Hal Duncan, page 34
¯ Keen, says Jack.
He tells himself the quack may actually be a master of the black ops arts of speech combat, playing a subtle bluff. It's never smart to underestimate the enemy, but, hell, this bastard isn't giving him much choice. What is this? Don't they know what they've got here? Anyone would think they'd never heard of Jack Flash. Weapons-grade adamantium. The original goddamn psychokiller. Qu'est-ce que fucking c'est?
He'd be insulted if it wasn't for the keeper behind the one-way mirror. At least he's got some fucking bite.
A Glint of Snickety-Sharp Teeth
Pechorin (bioform) status: all vital functions in homeostatic balance; psychophysiology and kinaesthetic senses dampened; affective/logical reactions inhibited; reflexive/habitual-behavioural reactions inhibited; ego shutdown; self shutdown; id shutdown; total psyche shutdown.
Pechorin (bioform) status: personality by-pass operation complete.
Observation: Subject sits with calm poise, studying Agent (Dr) Starn, eyes flicking up to the observation mirror, now and then {Analysis: bioform presence sensed by subject. Response: minimize bioform functions, deepen trance-state).
Operation: psychic contact made; preliminary scan initiated.
Narrative detected:
Jack looks in the mirror, at his own reflection, and at what lies beyond it. Under the bleached hair and the attitude, there's still an image ¯ a reflection, a shadow — of the boy he was, a bookworm buried in dreams, asleep to his surroundings, Narcissus or Endymion, Kama Krishna on his lotus. He lets his eyes unfocus, scries the mirror: leaves blow over and around him, red, gold, orange, yellow, leaves of autumn, leaves of fire, burning leaves torn out of books, existence on fire, black incense rising into blue eternity. Whole world should burn, he thinks, it would be so fucking pretty.
Jack grins a glint of snickety sharp teeth.
Operation: focus narrative; scan for core identity.
He walks across the grass, summer sunlight warm against the back of his neck, smooth heat like a caress, towards the red-brick library, sanctum of adventure.
¯ Hey, Jack, the voice behind him calls.
¯ Yo, Joe, he says.
¯ Where you been all week?
Nowhere, he thinks. It's just another lost, last day of the summer of his youth, and he's spent most of it in the library, out of the way of his peers, happier in solitude, in the realms of fantasy, than in a limbo reality of housing schemes and gang battles.
¯ Keeping my head down, he says.
He knows he's the weird kid, strange, estranged, but Jack doesn't care. He's got all of eternity to keep him company, in his head.
The Nature of the Conspiracy
Starn tries to ignore the feeling of being watched; it goes with the job, but the one-way mirrors always make him feel uncomfortable, like someone reading your newspaper over your shoulder. They do have video cameras, after all. If they want him to get inside the man's head, so to speak, they could just leave him to get on with it. It's not as if the officer behind the glass is qualified to make these kind of judgements.
¯ Perhaps we could speak a little bit about yourself, he says, but first I want to find out if you really understand where you are, what's happening to you. Can you tell me where you are?
¯ You know where I am.
¯ Of course. Of course. I just want to make sure that you know.
¯ In an interrogation cell, deep underground, inside the secret base of an empire that reaches from the dawn of time, across eternities, and into the minds of every monkey robot in the world.
Starn looks around the interview room. A small, grilled window sits high up on one wall, sunlight from it picking out dust motes in the air. The third floor is not exactly what he'd call 'deep underground'.
¯ 'Monkey robot'? he says.
¯ Puppets on a string, dangling, jangling, gangling from the ganglions in the head. That's how they control us. That's all we are to them, monkey robots ¯ apemen, golems, fucking soldiers of the Empire.
¯ The Empire?
¯ Empire never ended Just hid itself. You can only see it if you close your eyes.
The prisoner smiles, picks up the paper cup of black coffee sitting on the desk and takes a sip.
-You think this is all... part of this Empire?
¯ I know it and you know it too. You just don't know you know it. That's the nature of the conspiracy.
