Psykogeddon

PSYKOGEDDON

JUDGE DREDD

The Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe snatched up an unused fish knife - the fish course having not by this point arrived - and flung herself over the table, her face a snarling rictus of pure animal bloodlust and rage. She grabbed Malish's face with one clawed hand and then wrenched downwards - leaving deep, blood-spraying gouges rather than mere scratches, and bursting one of his eyes.

Then, as Malish hitched in breath to shriek in agony, before he could even bring his hands up to his ruined face, the Lady Tamara plunged the fish knife into his remaining eye, to bury it deep inside the brain.

JUDGE DREDD

#1: DREDD VS DEATH

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#3: BLACK ATLANTIC

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#4: ECLIPSE

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#5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

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#6: THE FINAL CUT

Matthew Smith

#7: SWINE FEVER

Andrew Cartmel

#8: WHITEOUT

James Swallow

#9: PSYKOGEDDON

Dave Stone

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'
To those fine people, who helped me out in an hour of refrigerator need.
'

Judge Dredd created by
John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra
.

Chief Judge Hershey created by
John Wagner & Brian Bolland
.

A 2000 AD PUBLICATION

www.abaddonbooks.com

www.2000adonline.com

1098 7 65 4321

Cover illustration by Clint Langley.

Copyright © 2006 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

All 2000 AD characters and logos © and
^TM
Rebellion A/S."Judge Dredd" is a registered trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-059-4

ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-100-3

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

JUDGE DREDD

PSYKOGEDDON

Dave Stone

Mega-city one, 2127

"
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

- Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn

"The final catastrophe, when it comes, is effectively the result of millions upon millions of discrete events - impacting, interacting and escalating to a gestalt climax that is greater than the sum of its parts.

"Every squalid little assault upon some individual, for some imagined slight or other, and every retaliation by that individual, contributes to a general atmosphere that makes such attack, and counterattack, more and more likely - indeed, inevitable.

"One step leads to the next, then the next and the next... until one suddenly finds oneself a member of the faction herding people into labour camps, and building extra crematoria as a result of the conditions in those camps, and speculatively comparing the size of the ventilation ducts in the showers with a canister of gas. Without ever quite - and this is the crucial factor - understanding how it happened.

"The crucial factor is concerned with how precisely any discrete event impacts on the triggers of its context. The catastrophe happens when it's going to happen, in the same way that it famously steam engines when it's steam engine time. It is the result of millions upon millions of individual and apparently unrelated decisions and interactions.

"It can be imposed upon to the extent that the storm troopers kicking in the shop-fronts are wearing armbands and believe in the World Ice Theory as opposed to the delusions of some other syphilitic lunatic; it can be anticipated and imposed upon to the extent that some particular individual arranges for a sudden ice pick in a competitor... but it cannot be actively or consciously controlled.

"There is no way for a single person to start it. There is nothing a single man can do to stop it. The permutations are just too overwhelmingly innumerable for the human mind, unassisted, to grasp.

"Unless, of course, that human mind has direct access to several others, and together they have access to ultra high-powered computational devices. Some gestalt amalgam of mind and machine..."

- Professor Rupert Gillhooly, FMCRS

Multiple Pathways to Singularity, or, Why Things get so Frankly Buggered

PractiBrantic Press, 2047

Preliminary Information: Recursive Scheming

The dream again; the same dream. Waking cold and slick with sweat, the air pockets rattling through the ducts that wormhole through the Warren, now sounding akin to distant thunder, an explosion behind the wall or chattering teeth directly by the ear. Shadows twisting on the walls; the imagined, half-heard sound of needle-teeth on polythene.

In the dark, the shapes take on a life of their own. The toys one could not care less about - the threadbare, boring lumps of ratty fur and polymer that seem to fade into nothing next to the new bright things bought for your new little sister - seem to watch you with their big eyes, talking in their sawdust heads
(a spoon, and sharpen it and slide it inside. I want to see what's inside and I want...)

You can almost hear the voices, buzzing and tickling inside your head, misshapen and uncrystallised, half-formed pupae crawling over the meat of the brain...

And woke.

For a long while little Robert remained immobile, absolutely still, his mind clicking over like cold clockwork - although "cold" is, perhaps, not the correct expression. It implies some sense of chilly, cerebral calculation and at the age of five, Robert Roberts was simply not that bright.

There was something broken inside of him, or perhaps it had not been present from the start: an emotional dead-zone and a fundamental inability to comprehend a reality outside of him, without the intelligence or force of will to compensate. The world outside him, in some basic emotional sense, was not quite real, and so it didn't count.

The imperfect mind of Robert Roberts ticked and clicked imperfectly over the facts of his life. The fracture in his mind precluded contact and made the giving and receiving of simple human warmth inconceivable to him, even from his mother and father. It was evident in the toys that littered the sleeping cubicle with the chilly untidiness of neglect rather than the innate entropic mess of childhood.

The mother and father of Robert Roberts had brought him toys in the same way that they fed him and tried to make themselves like him; it was something they were supposed to do, and they were damned well going to do it, even if they couldn't find it in themselves to put their whole hearts into it.

The toys, perhaps as overcompensation, were more expensive than those ordinarily given to a five year-old child. They were also pristine and almost utterly untouched. Robert Roberts would pick them up (because for some unconscious reason his parents would wrap them and leave them on the floor rather than
give
them hand to hand - they only touched him when they thought about it consciously), unwrap them, look at them blankly, take them to his cubicle because that seemed to be expected, drop them and never so much as look at them again.

Robert Roberts only continued to participate in this charade for the simple process of unwrapping the package and seeing what was inside. He had the unformed notion that, at some point, a package might contain something he actually wanted, though what this might possibly be he could not even begin to imagine. Robert Roberts had barely the imagination, at the age of five, to conceive that a dropped object might, at some point, hit the floor.

Robert's parents were a perfectly ordinary and amiable couple - or rather, they were no worse than any other occupants of the Shangri La Towers, a hab-block that had become something of a sinecure for the ultra-rich of Mega-City One.

They cannot in all justice - or even Justice - be blamed for their coldness toward their son; they were merely reacting on a primal level to the deadness within him, and would have been horrified and ashamed to learn that they were doing it.

Similarly, in the five years since their son had been born, they had followed advisory birth control procedures without a single lapse that might result in a "mistake", for their unconscious minds looked at Robert Roberts and flatly refused to countenance another one remotely like him. They only had another child when they actively and consciously
made
themselves decide to have one.

Robert had a little sister. She was called Roberta. The Roberts had a strong if somewhat limited tradition in family names, and they were sticking with it.

For the entire history of the universe (that being the four and a half years since he had first become aware of the existence of his self), Robert Roberts knew how the only living creatures of which he was really aware had interacted with him. Now he compared it to their interactions with the new baby. He saw how they touched and talked to her, and saw their genuine pleasure and joy.