Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

And then the lights went out, and half the city was swallowed by a very large Go Away Bomb, and the machines switched off, and Bobby Shank got hungry. He crawled out into the street. I figure it must have taken him about an hour to make it that far, maybe a little more if he got knocked out or distracted by the pretty patterns on the first-floor carpet. Where he thought he was going, or even if he understood that he was moving at all, I have no idea.

Bobby Shank, who didn’t know that he was Bobby Shank, crawled along Hornchurch Street, looking for pancakes. He could smell them, and while he didn’t remember them, some part of him knew that was what he wanted. A miracle, he found them. He crawled into the living room of a lady named Edith MacIntyre, and when she’d finished screaming at this hairy wreck of a human life and realised that he was a gentle, suffering thing, she fed him very slowly and rocked him, because her family were all missing and more than likely Gone Away.

Over time, Edith MacIntyre’s home became a hostel and a meeting place. Travellers drifted in and stayed for a few days, and talked to one another around Edith’s big old breakfast table, and they worked for their keep or paid in food. It was warm and safe, and what remained of Bobby Shank liked it very much indeed. He stayed—not that he was in any shape to run away—and he sat in a chair on the veranda and got monstrously fat.

The storms came to Edith MacIntyre’s place that winter, and a lot of people got turned into something strange, and a lot of houses were surrounded by chimeras and talking dogs. Half-imagined food stank in the gutters and spiders like fists skittered across roads made of gold and mud and ice. But nothing happened to Edith MacIntyre’s house. When the storms came down, the Stuff trickled through the roof and into the living room, and when it fell to the floor it was water, or dust. Anywhere near Bobby Shank, Stuff just became like whatever he was looking at. Because Bobby Shank couldn’t imagine anything else. He didn’t have desires or dreams. He just had what was in front of him, and precious little of that.

And then one morning a man with a most unfortunate name chanced to come by and rest up with Edith MacIntyre. When he saw Bobby Shank, it was like he was looking at the face of God. He was hearing the music, he said. Edith MacIntyre didn’t like this man very much, with his great bear shoulders and too-loud laugh. She’d had a husband like that, back in the day, and he’d been a bastard too.

A week later Humbert Pestle came back and stole Bobby Shank away, and Edith MacIntyre never saw him again. She worried about him, but after a little while she was too busy with the business of staying alive to think about it.

The station on the Jorgmund Pipe consisted of Humbert Pestle and Bobby Shank and an old sewage pump, working in a little place called Aldony. It didn’t take long before they were ready to expand. Bobby could turn as much Stuff into anti-Stuff (Humbert Pestle didn’t have a catchy name for it yet) as you could bring within a few feet of him. It didn’t have to be there for more than a second. It just touched Bobby’s tattered remnant of a mind and changed right away. And that was fine for a few months. He found the Clockwork Hand again—or they found him, the fifty or so who were still alive—and he had the beginnings of an empire. All good. Until Jorgmund got a bit bigger, and Humbert Pestle had to go looking for more like Bobby Shank. That was harder than it seemed. Very specific, strange things had happened to Bobby Shank. Humbert had to make do with approximations.

He found a woman in Bridgeport who’d been in a coma for twenty years. She was no use. Her brain didn’t do anything at all.

He found a kid from Belfistry who’d broken his neck. That was a disaster. The kid made monsters and houris and terrible, giant slugs. They flickered and raged and then vanished again; his mind was all over the place.

He found an elderly man from the Punjab who was afflicted with some manner of disease. This person was quite promising until blood came out of his nose and he died. Humbert Pestle had to keep looking, but wherever he looked, he couldn’t find another Bobby Shank. So he looked into his heart and listened to the music, and he knew what he had to do. He had to make people like Bobby Shank. After all, this was for the future of the human race.

At first he used bandits. There were plenty of them, ordinary people gone savage and angry, preying on those who’d stuck it out and living, like Ruth Kemner and her gang, in ghastly halls which stank of executions and stale beer. He got fifteen like that. Some of them he just locked away until the EEG readings went like Bobby’s. Others he did things to, sharp, messy things. They didn’t last long, not like Bobby, but they worked. They produced. But not fast enough. The new towns were springing up faster than he could increase his production.

That’s when he went to Heyerdahl Point with the whole of the Clockwork Hand, and turned it into Drowned Cross.

He took the people of Drowned Cross, and he worked on them until he had five hundred Bobby Shanks in five hundred black boxes with hoses coming out. They still didn’t last very long, but they lasted long enough. And when they were all used up, he took another town, and then another. Most recently, he took Templeton. Soon enough, he’ll take another one. That’s how Jorgmund saves the world. It uses people up. Feeds the princess to the dragon.

I tell them all this, and I tell them that I’m going to stop it. I don’t know how I can do it without them but I will, because I care about Gonzo and I care about the Bey and I care about those however many poor broken people in boxes. I don’t care if I am a monster, if what I am is the opposite of what they are. I won’t sit by. No, no, no, no, no.

My hand is hurting because I have been hitting the bar for emphasis. I don’t recall deciding to do that. I look down at it because it is throbbing. And then I look up at the sea of faces, and no one says a word. God. I’ve completely blown it. They think I’m totally insane. They despise me. It’s a bust. I’m sorry, everyone, I have completely screwed the pooch.

Ronnie Cheung raises one hand to shoulder height, and then he drops it, hard, onto the table next to him. The ashtray jumps. He raises his hand again, and brings it down. Ike Thermite follows suit, and Elisabeth, and Leah, and then Jim and Sally and Tobemory Trent, and Baptiste Vasille is shaking his fist and shouting something in French, and the thrumming roar of sound washes over me like an ocean. They do not hate me. They are not laughing.

They are applauding.

I did something right.

SAMUEL P. is lying on his stomach on my left side, and I can smell him. It’s surprisingly pleasant. Because he is wearing a frame of foliage on his body and pretending to be a small tree, Sam’s body odour is essentially grass and soil, with just a whiff of bracken. Beneath that, there’s a bass note of armpit, which I try to ignore. Any smell like that contains small bits of actual skin, and I don’t want to think about having Samuel P.’s pits in my lungs. But funky though he is, Sam is very good at this kind of thing—“this kind of thing” being your professional-grade sneaking.

On my other side is Elisabeth Soames, wearing her ninja outfit again, partly because it’s suited to sneaking and partly because it might afford the enemy some confusion if we get caught and she’s wearing one of their uniforms. I’m wearing mine, with a pair of decent shoes. The last-ditch plan is to pretend that we’re escorting a prisoner, then cause mayhem. Elisabeth Soames pointed out that this didn’t work well in Star Wars and can reasonably be expected to fail in the real world, which is somewhat more demanding in the field of cunning plans, and Samuel P. tried very hard to pretend he hadn’t been thinking of Star Wars when he proposed it. The trouble is that although it’s a lousy last-ditch plan, it is also our only last-ditch plan.