Of course, it is the sort of language you'd expect from a politico, thinks Starn. He's seen the slogans painted on walls and placards, by all the neobolsheviks and jihadists. But Starn doesn't think that this Tack Flash' is talking about the same 'Empire' as all those splintered factions fighting against Pax Britannica.
¯ Do you think I'm part of this 'conspiracy'? he says.
¯ The less people know, the more people in it, the better the conspiracy. This is the ultimate conspiracy ¯ everybody in it and nobody knows.
¯ You think everyone's a part of this conspiracy?
¯ I know I am.
Starn looks at the notes on his screen.
Subject displays typical symptoms of first-rank (acute) schizophrenia ¯ 'monster' / 'messiah' delusion, apophenia, ideas of thought broadcasting and mind control, auditory (imperative) hallucination. ‘Monkey robot' ¯ disturbance of identity, alienation from self.
Subject has externalised insecurities as invasive alien force ¯ conspiracy. Sees himself as 'secret agent'? grandiose / paranoid delusions. Certainly capable of murder. 'Spartacus' = slave rebel. Victims = directors, captains of industry = conspiracy 'rulers'? Highly complex fantasy.
The question is: is he faking it?
¯ Could you tell me more about this Empire, this conspiracy?
The Kali Yuga
I slice the skybike round the corner at a 30-degree angle to the ground, sparks flying from the spindisks as they scrape the cobbles of the street. The machine roars as I gun the ray-jet engine up to turbo. It can take it. This is a 1951 Jaguar Silver Shade, the only skybike ever manufactured by the company, British fascist engineering at its best. This is how the Empire was won.
The ornithopters come in over the rooftops, swooping low into the backstreets of the docklands area, like a swarm of mechanical bats or butterflies or birds of prey, all flashing, clashing, silvery wings. Their storm of gunfire tears up everything behind me in a rain ¯ a hail ¯ of bullets, pounding the street and throwing up a dust of shards from cobblestones and brick walls, crates and plastic bin-bags. Peels like all hell is on my heels, but then I'm always at my best when I feel hounded.
As I blast across the weed-cracked foundations of some long-dead shipyard, I fire over my shoulder, hit the pilot of the leading thopter with a chi-beam in the centre of his forehead, smack-bang in the sixth chakra, where his third or ajna eye will never now be opened. The thopter spins wildly through the air, smashing into the two immediately behind it, and I fire off a couple of random shots, clip the ray-tank of a fourth. The chaos of three tangled thopters buries itself into the ground behind me, shrapnel flying, and I make it into a narrow alleyway between two warehouses. The pilot of the fourth thopter, destabilized by the puncture of its ray-tank, tries to turn it, fails, and piles his machine into the brick wall of a warehouse, the explosion wiping out forever the last faded, peeling remnants of a painted advertisement for some long-forgotten company. I'm not out of the woods yet.
Four of the remaining thopters rise over the roofs of the warehouse while another follows through the narrow gap between the buildings, wing-tips almost touching brickwork, guns still firing. I admire the fly-boy's skill and nerve; it doesn't stop me putting a chi-beam through his fourth chakra, through his courageous but misguided heart. He's still a fucking keeper. As I burst out into the open again, the other thopters come back, gunning for me with a vengeance. Well. What can I expect?
It's the dark world of the Kali Yuga, out here on the edge, the Gnostic prison-world of a mad, blind creator, a world of lies, truth hidden in the silky veils of Maya. You may not see it that way, but trust me; I'm the archon of anarchy. I know what I'm talking about. Reality's got more diseases than a ten dollar whore, only this kind of sickness doesn't come from getting down and dirty with too many johns.
I tear the skybike into a 180 and open fire on the last of the thopters. One banana, two banana, three banana, four. One of the pilots actually makes it out of his fireball, spinning through the air, armour gyros fucked and boosters firing in what's definitely the wrong direction. He ploughs into the ground at my feet with a crunch that makes even me feel a little squeamish. Still, I kick his helmet off and stare into his mirrorball eyes, just to check the keeper drone is terminated. And with every bone in his body broken, including his watermelon skull, there's still a little bit of the astral puppet-master flickering in his brain. Fucking mindworms.
