Slaughtermatic

by Steve Aylett

The authorities portrayed shock and outrage but never described what it was they had been expecting.

One woman had given birth to a bulletproof child.

He’d once studied deterioration in order to have something definite to tell folk when they asked why he was sobbing. Then science discovered that the universe’s shape was a downward spiral and he took it to heart.

Dante approached the customer interface. He’d thought of modulating his voice but since meeting Rosa Control he’d engaged in so much oral sex his accent had changed.

‘Tell ’em to keep off the tills, Danny,’ whispered the Kid. ‘Yeah, keep off the pills, ladies and gentlemen - it’s a slippery slope and you know it.

‘Must have been a glacier in a past life, Danny.’ ‘Yeah, lucky we ain’t really after cash - this rate it won’t be worth shit after inflation.’

The vault was on a timelock - when the chip was used without the correct combination the user was thrown twenty minutes into a future in which he or she was already cuffed and surrounded. The computer man Download Jones had hacked a card swiper which was now housed in Dante’s belt buckle - Dante swiped it through, altering the program. He pushed it into the lock, tapped out a random set of numbers and was thrown twenty minutes into the past.

Explosions amplify in an enclosed space. People say that those who attack a system should be prepared to live without it and assume they are not. The worst thing about the ogre in a nightmare is having to dispose of its corpse.”

‘You must be mortified,’ Corey shrieked, chewing gum. ‘You shot your own twin brudder?’ ‘Wasn’t Danny’s brudder, miss,’ whispered the Kid as they rushed through the vault room, ‘it was Danny.’

‘How many inside, Benny?’ ‘Twenty-five, Chief,’ sniggered Benny the Trooper. ‘How many outside?’ ‘Four and a half million, Chief, border to border.’ ‘And ain’t it right that every one of us is essentially bisexual?’ ‘That’s what they say, Chief.’ ‘So us and the folks inside’ll have somethin’ to talk about. Gimme the bullhorn.’

‘Come out and we won’t blow the whistle on your goddamn depravities. Dogs? Cattle? Who’ll ever know? And for those o’you with Oedipal urges, mom’s the word.’

‘Nah, disorder theory, Chief - “Every action or inaction may or may not be related to some other action or inaction.”’

‘This place, man,’ he breathed. ‘Reminds me what my Pa said on his deathbed.’ ‘What he say?’ asked Corey. ‘Nuthin’, miss - he was dead. Hey, Danny, there’s cops out here and the sun’s goin’ down.’

Easier to pull a hat out of a rabbit than a habit out of a rat.’

He visualized the waters of a pond until the last of the shark fins had submerged.

Biff Barbanel is a diametric prankster who, chagrined at the microscopic impact created by even the grandest actions of the individual, sets upon a campaign of experimentation to determine the largest results attainable by the smallest personal effort. He wires up a sophisticated sonic rig to record himself blinking and relay the sound through ten stack amplifiers in the front yard, so that the slightest flicker of an eyelid shatters windows up and down the street. He changes a lightbulb by holding it up and letting the world revolve around him. He writes a history of digitotalitarianism by assigning letters of the alphabet to the varied unreachable itches in his middle ear. He officially nominates a ‘slight, fleeting sensation of nausea’ as a senatorial candidate. He declares a ceasefire with his reflection. Having learned to effect the world in a grain of sand and create heaven in a wildflower, he goes into the larger world with a tortuously amplified causal energy and finds he can switch the world image to negative and positive and back again with the flick of a hand. Told in the first person, the entire scenario proves to be the demented fantasy of a gameshow host who has repented and sits all day at the window wearing a propeller hat. ‘A thought is no different from an act,’ he concludes, ‘especially if your thoughts are of no consequence.’

“There was a time when the extension of illegality to innocent acts could be used to manipulate men. But when guilt is no longer felt over acts of genuine criminality, what hope of instilling guilt in the innocent?”

They’d memorized the upper floors in case the elevator stalled but Dante was faster than the Kid and spent a lot of spare time creating a memory palace.

