Tim Lebbon - White and Other Tales of Ruin

Tom watched him go.

“Come on,” Honey said, grabbing his hand. She pushed open a door and they entered a long, dimly lit corridor. “I’ve seen them used a couple of times… I’m sure I can find them.”

Tom was lost. He felt abandoned and loved, led and in charge, alive and dead… artificial and human. He wished the Baker could explain, but he guessed that even the old man would have made little sense of all this. Honey was leading and he was following, and this wasn’t how he had imagined it at all.

“What if the mercenaries find their way down here?” Tom asked. “If they catch Skin they’ll make him talk in seconds.”

“Don’t know,” Honey said. “I suppose that’ll be it.” And that’s all she offered. She was, Tom realised, as out of control as he.

Honey’s mention of needing a charge had started to make him feel weak, as if his muscles and byways and synapses had responded to her words, his bones thinning, his lungs withering. He could hook straight to the net and give them both a clean charge, but Honey’s idea to spread whatever he had — virus, madness, disease — onto the net… well, it was what the Baker had always wanted. Spreading a fire of love. The old man could never have imagined that the smouldering stage would have taken fifteen years.

The corridor twisted and turned, opened up into wider areas, narrowed again, sloped up ramps and down steps dripping with condensation and slime. The basement was the guts of The Slaughterhouse, Tom thought, a maze of rooms which all had closed doors. He was glad for that. This was where the chopping took place, Honey had said. From the extremes he had seen in the club, Tom did not want to know.

“Can you find your way out again?” he asked. Honey paused and glanced back at him. She looked stunned.

“You mean you haven’t been remembering our route?”

“Oh Jesus…”

“Come on,” she said, “I think we’re almost there.”

They must have been way down now, staggering through the depths of the club’s basement. And this far down the club must have felt safe… because some of its doors were still open.

Most of the rooms were empty, full of dank air and dark potential.

Some had rudimentary furnishings, beds in the centre or equipment burnt into a congealed mass in the corners.

A few were occupied.

Tom wondered how they survived, these victims of chops gone wrong. He saw heads and feet and pricks and stomachs, insides outside, pieces enlarged or shrunk or missing altogether. He saw other things too: appendages he could not identify; globes of flesh with eyes and vaginas; spider-limbs stretched around a webbed parcel; eyes on stalks, ribcage exposed. One person had limp pricks sprouting from his nether regions like a porcupine’s spines, dozens of them dribbling in profusion. A woman, startlingly beautiful where she lay uncovered in her bed, seemed to be fused to the bed itself, flesh and bone arms merging somewhere with the metal frame, legs overhanging and disappearing into the ivory tiled floor.

Honey seemed not to notice, or was unconcerned if she did.

They emerged into a well-lit room, larger than any they had seen before, and she paused.

“This is where it happens,” she said, her voice neutral.

“I don’t know why they do it,” Tom said, staring at the three operating tables arrayed with all manner of arcane equipment. It reminded him of the Baker’s lab. He tried to shake that impression but it stuck fast, and the more he looked the more he found similarities. He hated that that. He didn’t consider himself chopped.

“Most of them choose what they become,” Honey said. “Mistakes are very rare.”

“Those things back there…?”

Honey nodded. “Even mistakes have a right to life. And maybe even some of those chose.”

Tom shook his head, exhausted and amazed.

“So where’s the buzz unit?”

“Through here, in a little room in the corner. If that’s where they still keep them. If they’re still working. If we’ve really escaped the mercenaries and have an hour to do it. If, if, if….”

They crossed the operating theatre and opened the door in the far corner. The buzz units were in there, vast conglomerations of wire and capacitors and chip-hoods, other pieces of equipment tagged on seemingly at random. They were the machine equivalent of the people hidden away in basement rooms, except that these had purpose.

There was a bed with grubby grey sheets, on which the subject would lie.

“You first,” Honey said. “You’re the important one. Tom.” She paused and looked into his eyes. “This might change everything. Everything .”

“The Baker always told me that change is good. It’s how we evolve.”

“Do artificials evolve?”

Tom merely shrugged. He thought of the chopped people he’d seen back there, and those who lived on the streets. He thought of himself, what he was, as an abstract idea rather than a familiar. And he supposed that evolution was a track that nothing could really escape.

He lay on the bed and let Honey hook him up. He resisted the temptation to open a route to the net himself, instead allowing the buzz unit to do so, a violent, painful connection that caused him to wince and tense his limbs. He felt the charge begin to leak in, and it was like drinking piss instead of fresh water. He was invaded rather than energised. But as with all buzz units, it was an exchange rather than a one-way feed. Some of him was leaking out as well, dregs of his essence drifting against the tide like a backflow against his pumping heart… and this is what they intended.

As the first rush of outside images smashed into Tom’s senses, he closed his eyes and let fate carry him along.

Within seconds he knew why they became addicted.

A clean charge went one way. A buzzed charge was a vampiric symbiosis, demanding something of the user’s essence in return. And once given — or taken — that shred of memory, experience or thought remained in the net, floating like a miniscule fish egg in a vast ocean. Waiting for someone else to enter and sweep it up.

Tom’s veins and synapses tingled with the stolen charge, and at the same time his senses came under assault. He smelled rose and rust, tasted pussy and spice, felt a feather touch his eyelid and a weight crush his foot, saw a man on a barren hillside and a girl crucified on barbed wire, heard the soft pop of lips opening by his ear and the roar of a crowd. He gasped and thrashed on the bed, but something was holding him down. He opened his eyes to see Honey sitting astride his hips. She was smiling at him, and there were old lead connectors pasted to her temples and thrust into the slit beneath her breast.

This was a dual effort, a doubling-up. Tom had heard how dangerous this was, and a few times he’d seen artificials who had tried it. They were lost. Not hurt or damaged, but vacant. Missing. Gone somewhere else.

He closed his eyes and tried to buck her off, but the flow of input to his brain crippled him.

“Shhhhh,” a voice said, and he saw Hot Chocolate Bob shafting someone from behind, taking out his prick and coming on her back, his victim’s skin sizzling as the sweet blue acid spurted from his chopped cock and balls. The pimp laughed but he was somewhere else now, somewhere darker and more intimate. He offered Tom a drink and smiled kindly, dropping a gold ring into the glass just before Tom saw Honey’s hand take it.

Tom struggled to open his eyes and there was Honey. She was smiling still, even though her eyes were closed, and he found a free second to wonder which of his memories she was experiencing.

He was pulled back in as his muscles rippled with renewed energy. And there was the Chinaman performing his puppet dance, each finger alive, every twitch of his hand communicating a desperate passion, a morbid misery. Silence then, and blackness, before the dark was filled with the muffled crashing of music from a long way off, seeping between floorboards and through walls, setting him moving to the rough beat.