Minotaur was screwed. He sat on his trike in the underground carpark trying to figure a way out. Brags thought he was doing him a favor by bringing him into the loop on the security violation. Fact was the incident had yanked the rug out from under his feet.

For a moment there, Minotaur thought he might turn things around. The genetic sample was a trump card. Minotaur was sure it represented a breakthrough on the case. He had assumed it would give him the bump he needed to get back on the steady.

The way things looked now, the evidence was as good as useless. The code might lead him straight to the killer but he damned sure couldn’t log it. Logging that call was signing his own death certificate. Yet until he logged something he’d continue his status slide – all the way down to the Low.

He’d first realized he had entered a virtual death spiral when his online credit rating started eating into his personal status on Netspace. At this stage, Minotaur could take out the Arabian Peninsula and the points would barely slow the seep. He was losing face and there was nothing he could do about it. Refinancing the trike or subletting the apartment would only advertize the fact that he was in dire straits and undercut what little confidence his bullhead brand still inspired.

Screwed, screwed, screwed. He’d seen it happen to other people. He never thought he’d get sucked down the hole.

It had to be a fault in the system, he reflected. That this kind of thing could happen to an honest contractman – it was more disturbing than any glitch in the VOLICOMSAT. When the Volition Party had reignited pod culture in the Sprawl five years ago, distributing the personal units far and wide, the idea of a networked status system uniting personal, professional, and cultural achievements seemed like a great idea. Like old-world pod culture, it enabled people to build their brands and faces, and make their living on Netspace (previously Sprawl Online). Minotaur had burst from the blocks ranked in the upper twentieth percentile on Netspace thanks to his bloodletting as a team leader in the Volition revolution, a diverse network of contacts, and the intrinsic cool of his profession. Yet in these past five years, Minotaur hadn’t kept up. When pod culture started up, with Initiative Four and the launch of Netspace, anyone with some talent and initiative could start a business. But since Volition had campaigned for Initiative Five, the hive mind had gravitated towards democratic utopianism, and dissenters had become rough edges that seemed to be smoothed off by the power of consensus. Minotaur’s mistake had been to let his innate distaste for House of Representatives, and everything that it represented, bleed into his status updates. He’d given up voting, or even keeping up with what was going on.

Friday week, the Sprawl would vote on the fifth and final Volition initiative. All the polls said that Dorien Xiao would cream it. The world was on the brink of a high-tech democratic revolution. And Minotaur was an old-school contrarian. It was the wrong time to be caught in a virtual death spiral. Everything that he’d worked to achieve. Everything that he’d dreamed of achieving.

Look ready soldier. It wasn’t over yet. He synced the pod with the dashboard feed and checked the files Brags had uploaded for him. Sure enough, Volition was preoccupied with concealing the anomalies in the VOLICOMSAT from the media. Minotaur figured he could make use of the confusion. It was time for some detective work. It was time to figure out what really happened at Volition House last night.

He checked the files of the deceased. Davidson, the psychiatrist, was a Volition insider. So too was Undersecretary Lewis, who looked like a powerbroker in the Sprawl. Admiral Dixon was a dark horse. Dixon’s file was a maze of restrictions and truncated narratives. This made Dixon the decisive variable in the equation. But it didn’t indicate a way ahead.

The other clue was Seritus Wetectronics. Minotaur’s initial search didn’t turn up any record of the company. He sent out posse of autobots but registered no hits.

His avatar appeared carrying a flashlight.

‘Are you lost, Minotaur?’

‘Trying to find Seritus Wetechtronics’.

MINO3GRAFXX30 looked pensive. ‘Not on file, I’m afraid’.

‘That is why I’m lost’.

A business party unfurled from the elevator shaft in a snarl of voices. The security contingent kept lock on Minotaur as their clients climbed into an armored vehicle and drove away. Minotaur returned his attentions to the portal. He entered Brags’ security codes and dived through the hypercoded flows of Netspace. For a quarter hour he trawled a series of low-level servers dating from the Federation era. He dived again. Each search led him further from the online architecture of the Sprawl. Soon he was deep in the strata of the old internet. There he found the Seritus homepage, rotting like a fly in the tattered framework of the World Wide Web.