But this wasn’t the building he’d memorized - similarities triggered flashes of text here and there but in a jumbled order. He’d memorized a favourite Gamete story in which an angel stows away in a hypodermic needle and is inadvertently injected. The girl who receives it feels only the faintest tingle as the being is absorbed. In this unfamiliar place the story was scrambled so that the girl was injected into the angel, which reacted by becoming a god. Why was the real thing different from the simulation? Had Jones really sold them down the river?

Rosa had lost a finger in a mood ring explosion.

Developed to re-empower the victim, the Zero Approach gun worked on a principle of etheric consent and only fired when the target was asking for it. Since its introduction, the homicide rate had risen by four hundred per cent.

He was thinking of a time when things were different as the result of an experiment. Hearing frequent news reports of people’s unsuspecting and carefree condition just prior to violent misfortune, the Kid had attempted to attain this condition by taking out a contract on himself and ingesting an amnesia drug to forget the arrangement. Sure enough, on the day of the hit he felt an alien lightheartedness. But as the hitman’s car sped toward him he remembered everything and felt more cheated than ever that others got the service for free. He leapt aside and the hitman, who hadn’t a care in the world, died violently on impact with a wall.

In fact VR was held in such contempt that many states ran hive jails in which prisoners were permanently hooked into a sim crime environment to play out their rage until decrepitude or drooling madness. Physically the prison was a coffin-stack bunker where inmates were drip-fed nutrients and urban fantasy.

The petty clench was based on the old panopticon model, despite complaints from tower guards that every single prisoner would stare at them.

‘Gotta realize, Benny,’ Blince rumbled, slapping a new magazine into the gun, ‘value’s based on rarity, demand and ease o’ replacement.’ He resumed firing into the panicked crowd.

He was referring to a Colt Demograph with a nine-inch barrel, which he’d fetched from the squad car as the bank employees began to emerge. It could be set for age, colour and wage bracket. Blince had wanted to work in Vegas until he discovered he’d only be allowed to shoot blacks. He liked to throw it wide open. ‘Why ain’t they keepin’ still, Benny?’

Everyone reversed up Deal and a Gates gun was trundled forward, steaming like a diesel truck. Denizens froze in its spotlight. Then they were crushed tightly together as though magnetized, and blown to tiny bits. As the cops moved forward, the street was being pelted as if by popcorn. Blince lit a cigar off a burning car and used it to gesture at the blasted bank front. ‘Now we can begin to find out what happened here.’

As he strode across the non-existent landscape, Blince’s reasoning was impregnable. No civilian would have been fooled. The brotherhood, however, was trained to disregard detail. If anything, Blince felt more secure than ever in the mutable blur of the unreal.

the two cops were almost at the point of thinking for themselves when the scene cut in again. They were back on solid illusion.

‘But our concrete actions are unequal to the ideas we hold,’ he bellowed aside.

Blince caught a glimpse of Benny being bundled into a cartoon car which roared off, flattening rioters. The bodies were as viscous as a Dali watch, sticking like gum to Blince’s boots. Running, he thought about bugs and their external skeleton. Charmless but happy. People meanwhile buried their bones as deep inside as was physically possible. What were the creeps trying to hide?

On one occasion the oil industry hired him to kill the inventor of a car that was fuelled by depression. The moguls didn’t know how to profit from such a cheap and abundant resource. After ventilating the inventor, Parker went to bomb the depression-fuelled car as per contract, but couldn’t resist trying it out. Due to the boneshattering rage he expressed at the drop of a hat he hadn’t enough depression to fill a bird’s ear - the motor whined but never caught. Parker torched the target’s house but towed the vehicle home and brought in Download to take a look. It was a drophead Spider with a biofeedback net, four-wheel drive and a wetware graft engine. Download retuned the graft net for anger and ignorance in a split-propulsion system. Anger ran the front wheels and ignorance the rear. Strapped in, Parker found himself start-stopping like a learner, the rear and front bidding for control. He was thrown repeatedly against the dash, his anger and confusion fuelling the process in the most vicious of circles. Jones pedaled alongside on a tricycle, braying with laughter and shouting that Parker could stop the car by feeling a sense of calm. Parker was over the state line before seeing that rather than transcend his stupidity and rage, all he need do was synchronize them. It had been the formula for complacent brutality since the year dot. In a moment of rare gratitude, Parker drew off his mirror shades, uncovering the gun-metal grey of his eyes. That was enough to convince Down...

