Vellum (42 page)

It's the dark world of the Kali Yuga, out here on the edge, the Gnostic prison-world of a mad, blind creator, a world of lies, truth hidden in the silky veils of Maya. You may not see it that way, but trust me; I'm the archon of anarchy. I know what I'm talking about. Reality's got more diseases than a ten-dollar whore, only this kind of sickness doesn't come from getting down and dirty with too many johns.

I tear the skybike into a 180 and open fire on the last of the thopters. One banana, two banana, three banana, four. One of the pilots actually makes it out of his fireball, spinning through the air, armor gyros fucked and boosters firing in what's definitely the wrong direction. He plows into the ground at my feet with a crunch that makes even me feel a little squeamish. Still, I kick his helmet off and stare into his mirrorball eyes, just to check that the keeper drone is terminated. And with every bone in his body broken, including his watermelon skull, there's still a little bit of the astral puppet-master flickering in his brain. Fucking mindworms.

“Jack Flash,”
it hisses. Sounds like white noise, bad radio.
“No sleep for the wicked.”

“Get out of my head,” I say, and put the barrel of my chi-gun right into the brain cavity. On second thought…get out of
his
head.

And I blast it.

Yeah, reality has some pretty nasty parasites, and I'm the homeopathic, sociopathic remedy. I'm the angel assassin, armed with all the mystical technology the Empire stole from its dominions in the Orient and India. I'll do you acupuncture with a needle-gun. I'll rearrange your living space with cluster-bomb Feng Shui. I'm an agent of change, a spiritualista Sandinista.

Society and me…well, let's just say we don't get on.

SOLDIERS OF THE EMPIRE, CHILDREN OF THE SCHEME

OPERATION:
Enhance psychic substructure. Trace core identity.

NARRATIVE DETECTED:

“I fucking hate this place,” says Joey.

“Tell me about it,” he says.

Jack looks around at the buildings of the Scheme—identikit matchbox blocks built by some contractor with a hard-on for pebble-dash. An extermination camp for the soul. Good enough for us overspill proles, he supposes. No fucking wonder the razor gangs are back.

Guy plays with his State Security card, weaving it between the fingers of one hand. Jack watches him. Guy's the girl-magnet, smooth as a shark through water. Joey's the badass, black-clad bastard, smoking with sullen hostility. Jack? Jack's the tagalong weird kid with the big ideas.

“That's all we are, you know?” says Joey as he takes another draw on the cig, passes it to Guy. “Just another fucking number. They'll be tagging us like fucking dogs next. Chips in the ear. Fucking dogs, bred to be vicious, bred for the fucking army or the pigs.”

“Soldiers of the Empire,” says Jack.

INFORMATION UPLOAD:
Location—Schemes; Period—Adolescence.

OPERATION:
Enhance location. Specify locale.

They sit on the brick wall, bored and bitter, all of them. Facing them there's the little one-story block of shops—well, a fish 'n' chip shop, a bookie's, a newsagent's, a grocer's and a pub. That's all there is in the Scheme. That's all there is in any fucking Scheme.

“There's always a life of crime,” says Guy.

“Yeah,” says Joey. “Let's burgle some house, steal a car, burn the fucker. We could set ourselves up as drug dealers. Loan sharks. We'd still be fucking guard dogs. You know? You know what I mean?”

“Patrolling the boundaries of society,” says Jack.

Joey nods, mutters something about
fucking drones.

“Weapons,” says Jack, staring at the graffiti on the shutter of the bookie's. “We're weapons.”

“Maybe,” says Guy, looking at him weirdly.

But he's used to that.

Welcome to Siagon,
the graffiti says, and he knows the feeling. He could have written the words himself, although he would have at least spelled
Saigon
correctly. And he would have probably gone for
Welcome to Hell
himself. He's always fancied writing that on the road sign into town.

OPERATION:
Reinforce imperative: Enhance location. Specify locale.

The road is tarmac but rough, weathered and cracked with weeds, covered in generations of graffiti, tags and band names, obscure gang sigils made from letters fused together. Pages torn from porno mags and newspapers hang crumpled, caught in the wall of brambles that they have to scramble through to get down onto it. There's no other way onto the road—it just appears out of the grassy dunes and disappears back into them, a hundred yards at most, as if someone just dropped the world around it, as if it used to go somewhere but then they took that somewhere away. It isn't so much that the road seems out of place, out here in the grassy, sandy hills on the other side of the farmer's field and the stream they have to walk along a water pipe to cross; it's more like the landscape around it doesn't belong. Like someone scrapped a previous world, built this one over it, but forgot to erase this little area of the old reality.

INTERJECT THOUGHTSTREAM.

OPERATION:
Reroute digression. Specify locale.

Jack has the weirdest feeling that he's been here before, a long time ago, when he was younger. He looks around at the empty spray cans, jars of glue and plastic bags, and—

“Check this out.”

Some kind of concrete cylinder, six feet in diameter at least and maybe two feet high, an iron manhole cover on the top of it. Jack feels the spray can in his hand, the can that he's just used to add his name to all the others. He feels his finger pressing down on the nozzle, hears the hiss and sees his hand moving…and has no idea what he's writing, why he is writing it.