Legend, the body text declared. Hardly any of the graphics were working. The site hadn’t been updated since 2030. Minotaur clicked FAQ. Seritus was: a provider of genomic services and nanotechnological solutions. Looked like any number of wetectronic companies that sprung up in the biotech boom of the twenty twenties.

Wetech – what did he know about that? Fisherman was offline. Minotaur struggled to recall what he’d picked up over the years. Wetech was biotech meets nanotech, something like that. It got going when biogeeks started using nanobots to recode DNA in situ. When Minotaur got cancer from the rad-bomb in Afghanistan, the medics had used a nanostimulant to trigger a genetic pattern that helped fight the disease. Everyone knew the case of Justin Tsimfuckis, aka chick3n little, who used wetechtherapy to change his looks and went onto a career as an award-winning actor and talk show host.

Wetech changed a lot of things, back in the twenties. It changed the way people thought about race and ethnicity. It changed the way people thought about human nature.

Minotaur had spent most of that decade on duty overseas, and he lived on camp between sorties. But he watched the military channel as he worked out, and joined the chat feeds on the holocrom, and the changes that he saw taking place in US popular culture confused and depressed him. Things had gotten wild, back in the twenties. Part of him wondered if they had been lucky to have been wiped out in the Change. Given another decade, who knows what the human race might have done with itself. NuFlesh was a mausoleum of freaks who still experimented with wetechnology. If things had kept on, Freddy the Fly and the lizard-girl might be normal average citizens.

He checked some more links on the site. Seritus’ customers included the Department of Defence, USHealth, and select US government agencies. With a client list like that, Seritus wasn’t just any company. It was contracted to the most high-tech military in history. The CEO and board would’ve been tight in Washington, in there with Cleaver’s circle. If those people had survived the Change, they could have easily forged connections in the Council of Marshalls, who knows where else after that.

He browsed the product portfolio. Whatever lay behind the alluring titles of Seritus’ various wetectronic innovations – like Sericonin PDRI® Reagents: Blast from the Past!, SWARM2 Metabolic Enhancements, and the award-winning SYNCRON4000 Nanopacifier – the links were lost in time. Minotaur noted that Seritus had a local headquarters – Curtis Bay, Baltimore, now under the greater DC area.

He was punching in a TripQuest when a title to the corner of the holscene caught his eye. Autonet. It was listed in a section of the site devoted to new R&D projects. The page link was down.

Minotaur thought hard. Autonet. Where’d he seen that name before? Following his instincts, he scrolled through Leopold Lewis’s file. There it was: Autonet. Autonet was a private corporation attached to the United Eastern Federation Centre for Democracy, a proxy for the progressive arm of the Volition Party. Its mission was ‘the enabling of civil synergies through technologically-facilitated virtual processes’. Minotaur knew the rhetoric. This was what Xiao and his cohorts called democracy.

The question was whether the name was a coincidence, or if it indicated some deeper connection between Seritus and the Volition Party. Minotaur checked the Autonet offices, off Columbia Pike. He fired up the trike. He’d call in at Autonet to ask a few questions en route to the Seritus building.

——————————————————

Reggie Williams was the public relations manager for Autonet’s East DC operations. He looked about twenty five, but his manner suggested that he had years more under his belt. It was the funny thing about people who got into retroagents – the mismatch between look and manner. It was disconcerting. Reggie was none too happy to have had Minotaur burst into his office at seven thirty, as he was preparing to leave the office. He sat on the thither side of a buffed obsidian desk, elbows upon the desk, resting his chin on a steeple of manicured fingers. As Reggie considered each of Minotaur’s questions, the peak of the steeple would ascend to his lips then descend again to the chin as he delivered his answer. The performance was as artificial as the holoscene vista behind him, which showed a golden sun falling behind ice-cream mountains.

‘Let me explain again what it is we do here at Autonet, Minotaur’, Reggie was saying. ‘Autonet is not a service organization. Strictly speaking, Autonet is not an organization at all. Autonet is an initiative, a group initiative – an online initiative. The initiative has a political mandate and a democratic mission’.

