cameras. Tonight’s piece was meant to launch the more subtle and mature work for which everyone assured them they were ready.
On the fourth floor they found a warehouse full of hydraulic dictators and other creepy toys. The bullet elevator didn’t show but there was a regular one the brotherhood had taken out with a crowdpleaser. ‘Why’d they run a tank into the elevator?’ gasped Corey.
‘Didn’t figure we newted the other one,’ said Dante. ‘Guess they know we’re headed for the roof.’
‘I hate inflatables!’ Corey shrieked, kicking the face of a vinyl Hitler. ‘They’re historic!’
Dante was already feeling strange about the caper – about everything. Was it just the screw-up with the building? By guesswork he tried to match his disassociation to the disused words he’d salvaged from a contraband copy of Vampire Reverse. Abandonment? jacinth? Shame? Nostalgia?
He seated himself against a wall and breathed deeply. For once he was glad Rosa wasn’t around - she referred to meditation as ‘aspirin on stilts’ and approved less of the shelled ebook he’d boosted from the vault: The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel by Eddie Gamete.
He visualized the waters of a pond until the last of the shark fins had submerged. A little clearer in the head, he closed the meditation and scrolled the stolen volume, recalling the story. 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.’
This was the last thing Gamete had written before his spectacular death. Legend had it the book had been written not with a pen but a bellows.
Dante knew all this from snaffle and hearsay, but now was the first time he’d held the fruit in his paws. Browsing, he saw straight off the story wasn’t central - the spice seemed to be in the speed-of-consciousness rants Barbanel scrawls on the walls and ceiling:
“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?”
Barbanel’s wallworks reminded Dante of an exercise he’d idly pursued during rehearsal - as an installation piece the job had been organized more like a notion than an act. 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. Every hall and corner of the building was used as a signifier, a means of remembering text and images by having them dotted around the walls of the simulation. Strolling through the simulation he could read an entire story and then, by walking through the real thing, be able to recall it.
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?
As he sat considering these issues he heard the leper’s bell of an approaching idea - maybe Download never let them out of the simulation. The thought hit him like a car at a stop sign. If they were still hooked in, the heist had been nothing but a wraparound dream.
Virtual reality. That would explain why he felt so bored.
3 ROSA
Rosa strode down Swerve Street, dragging her nails along the wall. Sparks leapt and underscored a graffito saying Only the expert will realize your exaggerations are true. In her other hand was a Zero Approach gun identical to Dante’s except for a squeeze adjustment - Rosa had lost a finger in a mood ring explosion. She couldn’t believe she was here when Dante was waiting for the pick-up on Deal Street. Download was up to no good. A guy like that needed a wound bigger than his body.
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. Download’s ignorance was sure to demand a bullet. Without the firm and necessary grasp of present and past, he didn’t believe an entire nation could lie. She thundered over the monroe grill which served as a welcome mat for his digital foundry.
Dante thought of dolls within dolls and wheels within wheels. ‘Hey Kid - Kid. I look okay?’
‘Yuh look like shit, Danny.’
‘Sure, but I ain’t all shiny, right, not movin’ like a robot?’ He flexed his hand, viewing it. It seemed completely normal. ‘This look texture-mapped to you?’
The Kid ignored him, slumped morosely against a gas tank. 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.
Seating herself opposite him, Corey the Teller asked gently after his wellbeing. He raised a face scorched with reality and whispered that life would be great if it weren’t for its termination in a box of earthworms. They got to talking about carrion, absence as therapy and the fact that not a single vitamin had ever been visually identified. The Kid described his ability to mentally unwind people like spiral-peeled apples and see them as skanking, swing-armed skeletons. ‘One thing you’ll say for skeletons,’ Corey said brightly. ‘They’ll always give you a smile.’ There are two ways of bringing someone around to your way of thinking - softly, or hardly.
‘Danny says crime’s one of many methods justice may select,’ the Kid quoted. ‘But I don’t think I believe in justice d’you, miss?’
‘Far as I can in somethin’ I never saw - so break it to me, you guys givin’ up or what?’
‘You think we’re in Jones’s fuzz machine, Danny?’ asked the Kid, uneasy at Dante’s suspicion that they weren’t real crooks. ‘Still in them old-fashioned roller wheels?’
