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A heist doesn’t occur in a bank - it occurs in the heart of the criminal.
He had found a scene where Biff Barbanel glances at a book called Punching the Sarge - by clicking on the title Dante found he could access the full text of Sarge, in which a brilliant mathematician shoots himself with a foam gun and drowns. Shortly before this denouement, a football coach quotes from The Tangle Hymn, the text of which Dante accessed with a single click. In Tangle there are numerous references to the fictitious author of The Think Tank, in which a bigot bums a copy of Parashite, which includes a scene in which a drowsy cleric browses through Knitting the Ties That Bind, at the
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‘You know they used to cut off the dukes of thieves in the old days?’ ‘What goes around comes around.’
Toto knew it to the bone. He had bought the place knowing the trustiest rule of social disintegration: bars burn last.
Contradictions tore at his head - she asked him to open up and was disgusted when he did. She said she didn’t want to change him yet wanted him to be happy. She stuck as close as a tattoo. She thought with her hair. The Kid toyed nervously with his gun.
Aiming the Kafkacell at himself only shorted the circuit. Aversion surgery prevented his using another weapon. Every suicide line he called turned out to be an anti-suicide line. He was trapped.
One sympathetic doctor involved him in regression therapy and the Kid discovered seemingly repressed moments of happiness in his childhood, but it was a classic case of false memory syndrome.
Someone selected a burst of Ruger Mark 11 on the jukebox. There were groans and some violence from the clientele - the Ruger was considered close-range, elevator gunfire.
dead of bullet inhalation.
‘This is a Zero Approach Arm Cannon, Mr Specter. I have pulled both the trigger and the BOD pin. One false move.’ ‘Benefit-of-the-doubt capability - you have a doubt?’ ‘No sir. Merely a code of behaviour.’
The trouble with the law is that it’s yet to fall into the right hands.’
Specter was used to stating his opinions as law, a practice known as Dworking. He’d utilized it in the perjury room to clear a guy who’d shot a hundred people near a gun shop. Citing American military procedure, Specter proved that the slaughter was a pre-emptive strike. Another time he got a total innocent worked up as a multiple killer despite a transglobal alibi - the only doubt was the guy’s state of mind. Sanity was denoted by the presence of remorse, but as the accused was innocent he had none - he was deemed as crazy as a chef and thus unequal to the task of knowing anything but evil.
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Four years ago the Intolerance Gun had been doing the rounds, but the joke was on everyone. A variation on the Stone Pistol - which instead of aiming at the target ignored everything the target wasn’t - the new gun dealt with the target by going into denial. But it was clear to the denizens of Beerlight that intolerance of a target didn’t make it go away - at best, only sent it underground a few years.
Rather than acknowledge and reject the target the modified weapon never recognized the target at all - this was utterly annihilated by the force of the shooter’s ignorance. Energy was conserved by scorning the need for a reasoned rebuttal. ‘Tolerance’ was a shooters’ abbreviation.
It was just like a trailer home except that it didn’t explode when you turned on the gas.
She opened the top of the cooler and dunked her right arm to the elbow. The wetware gun wrapped around the limb, sealing itself to her seamlessly. Rosa tensed as though armwrestling, was pulled off balance a little, then gradually relaxed. She drew her arm out of the tank, swaddled in biomorphic datamuscle. It was like an arm cannon, but interfaced with her nerveweb directly. The gun had a pulse.
‘Gamete,’ Restraint continued, ‘said any act worth a damn could not be ignored and when an effective person is ignored it’s the result of a deliberate series of steps on his or her part. Children, I now have proof that these ribs of mine are furled insect legs awaiting my command to spread and scuttle. Watch me now.’ And he began breathing heavily from the diaphragm.
Corey the Teller stood on Dive, the epicentre of the Beretta Triangle, and watched a pasty-faced guy mime the further unfolding of his ear. Then he funneled his hand against it and listened with exaggeration. Clearly astonished by what he had heard, he began to bend-walk on the spot. Corey pulled her Hitachi pistol and put the guy down with one shot. Right there was what she hated about this neighbourhood.
‘You a cop?’ she asked the driver carefully. ‘My name’s Benny,’ said Benny. ‘But they call me . . . Benny.’
Rosa studied the growth-inhibited, steel-plated nails of her left hand.
She put up the phone and walked around the desk to swatch Meese’s datafiles - what she found made her question her perceptions. The desk was filled solid with meat, an extension of Meese’s body attached by a bundled ganglia of gristle. The wooden exterior of the desk existed solely to conceal this flaw in his personality.
Toto scraped at the component as though removing lead from a statuette. The air ignited with ballistics.
His secretary informed him his entire legal staff had been flattened in some kind of aircraft disaster. Specter was an expert in fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other. Somebody would pay.
This was what Dante Two loved about this neighbourhood - catching up on old associates and seeing what they were doing.
The brotherhood had escalated internal cover-ups after the crime-strike embarrassment four years ago - the only people conspicuously unaware of the strike were the cops, who had gone on killing and looting as usual.
It said here Cincinatti was the result of some guy experimenting in a garage - time got folded over and there were two versions of the same guy. One fainted and the other tried giving him the kiss of life, destroying the city in seconds. It was the sort of scenario Cincinatti folk had always dreaded.
Costello had been given six months for crucifying a Valley girl and everyone was boasting that if they’d been allotted that much time they could have crucified fifty.