Minotaur coughed. He had no doubt that he was taking up Reggie’s Williams’ time. He also knew that Reggie was obliged to speak to him.

‘You build online platforms. You design spaces’.

‘Minotaur, take a helicopter view. Since the birth of society, human beings have sought to organize themselves into groups driven by common values and visions. Sometimes this has had a political aim. Sometimes it has just been aimed at the preservation of social life. Here at Autonet, we make no distinction. We treat all forms of collaborative activity the same. Collective action unfolds in a common vision. Masses of people learn to swarm. We call this process: “symbiotics”‘.

Reggie made quote marks in the air with the tips of his fingers. From where Minotaur was sat, it looked like he was placing devil-horns on the sides of his head.

‘And symbiotics is democracy, right? Democracy 2.0′.

‘Symbiotics is democracy. Not some new democracy, but true democracy, democracy as it is and has always been. Autonet is not trying to bring democracy to the masses, Minotaur. We are not trying to instruct people how to behave. We provide tools. Autonet provides platforms for collective democratic activities. Our mission is to enable civil symbioses, regardless of what expression these symbioses may take’.

Reggie’s face solidified in a smile. Minotaur sensed he was being asked to leave.

‘Uh huh. And how is Autonet related to Initiative Five?’ he asked.

Reggie looked displeased. He deconstructed his steeple of hands.

‘Autonet is the architecture for Initiative Five’, he said. A holocard slid across the desk. Autonet is Internet Five Alive! it said.

‘You haven’t been keeping up, have you Minotaur? You haven’t been watching House of Representatives. Shame on you. The fifth initiative has been debated on the show for months. The vote is Friday week. Once Initiative Five becomes law, Autonet will take over a large part of the day-to-day administration of the Sprawl. People will use the platform to run their lives and govern it: triggering initiatives, debating policy, even with the power of attorney. We are completing the revolution, Minotaur. This is what Volition has always been about’.

‘Point-click democracy? I’m not very political’.

‘Democracy, Minotaur, has always been the goal the Volition Party from before the revolution. It is in the Freedom Manifesto: democracy is the political expression of volition, and the principle ambition of any legitimate administration. To this extent, yes, one could say that the Autonet system has always been central to the Volition agenda. You might even say that Autonet is Volition – a slogan I have suggested to Representative Xiao on numerous occasions, to which, I must say, he is beginning to warm’.

Minotaur synced the holocard and placed his pod on the obsidian top of the desk. He placed his hands to either side of it. The stone was cool and centering under his palms.

‘What exactly is the legal relationship between these two organizations, Autonet and Volition?’

‘Autonet is a private company contracted to Volition. As a start-up, we were incubated under Volition, but we were privatized in 2042. Alongside Organix, Minutiae, a whole range of companies’.

‘Autonet and Minutiae, back in the day’.

‘I don’t know what you mean by that, Minotaur’.

Minotaur took his hands off the desktop.

‘I have just a couple more questions, Mr Williams. I’ll try not to take up much of your time. The first question concerns one of your, uh, users, who was killed in an incident at Volition House last night. You may have heard…’

‘Tragic. Leopold Lewis was one of our most active and innovative contributors. He was with Autonet from the start’.

‘The question that interests me is whether there might be any connection between Undersecretary Lewis’s murder and his involvement with Autonet. The vote on Initiative Five is, as you say, just around the corner’.

‘Friday week’.

‘And there is a heap of controversy surrounding the final initiative. Do you think there’s a possibility that Leopold Lewis may have been targeted on account of his being a democrat?’

Reggie placed his fingers on his lips.

‘May I speak off the record?’

‘For sure’.

‘Admiral Dixon never made any secret of his opposition to the Volition initiatives. I think this is unsurprising. Dixon was the product of the US Marine Corps – a hierarchically-organized and highly individuated social system. He was not exposed to the horizontally-distributed forms of autonomy characteristic of true democracy. Dixon’s opposition to the Volition Initiatives was strong and vehement. He tried to block public funding for Autonet’s activities at several points. And he clearly bore a grudge against key figures in the Autonet community. I wouldn’t want to go on record suggesting that Dixon was carrying out some kind of vendetta. But off the record – it is possible’.