Here in actuality there was no such thing as a demographic firearm - the nearest equivalent was the Nafta gun, which killed Mexicans first.

He’d once seen a wave weapon in action. During a little riot in McKenna Square, a cop flung a crucifixion bomb, which skittered into the plaza. A hemisonic flux affecting the guilt centres of the brain converted the entire crowd to Catholicism.

An escaped braincut subject, the Kid was neurally bonded to his gun. When he pressurized the trigger he got an instant flash of his victim’s eye-view and the barrel of his own firearm. Several convicts had been given the Kafkacell implant experimentally, but rather than inhibit firing it sent them on a kill frenzy, their only motive a repeatedly frustrated urge to self-destruction. The Kid also found it improved his aim.

Now he sat in a yelling-cell at the end of a distinguished career and a cop was saying, ‘You pulled off a strong one, Jones - Chief still believes there’s a gun you can set for niggers.’

But it occurred in a more roundabout fashion due to some low-spark suggesting that lifers could be stored cheaply and easily in bulk cryogenic freezers. When the policy was adopted, the entire population went berserk in the hope of being slammed in a fridge and thawed out to a better world.

In what form would his atonement come to fruition? They refused to tell him, feigning bafflement. A fist smashed into his jaw and with a sound louder than a bomb, the building vaporized so fast a dozen cops were left falsifying evidence in mid air.

Brute Parker thought ‘passive aggressive’ meant shooting someone from a lounger.

Benny went out and Blince bit thoughtfully into a pie. ‘This changes everything. Except me.’

night of tank-chasing had ended in his misrepresenting a wealthy gran who had witnessed the brotherhood breaking a kid’s neck - denial had reached such a pitch it was illegal not only to premeditate a crime but to remember it later.

Entering, he pulled up a chair and insulted Blince in a degree of detail which did him credit. ‘You got a point, Harpo,’

‘This here’s the bank-floor view ten of your Earth minutes before the Kid entered, and fifteen minutes before lock-up.

‘I’m feelin’ stranger’n Godzilla’s chubby son, Chief,’

it was reasoned that a martyr gave better value than an opiate as it could be used and abused at the same time, while a drug was only abused when you ceased to appreciate it. Or was it the other way around? The idea broke like a bone, hurting and useless.

Having been cautioned so often against taking the easy way out, the Kid had left by the window.

‘Here’s the wire on Mr Dante Hinton Cubit,’ Specter announced, scrolling the file. ‘Nationality - Illinoid. Handicap - white. Religion - fetish orthodox. Weighs in at twenty-five years. Father died in a voting accident. Mother missing, presumed skinned and salted. Cubit skipped to Our Fair State after a personality offence, age of fifteen. Once heard to describe the President as “something to shoot for”.

Broke into a premises on Chain Street, called the cops and got the occupants arrested for burglary.’ ‘Sure,’ Blince laughed. ‘I remember the guy - tall guy, right? And the old folk nearly went to the chair but somethin’ got in the way.’ ‘They were your parents, Henry.’ ‘Ah, sure, I get it - so what’s the rapsheet on this joker? You tellin’ me he’s some heistmaster out of a sheer blue sky?’ ‘Well, after he moved out of your mom’s place he got heavily into data contraband

The bank shrewdly offered a pension but no medical. Within this framework, profuse bleeding and delirium were luxuries few could afford.

In Caligari’s Garden two identical men shave their heads and try to grow a hat, straining to push one out. One dies of a stroke and the other dies of a broken heart.