down the bell curve. The bastards in question took unblushing advantage of Blince’s surprise and Benny’s distress. Unrelieved years of polychrome abjection turned to hard fury and hit the cops like a diamond anvil. Splinters of panic broke out of the sky.
Blince registered the situation with a flummer of his pixellated jowls and, in a sluggish attempt to pull in the reins, began shooting people for all he was worth. Every gunflash was like a fluorescence bomb and knocked the target to crimson pieces. The broad sweep of his firearm took in bomb zombies, pandemonials and others who had deemed morality a woefully inadequate protection against the modern world. Better guttural cries and stabbing daggers than a shapeless apprehension, thought Blince. ‘But our concrete actions are unequal to the ideas we hold,’ he bellowed aside.
Benny heard nothing above his own screams and fired his snubgun with less and less discretion, unreality muffling the reverb. A gridgirl with what appeared to be a sawn-off belly gun put a salvo in his direction and exploded like a doll stuffed with meat. The street ran with berserkers and sim flames of rubine red. He was dazzled by strobe light.
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?
Smoking a shock absorber, twitching once for each nerve in his body and speaking artlessly from a technocrazed heart, Download laid out the scam. He’d hacked the Mall less than twenty-four hours ago and had been preparing to shoot up with a jolt gun when the cops bellied in. Jones tendered a dozen rounds at the intruders, who objected reedily while subsiding to the floor. ‘Admit it - you liked it,’ Jones had sniggered as he strapped them semiconscious into the VR rigs, the most convenient fixture of restraint. Then it occurred to him to goggle the cops and open the Mall. The more he thought about it, the more suspect and enjoyable the notion seemed.
This was Jones all over. There’s a story concerning Download and the slabhead Brute Parker which illustrates the Jones rip. Parker had owned the all-night gun shop on the comer of Dive, and when it was burned to a shadow by the cops he attempted to wreak vengeance upon the downtown cop den and everyone in it. The heartfelt plan went awry and Parker went freelance as a hitman. His clients ranged from the IRS to the mob. 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 Download he should never sell used eggs again.
But finding himself with two cops in a VR deck, he knew the dry seed of wisdom was dead. He jacked Blince and his yes man into the Mall, hoping they’d meet some old friends.
Once in the layout, they made for the bank and Download started to sweat. Though based on Beerlight, the Mall was entirely lacking in detail, which he had to patch in on the run. When they reached the bank, he superimposed the sim he’d created for the heist rehearsal, including demographic glyphs for bank personnel. Beyond this he was newted for ideas and, figuring the cops were here about the heist anyhow, lassoed the fly-by-wire in Rosa’s jetfoil, bringing her in. ‘So it’s hacker shit,’ she said now, having heard the sob story. ‘Freedom in cyberspace’d be fine and dandy if we happened to live there.’
‘Don’t speak ill of the drip-fed,’ said Download, trying to be forceful through a snot-cemented nose. ‘Some of the all-time headmen are inside. Babyface Terrier. Billy Panacea.’
‘We’re on itchy ground here, Chief,’ said the little cop in the sphere.
‘Billy who?’ asked Rosa, looking for a real steamer. She was sick of fair guns and metabolics - Download’s Glock was irreversibly modified for mood amendment. Glancing in a cupboard, she found a microwave pistol jerrybuilt from a cell phone.
‘Burglar extraordinaire. Burgled up a storm a decade ago.’
Rosa found a wedge of six-hour ego patches and applied two, stuffing the rest in her jacket. ‘Listen Jones, I misjudged you - you’re not dishonest, just stupid. I brought the wrong kinda gun.’
‘Count your blessed chickens, Rosa - I nearly flipped my fang when the prefabs burst in.’ As well as the handbuzzers surgically implanted under his palmskin, Jones had a toggle under the first right premolar of his upper jaw linked to a scatterat bomb in his chest. ‘I could have come to a forensically sticky end.’
‘But our concrete actions are unequal to the ideas we hold,’ yelled the big cop.
‘How ’bout them?’ asked Rosa. ‘They come here clean?’ She patted down the nightmaring cops and pulled a Beretta 9mm off the small guy. She slotted the snub into the Approach holster. ‘These clenchers musta heard about the heist on the way in here - they wouldn’ta got to the scene in time anyway, and meanwhile thanks to you Danny’s waitin’ for the pick-up. It’ll be no bed o’ cherries on that roof.’
‘Somethin’ the nature o’ which I may dimly comprehend in the fullness o’ time,’ called the big cop, and the crimewires sniggered despite each other. Download’s face, which usually looked as if it had been thrown together in the dark, was fleetingly natural.
A clank of the monroe grill warned of the brotherhood’s approach, and Rosa drew the snub in time to break four cops like paintbombs against a wall. There was a rear exit and Rosa took it as shots burst off and Download shielded his machinery. Pursued through an underground garage and on to the street, Rosa pelted across traffic into blur-stains of exhaust and neon. Male cops were taught it was okay to shoot a woman in the back, but most still considered this too much of a commitment.
Blince scuttled down a blank reproduction of Scanner Street. Luminescent steam rose from the gratings like a wraith, flickered out, then repeated in an identical pattern. Sodium lights bleached the skullfront of what should have been Britomart and the Vein Arcade. The pagoda roof of Otomo’s Needle Bar was like a crude white plastercast. Blince slowed with a cancering apprehension. He felt as welcome here as a dog at a dance marathon. Did dogs really need eyebrows? He thought. Didn’t those mothers know when to quit?
A low thrumming filled the non-air above his head. The street held on to the walls as if a bomb was going to drop. A giant bug was whirring out of the digital sky. Blince made a face and began to run for the mouth of an alley, covered by a flitting halftone shadow. Crashing through clean trash, he looked back - a towering chrome grasshopper with hydraulic rodlegs came to rest outside the alley opening and lowered a head like a jack-o’-lantern, peering in at him with a solar eye of poured steel. A headcap flipped and sprung a rotary cannon full of ammo and