‘Though I suppose if he were carrying out a vendetta, Representative Xiao would have been a more obvious target’.

‘Assassinating Xiao at this point would have worked against him. He would have created a martyr. It would have shored up support for Initiative Five’.

‘OK. Last question. Have you heard of a company called Seritus Wetectronics?’

‘I can’t say that I have’.

‘You can’t say that you have or you haven’t?’

Reggie looked displeased. Paydirt. Minotaur suppressed a grin.

‘What is the point of this question, Minotaur?’

‘I’m interested in learning whether Autonet is in any way related to the activities of this company, Seritus Wetectronics. In any way at all’.

‘Minotaur, as I explained to you, Autonet is a private company. If you are interested in checking our accounts from 2042, I’d advise that you should contact…’

‘I’m thinking more of the technology that you use here at Autonet, Reggie. Where it comes from. Who made it’.

Reggie deconstructed the steeple and put his hands on the desk before him. The interview was over.

‘I have to apologize, Minotaur, but I don’t have the answers to these questions. I’d recommend you direct them to our legal team. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go. It is a long commute. House of Representatives screens in two hours, and I do not intend to miss my chance to vote’.

————————————————

Fisherman’s reply came through as Minotaur was leaving the building.

‘Good and ready’, it said.

Minotaur mounted the trike and summoned the encrypted site they used to exchange information. He downloaded the file and decoded it on the dashboard system. It was a vidiclip. It changed everything.

Fisherman had just come inside. His orange oilskins glistened wet.

‘Minotaur’, he said. ‘This time you have met your match! It is a genuine monster. Humanoid, it turns out. There are traces of homo sapiens in the field structure, but it’s not human. Periodic isoforms indicate baboon, cat, reptile, and protoplasmic origins, all in one beastie. Go figure. I hope this is a failed science experiment, Taur. It’s an impressive architecture, I have to admit. Quote me on saying it is gloop and I’ll deny it‘.

Fisherman fetched a beer. ‘Reason I’d say it slips under the VOLICOMSAT is because it’s too subtle for the system’, he gasped between gulps. ‘This is alien stuff, man, a generation or two ahead of where we were in the twenties. I haven’t seen wetech like it. Like any design, you don’t see the action until you get into the strands of the double-helix. Here you find the chemical pathways enabling the viruses to swarm. The weird thing about this structure is that it’s flooded with nanites. I kid you not – the rungs of the double-helix are crawling with nanobots! Don’t ask me what they’re doing there. You don’t put people in an architecture, right? You apply architecture to build a hotel for people to stay in. Same way, wetech designs are just architecture. They open trails and pathways for the nanotriggers; they don’t host freekin nanobots.

‘Good news is, if you wanna find Dr Frankenstein, the DNA has a patent, coded into stable phosphate groups between the nucleotides. Ever heard of a company called Seritus Wetectronics? They were big in the 2020s. Couldn’t miss them if you were working in my neck of the woods. You were probably applying their biowarfare portfolio to the Chinese at the time. Anyhoo, Seritus owned the IP, so Seritus is your lead. I ran a search – seems they closed their books in 2030, same time as everyone else’.

Back to Lord of Swarms

Back to main page

Minotaur’s pod was chirping. He reached for it in his sleep, and the cosmic bass in his dream disintegrated into a jackhammer ache. Why did it hurt to wake up? He reached for the Novo on the table as memories of the night before seeped back to him. He’d sustained a broken rib and assorted cuts and bruises. You are lucky you’re not smeared on papercrete, the Volicom medic had said. Minotaur stumbled through the Low as the sun rose over the Potomac seawall and burned his eyes. He shouldn’t have drove, but he wasn’t thinking. He wanted to get back to the crib before collapsing. He’d made it home through peak hour traffic and thrown himself to bed at 9.05AM.

Now the wallscreen said 11.15. His pod chirped merrily from beneath a pile of clothes. Minotaur sat on the side of the bed, nursing his head, staring his rifle and boots. Brags was right – the killer was leaving a trail for him. First the biosample on Butler’s bathroom wall. Then the flagrant use of nanotech at the Hampton Bay apartments, leading him to Freddy and the Seritus card. Seritus Wetectronics. He didn’t know the name. But he’d played this kind of game before. The whole thing was too perfect.

