Moral Zero (29 page)

Of course, it wasn’t crime if it was by the Elite.
In fact, the word “crime” itself had lost nearly all meaning since the Sixty Years War. With an absence of defined laws, with the free tyranny of the families and the subjugation and commodification of an entire class of people, calling certain acts crimes no longer seemed to make sense. There were things that affected you, and things that didn’t. There was no justice. Even that which you made yourself was not really justice; there was no moral consideration of balancing the world, no real idea that what was done to you was wrong and unforgiveable. They were things that happened, and they all had their common place in the world. There was no justice, only revenge and no regrets.

Few really cared. Not while there were games to play. Better lives to lead.

The City was polished and it was grotesque. It gleamed and it scabbed. Rust flaked and walls moulded while up above the families sat with feet on naked slaves and each looked out a window of a wall at the world of sky.

Johnny hurried through this vile place
of putridity and pomp, not wishing to remain there any longer than necessary. He picked up supplies in the black market and walked quickly away, along narrow streets and walkways and up elevator shafts to ground level. He was about to cross a main road when he stopped.

He
looked across the street and stared. There was a man there walking along, holding hands with an attractive red-haired girl. She was on the other side and he couldn’t see her face. He could see the guy’s though. He watched as the man tousled fingers through messy blond hair. His eyes were bright and good-natured, yet the set of his face and the lean of his back suggested that things were not all that rosy inside.

The man looked a hell of a lot like Kidd Red.

Is it him . . . murmured Johnny to himself. It’d be a fair miracle of a coincidence. That I come to the City now and see him, there, stood out from all the other inhabitants in this huge black hive. But . . . hell they could be twin brothers. The character is usually modelled on the player. Especially a vain bastard like Red.

Johnny lit up a cigarette and kept watching. The couple were halfway along the street now.

You don’t go up to another player who you only knew in-game. It’s for creeps, stalkers and the mad. Those with a vendetta, those who took the game too seriously. You especially don’t go up to one you killed. What would be said? Hey. Hey. You shot me. Yeah, yeah I did.

You just don’t go up to a man you shot
and say howdy. You just don’t. Johnny took another deep drag and as he breathed the fumes in he turned away and walked off, lowering his hat down on his brow and puffing smoke that covered him like trailing clouds.

Kidd Red felt something, some shadow moving in the darkness. He let go of his girlfriend’s hand and looked up with startled eyes, searching. He saw the back of a man in a cluster of men and they all walked the same way and one by one disappeared.

CITY - RED

Kidd Red was in the Hive. He walked the underground streets, drunk, feeling the weight of the drink and all that was overhead lying on him. He felt like some insect in the bowels of the earth, or some mechanical thing not really real, moving between dirt and dust.

Lights flickered around him. The only telling between day and night down there was whether the lights were yellow or blue. Many places, especially those at the lower levels, were perpetually dark. The underclass etched out their lives in shroud. Controlled, harassed and abused by the Elite for as long as any
one could remember, they did their jobs as would a race of subhumans. They did not protest. If they fought back it was a rare, spur of the moment instinct, and others did not come to their aid. They were regularly extracted to be bred, to be raped, to be experimented on, to be tortured and killed, all at the discretion of those richer than them. They were just numbers on paper, soulless to the families and their subordinates who gave out the directives, or who enabled those looking for entertainment and stress-relief to exercise their power. They ran the economy of the City, made the food and fixed the machines and repaired the defence systems and served their masters, and yet they were nothing and knew themselves as nothing more.

Some, born in birthing centres under the
City as mere output of breeding programs, lived their whole lives under the earth. These were the industrial Hivers, those who worked in the factories and plants. Others might work above ground, perhaps fixing and serving the needs of others. They all lived in the Hive. Assistants of any real value were not taken from the underclass, and were far better off for it, living lives in the shadows of their superiors but in relative luxury, luxury in this case being anything above ground. They made money, not much perhaps, but money nonetheless. The underclass did not have wages. The Elite said that they did not need wages. And if they were given money, they did not know what to do with it. They did not understand its use to them. They had no education. No desire beyond the most basic. No comprehension of anything other than basic needs and obedience to the needs of others.

Countless people lived in the depths, never seeing the sun. Their lives were those of the eternally artificial, hollow eyes lit from the glare of artificial lights, eating artificial food so processed and low-grade as to be mere gunge, deliberately designed for the consumption of the underclass as it did not cost them. It was pumped out in thick tubular brown or green pastes and they collected it in bowls or cups or buckets.

Lifetime after lifetime of living down here, the weight of the world on their hunched shoulders, born and bred without natural light or real food, with smoke in their lungs and diseases in their gut. The breeding programs did not take much account for inbreeding – maximum output was the prime directive. Only those with birth defects debilitating enough to hamper their later productivity would be aborted. Those who developed defects later on were left to struggle out the rest of their existence until they died. They were often the sport of the Elite, who were known to take cruel pleasure in tormenting them.

The life expectancy of the underclass was a
very short one. The deeper down you went, the more mutations you saw. The more subhuman they looked, the more subhuman they were treated.

Red stopped by a railing outside a huge grey structure where a man was sitting on the ground. He looked part alien, with a hunchback and a gnarled face half hidden in beard. His age was indeterminable. His clothes were the same dark blue work uniform of most of the factory workers, a badge on the uniform naming him as a tobacco processing operative.

