one swatch at the mischief engine’s jeweled thorax and raised his Colt. ‘I’m Chief Henry Blince. My soul magnifies the law. I’m arrestin’ you for incitin’ somethin’ the nature o’ which I may dimly comprehend in the fullness o’ time.’
The Demograph blooped like a mudbubble - didn’t have a setting for insects.
An alternator winked in the armour face.
The bug was an inmate who’d changed her identity code, a hack to get her through the day. And she couldn’t believe her luck. Ten years ago she’d been falsely convicted on Blince’s word. Imprisoned by a maze of irrefutable conjecture, she’d come to believe that the trials of this and the actual world were rooted in the delay of Blince’s death. If this delay were foreshortened or eliminated, the way forward would be crystal clear.
Blince watched the texture-mapped machine’s lung inflate and shrivel like a surgical bladder, its gunsighter ranging like the pupil of an eye, the head lock in. His mind too stunned to connect, he saw the cannonfire leap and was instantly looking at Download’s cop-filled basement, the afterimage of doom blooming on his retina. A geek in jestware was being worked over with a cable hook. The cavalry had arrived.
Eyephones hung off Blince’s face like novelty eyes on springs. The enhancer drug cleared like a nightmare as he reached repeatedly for a gun which didn’t exist. Here in actuality there was no such thing as a demographic firearm - the nearest equivalent was the Nafta gun, which killed Mexicans first. As Benny would learn and Blince would never let himself discover, the panicking Jones had armed the cops with copies of the first gun he’d blundered upon in the Mall layout - a virus created by an inmate.
The responsible party was Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire, and back in the Mall he stood atop a virtual building spectating the sad frustration of the bug. It was clawing into the alley mouth like a cat at a rat hole.
When the Blince and Benny borgs popped into the Mall it was the first time in four years Panacea had glimpsed the true enemy. He sat down, turned to the ersatz sky and knew that, in a honeycomb bunker somewhere, his real eyes wept at the hours and years wasted circumventing the interference of the law.
5 IT OCCURRED
It occurred to Dante that midnight in the Mall might not coincide with midnight in the outer world. Waiting had proved nothing. Disarmed by an enormous sense of unreality, he felt more and more complacent about their position. He gazed out of the window, his thoughts dispersing harmlessly. Am I under the influence? he wondered. 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. Unable to look each other in the eye, the inhibited mob were fish in a barrel for the brotherhood, who slaughtered them before they could lapse.
The cops on Deal Street seemed inert and bored. A few fired at the entrance and bank front, and someone returned a little. Couple of carshells burned. A mail truck, leadlined against electro-radiation, lay on its roof and smouldered like charcoal. There was a snack stand and situation van.
Dante turned back to watch Corey the Teller reason with the Kid. Trying to buck his ideas up, she was inadvertently undermining the cowardice, laziness and force of habit that had kept his wrists closed for years.
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.
The heist was mining a rich seam of gloom in the Kid. Lacking the perversity so pivotal to the present headcrime, he was racing to waste. Looking as sad and creepy as a pickled alien, he whispered he’d give a medal to the man who could loosen the iron grip of his life. Corey, who had boosted eighty thousand smackers from the register in the confusion of the heist, considered him her ticket. She would have berated him anyway in her professional capacity as a stranger. ‘You’d be surprised how sullen I can be,’ she told him. ‘But you look like a bile fish, for Christ’s sake. It’s wrong.’
‘Why, miss - what happens.’
‘Morally wrong. Whatever shitstorm of motives brought you here they better be good enough to get y’out.’
‘Circular thought’s a way of surrounding something,’ he said in a voice devoid of all emphasis.
‘What? What are you, nuts? A maniac? Don’t you know there’s a streetful of army cops outside this doll brothel? Speak up you sonofabitch.’
She barked at Dante. ‘Hey, Lofty.’ But Dante was reading a book and did not reply. What sort of a hold-up was this?
The Kid swallowed a Coma Plus and almost inaudibly stated the view that humanity’s demise was rooted in an evolutionary strand which caused its ass-cheeks to undergo binary fission like amoebas under a microscope. ‘Every hundred thousand years, miss. First one buttock, now two, in a few years four, then eight, sixteen and so on. And you know where that’ll lead. Cumbersome, dragging heaps of dough.’
Corey breathed deep a while. A commotion of slaying echoed from outside. That Danny guy looked as hypnotized as a Segabrat. They were surrounded by inflatable bastards. She wasn’t any virtual puppet, but this wasn’t any virtual heist, so the peril level was even stevens. She’d have to take charge. ‘Kid. You and me get outta here, we’re happy as pups in a sidecar. Tell ya a secret.’ And she drew up a pantleg on an ankle-holstered Hitachi 20-gauge, one of the countless untraceable one-off guns designed on desktop since the Crime Bill. ‘Life’s a geology of precaution. Your pal’s knee-deep in himself. You hold up a place without thinking? What if everyone acted that way?’
The Kid found he agreed with the argument - it was what had stopped him becoming a doctor. What if everyone became a doctor? Who’d drive the buses? By some imperceptible transition he found himself feeling interested. He harboured a sly respect for her leg, the gun and the pink painkiller of her mouth.
Seeing a brawl in a bar, Download Jones had called the cops and been arrested for obstructing justice. A little blister of a crime, it had swelled into pranksterism. Pretty soon he was selling other people to science and slapping fire-eaters on the back so they’d gulp and explode. 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.’
Snowblind with crass mediocrity, the cops were nettled and grateful at having to work over a small guy who was by their standards weird and clever. Download smiled in deference to their coarse elation. They tore off his coat and released a blizzard of ID cards. Download waded through them, yelling that one somewhere was authentic. An emphatic man who wore his ignorance like a badge of honour engaged him in a no-nonsense interrogation with a butane torch. Download underwent the surgical assault with a stupefying resilience, relentlessly inhaling and exhaling despite everyone’s best efforts. Crestfallen at Download’s unyielding integrity, the surgeon asked him about the Mall and snipped at him with a bolt-cutter. Download volunteered nothing but fluids. Blood flooded out in great gushing spurts - nature’s way of telling him he was bleeding. The overhead fans churned. Download felt like an individual nerve.
‘All the world loves a scamp,’ said the surgeon, ‘but in this case we’ll make an exception.’ He dealt Download’s skull a blow which turned it into a personalized planetarium.
