Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

He was but a child to her. A servant. The daughter would bring freedom. The daughter could wake her. The water felt warm, quiet and subdued like the womb. Everything was loud, painful and so dry on the land, in the city. In the city every street was a reminder, fragmenting memories played out like an old film. They might as well have belonged to someone else. On dry land it felt like you could reach up and touch reality, pierce through it like a membrane to where madness and hate waited.

He swam down. He would do his duty, but first he needed to touch her, be with her, join with her, and inside her he would try to cease to exist so there was only her.

Heavily sedated and on as much pain relief as he was, Arbogast couldn’t stop the tear trickling from his eye as he saw McGurk, resplendent in shell suit and bling, the cane, the latest phone in hand, flanked by muscle, making his way through the ward towards him.

The other patients and the staff watched him walk by. If they didn’t know who he was, then they knew what he was. The constant chewing and the wild amphetamine stare didn’t help.

McGurk walked into Arbogast’s room and stood at the bottom of the bed, looking at him with contempt. Trevor remained behind McGurk while Markus went and pulled the curtain shut across the window that looked out onto the ward. Then he closed the door.

McGurk looked down at the bandaged stumps where Arbogast’s fingers used to be and then back to the tear running down the pimp’s face.

‘Do you know what I hate most?’ he asked. Arbogast dared not answer. ‘Fucking weakness.’ McGurk moved quickly but with the jerky movements of a habitual speed freak. He grabbed Arbogast’s wounded hand and got up close to the pimp’s face. Over the sterile and sickness smell of the hospital and through the fugue of sedatives and painkillers, Arbogast could smell spearmint over something rancid on McGurk’s breath. McGurk put his hand over Arbogast’s mouth. Arbogast wet himself. He was sure it was over.

‘I want to test the limits of modern medicine’s ability to relieve pain,’ McGurk told the pimp. It was something cool to say that he’d thought of on the way over. McGurk squeezed the stumps of Arbogast’s fingers. The dressings turned red. ‘Don’t you cry! Don’t you fucking cry, you bastard! You owe me an explanation.’

McGurk was wiping his hands with a paper towel when the doctor burst in flanked by security.

‘It’s okay. We’re leaving,’ he told them.

‘We’ve called the police,’ the doctor told him. McGurk turned to look at the whimpering ball of pain on the bed that used to be William Arbogast.

‘He doesn’t want to press charges, but you do what you think is right.’

Trevor made a path for them through the security and they left.

‘You believe that shit?’ Markus asked as they made their way through the ward.

‘City’s getting weirder.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want to know who the fuckers in the masks are. I don’t want any of the cunt with a gun – he sounds like some super-plod, Special Branch, something like that. Find me where the sister is, though.’

Caitlin felt like she had bled onto the page today. Sometimes it just wouldn’t come, but today it had been pure stream of consciousness. Poetry wasn’t cool or interesting to most people any more. Caitlin felt it was difficult to do well and with relevance to the modern world, but today line after line had come out of the platinum-nib fountain pen given to her by proud parents and onto the yellow legal pads. She felt like she was talking to something else, listening to the beat of the city or the world, channelling the words. Normally she hated her work immediately after she’d written it. Sometimes it was hard not to tear it all up and burst into tears, but not today. Today she even took pleasure from the shape of the words on the page, wishing she could publish them in her handwriting rather than through some soulless word-processing package. She was the biggest critic of her work. If she liked it then she knew it was good.

The inspiration had wiped her. The invitation to go out had been half welcomed and half not. She could do with leaving her flat after such an intense day, seeing some actual people, but she felt drained. The answer had been obvious, a little chemical pick-me-up. After all, she was following a trail blazed by hedonists of all stripes.

Red-haired and unconventionally attractive, a little too tall for the more insecure male, Caitlin didn’t stop a room when she walked in, but some attention was inevitable. Single, she was keeping an eye open, but she didn’t panic when she was on her own, like some of her friends. Tonight she just wanted to dance but she needed some fuel.

It was something new. Caitlin was initially suspicious as it looked like an acid tab with a dot of red on it. The girl dealing in the ultraviolet-lit toilets had assured her that although it provided good visuals, it was all about the dancing. Caitlin had let herself be talked into it.

Dancing. Moving to beat and bass. Trying to find that perfect moment. The modern shamanic experience. The lights above her becoming stars, light refracting through the dry ice becoming glowing gaseous nebula. Dancing on the edge of a spinning spiral galaxy. Joy. This was why she did it. This was the moment. To transcend the club. The music receding. She felt something wet under her eye, coming from her ear. She tasted copper in her mouth. She touched her face. Her fingers came away wet. She looked at the other dancers. They were covered head to foot in blood. Above her, space started to seethe like angry bacteria consuming everything.

There wasn’t even time to scream.

Du Bois lay on the bed in his room in Fort Southwick. He liked the room. It was another faceless barracks room. He had felt at home in places like this since he had lived in his first preceptory. His room was part of the officers’ quarters for the contingent of Royal Marines who guarded the facility.

Fort Southwick was one of the grand Victorian forts built on Portsdown Hill at the behest of Prime Minister Lord Palmerston for an invasion that had never come. The huge, squat, red-brick edifice had been used for Operation Overlord during the Second World War, as a NATO communications centre during the cold war and was now part of the Admiralty Research Establishment.

He had the information sent to his phone. He could have had the information downloaded straight into his brain, but he preferred to watch and read and then assign data to his augmented memory. He received the information shortly after he had used his phone’s systems to interrogate the control nanites he had found in Arbogast’s blood.

He hadn’t understood some of the words. Or rather he had understood them but struggled to make sense of how they fitted together. He had learned new terms like RLK, which apparently meant real-life kill. He understood those who killed for belief, profit and pleasure. He didn’t understand insanity, but appreciated it as a motivation. What he didn’t understand was how humanity had become so jaded. Perhaps they deserved their inevitable destruction. He had never felt so old, so divorced from everyone around him, so out of his time.

They were called the DAYP clan. This stood for Do As You Please. They had taken their name from Carroll. Du Bois was of the opinion they should give it back. He understood their criminality. What he couldn’t understand was how it connected to their games. As if it was all part of a computer simulation and they could do what they wanted to whoever they wanted. As if none of it was real and therefore none of it mattered. How had they become so divorced from reality?

They had started life as an elitist gaming clan. Something called an uberguild, apparently. It had taken a while for du Bois to realise that the weapons they were dealing were effectively electronic game pieces for computer games and not real weapons. Even longer to realise that people would pay for these virtual weapons and for high-level characters. This was how the fledgling DAYP had financed themselves. Virtual weapons dealing and organised league game E-sports, where they were known for domination and bullying.