Hey man. Red moved up to him and the man turned and stared at him. You got any smokes?

No, sir.

Red flinched. Don’t call me sir. I’m no sir.

I’m sorry, sir.

Red sighed. Forget it. He trudged off, along the factory streets and past where the great hammers pounded their industry so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. He walked through clouds of smoke and steam and at times his form was only half-seen, or lost entirely. He walked past the chemical plants where they manufactured all the artificial foodstuffs that everybody ate in the City, in all the cities. Pizzas half as good as real pizza. Bread half as good as real bread. All the best quality going to the Elite, of course.

             
Red made his way to an elevator shaft and rode it up through the underground, and then took a short walkway to another and rode it to just below the surface, away from the Hive. He took a shuttle train with other dead-eyed passengers of the night, all clanking bars and rattling lights. He arrived at the minus second floor of the building where he lived and scanned himself in, nodding to the security guards as they stared at him through narrowed eyes, as though he had no right to be there. And he still had further up to go. He had more money than them, much as they might hate to know it. Especially if they knew he’d never even worked for any of it.

             
He took the elevator up to the seventh floor and moved down the richly carpeted corridors and soft lighting to his apartment. He could have afforded to live higher up but he couldn’t stand it. He didn’t want to be a part of
them.

He unlocked the door and opened it and moved to the bedroom where his girlfriend lay in bed. She turned on the small light by the bedside and it lit her lovely face in glow.

              Where were you?

             
Red took off his boots. I was out.

             
It’s late.

             
I know. It ain’t that late.

             
Have you been drinking?

             
A bit.

             
I thought you’d given up drinking yesterday.

             
I had given it up yesterday. This is today.

He took off the rest of his clothes and got into bed.

              Do your teeth.

             
He got out of bed and went to the en-suite while he brushed his teeth. He could see her in the bathroom mirror. She was sitting up a bit and continuing to talk.

             
I don’t see why you have to drink so much.

             
I don’t. He spat and washed his mouth out and looked at his reflection, tired and worn.

             
Most people drink to escape from reality.

             
What’s to escape from.

The next day they ordered a takeaway and watched an old movie and said nothing because there was nothing to say. When it was over Red tried to talk but he didn’t know what to talk about, and so eventually he put on another movie and they sat and watched that.

Two hours later when the credits rolled Red leaned towards her and began to kiss her. He left soft, grazing kisses on her cheeks and then her lips, and slowly increased their strength and so level of emotion he could transmit from him to her through his mouth, receiving the same and more in return, but different. Her kisses were lost in the moment, while his were pointing towards the future.

He moved his hands over her, graceless and without fluidity but trying. A body and mind unsuited to such gentleness. His movements were overly light coupled with small involuntary surges of strength, as though he were some beast worried he could break her if he did not conduct himself with the utmost caution. He stroked the nape of her neck and he tapped his fingers down to her waist and her thigh. She sighed and nuzzled into him and he broke a little inside.

He gave all his attention to the performance, the pantomime. He seduced her slowly, with infinite care. He seduced her like
he did every day, or every other day, or every several days. He kissed her for fifteen minutes and added new acts, old acts to the performance as she fell open to him. He gave himself to her in body but not in mind, not all of it. She was a twisting delicacy to his touch, a quietly writhing rose, and she breathed and moaned softly as he did what he understood to be right. She lay there, moving slightly and obediently to his prompts, pleasured just enough.

H
e nibbled her ear. Her body was warm and he fed on this warmth like it was a conduit to something greater, some burning pit, a roadway to Hell. His mind fell down it and he made rituals with the foulest of succubi. Sluts and whores and demons. The depraved and the eternally wrong. Girls needing comfort and fucking, girls needing abuse and fucking. Girls needing humiliating and fucking. Girls wanting to abuse and humiliate and fuck. Girls needing everything. The dirt of life. The extremity of existence. To feel empowered through sickness and intimate brutality. An overpowering of sex, surfeiting. An injection of life to make them foam at the mouth. To give themselves over to him and he to them. Unions where all humanity and goodness melts away. Where love’s only existence serves the taboo.

Sluts and whores and demons.

I love you. The whisper crawled into his ear.

She was not a slut, she was his girlfriend, and he was making love to her. He softened and had to concentrate harder, see the body parts, see the curves and feel the warmth and
– no, he must retreat, back into his mind, see things in front of his eyes but in new ways, as though he was living in two dimensions at once and connecting them together, overlaying them on top of one another so things could be other than what they were.

I love you too. He spoke quickly, rushed. He empowered the words with the strength of the fantasy, forcing the love to serve the taboo. An incestuous intimacy of glorious nausea, the pantomime of the bedroom. Playing over and over in his head and his head only.

Eventually she orgasmed and a bit later he did too, although to what or who not even he knew.

Was that okay? he asked, moving away from her post-coital clutches and off the be
d, to stand up and wipe his penis and brow with tissue.

You always ask that.

Yeah. I know.

WASTELAND

Johnny felt something was wrong before he was even within three miles of his home. Even before he saw the tire tracks. And the three sets of footprints, hard and heavy where the tire tracks had swerved and turned back in the aftermath. Before he smelled death, heard the buzzing of flies, already thick and eager in this heat.