like electoral hype.’
The Kid was nonplussed at his accomplice’s apparent apathy - this wasn’t the Dante he knew. The Dante he knew would spring into action so fast he’d leave his aura behind. Was this hanging around part of the plan? ‘What about intent, Danny?’
‘Sure I guess we got that,’ Dante conceded, though he was on shaky ground. There was a name for those with intent to crime who subsequently enacted it in a simulation - crap.
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.
It was a source of mirth throughout the SSA that the virtual environment, called the Mall, was modeled on Beerlight. This had led Beerlight itself to reject plans for a VR clench, opting instead for a re-offenders’ trashpile and a standard clench for first-timers. The petty clench was based on the old panopticon model, despite complaints from tower guards that every single prisoner would stare at them.
‘Maybe we been arrested already, Danny. Wired up in one of them funny places.’
‘We’ll find out at midnight,’ said Dante absently. He knew the Mall ran the same twenty-four hours on a loop and that there was a burst of static at the reset. Anyone killed was resurrected. Anything damaged was restored. Like a kids’ game.
‘What about her?’ whispered the Kid, pointing at Corey.
Dante said nothing. If this was Jones’s simulation, she was no less a puppet than the toys in the warehouse - effectively, she was Jones.
None of it really accounted for the weirdness - since he worked the vault he’d been weaker, spread thin, in two minds about the whole match. He thought of Rumpelstiltskin, the real version where he tears himself down the middle, and found he preferred the PC mix in which the little bastard just runs away. What would Gamete have said?
‘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. People dropped as predictably as ninepins. ‘This gun’s my pride and joy.’
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?’
‘Guess it’s what they call civil unrest, Chief.’
‘This ain’t civil unrest, Benny, it’s civil goddamn insomnia. Pull back. Take out the whole goddamn street.’
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.’
Rosa felt that if she stopped she’d receive a burn hole, like film in a jammed projector. Pre-detox pale, her face shone out in the gloom of a basement hung with cyberwire and spine X-rays. From here Download ran a sting board full of garbage as a honeytrap for the brotherhood - peeping cops would find their accounts abruptly devoid of cash. Moving cautiously through to the main chamber, gun already drawn, she saw two rocking gyrospheres. Download Jones was bent over a keyboard, hacking frantically, stress-free as a rabbi playing Twister with a psycho.
At the creak of leather, Jones spun to stare, glaucous-eyed.
Rosa raised the gun. ‘See you after the recession.’
When the trigger was squeezed, an area of eighty cubic yards was mapped into an ethigraph grid, converging the vibes so intensely that the piece responded only to the needy. The gun was silent. Rosa frowned, suspecting a jam, then knew what it meant. The rounds weren’t meant for Download, who’d clunked to his knees and seemed about to sob.
Rosa took a closer look at the figures rolling in the VR spheres like hamsters in a wheel. One was big and one was small. It wasn’t Dante and the Kid. It was Chief Henry Blince and Benny the Trooper.
4 IN HIS TENDER YEARS
In his tender years, Eddie Gamete wrote a mindmauler on ‘The Difficulty of Locomotion on the Upper Lattice Face of a Proton Pulse Bridge’. The difficulty alluded to was the fact that Proton Pulse Bridges were a figment of Gamete’s imagination and anyone attempting to locomote on one would surely die. ‘And I’ll certainly laugh,’ he concluded.
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.
Benny, however, was undergoing squirly symptoms from three hours’ circumstance abuse. There were two ideas tilting at each other across the blank, blizzarding wastes of his psyche. The first was that the gunshot limp he’d endured for eight years had disappeared as though he was placing no real pressure on the leg. The second was that Blince was a bullnecked idiot for deeming to leave a geek basement a few hours back without arresting the geek. The VR enhancer drugs Download had hit them with as soon as they entered the basement were neither here nor there. Ironically, Benny’s mind was more lucid now than it had ever been, but the clarity was as fleeting for him as for any new inmate or cop recruit. Confronting the lie was so painful he had to believe it to ease the strain.
‘Do the Germans have a word for blitzkrieg, Benny? It’s been naggin’ me since we left the cop den.’
‘We’re on itchy ground here, Chief,’ squeaked Benny uncertainly.
‘Do my shell-like ears deceive me, Benny? Skittish at a brace o’ cadavers? I’ll have you know better than I do –’ and he gestured to the bodies around the bank entrance ‘- these folk are in a better place.’
‘Some of ’em are maybe burnin’ in hell, Chief.’
‘What did I just say.’
The sky flickered.
‘And why are you so goddamn edgy?’ added Blince as they hit the edit. The evidence of their senses fitzed and sputtered, shorting into a vertigo vortex of TV static - the two cops were almost at the point of thinking for themselves when the scene cut in again. They were back on solid illusion.
The bank stood before them, undamaged and empty of corpses. Any modifications had been voided by the restart. In place of the smoked bulletproof glass of the Highrise was the cheap whiteness of styrofoam. There was no cop back-up in the street behind them and the street was unblemished by name or crater.
There was a long-term kickback to the Mall’s twenty-four-hour loop. The theory was that the lack of any lasting consequence would maintain the dull ache of disempowerment familiar from the outer world, but here the absence of effect was so immediate even slabheads perceived it and felt a sense of carefree surrender at no longer having to delude themselves on the issue. The instant the new day kicked in, Blince received
