Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

'No. Keep it on.'

I had a bad feeling, you see, and I knew Brendel was at a loss on this one. And when we walked round the corner, I could already hear the cries and the screams from the store, and see the chaos that the commcops were thrown into. Brendel was struggling to get out of her van, and even from the end of the lane, the look on her face, the fear…

'Jesus! What the-'

It was Gumball's voice, and I swear he actually took the gum out of his mouth to say it. But what could I do? He was all set to run, to give help, but I called him back. I wanted to tell him how bad it would be, and how hopeless and if only people listened to me, once in a while, wouldn't life be better, easier, more long-lasting. But the mood of before, the distance from the world had come upon me again, folding like a stranger's shadow.

Later, I went with Gumball to visit Beenie's Fishorama. I guess we were, the both of us, hiding our despair behind the workload. First of all we rounded up Mr Beenie himself, told him the usual about transmitting illegal adverts, confiscated his broadcaster, slapped another fine on him, his seventh in that year alone. Then we found the flotboy from before, which was easy; him and his friends were tucking into plate after plate of spicy prawns. I gave him the spoiler shot, which he had to receive by law, and of course, a few seconds after the stuff had entered his veins, he threw up violently. The jetgirl was there as well, the one who had been fixed upon my spoiler gun. This was strange, because flots and jets kept well apart usually, and anyway, she wasn't eating, not having seen the prawn advert up front. Again, she was all eyes on me, on the uniform, the upraised scattermask, the gun, especially the gun.

Meanwhile, Gumball had succumbed to a plate or two of prawns himself. 'I must have got a glimpse,' he said. 'Never mind, eh? I'm hungry anyway.'

'No, you're not, Gum,' I answered. 'I told you, mask on, all times.'

I didn't eat, myself, still too strung out from the Dollberg incident. But we sat together, and I watched Gumball tackle his meal. His chewing gum was stuck on the table beside him, for later use. It was a sickly green this time, the colour of a bad moon. And between every mouthful, my new partner was full of spittle and talk.

'What about Drane, eh? Thank Christ we didn't go in. Hey, I should thank you for that. Jesus! What'll happen to him, Drane I mean? The same as Parker?'

I shrugged, keeping the mood cool. Really, I just wanted to finish this shift, get some sleep.

'You were close to him, weren't you? Parker, I mean. So the boys tell me. I mean, you had a thing going on, right?'

'Wrong.'

'Wrong? But I thought-'

'Look, Gum. Shut up, will you. Eat the prawns.'

'Sure I will. Nice prawns, these. What happened?'

'What?'

'You know, with you and Parker, and this… what is it? This staircase advert thing. I mean, what's so fucking bad about it?'

'You've read the reports.'

'Official-line bollocks? Never touch 'em. I want the truth, Muldoon. I mean, don't I deserve it? Nobody wanted to take Parker's place, you know? You're down as a bad deal.'

'You think I care?'

'Do I fuck think you care. Ain't that why I like you?'

I didn't tell him everything, of course. I left out the worst part. But I kept it truthful, and I kept it cool and neat, because telling it like that, like a story that had happened to somebody else, well it brought a calmness to me. It started, as most of our jobs do, after the beginning. It's double-bonus time if we catch an advert before it's affected anybody, especially the killer thralls. Usually, we're too late to save the first victims. We're just the cleaners, really; we go in after a bad show, we make it safe again for the taxpayers. Apex jobs are a recent trend, and the Stairway trans was my first. Parker's last.

He was only a kid really, Parker, and I should've looked after him better. He'd been my partner for about two months when the trouble started. I knew all about the locker-room gossip, of course. There's still only a few of us women in charge of teams, and Brendel's decision to set me up with a kid ten years younger than me, well… let them talk. But we had a thing, you know, a way of working together that was good. Parker respected me; it wasn't the constant battle of wits, like with Gumball and all the rest. I really should've looked after him.

We first got word of the trouble when a too-high proportion of people started killing themselves. Lobjobs, mostly, and usually off the top of prominent buildings. It was a public display, a grand exit. It was fairly obvious that an advert was to blame, but tracking it down to source was proving difficult. The adverts they've got these days, it's not just buying the latest gizmo; they can make you do anything. That's why we have the strict controls; that's why we're here, the commcops. Someone should've realized that bad people would get hold of the technology, because don't they always? So, we'd had killer transmissions before, but never this successful, and never this prominent. It was the number one job on the crime sheets, and we were getting nowhere on it, until a victim came forward.

This guy was in a right state, babbling mainly, and screaming about a stairway, 'a golden stairway, endlessly… endlessly…' Eventually, we got some sense out of him. He'd been sitting at home, quite peacefully, watching a game show on television. His wife was with him. The children, thankfully, were upstairs at the time. They missed the advert. The advert that came out of nowhere, just sitting in between all the other adverts that plagued the TV that night, and nothing strange about it, just this image of an endlessly rising stairway. No words with it, no slogan, but that was the norm. The usual freeze. The freeze and the thrall. Legal ads were low-level interference, and you could easily resist their temptations with a little will-power. So they'd thought nothing of it, this man and woman, except they both dreamed that night of the stairway, and of going up it, and what they might find there.

The next day, two in the afternoon, the wife had thrown herself out of the top-storey window of the office where she worked. That was five days ago, and distraught as he was, and full of suffering for his lost wife, how could the husband not want to join her? This is when he read about the spate of similar suicides. God knows what resources he had conjured up to get himself as far as the commcop station.

Brendel wanted to place him under arrest, for his own safety, but the authorities would have none of that. So we filled him up with the maximum dose of spoiler juice, and then let him go. He lasted two days. Of course, we had a cop on his tail the whole time. Did no good; he shook the cop off, just for a minute.

A minute's a long time when you're falling…

Things got bad then, because the story broke loose. The media were hounding us, and Brendel was on a sharp edge. She cancelled all leave, tripled the bonus for the Apex score, got the lab boys working full-time on the transmission source. The only good thing they could find was how the stairway ad would only ever appear on one receiver at a time. What we call a narrowcast. It would turn up on a private TV, a computer screen, an arcade game. Never on a public system, like a cinema screen. As though the advert was picking people off, one by one. Sniper mentality. We tried putting out our own adverts, warning people not to watch, or play, or in any way to have serious leisure time. We did the usual pointless appeal to the TV and game companies, asking them to suspend all transmissions. Like, yeah, sure we'll cut off our money supply, just on some unsubstantiated claim about a killer ad. Get out of here. So we distributed free scatterglasses, cheap and nasty ones, which is a bit like getting flotsams to wear pinstripe suits. No deal, and you can't reach everybody, not all the time, so I guess we all got to feel like warriors, us commcops, naked on the streets against this invisible, deadly enemy. How else explain what Parker did, what I let him do?