The Cyberkink Sideshow (4 page)

Sylvia turned the card over. It showed a holographic image of Victor R. Maynard in a rather less than dignified state of attire and posture. She quickly turned it back and pocketed it. Time to get out of here and clear her head, at last.

Chapter 2

Sylvia faced Superintendent Pikesley in his office the following morning. He tidied his laptop and whatever he was working on to one side before addressing her. “So, Price, what did you find?”

“Sir, I don’t think there
is
anything illicit going on there. There wasn’t anything to suggest it.”

Pikesley stiffened in his chair. “We’ve had numerous complaints! If you’ve not found evidence, you need to look harder.”

A large Bible with gilt-edged pages in pristine condition lay in an obtrusive position on the outside corner on Pikesley’s desk. On the other corner, facing outward, stood a picture of Pikesley with his wife and two boys. Behind the desk hung a tacky gold crucifix with a miserable-looking Caucasian chap in a baggy loincloth nailed to it. He was painted in lurid, fleshy colors, making Sylvia think of one of the performers in the Cyberkink Sideshow.

Pikesley was overtly a Christian, and he overtly was married and had children. He went to great effort that other people would be able to see immediately that was the stereotype to which he conformed. That was what he wanted to portray as his identity. Not that Sylvia expected he went to a church or read the book on the desk, or that driving slowly around Highfields every Friday night looking for hookers as he pretended he didn’t counted as an act of worship.

“With all due respect, sir, if they’re just complaints with no evidence then I’d be skeptical. The thing seems to be the source of a whole load of controversy, and people might just be trying to stir stuff up because the sideshow doesn’t sit well with their personal moral codes.”

Pikesley yanked open a drawer by his knee and threw something in a plastic evidence bag down on the imitation obsidian surface of his desk. “Do you know what this is, Price?”

Sylvia studied the black square within the bag, about the same size as two ordinary mug coasters stacked. “It’s a memory bank, sir.”

“Correct, Price. And do you know what’s stored on it?”

“No, sir, it would be impossible to tell without interfacing to it.”

“Correct again. And because whatever’s stored on it might be dangerous, that’s why we use dogs and secure computers to check these things and protect ourselves. Would you like to know what
is
on the memory bank?” Pikesley raised his eyebrows.

Sylvia always had an irritated urge to reply “no” whenever Pikesley asked one of his rhetorical questions in this patronizing, sarcastic way. She said nothing, waiting for him to provide the answer.

“It’s an imprint from a twisted mind. Someone has sat, interfaced to this thing, and recorded lustful feelings on to it, day after day, until it becomes an autonomously functioning unit capable of interacting with anyone else who interfaces with it. It’s a fragment of some sick pervert’s soul.” Pikesley’s eyes narrowed melodramatically. “It’s the closest real-life approximation there is to a
demon
, and it’s banned internationally. A dog handler found it on a pedestrian in the city last night. After questioning, he revealed he bought it at the sideshow. Now what do you think of that?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Sylvia.

“What d’you mean, you don’t know? You don’t know what you
think
? What do you think the public think?”

Sylvia twisted her fingers together behind her back. “I don’t know, sir. I think maybe the public think that’s making a mountain out of a molehill, and that murderers and rapists and information terrorists should be our main focus.”

“Ha! Information terrorists!” Pikesley raised his finger. “The people making this...poisonous rubbish...and flooding the streets with it, those are exactly the sorts of people who are going to wind up committing information terrorist acts. You think the money they get from this they use to pay the rent and buy food and make an honest living?”
 

He pushed the black square across the desk, away from him, so it balanced right on the edge in front of Sylvia. “They use it to buy materials to make Compton bombs, to recruit vulnerable youths gone astray from the right path to use for pawns their diabolical schemes. Making stuff like that is just the beginning. Say they decided to incorporate a few nasty terrorist memes into the subconscious of these sex demons? Now they’re distributing crude but effective brainwashing. Suppose they start making hate demons instead of sex demons?”

Pikesley had been staring at the device as he spoke, and it seemed very conspicuous on the edge of the desk like that.

“These people need to be stopped now, before anyone gets hurt. We know they’re at the bottom of this. There’s too much anecdotal evidence about for it to be otherwise. We need to stop them fast.” He gave another, pointed glance at the device. “Price, how long have you been working here?”

“Six years, sir.”

“Well, it’s about time you had a promotion, then. This is an easy job. Get it right and there’ll be something in it for you.”

He had stopped looking at the memory bank now. He ignored it as though it had never been there. He wanted Sylvia to take it, she realized. He wanted her to use it as a plant, to frame somebody. It would be easy for her to slide it off the desk, in this private room, to slip it into her pocket and bring it away with her. That was what he expected of her. What would happen if she didn’t take it? Could he frame her for something? What if she took it and got rid of it, never to mention it again? He would deny it if she said anything, but could they trace it to her? Which was worse? She couldn’t take it and use it to incriminate an innocent bystander. Could she?

She turned these thoughts over for a few seconds without reaching any satisfactory conclusion, she said, “Sir, are you trying to imply something?”

Pikesley snatched the thing off the desk and slung it back in the drawer. “I’m not
implying
anything. I’m telling you to get your damn dog and get back there, and find me some hard evidence! Go plain clothes! Go undercover!” Pikesley slammed his fist down on the desk. “Just do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this shit!”

Sylvia hated the way she always felt after she attended an interview with Pikesley. It wasn’t just that the way he spoke to her made her feel incompetent, but it made her feel worthless about herself as a person, almost making her into someone she didn’t want to be.

When she got back to the dog cages, Max barked and bounded up to the bars to greet her, and some of the horrible tension inside her eased. At least Max loved her, and she felt like someone she wanted to be when she worked with him.