Someone wanted him to investigate Seritus Wetectronics.

The pod stopped chirping. Minotaur dug it out and checked his messages. There were a string of calls from Harry Brags.

‘Get over here’, said the first. Reiterations riffed on expletives.

—————————————-

Harry Brags was furious. He was a short, stocky man, but as he reared across his desk, prodding the air with his cigar, his presence vastly exceeded his size.

‘You’re goddamned lucky you come in here with a face like a cut steak, boy’, he said. ‘Else I’d be goddamned tempted to rough you up myself. While you been sleeping, half the goddamned Sprawl’s been on the trail of our psychokiller. You just about slept your way out of a commission, Minotaur’.

‘Just the facts, Harry’, Minotaur said, easing himself into a chair. ‘Kinda fragile here’.

‘What’s fragile is your place on this case, Minotaur. Three weeks on the job and what do you get me? I get grief and that’s it. I’m telling you, Taur, I don’t like it when I have to do all the thinking work myself’.

‘How about we stick to the case, Harry. After that, you can go screw yourself’.

Brags smacked on his cigar. Minotaur would not be intimidated.

‘Don’t hold out on me, Harry. Whatcha got?’

Brags put ass to chair. He glared at Minotaur as he slapped the desktop system into action. A newscast sprang to life on the wallscreen beside them. SECURITY VIOLATION AT VOLITION HOUSE, the headline screamed. Journalists jostled at the stairs of Volition House. Troopers cleared the way for paramedics carrying a stretcher, a body draped with a sheet. Brags hit the mute as shots of the deceased filled the screen.

‘Society dinner at Volition House, last night. Representative Xiao is in attendance, though not in the room, when this guy’ – pointing with his cigar – ‘Admiral Willard Dixon here, stands up and shoots Leopold Lewis, Undersecretary to the Minister of Oil and Resources, right across the table in front of two hundred guests. Bang bang. Dixon turns the gun around and decorates the room with his brains, as we see here – good Christ, Minotaur, what is the media coming to? Are there no standards?’

Brags froze the recording as it cut to a woman faced off against a phalanx of mikes.

‘Big city, all action. Thirteen freekin hours ago. Where in hell you been?’

‘Seeking medical assistance, Harry. What does it look like? Stop screwing me around, will ya? How is this related to my case? Where is the SAD?’

Brags tapped the side of his head.

‘Here is the thinking part’. He applied the remote. The newscast disappeared.

‘There are a couple of anomalies in the case that Volicom have yet to explain. Number one is how Dixon came to have a gun in the ballroom, which, as you imagine, is a heavily secured place. Check it out: a pre-Change model, US military issue. I mean, what was that thing doing out of a museum? Leaving this matter aside, there are other irregularities in this case that I suspect shed light on the Dubrovnik killer you’ve been following’.

Faces of a man and a woman filled the screen. The man wore wire-framed glasses. The woman had dark hair and a winsome smile.

‘Two anomalies. It seems they knew each other, which may or may not be significant. This one’, pointing left, ‘is Doctor Daniel Davidson – this is stiff number three. Yeah, Davidson died of cardiac arrest pretty much the same time as Dixon went Happy Hanukkah with the service pistol. His involvement in the shootings is hard to say. Davidson, by the way, was Dixon’s psychiatrist. He was seen yelling at Dixon shortly before Dixon did the pop and top. Or someone was. Let me come back to Davidson. Volicom have a question mark over Davidson’s whole role in the shooting.

‘This is the broad. Janice Chanteau, diplomatic attaché for the Republic of Laurentia. Chanteau’s still with us, or with Volicom, at this point of time. I’m trying to find out where they taken her. Seems that, like Davidson, Chanteau spoke to Dixon moments before the shootings. So we got these two people, who knew one another – both of them talk to Dixon in the run up to the shootings. One dies or ODs the same time as Dixon goes crazy with his handgun.

‘Strange world, huh? Minotaur, you ain’t heard the beginning of it’.