On a coffee table was a large bowl of anodyne pills, used to damp down original thought and reduce conspicuity in public. The practical hazards of re-examining one’s mental premises on the wing were well known to the denizens of Beerlight - a guy skyjacking a plane one time had pushed a gun to the pilot’s face and instead of demanding a flight to Cuba, snarled, ‘The cultural space vacated by logic and morality has been filled at once with an automated and meaningless simulacrum which is nevertheless of precisely the same dimensions.’ A kidnapper started assembling a ransom note from scissored
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When he was a kid his mother had always tried to stop him picking his nose by saying ‘God can see you when you pick your nose.’ This guarantee had led him to create a snot graffiti which said YOU FUCKED UP BIG TIME. But in adulthood it occurred to him that maybe God couldn’t read. The thing needed to be simpler.
1. Leave town by east side and circle. 2. Hit the airport from north side. 3. Boost jetfoil. 4. Locate Rosa and Dante in Alaska by rumour trail regarding damn near impossible sexual escapades. 5. Claim supremacy over Dante in mindbendingly cunning chess games which last for months, evenly matched Dantes guessing each other’s moves to a T. 6. In the fifth month, have Dante kidnapped and subjected to a course of neuro-linguistic self-improvement which actually alters his submodalities and thereby his very personality. Thus faced with an unequally adjusted Dante at the chessboard, don a boxing
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1. Take the time to say a long goodbye to everybody. Take a final look at those landmarks. Don’t get a ticket driving that car. 2. If pursued by cops, nearly collide with fruit truck, causing it to shed its load across street. 3. Mount sidewalk for no reason and plough through dozens of trash cans. 4. While driving, have a shave in preparation to beg for mercy. 5. If windscreen smashed by gunfire, run car into store front. 6. Drop gun. 7. Run down blind alley, stumbling over dozens of trash cans. 8. Hit tall wire fence and clamber frantically upward. 9. Mindlessly climb fire escape to roof,
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Tell you what, though. You answer a simple question, I consider it.’ He held up four fingers. ‘How many fingers I holding up?’ Parker shot one away. ‘Three.’
and have demonstrated beyond a doubt that as an outlet for snipers capitalism has been indistinguishable from the agrarian commune. Thank you.’
Dice ‘Killer’ Agnew, the Kid’s former cellmate, stepped on to the stage and continued firing at the body. As the Carny, he knew nothing of his own previous persona and was something more or less than human. He’d modified his Kafkacell Cannon so that the victim’s point of view was transmitted even after death - when he killed he got a mesmeric hit of the afterlife.
And he’d only come here to shoot the audience.
Working on the principle that personal and cultural history are drawn by an eschatalogical attractor, an endtime which pulls events like a magnet, the Eschaton gun cut out the middleman by invoking the summational condition of the victim - usually a drift of ashes. Now and again, however, depending on a target’s future plans and fortune, it would transform the victim into an all-knowing, all-powerful, floating luminous doughboy. This all-or-nothing quality and the weapon’s flat ammo drum made it known to some as the ‘roulette rifle’.
A couple of minutes back, in Download Jones’s deserted basement, something activated on a time switch behind the boarded-up door to the disused elevator. Ex-DoD hardware, it was a modified HAARP ionospheric storm cannon which fired a quantum electron charge up the empty shaft and out the roof of a tenement. It hit the sky, inverting the atmosphere’s electron densities. Within minutes an intense electromagnetic flux saturated the city. People’s hair stood on end and every particle of unshielded program data was obliterated. Monitors blanked out. Communication networks took a flap in the wind.
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A smile formed a hundred miles behind his face. The patience of the unfired bullet is vast, he thought, as is its strength.
Constructed this with the intention of firing cliches at quantum speed and colliding them to see what sort of stuff they were made of. But of course when it came to it I had nothing to fire, since they’ve no basis in reality.
‘Postmodernism was the line of retreat for the ineffectual in those days, but once again the law was there first.
When I was a young man that absence had already swallowed the states of Panic and Ohio.
‘Well there’s the worm in the gun, Cubit - you shouldn’t mistake knowledge for information.
Listen, Cubit, it’s a bone-shattering shame but there it is. We’ve both been driven to perform somehow a crime which is unclassifiable. We’ve paid a price. Life’s like that. Dust and a plan.’
She held his breath with a love which abandoned the human context.
Alone in the railcar, Dante Two watched the ceiling. He was having a mild infinity crisis, toxic beauty zinging like neon under the skin. Prolonged arterial love had left contusions in his flesh and garnets in his heart. Two psychoses twenty-five years in the making and this was what they made together - a pharmaceutical romance so deep it needed an airtank.
She was giving away bullets like they were coming into fashion. She was berserking. Dante Two nearly came just listening to it.
Submission to causes is what befell the gods, thought Parker. But was love a cause? His heart was swelling like a cancer.
A cop sitting on the hood of a tank bit into a hotdog and looked up in time to see the man who shot him - a death-pale guy in layers of black like the curled pages of a burnt book. Dante ditched the pistol, climbed in and started up, spinning the tank and heading downtown with the dead cop lying on the hood.
He had tied a number of chefs to the rails in the hope that the driver would speed up and hit the real obstacle placed further along, jumping the track. In the event the driver mistook the chefs’ ridiculous hats and overalls for those of white supremacists and slammed on the brakes. Dante Two had had to run for his life.
Behind a melted jawchair he found a chainsaw - and a guncase which he opened tenderly. An antique .38 special. At the front of the twentieth century, Southern anti-drug campaigners had stated that drugs were making the black population bulletproof and the cops upped their calibre. The result was the issue of this gun as standard. He chuckled fondly.
