M. Harrison - Empty Space

In Saudade City, the Toni Reno case was duly filed ‘unsolved’.

Not long after, Epstein the thin cop found himself on patrol with a uniform called Grills. It was a mild night. Some rain. The traffic on Tupolev was thinner than usual. For the b-girls, on parade in their candy-coloured mambo pumps at the corner of Johnson & Chrome, business was slow. Over at Preter Coeur, the fights were slow. From Placebo Heights to the Funnel, from Retiro Street to Beasley Street, entire entertainment demographics were staying home.

GlobeTown, 2 am: Epstein and Grills found time to talk about the war. Grills believed it could lead to a permanent change in the social landscape. Crime tourism, she said, had tanked; they also were seeing across-the-board decreases in illegal tailoring, donkey capers, sensorium porn and other personality hacks. But the way Epstein saw it war was only another layer added to a bad cake — these downward trends she outlined being balanced by the growing market in counterfeit identity chips, food stamps and rackrenting. If personality crime was down, smuggling was up, seventeen per cent year on year. After a pause to consider this, Grills opined that a lot more crowd control overtime would be available in the months to come; with that Epstein could only agree, and they left it at that. Suddenly there was a white flash in the sky high up, silent but very sharp, very high-end. Epstein shaded his eyes with one broad hand.

‘Is it an attack?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Grills said. ‘I’ve seen an attack, and there was —’ here, she felt around for the right words ‘ — more of it.’

Five hundred miles above their heads, K-ships were disappearing from one orbit to reappear almost immediately in another. Empty space was frying with their communications. A minute ago they had been administering their flock of rusted hulks: now they were facing into a void. Ten million metric tonnes of psychophysical gunk, welded into receptacles ranging from the size of a coffin to that of a largish asteroid, had gone missing. The news media were full of it. Some fierce new kind of physics had lit up the sky and in a matter of nanoseconds the entire quarantine orbit of Saudade had drained away like dirty water in front of people’s eyes. The Quarantine Police were mystified. Everyone else was excited. All over GlobeTown, they came running out of the bars and Nueva Tango joints to stare up into the rain. Epstein and Grills, glad of the action, kept order. ‘Nothing to see here,’ they admonished; but they stared up too.

‘Who wanted that shit anyway,’ Grills remarked, voicing the general sense of relief that would set in over the next few hours.

Two or three streets away, in a tenement so close to the corporate port that its geometry shifted a little every time a ship came in, things were holding up well for George the gene tailor.

Perhaps he looked a little bloated. Internal changes had taken place. If you found him, it might not be wise to move him. And he was, of course, dead: so his hold on things had become tenuous. But he still had what might be described as a footprint there, in the assistant’s old room. At this scale, anyway. If you were able to see the room as a context fixed across a couple of hundred years, George, like everyone else who had spent time there, would be part of a kind of dark smoke rushing through. However hard they tried to fix an identity for themselves at one scale, it was taken away from them at another. They thought of themselves as people but they were more like ghosts or ads — anything that flocks or swarms.

. . . Lucky Pantera, Bruna, Kyshtym, Korelev R-7, ‘The Angel of the Parking Orbit’. Janice. Jenny. Geraldine. You blody polse thing. Fucking in me. Get out! & don’t come in! October falls into November. West London draws round itself & for one second seems comforting. Then Michael comes in & there’s a row. Marnie, seven years old: ‘It’s a dog’s poo in a paper bag & he lit it on fire.’ You aren’t a camera, but you are, in everything you do, a description of the present. We fall into the dark street & kill someone. My name! she calls out. We kill someone again . . .

Meanwhile, a thousand light years from home, the assistant was undergoing transitions of her own. They were quick and dirty. The world, coming apart into pixels, streamed like eels then reassembled itself around her. She was looking out, as if through tinted glass, or from a very dissociated position, into a room.

Part of her was a million years old and the size of a brown dwarf; other parts were, for the moment at least, describable only as ‘something else’. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. Sediment oozed from the corner of her mouth. If you had asked how she felt, she would have answered, ‘Spread thin.’ There were deep shadows up in the ceiling. There was a noise like tinnitus. People came and went at the wrong speed, in groups and smears like animated statistics. Some of them were people the assistant had talked to earlier. Some of them were pushing racks of equipment about. They were all ignoring her. All she could do was wait for them to notice what had happened, wait for the situation to stabilise, and encourage them to engage with her. She was patient and calm. If she didn’t have a name, she could at least identify herself.

‘SiteCrime, Saudade City,’ she repeated at every opportunity. ‘Junction of Uniment & Poe. Fifth floor investigator.’

Someone peered in at her from very close quarters.

‘Gaines?’ he said, raising his voice and tilting his head almost horizontally into her field of view: ‘You might be interested in this. It’s asking for something.’

‘There’s a data spike in VF14/2b,’ someone else called.

The assistant was impaled on that spike. It went right through her, and she through it. There was no describing what had happened to either of them.

‘It keeps repeating this address.’

‘Address?’

‘It’s asking for a detective from some hick police service the other side of the Halo.’

. . . It is like enacting yourself as one sentence over & over again. I redline my equipment & make the moves. That bitch comes up fast but she will never be as fast as me. I call out my warning, they don’t want to hear that, so I kill them again. I can’t hear the language they talk between themselves. Do you know what it is to be like me, your condition is unnameable. It is relieved of all previous contexts. This freedom! My goodness when you’re like me even your piss is inhuman . . .

Anna Waterman could watch the soap slip off the edge of the bath one night in 1999.

A white figure knelt in the cooling bathwater, while another figure curled round it from behind. Laughter. The water splashed about and the bath made vigorous but mournful sounds.

Unused to skulking around her own life like this, Anna found its details surprising: not so much in themselves but in that they existed at all. It was exciting, in a way, to see your own naked body walking away from you, or hear yourself say with a laugh, ‘Now, what can we eat ?’ But everything had the false clarity you get with a certain kind of photograph. Every surface proved to be microscopically available to her new vantage point; yet they were without meaning. The facts were often different too. The man in the bath, for instance, who she had always remembered as Michael, turned out to be Tim. How embarrassing. Everything was the same but, in the end, quite different. You could count the varieties of toothpaste in the bathroom, which a memory of sex doesn’t normally encourage. She could view every aspect of that event, and of the events surrounding it, and of every other event in her life. A generation later, water poured its yeasty bulk over the Brownlow weir; ponies ran about in a field as if suddenly released; skylarks rose and fell over the South Downs like busy lifts: at exactly the same time, Anna could watch herself, peacefully becalmed in what she had learned to call the Noughties, rapping upon her kitchen window.