Donald Davidson lay sprawled on the floor in a chalk silhouette, wire-framed glasses crushed in his hand.

‘Davidson was found near the Cyclovac, away from the crime scene. First people thought he caught a bullet. But he died of a drug overdose.

‘The mainstream media has played down Davidson’s death. It looks incidental and it complicates the pop and top story. Volicom, on the other hand, are treating Davidson’s death as suspicious, for reasons that shall become apparent…’

The picture changed again. It was a security-cam shot of an empty passageway, looking down from high on one wall. The readout at the bottom-right said: 22.23.

‘What I’m showing you here has a high security clearance. I tell you this because, if you watch this and tell anyone about what you’ve seen, I cannot protect you. You understand me? Officially, I don’t have it. If you talk about it, I will deny it, right? What you see here does not leave this room’.

Minotaur signaled with his chin.

‘This is footage from one of the exits to the ballroom. The time is shortly after the killings, when the Representative Guard evacuated the room’.

Figures flooded down the corridor in a rush. Brags slowed the tape as the psychiatrist, Davidson, came about the corner. He adjusted his glasses and passed beneath the camera.

The readout said: 22.24.

‘Check it out’, Brags was saying. ‘Mr Mindscience’. He looped the sequence, selected and expanded the visage. ‘Say, isn’t Davidson dead already? Gee, I thought so’.

Minotaur tried to speak but Brags silenced him with an artfully poised cigar.

‘You know what? It gets even weirder’.

He split the screen, shifted the security-cam footage to the left and put a Genscan readout to the right. He tagged Davidson and replayed the segment. Davidson passed underneath the camera. The Genscan readout was blank.

‘Check-it-out. Mr Mindscience doesn’t show up on the scope. Of course, right, because, as far as Volicom is concerned, the guy never left the room. Davidson is already dead. There are people out there right now who think that this here is his ghost!’

Brags pealed off a wheezing laugh. ‘Friends of mine in the forces, they are asking themselves whether they should look into a ghost, whether they should take the digital record seriously at all. It’s like, they don’t have to. They have a facial scan but they got no biomass. No biomass is: no body. No body is: no case’.

Minotaur’s heart was racing. ‘It’s spooky’, he said. He watched the Davidson lookalike drift across the screen. It wasn’t Davidson, or his ghost. Minotaur was looking at his SAD.

He was trying to gauge the implications of the information. He was in no state for it. He needed sleep. But what Brags was telling him seemed to confirm what he’d suspected. So far as VOLICOMSAT was concerned, the killer was invisible. A genetically invisible assassin. How it had come to look like Davidson was another question. If it could change its appearance, that would solve some puzzles. But here was his killer, digitally enhanced, walking under the genetic scanning system. It was time to tell Brags about the sample that he’d taken from the Hampton Bay apartments. It was suddenly part of a larger and more auspicious investigation.

But Brags had started talking again.

‘That is the first of the anomalies. The second concerns the enchanting Janice Chanteau. Eyewitnesses swear that Chanteau was present at the scene of the shooting. Apparently she said words to Dixon immediately prior to the murder-suicide. We are talking about a dozen people out of a count of twenty who can positively identify Chanteau as being present at the shootings. Word on the hypernet, though, is that Chanteau was in another room at the time. I got confirmation on this just as you came in here. According to VOLICOMSAT, Chanteau was in another part of the ballroom at the time of the shooting, a completely different location.

‘Again, this is classified information. But I’d like to hear your thoughts on it’.

Minotaur played the straight act.

‘Let me get it straight’, he said. ‘We have the psychiatrist, who shouldn’t have been walking around, walking out of the place – we have a visual ID. Yet Volicom says he wasn’t there. Then we have the attaché sighted talking to Dixon just before the shooting, again we got a visual ID. Volicom says she wasn’t there. That’s two people identified as being in places that they are not. Blankety blank. It’s weird, alright, Harry. It don’t make sense’.

Minotaur settled back in his chair. ‘Thing is, neither of them fired the gun – so why the song and dance? How is this related to my contract?’

Brags eyed him silently.

‘How about you let me in on what you’re thinking, Harry? I’m getting old here’.

