Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

It was a Sunday night, quiet time in the all-night arcades. The usual flots and jets to unfreeze, no big deal. Parker was getting bored, and itchy. He was expecting more of the job, of course he was, young like that; I was the same. Pretty soon you get to find out that being a commcop isn't quite like the recruiting images, and I tried to give him the real package. Stupid kid wouldn't listen, going crazy he was, with fighting talk about how he was gonna take this stairway fucker out, once and for all. He was hot for it, and I couldn't help but get a secret pleasure, remembering mainly, remembering how it had been when I first started out.

We found a group of flots gazing full on at a game screen. Locked solid they were, and as we came up, I was dreading seeing the stairway there. This had been my fear, the last few weeks: coming across a spectator in thrall to the killer. Luckily, it was just a slowly rotating pair of plastic trainers up there on the display, saying in secret, 'Buy me! Buy me! Buy me now, you stupid suckers!' Easy game, because this had all the design flair of a camel's arse, and was obviously a trans from Minskey's Muscle, a sports shop only two blocks away. Parker was mad keen to shoot the trainers himself, he had the gun out and loaded and everything, so I said, 'This one's yours, kid', and went off to slap the fine on Minskey.

Big mistake. Because it took longer than I thought, what with Minskey putting on a show, and his pumped-up sales assistants hanging round in sub-pensive mode. All around me were banks of screens playing out the same commercial, and variants thereof, and here this guy was, claiming he 'didn't never have such bad adverts, no ma'am, not never. See now, these good adverts, clean adverts, no nasties. No freeze. See?'

All the time I was hoping Parker would hurry up. I needed the back-up. What was the kid doing? Surely he'd done the deed by now, come on. In the end I had to walk out of there empty-handed, which pissed me off. So I was all set to give the grief to my so-called partner. I was acting mad for my own failure, I know, and maybe the kid was having trouble, it's just that I can't stand not making a clean case of a job. And by the time I get back to the arcade, the place is deserted, all the games standing empty, forlorn with abandoned play. No flots, no jets, no Parker. So I'm looking round and getting worried, when I hear this noise from the next aisle, a kind of screaming sound. Like human, through the mincer. Straight off, I should've called for back-up. Instead I was just running over there, towards the bad sound, because the sound got me in the guts. Bad reaction getting to me. Round the corner, I see a bunch of people going crazy outside this one shop. The screaming coming from them. OK, get up close, and slow down, slow down, check the situ, play the book. The shop was a dark-eye, shut for business. Abandoned, read the slashed-on sign across the window. The door thinly open. OK, what's the score here?

'My sister! My sister! Help her! My sister!'

One freaked-up flotboy, coming right on at me, making me sweat, so desperate. And someone else, saying, 'It's the stairway thing, pretty sure it must be.'

'She's in there?' I ask.

'Get her out!' screams the boy. Keeps on screaming.

'Where's my colleague?'

'Uh?' Voices.

The other cop, where is he?'

'He went in.' Voices all round.

Shit.

I look around the crowd, most of them quiet now and just looking at me, as though I could save one of their kind, but all I was thinking about was Parker, that stupid fucker, going in alone. I think that's when I got round to calling HQ for the back-up van, Apex coding. Of course, I didn't wait, how could I? Instead, pull the mask down tight, load the spoiler, kick the door wide, step through.

Dark. Dark in there. Only the faint buzz of colour through the scatter, vapour from some screen, way back. No sign of Parker or the girl, and what the fuck was a television doing on, in this dump? Moving through, beam on, I see signs of cheap habitation, spread duvets, camping stoves, pots and pans. Flot squat. In the dark my beam flashes on something, a rolled-up duvet or something, then I see it's a kid, a young girl. She's lying on the ground, all cradled up in herself, gently rolling, back and forth, back and forth. And when I bend down, turn her over, and she opens her arms for me, I see this amazing thing - she's got a mask on. A commcop mask.

'Jesus, I didn't know that,' said Gumball. 'You mean…'

'Yeah. Parker took his mask off, gave it to the girl. He saved her life.'

'Jeez!' He'd finished his prawns by now, and the gum was back in his mouth, and he was chewing on it, but slowly. 'That's fucking brave!'

'It's stupid. But yeah, brave, I suppose. I found him there, stuck fast in front of the television. He had the gun out and everything, and he was pointing it at the screen, and I swear he was trying to shoot, even with the thrall on him. He had tears… tears on his cheeks, frozen. That's when I heard the backup sirens. Too fucking late, course they were.'

'Hey, don't blame yourself, Muldoon.'

'Why not? You got someone else handy?'

'So…' And here he stretched the gum out of his mouth in a long line - a dirty yellow this time - and then let it snap back. 'So what did it look like?'

'The advert? Well, I had the mask on, so I was only getting the filter. Just some stairs, nothing special. Animated, so that they kept rising upwards, and never ending. Looked kinda cheap, really. You know, amateurish.'

'That's it?'

'That's it.'

'Jeez!'

'Yeah. Let's clock off.'

But when I started to get the gear together, I saw this kid looking at me from the next table along, listening distance. It was the jetgirl, the one with the hard shopping eyes, and away from her flottish friends now. She was smiling at me.

'What's up with you?' I asked her.

'Nothing much, just listening.'

'This is cop business," said Gumball. 'Get the hell out of here. Bloody flots!'

'I'm not a flot. I'm a jet. How dare you?'

'All the bloody same. Nothing better to do than play stupid games all night long.'

'They're not games. It's an art form.'

'Yeah, right.'

'I'm good at them. I get to cheat, you see. It's a secret, cause the cheating's built into the art. You have to discover it, then you progress. The next level.'

Gumball stood up. His mouth worked at the gum like a machine, a rainbow machine. 'I'll progress you!' he snarled, and when he spoke, you could see all the colours inside, caught in the change.

'Sit down, Gum,' I said to him. 'Just a kid, that's all.'

'You're not telling him everything, are you?'

She'd said this directly at me, with a look in her eye, a knowing look.

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Tell him about the mask.'

'What is this?' asked Gumball.

I ignored him, kept my eyes on the girl. She looked so young, nine or ten, although you can never tell for sure, not once they're on the street. 'What do you know?'

'Stuff.' And she smiled again.

'What's your name, girl?' I asked.

'Lucy. What's yours?'

'Never mind that. You'll have to come with me, I'm afraid.'

'Smashing. Will I get to be a commcop, please?'

So I sent Gumball on his way, clocked off with HQ on the bleeper, and then offered to buy the jetgirl some breakfast. This she readily agreed to; not prawns, just coffee and biscuits would do. She sat there, slurping away. I took a look at her; quite good-looking, incredibly slim, like I could pick her up like a feather. And well-dressed like all the jets were. Compared to the flots of course, who were trash personified. I asked her why she'd left home, and she said that home was for the lonely, and I could connect to that. I was a commcop, wasn't I?

'I can look at adverts,' she said, with a crunch of biscuit. 'Bet you can't.'