* * * *

The summer heat still hadn’t relented when Sylvia returned to the festival that evening, this time in her own hatchback with Max on the back seat. As she walked with him toward the Sideshow’s enormous tent, she noticed more tents had now been added, their canvas sides forming an enclosed square to one side of the main one.
Main attraction now open!
read several new sandwich boards planted along the route.
Now experience the depravity for yourself!
Numerous people in the queue wore trench coats and other heavy outer clothing, despite the summer heat. Some of them had brought sports bags or carrier bags.

The bouncers in leather shorts were back, this time stationed outside a different entrance leading via a curtain into the circuit of plain beige tents. Sylvia glanced from one to the other as they took her money. She’d come in plain clothes, but there was no disguising Max. Someone bringing a German shepherd to the sideshow might jog the bouncers’ memories back to the previous night’s admittance. She hurried the dog past once they’d handed her the ticket, trying to keep his nose away from them. He picked up the usual unpleasant miasma of sweaty gussets and armpits and feet, but no drugs and no suspicious signals.

Ranks of biometric lockers filled the first tent. People were stripping off coats and outer clothing to reveal outlandish and indecent outfits: bondage harnesses and bizarre underwear. Others had opened their bags and begun to dress in equally strange costumes. Buttocks and breasts and bare skin were on display throughout the room.

Sylvia hurried through, arms pressed to her sides and trying hard not to brush against anyone and to keep Max’s nose out of people’s crotches. The gap at the opposite side of the tent led to an annex crowded with people. A gap on the left led back into the open, to the space the square of tents surrounded. In the middle of the enclosed area a hole had been dug in the ground and set up like a Roman arena with seats and gaudy flags on a fake aged coliseum around its rim. In the ring below, a chariot race took place, only the chariots were pulled not by horses, but by women in revealing harnesses and with colored plumes on their heads. People seated around the rim cheered and waved, and a man in a ticket office took bets on the race.

A fear took hold of her that someone might recognize her. Most of the people wore masks, making them conveniently anonymous, no matter how exposed they might be otherwise. She pulled away from the gap and moved through to the next tent. Sylvia noticed people staring at her. She’d come wearing jeans and a spaghetti-strap top, and now it had become apparent she was horribly overdressed. Everyone here must realize by now she was a plain-clothes copper. Embarrassment at being fully clothed in a room full of near-naked people didn’t make sense somehow, but she still felt it.

This tent was opulently outfitted in deep-colored silks and cushions, making it look like a Western man’s fantasy of an Eastern harem. The people’s attention was focused on a fat lady who stood speaking beside a curtain. She had long, black hair and was dressed in horizontal stripes.

At first Sylvia assumed it was a costume, but as she went closer she realized with a sense of unease curdling in her stomach that the woman wasn’t wearing anything at all, and that her skin was in fact decorated with a tattooed zebra-stripe pattern. As she spoke, a ropy length dangling behind her legs, covered at its tip with the same black hair as on her head, caught Sylvia’s attention. Some sort of prosthetic tail?

The woman turned to address another section of the audience, and her tail switched across the back of her knees as though whisking away flies. It wasn’t prosthetic. It was a genuine living limb, fused to her spinal cord and wired in to her nervous system. It came as an uneasy revelation that this woman must live full time as what she was here. If she needed to go to the supermarket and buy food or do some other everyday act, she’d still have the tail and the pattern on her skin in full view, for everyone to stare at and disapprove of. Sylvia couldn’t understand why anyone would choose that.

Beside the curtain the woman stood before was a window in the thin wood panel that partitioned off the side of the tent. It looked in on a booth with a luxuriant patterned carpet and silk cushions and colorful gauze veils. Five people reclined on the cushions around a central object that resembled a large hookah decorated with elaborate figures. Wires snaked from the top of the hookah, connecting to the neural shunts on the foreheads of the participants, whereas more wires from the base connected to other parts of their bodies. Two spent the time touching each other, another masturbated and the others simply lay there, their flesh quivering, eyes closed and faces intense.

“I’m sorry, miss, but you can’t bring your dog into the neuro-orgy.”

Sylvia started. The zebra woman had just spoken to her. When she looked her in the face, she noticed her ears had been surgically sculpted into an upright equine shape.

“I can see if I can find someone who’ll look after him for you if you’d like though.” The woman smiled at Max and held out her hand for him to smell. He backed away, looking her up and down. The woman’s stripes tapered out as they curved over her flanks to her belly and breasts, leaving the pale skin from her throat to her vulva unmarked. A red gem had been sunk into the depths of her navel. She didn’t have any pubic hair and another jewel glinted from the plump, fleshy cleft below her protruding stomach. Max’s feedback told Sylvia the woman smelt slightly of marijuana and some mild, semilegal opiates.

“It’s okay, I’m just...” Sylvia tried to step around Max and he walked into her legs. “Looking.” As she turned, she saw something else had been set up at the other side of the tent. Six men were gathered around a machine with their neural shunts plugged into it. Their faces bore expressions of extreme concentration, focused on the woman on the other side of the machine with electrodes all over her body, who writhed and screamed with apparent ecstasy. Sylvia couldn’t work out what was going on. Perhaps the parts attached to the woman were vibrators, or maybe electrodes, and the men were controlling them mentally.

It was only as she moved to the next tent that Sylvia remembered what she’d come here for with a rush of annoyance at herself. She should have asked the woman about buying illegal software and imprints. The woman’s appearance had been so discomfiting it had completely slipped her mind. It was no good going back now–as if she hadn’t drawn enough attention to herself already. Why, again, had Pikesley given this job to her, of all people? It would have been so much easier to plant that device from his desk. If she’d just taken it, she could have been out of this whole sordid affair and home by now. Perhaps Pikesley had intended that all along.