scruff of his shirt. The three of them crawled down the fire escape and were off into the night, Johnny turning them through backstreets of backstreets. Red ran stumbling along, trying to light a hastily plucked cigarette with one hand, the purple dildo waggling in his other.

There were sixteen districts in Rule, and they spread out like a grid, all within walking distance of their neighbours. At the edges of Rule, the edges of the furthermost districts, was a wall so high that even the tallest buildings could not see over it. It could not be scaled, knocked through or tunnelled under. On each of the four sides of Rule there were huge metal doors, guarded 24/7 by a contingent of police. They were opened rarely, and when they were they showed merely an extension of wall, the gatehouse and another set of doors, and before the exterior doors were opened the interior doors were closed fast. No onlookers standing in the area could ever see outside. Whole lives had been lived and lost in Rule, lives that saw the outside more as a myth than anything, if they ever thought of it at all. Something unseen and thus unreal.

If you
were in Rule, then Rule was everything.

Rule was a city unlike any other.
If it could be even called such. Each district, no matter how close it touched its neighbours or how brief its borders, was under its own, local rule. A government of one district had no say in the running of another district, not in its infrastructure, its justice system, its laws, its customs, or its moral code. There seemed little crossover between districts; some values might be mutually shared among certain districts but they were never mutually understood. The borders were kept and controlled, immigration and emigration were permissible, but the only real co-operation between districts was of material transport, the trade of goods. A criminal in one district, should he or she successfully cross the border, was a free citizen in the next, even if he or she had broken a very similar law to what was considered illegal in the new district. There was no extradition. A district would capture and punish its own. The chances were, however, that an escaped criminal from one district would soon be convicted in another, given continuous opportunities to break the law. Even the most evasive of criminals would soon run out of districts.

Crimes considered the most severe were those that befouled some strong moral taboo
within that sector. These were usually sexually related. Common ethics as they applied to all other situations were never applied when sexuality was present. Sex was seen, in every district, as the prime factor to make a case unique, to be dealt under its own terms. Each district had its own idea of what was, plain to put,
wrong,
and the insular, intensely xenophobic nature of each district propagated these ideas as history passed, so that these moral taboos were enshrined in the local system. Sodomy in District Three was as foul and alien a concept to them as use of condoms was to those in District Five.

The districts
might as well be separate states or countries. No-one held authority over Rule in its entirety, there was nothing to command the city en masse. It was if separate countries from across the world, complete with all their cultural, judicial and moral baggage, had been crowbarred together to within minutes walking distance of each other. It was preposterous and yet Rule continued. It did not thrive. For the most part, it was run-down, slums and seediness. The criminal element was high, as was the presence of law enforcement, each force local and protecting only the district itself. Police were known to stop dead at each border, with no jurisdiction beyond.

             
Moving quickly from one district to another made it apparent how specified the laws were. Any country has highly specific laws but, until immediately contrasted with another’s, the distinctions remain vague. Not so in Rule. It was a strange, troubling feeling to move a few steps from one moral paradigm to another, perhaps vastly different. To walk from District Nine where traditional marriage was sanctified and sex outside of marriage not only grossly contemptible but in the upper echelon of illegality, to an area of the polar opposite such as District One, where strong emotional attachments were against the law, was at first disorientating for new visitors to Rule. To go from an age of consent of thirty in District Nine to an age of consent of twelve in District Fourteen, or no age of consent in Thirteen, could be even more alarming. At first. Soon, the spell of Rule bewitched everyone. One of two things happened. Either they identified with and respected certain districts (or just the one) and their moral and legal codes, and vilified others, or, more commonly among visitors, they lost respect for all of Rule’s laws, seeing Rule not as a collection of what should be far-flung states shackled together, but as an absurdity, an illogical mess, where justice and morality became, in its arbitrary intemperance, a joke, a game to be played. A system to be fucked with. Whether one indulged in whatever practices were legal in that district before hopping to the next to try something else, or, for the risk-takers and thrill-seekers, indulging in whatever was illegal, moving to another before they were caught.

             
Breaking the law in Rule was not without considerable risks. The law was not kind. That was something true to every district. The sexual crimes, considered crimes of obscenity, were usually worthy of capital punishment, for perpetrators against such stringent moral taboos were considered inhuman. Torture was sometimes employed, for the perpetrator’s mind, body, and in some cases soul, was such an abhorrence that it had to be cleansed, with all intangible grotesquery removed as if carving or burning out a tumour, even if such a purification involved the deepest of mutilation.

You could not defend yourself in the districts of Rule. There was no jury or trial as others might know it.
Once you were arrested, you were charged, you were done. The local government called your crime and exacted the punishment, which usually ended in death for all but misdemeanours, none of which were sexually-orientated. In a number of districts murder was significantly less atrocious an act than particular sexual transgressions.

The laws of
the districts, especially when contrasted against each other, seemed irrational, nonsensical, just as those of one culture might appear to another halfway round the world. In Districts Four and Fourteen rape (with differing quantifiers) was legal against women, provided it was not vaginal. In District Eight rape of males was legal. District Two allowed for much sexual fetish, including the legality of incest, with its chief laws against vaginal intercourse, and in particular pregnancy. Any woman found to be made pregnant whilst in Two would be killed, her unborn foetus dying inside her. Through DNA matching the father would then be hunted down and also executed.

Other districts held strong claims against anal
or oral intercourse, or allowed for polygamous marriage, or bestiality, or forbade sexual contact with augs, or the practice of BDSM, or were for or against homosexual or heterosexual relations. Six had a zero tolerance policy on any fetish. The conservative Nine had far reaching obscenity laws, with a strict dress code enforced for both sexes, and an early curfew for under twenty-fives. Some districts outlawed prostitution, some economies thrived on it. Thirteen, with its zero age of consent that was a constant source of horror to some of the others, had mandatory contraception and monogamy laws, as well as a regulation penis size (forcibly controlled), and a law (fully open to police interpretation) forbidding the perceived degradation of females. They in turn saw themselves as the stalwart guardians of the otherwise moral turpitude of Rule. Likewise District Five, which had legal incest and yet a tough, no-nonsense law that sex must always be “loving”.

And so on, and so on. It was a melting pot of discordance, a judicial cesspool thriving on
sanctimony and moral inanity. But for those who made, kept, and lived the laws, it was nothing of the sort, at least not in their district.

DISTRICT 8, BAR

They sat and watched as two pubescent teenagers were propositioned by an old couple. The woman held out something they couldn’t see and the teenagers’ eyes lit up. The man extended a hand and touched one of the girls on the shoulder. He blinked slowly under his thick rimmed glasses and took out a handkerchief from his coat and wiped his brow with it. The woman smiled at the two girls and showed them the contents of her hand again.

Do you think they’re legal? Red asked.

I don’t know, said Mr White. Maybe not.

Why do people still wear those things?

What things?

Glasses.

Not everyone has the money for augments, Johnny said. And many just don’t want to fuck with their bodies.

Even in this day and age.

Even in this day and age.

They watched as
the young girls were led away by the couple. There was an insistent pull in the grip, one of the girls faltering but dragged along anyway. She looked a little apprehensive. Her friend looked determined and whispered to her. There was no room for doubt in the world. No halfway points. One must go or not go.

What’s the age of consent here? Mr White asked
more for Kidd Red’s benefit than his own.