¯ Jack Flash, it hisses. Sounds like white noise, bad radio. No sleep for the wicked.
¯ Get out of my head, I say, and put the barrel of my chi-gun right into the brain cavity. On second thoughts ... get out of his head.
And I blast it.
Yeah, reality has some pretty nasty parasites, and I'm the homeopathic, sociopathic remedy. I'm the angel assassin, armed with all the mystical technology the Empire stole from its dominions in the Orient and India. I'll do you acupuncture with a needle-gun. Ièll rearrange your living space with cluster-bomb Feng Shui. I'm an agent of change, a spiritualista sandanista.
Society and me ... well, let's just say we don't get on.
Soldiers of the Empire, Children of the Scheme
Operation: Enhance psychic substructure. Trace core identity.
Narrative detected:
— I fucking hate this place, says Joey.
— Tell me about it, he says.
Jack looks around at the buildings of the Scheme ¯ identikit matchbox blocks built by some contractor with a hard-on for pebble/ dash. An extermination camp for the soul. Good enough for us overspill proles, he supposes. No fucking wonder the razor gangs are back.
Guy plays with his State Security card, weaving it between the fingers of one hand. Jack watches him. Guy's the girl-magnet, smooth as a shark through water. Joey's the bad-ass, black-clad bastard, smoking with sullen hostility. Jack? Jack's the tag-along weird kid with the big ideas.
— That's all we are, you know? says Joey as he takes another draw on the fag, passes it to Guy. Just another fucking number. They'll be tagging us like fucking dogs next. Chips in the ear. Fucking dogs, bred to be vicious, bred for the fucking army or the pigs.
— Soldiers of the Empire, says Jack.
Information upload: Location ¯ Schemes; Period ¯ Adolescence.
Operation: Enhance location. Specify locale.
They sit on the brick wall, bored and bitter, all of them. Facing them there's the little one/storey block of shops — well, a fish 'n' chip shop, a bookie's, a newsagent's, a grocer's and a pub. That's all there is in the Scheme. That's all there is in any fucking Scheme.
— There's always a life of crime, says Guy.
— Yeah, says Joey. Let's burgle some house, steal a car, burn the fucker. We could set ourselves up as drug-dealers. Loan-sharks. We'd still be fucking guard-dogs. You know? You know what I mean?
¯ Patrolling the boundaries of society, says Jack.
Joey nods, mutters something about fucking drones.
¯ Weapons, says Jack, staring at the graffiti on the shutter of the bookie's. We're weapons.
¯ Maybe, says Guy, looking at him weirdly.
But he's used to that.
Welcome to Siagon, the graffiti says, and he knows the feeling. He could have written the words himself, although he would have at . least spelled Saigon correctly. And he would have probably gone for Welcome to Hell himself. He's always fancied writing that on the road sign into town.
Operation: Reinforce imperative: Enhance location. Specify locale.
The road is tarmac but rough, weathered and cracked with weeds, covered in generations of graffiti, tags and band names, obscure gang sigils made from letters fused together. Pages torn from porno mags and newspapers hang crumpled, caught in the wall of brambles that they have to scramble through to get down onto it. There's no other way onto the road — it just appears out of the grassy dunes and disappears back into them, a hundred yards at most, as if someone just dropped the world around it, as if it used to go somewhere but then they took that somewhere away. It isn't so much that the road seems out of place, out here in the grassy, sandy hills on the other side of the farmer's field and the stream they have to walk along a water-pipe to cross; it's more like the landscape around it doesn't belong. Like someone scrapped a previous world, built this one over it, but forgot to erase this little area of the old reality.
Interject thoughtstream.
Operation: reroute digression. Specify locale.
Jack has the weirdest feeling that he's been here before, a long time ago, when he was younger. He looks around at the empty spray-cans, jars of glue and plastic bags, and—
¯ Check this out.
