Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

“You’re a sharp operator, Doctor.”

“We have the agreement?”

“Indeed. We have the agreement.”

“Then welcome, Sir , to Stemset. And how may I be your assistant?”

“Can I count on your discretion?”Holubec nods with a wry laugh.

“If it were not for the simple virtue of lying by omission, I would not be where I am today!” And he gestures toward a set of heavily-barred steel doors. When the infrared fingerprint scanner fails to work, he unlocks them with a rusty old key. “We shall enter through there. But the fool must stay here, for all our safety. He is drunk and his tongue is like a wobbling eel. I do not wish to see it.”

“I was hoping you could take a look at him, Doctor. You see my problem is… is him.”

“We can observe him via surveillance camera. I have them everywhere because I am, how you say, a paranoid bastard. Plus, he appears to be the kind of man who opens dustbins in search of food. We have very unusual things in our dustbins here, Sir, and were our retarded acquaintance to satiate his appetite, he would undoubtedly explode.”

He seats Ceesal beside the increasingly worried looking receptionist. “Do not worry, he will be perfectly safe here. Michelle is a cold and unpleasant woman. Her heart is dead from a man who left her many years ago. She will make sure your shavenape does not make any trouble. And now, Sir, if you would be so kind as to follow me, I shall show you around whilst you detail me the full extent of your problem. Possibly you will offer me more money at the juncture of which we may endeavour to do something about it.”

“Indeed,” says Malmot, picking out the meaning from the doctor’s rattling syllables.

Stemset’s labyrinthine corridors beckon. Onward they go, through infinite soulless, olive drab hallways – all mental institution clichés present and correct. They barge through reinforced door after reinforced door, Holubec pointing out numerous fascinating atrocities; things that shouldn’t exist but do; partially-human arrangements of flesh, screaming silently inside tubes full of oxygenated liquid.

Meanwhile, in reception, Ceesal skips and sporadically collapses, performing a dance he believes will win Michelle’s affections. He asks if he is annoying her. She replies that he is.

In some horrible, tiled room, Holubec points into an incubator.

“This,” he says, moustache twitching emphatically, arms in an animated flourish, “is the most rather amazing breakthrough in bio-mechanical surveillance technology. I say, the most rather amazing, but I mean the most rather fantastic! This is Science in action – beyond the cutting edge; beyond the bleeding edge; the Stanley-knifed cheek of discovery: The Sliced Face, yes?!”

“Where is its head?” asks Malmot.

“There,” says the doctor. “We have replaced the jaw and mouth with a socket that goes straight to the stomach. It is accepting an intravenous-style drip tube for the drastic reduction of feeding/refuelling times.”

“And the wires?”

“We steer the creature with electrical impulses to the brain. The connector in the spine is for data transfer.”

“It looks like… Well, no offence intended, Doctor, but now I look, it bears a passing resemblance to your good self.”

“It shares a small percentage of my DNA, I will admit.”

“And you’ve had it tattooed?”

“Let us be realistic,” Holubec says, pointing with a pencil. “Many institutions employ complex anti-surveillance technologies. Given a long enough operational time span, it is likely that the creature will be discovered. And if it is to be seen and examined, then we would be foolish not to utilise the advertising space.”

“Is it alive?”

“It, er, was .”

Further into the intestines of the building, they encounter a stack of insulated metal containers.

“What’s in there?” Malmot asks, whilst adjusting his flies.

“Possibly your penis,” Holubec replies, “But the boxes contain arms.”

“Guns?”

“ Arms, ” Holubec corrects. “Like legs with hands on the end. We are removing them from soldiers in preparation for limb regeneration experiments. It is very hard to get genuine amputees these days, since the landmine treaties.”

“You experiment on conventionally-born people?” asks an incredulous Malmot.

“Of course!” Holubec answers. “We cannot let the freaks take all the credit. We are an equal opportunities experimental facility. We can even experiment on your companion. We were always testing the cognitive capabilities of apes. We could teach him sign language. Then he would be able to communicate.”

“Which brings me, rather, to my point,” starts Malmot, but the doctor interrupts.

“You will be wondering what happens to the arms in our efficient waste-not-want-not operation,” he says. “In times gone by, we are sewing them onto the dogs at tobacco research laboratories. The dog had no opposable thumbs, you will remember. It could not be holding its cigarette in a dignified manner. But now the dog is extinct. So we are taking the arms and are grinding them up into a highly nutritious, high-protein milkshake which we are feeding directly back to the soldiers. They are needing a lot of protein. You would be needing it too, if you were trying to grow back an arm.”

“I’ve always believed in recycling,” says Malmot. “And your success rate?”

“Hmm,” Holubec says, “Limited for the moment. Partial regeneration in two percent of test subjects.”

“How partial?”

“Very Partial. Quite minimal. Almost non-existent. But we are working on a new incentive scheme and are expecting to be seeing more positive figures soon.”

“Incentives?”

“Yes. We understand the military mentality, you see. We are documenting its tendency toward criminality. Rather than to suppress it, we are choosing to be accepting and exploit it; to work with what we have been given. Freedom from prosecution for one illegal act. A form of getting-out-of-jail-free card for one pre-planned, pre-agreed crime for the first soldier showing indisputable signs of regeneration.”

“And who did you arrange this with?” he asks.

“We have an agreement with The Policing Company . We assist with their prisoner sterilisation projects and they, shall we say, do us small favours in return.”

Malmot nods. He smiles – outwardly. The inward view’s a little less rosy as our arch-conspirator considers he’s been cut out of the conniving by his own coppers. Or one copper in particular. But we’ll go into that later.

“So, these crimes?” he enquires. “What sort of things do the fiends go for?” Holubec guides him through a pair of dirty-olive doors into a packed ward. He points at a sleeping soldier.

“Well,” he starts, “cutting off the limbs is never particularly popular. Especially without permission. So you will be unsurprised to discover that the majority of their criminal intentions are aimed towards me, myself. Private Chippen, there – you see: fat, snoring man. He is simplistic mammal. Barely sentient. Chippen is wanting to beat me round the head, to my death, with my own legs. Other fellow there, with the moustache and the beady eyes – frankly, he is very sick. He requests intercourse with my mother whilst I am forced to watch.

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“Hah no! My mother was cremated many years ago and now resembles the contents of an ashtray. He will experience no sexual pleasure, just gritty chafing.”

At the far end of the ward, shrouded in shadow, sits a lone soldier, motionless in a dirty towel dressing gown.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He is dead,” Holubec answers.