Tim Lebbon - White and Other Tales of Ruin

He was an artificial, after all.

“Do you love me?” he said.

Honey frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, you know, I’m a plastic bitch and I hear the word ‘love’ a lot… but then you did rescue me. And you have resurrected me. So yes, I suppose I do.”

Tom was crestfallen.

Then Honey laughed and kissed him, and she held his face in her hands so that he couldn’t look away. “Of course I do! Now, can we leave please? There’s a place I need to go.”

“Where?”

“The Slaughterhouse. Best club in town.”

He was dumbfounded. Didn’t she realise just how deep the shit was they were wallowing in? “Honey, we need to leave ! Hot Chocolate Bob… we have to leave the city, get out, maybe up into the mountains — ”

“There’s a friend I have to say goodbye to. And it’s near the city walls.”

Tom looked around at the cabinet as it started to hiss. It was venting an opaque gas from a port in its head. He realised how this had been the first place he’d thought of bringing Honey for safety… and he wondered how much of that decision had been a subconscious wish to say a silent, final farewell to the Baker’s memory. Was Honey’s request so different?

“We have to be quick!” he said.

Honey kissed him once more, and then stepped back so that he could open the door.

The thing in the cabinet had shocked and disgusted him. Some of the Baker’s equipment must have corrupted and gone bad, kick-starting the creation of some meaningless experiment as soon as he’d entered the rooms. The instant he and Honey found themselves out in the open Tom uttered the locking phrase, praying that he, nor anyone else, would ever have to go in there again.

And he bid the long-dead Baker a fond, final goodbye.

They hurried away from the business estate. Tom thought of the simulacrum of him trapped down there forever, without benefit of memory or knowledge to keep it sane. He remembered the Baker saying that some things in those rooms were best forgotten. Now more than ever that was true. So he put a block on the image and memory, and he and Honey moved on.

The streets sang with the sounds of night. Sirens echoed between the tower-blocks like carrion cries in desert canyons. The flood of chopped humans turned the city into an extravagant nightmare, a place of evolution bastardised by enforced mutation. A thousand possible futures walked the pavements, waving their wings, whistling through gilled throats, scurrying spider-like or walking tall.

“He’ll look for us,” Honey said. “Hot Chocolate Bob won’t give in. He’d have spread the word.” She ducked into a boarded-up shop doorway as a feisty gang of teenagers ran by, trailing a sense of threat behind them.

“Going to a club is crazy!” Tom said. “Who is it you need to see?”

Honey turned to him and held his face. “You sound jealous,” she said, smiling.

“I would be if others like us could love,” he said.

“What?”

And then Tom realised for the first time that, as much as Honey’s feelings for him were a surprise to her, the reason behind them would be more so. He should tell her. But he was afraid.

How to tell her that her love was caused by a virus?

“Nothing,” he said. “And I’m not jealous. I’ve never felt like this before and I know it can’t be false. You and I… we’ll endure. If we’re given the chance. And that’s what frightens me, the idea that we won’t even be able to try. If you’ve been to this club before, it’s one of the places your pimp — ”

“He isn’t my pimp anymore,” Honey said, quietly but firmly.

Tom shook his head. “Yes, but you know what I mean.”

“The man I’m going to see… he’s my only client that Hot Chocolate Bob never knew about.”

Tom was confused. A lover? A sex partner for a hooker? Or was the Baker wrong? Had love existed for artificials all along, and only he, Tom, had never experienced it? The thought was chilling and belittling. He felt the world moving out from him, and Honey seemed to recede, forever beyond his reach, their separation confirmed by an awful, unbelievable truth.

“And you have to say goodbye?”

Honey nodded slowly. “He’s a human. His name’s Doug Skin. There were lots, hundreds, but he was kind, Tom. Not the first time, then he was just like them all — he fucked me, beat me, came in me and left. But the second time he’d changed, he was different. We never had sex again. Ever . And he said it was because he’d fallen in love with me.”

“Do you love him?” Tom asked. Such complexities in four short words. The answer would make or break his existence.

“No,” Honey said.

“ Did you, once?”

She frowned. “No. I respected him, and I was grateful to him, and I treasured him. I still do. But no, I never loved him, even though he wanted it so much. It was never like that.”

“Can we trust him?”

Honey merely nodded once, and Tom thought it was because she was angry at the question.

More people passed them by, a couple of grotesque manacled women stopping to hiss and laugh and piss at their feet. One man — chopped so that he was over eight feet tall — strode over and whipped the women around the necks and faces with his extended phallus, as long as he was tall and festooned with knotty lumps.

“Hope they’re not going to this club of yours,” Tom said as the three freaks sauntered away, laughing and crying together.

Honey raised her eyebrows. “Well, they’re going the right way.”

Tom sighed and followed, grabbing Honey’s hand and enjoying the contact. They were both dressed in black, and really they didn’t seem that out of place on the streets. But if Hot Chocolate Bob did have important contacts, and money to buy up-to-scratch surveillance equipment, then they would be found. No question. Chances were, if he worked in association with regional drug barons or the illicit chop surgeons, he would be tracking them now with a hijacked police satellite. Recognition software would have picked them up within minutes of leaving the Baker’s unit.

Tom looked behind them, up, across the street, feeling eyes burning into him from every angle. He’d never felt so exposed, even though they were lost in a crowd. And each time he turned to Honey she was looking at him, smiling, eating him up with her resurrected eyes and holding his hand tighter every time.

“What?” he asked, half-smiling.

“I don’t know. I’m just enjoying what’s going on, loving that fact that I love. Maybe I caught life from one of the humans who had me.”

Tom thought about that, about all the living stuff she’d had pumped into, onto and over her. In reality it wasn’t life she’d caught, but something even less quantifiable and understood.

Yet again, he wondered whether he’d ever tell her the truth.

And that’s when they were seen. Freedom, so fleeting and precious, was lost to them in the space between breaths.

Tom felt the instant change in atmosphere. One second they were part of a crowd, two black-clad night walkers with plenty of secrets to hide, and that was their camouflage. Next second, all attention was on them.

When he turned around and scanned the street behind them, he saw why.

“We’ve been found!”

Three people emerged from the steaming mouth of a subway station and ran straight at them. They were chopped. They had elongated legs to help them move faster, at least two extra arms for multiple weapon implementation, and their bodies were mostly hidden by a sleek, shiny protective coating. They looked like man-sized beetles.

“Mercenaries,” Honey said. “One chance. Run with me!”

The crowds parted as Tom and Honey sprinted along the pavement. For a second Tom wanted to mingle with them, pressing away from the streetlights and melting into the dark. But he knew that would be pointless. The mercenaries had them now, they were locked on as surely as if they were all chained together, and the only chance of escape was to outrun or outmanoeuvre them.