Some kind of concrete cylinder, six foot in diameter at least and maybe two foot high, an iron manhole cover on the top of it. Jack feels the spray can in his hand, the can that he's just used to add his name to all the others. He feels his finger pressing down on the nozzle, hears the hiss and sees his hand moving ... and has no idea what he's writing, why he is writing it.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO.
¯ What the fuck does that mean?
¯ I don't know. Fuck, I don't know.
But he can hear a voice from somewhere whispering it in his ear.
A River of Voices
¯ Do you know who's on the other side of the mirror? says Jack.
¯ No, says Starn. The officer on the case. It's just procedure.
¯ You know they're watching you as much as they're watching me.
¯ I don't think so, Jack. But you were going to tell me about this Conspiracy. Was that why you killed ¯ how many was it? You think there's some sort of... scheme against you?
¯ Scapegoats and saviours, mate. You want to rule people's minds, you need a monster or messiah, something to sacrifice to silence all the voices.
¯ Voices?
Starn looks at his watch, wondering if he's going to be able to wrap this up early.
¯ All the voices in our heads, the river of voices in our heads, trying to tell us what to do.
But it's too obvious, too pat. Yes, auditory hallucination is a classic sign of florid stage schizophrenia, psychotic breakdown, but it's the sort of thing that every selfish little murderer trots out ¯ from his in-depth knowledge of Hollywood movies and tabloid newspapers ¯ when they want to get out of that pickle they've put themselves in. It wasn't that my wife was cheating on me and I hated the bitch. It wasn't that my boss was an arsehole who deserved to die. It wasn't for the insurance money or the drugs or the brutal, bloody thrill of it. It was the voices in my head.
¯ You hear voices. Jack?
¯ Don't we all? Voices of souls, of ancestors, family and friends, enemies and demons, ghosts inside the head, the ghosts in the machine. You telling me you don't hear your own little internal narrative when you're thinking to yourself? You've never had an argument with a friend that didn't carry on in your head afterwards? You've never lain in bed and thought to yourself in someone else's voice, to get a different perspective, someone else's attitude? We all hear voices, doctor. Most people just keep them turned down real low.
Jack leans forward.
¯ Too much noise, you see, the monkey-robots might not hear the puppeteer. little doggy might not hear his master's voice, mate. So we gotta shut those other voices up. But, shhh. You can hear them if you only listen.
¯ And these voices tell you to—
¯ Listen. It's like being asleep beside a river, a river of voices, babbling, buried in the rustle of leaves. Narcissus sleeps and dreams us all.
Starn sits back in his chair. Narcissus, eh? The boy who loved his own reflection in a river, and wasted away from his love. Well, it's more original than the Devil or God.
The Lost Boy
Analysis: subject resistant; lateral approach required.
Operation; trace source of identity-construct 'Jack Flash'.
Imago detected:
Hair the colour of flame, not blond but yellow, orange, red.
Jack remembers the picture on the milk carton, the lost boy ¯ Sandy Thomson ¯ with his corn-blond hair, and realizes the boy's ghost has been haunting his imagination ever since he was a child.
Ever since he was a child, he's had this hero in the stories that he makes up on the edge of sleep, an idol, an icon, signifying everything that he desires, everything that he desires to be. Flash Gordon. Jack, the Giant-Killer. He looks in the mirror at what he's made himself and sees, under it all, that picture on the milk carton, the lost boy, the golden boy.
Analysis: compensatory fantasies; narcissistic fixation.
Operation: enhance engram context; establish imprint location.
Narrative detected:
They leave their bicycles in the long grass at the side of the country road, together with the packed lunches and flasks of juice their mothers have given them, and walk like tightrope artists along the great steel pipe over the farmer's field and the stream, and jump down into the tall, grassy dunes. The area is fenced-off, part of the premises of the chemical plant over the other side of the hills, so it has a kind of mystery for them, beyond their mundane world. It seems the obvious place to hunt for the lost boy. It was Guy's idea, right enough. He's been here before, he says. Jack imagines what it would be like to find the boy and be a hero.