ET IN ARCADIA EGO.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don't know. Fuck, I don't know.”

But he can hear a voice from somewhere whispering it in his ear.

A River of Voices

“Do you know who's on the other side of the mirror?” says Jack.

“No,” says Starn. “The officer on the case. It's just procedure.”

“You know they're watching you as much as they're watching me.”

“I don't think so, Jack. But you were going to tell me about this Conspiracy. Was that why you killed—how many was it? You think there's some sort of…scheme against you?”

“Scapegoats and saviors, mate. You want to rule people's minds, you need a monster or messiah, something to sacrifice to silence all the voices.”

“Voices?”

Starn looks at his watch, wondering if he's going to be able to wrap this up early.

“All the voices in our heads, the river of voices in our heads, trying to tell us what to do.”

But it's too obvious, too pat. Yes, auditory hallucination is a classic sign of florid-stage schizophrenia, psychotic breakdown, but it's the sort of thing that every selfish little murderer trots out—from his in-depth knowledge of Hollywood movies and tabloid newspapers—when they want to get out of that pickle they've put themselves in. It wasn't that my wife was cheating on me and I hated the bitch. It wasn't that my boss was an asshole who deserved to die. It wasn't for the insurance money or the drugs or the brutal, bloody thrill of it. It was the voices in my head.

“You hear voices, Jack?”

“Don't we all? Voices of souls, of ancestors, family and friends, enemies and demons, ghosts inside the head, the ghosts in the machine. You telling me you don't hear your own little internal narrative when you're thinking to yourself? You've never had an argument with a friend that didn't carry on in your head afterward? You've never lain in bed and thought to yourself in someone else's voice, to get a different perspective, someone else's attitude? We all hear voices, doctor. Most people just keep them turned down real low.”

Jack leans forward.

“Too much noise, you see, the monkey robots might not hear the puppeteer. Little doggy might not hear his master's voice, mate. So we gotta shut those other voices up. But, shhh. You can hear them if you only listen.”

“And these voices tell you to—”

“Listen. It's like being asleep beside a river, a river of voices, babbling, buried in the rustle of leaves. Narcissus sleeps and dreams us all.”

Starn sits back in his chair. Narcissus, eh? The boy who loved his own reflection in a river, and wasted away from his love. Well, it's more original than the Devil or God.

THE LOST BOY

ANALYSIS:
Subject resistant; lateral approach required.

OPERATION:
Trace source of identity-construct “Jack Flash.”

IMAGO DETECTED:

Hair the color of flame, not blond but yellow, orange, red.

Jack remembers the picture on the milk carton, the lost boy—Sandy Thomson—with his corn-blond hair, and realizes the boy's ghost has been haunting his imagination ever since he was a child. Ever since he was a child, he's had this hero in the stories that he makes up on the edge of sleep, an idol, an icon, signifying everything that he desires, everything that he desires to be. Flash Gordon. Jack, the Giant-Killer. He looks in the mirror at what he's made himself and sees, under it all, that picture on the milk carton, the lost boy, the golden boy.

ANALYSIS:
Compensatory fantasies; narcissistic fixation.

OPERATION:
Enhance engram context; establish imprint location.

NARRATIVE DETECTED:

They leave their bicycles in the long grass at the side of the country road, together with the packed lunches and flasks of juice their mothers have given them, and walk like tightrope artists along the great steel pipe over the farmer's field and the stream, and jump down into the tall, grassy dunes. The area is fenced off, part of the premises of the chemical plant over the other side of the hills, so it has a kind of mystery for them, beyond their mundane world. It seems the obvious place to hunt for the lost boy. It was Guy's idea, right enough. He's been here before, he says. Jack imagines what it would be like to find the boy and be a hero.

“Come on,” says Joey, pushing his way through the jaggy bushes.

He's a little scared, a little thrilled that they're trespassing in this forbidden territory, this landscape of soft sand beneath their feet, this neverland out on the edge of their nowhere town existence. They might get lost too, he thinks. As he scratches and yelps his way behind Joey and Guy, he thinks, what if the Thomson boy found the secret place where all the world is like soft sand, slipping under your feet and you slide through it and you find yourself somewhere…somewhere where adventures happen. And he imagines Sandy, imagines himself as Sandy, as some sort of Peter Pan, lost and happy, out in an eternity of daydreams.

He crashes through the last of the brambles and down onto the cracked, tarmac road, dusty on this dry summer day. Guy is standing there, up where it disappears into the dunes.

“Hurry up,” he calls.

“Shut up,
Reynard
,” says Joey, taunting him with the awkward given name he hates so much because, well,
nobody's
called Reynard. It's a dumb name.

“You shut up,
Narco,
” says Guy, flinging Joey's taunt back in his face, calling him that because Joey falls asleep in class so much, and because when Guy called him a “narcoleptic” he didn't know what it meant. So he hates it.

Names are important, thinks Jack. He doesn't have a nickname, but if he did, he'd want to be called Flash, like Flash Gordon from the black-and-white serials they show on TV every Saturday morning during the holidays. That would be cool.