Minotaur could play dumbass with the best of them. Brags could see through it.

‘Don’t give me that, Taur. I hate to see you lookin ugly and dumb. We’ve been beating our brains trying to figure out how our killer moves from A to B without a trace. Now we know. Somehow, this guy, or woman – it could be a crew of killers for all we know – somehow he, she, or they are slipping under the VOLICOMSAT. Don’t ask me how. But there you have him, or her – or rather you don’t. This is big. We are talking major security threat. When Volicom put the pieces together, they are gonna freak’.

Minotaur was adding it up. If the evidence he’d picked up at Hampton Bay had been left there for him to find, as he was coming around to think, it suggested that the killer ultimately wanted to reveal the hole in the Genscan system. This made the killer even more of a security threat than Brags assumed. What in Jesus’ name had he got himself into? Minotaur already knew way too much about the case. If he told Brags about the DNA sample, and Brags passed it on to Volicom, he might find he had a SAD slapped on his own head. If it were just about the case, he might have taken the risk, and told Brags about the evidence. But now it was a security issue. Brags, who had made his living out of the contacts he’d forged within the Volicom network, had everything to gain by bringing the sample to their attention, even if it cost him a contractman.

Besides, there was a hole in Brag’s story big enough to drive a truck through. Minotaur decided to milk the dumbass act some more.

‘Well, it is an interesting hypothetical, Harry. But you are not taking the point. Ghosts and security violations aside, this looks like a straightforward top and pop. The Davidson-lookalike isn’t involved in the crime, right? And the woman people identify as Chanteau – she spoke to Dixon, but she didn’t pull the trigger. I’m hunting a killer, Harry, not suspicious bystanders. Blankety blank, y’know?’

Brags reached across the desk and pulled Minotaur’s pod from his chest pocket. He synced it with his office system.

‘You are damn right it doesn’t make sense’, he growled. ‘No sense at all. Which is why I’m giving you all this information and special clearance so you can go and make sense of it for me’.

He tossed the pod back to Minotaur.

‘Now listen, Taur. Listen good. Xiao’s people are upset about this. Right now there is an army of special ops trying to put the pieces together. All we need is some bright spark making the connection between these anomalies and the Dubrovnik killer and we’ve lost our edge on this case. So keep schtum. And move fast. We are running out of time on this contract. And this has changed things.

‘I will make it plain. You are my number one ballbreaker, Minotaur. You are my man. But this is a big contract and I’m not gonna let it slip through my fingers. You have until tomorrow night to produce some results on this case. Otherwise – I’m signing up some other tough guy for the job. Capische?

‘Nuff said. Now get outta my office’.

Go to Chapter eight: Democracy 2.0

Back to Lord of Swarms

Back to main page

Gutache. Sleep. Cough. Awake.

The digital readout on Buzz Lightyear’s chest says four forty five AM. The beach house is asleep.

Cough. Venger is wide awake.

The boy lies coiled in the sheet. Venger is at him again. Therapy had left it blind. For weeks after he had visited the Davis clinic in Boston it had been feeling its way back into its lair. The boy would wake with talons in his guts. A fist of throbbing pain in his chest and throat. He whimpers now and pulls his knees into his chest. Left unchecked, Venger will claw up into his esophagus and blossom with the rising gorge into his lungs. It is important to keep Venger out of his lungs.

Something knocks at the window. A bird foraging for food. The boy listens as the small shape pecks and scratches and flies away. He can hear terns calling in the dark. He listens as they build their morning chorus.

Cough. He’d dropped to sleep. Buzz Lightyear is showing five AM. The boy switches on the light and looks at the machine beside his bed. The pills on top of the machine. Tobramycin. Piperacillin. Ceflazadine. The bottled water on the bedside table. He unscrews the cap and lays it by the bottle on the table. He does not drink.

The boy has a hole in his chest, sealed by a valve and metal plate, where the tube goes in to empty the soggy vessels. He can activate the pump to vacuum out the snot. It goes into tiny blue sacs under the bed that Pa stores in the laboratory at the Beacon Hill house. Sometimes Pa sends them to the clinic in a refrigerated box. The boy will keep on filling those sacs, sure as breathing, till something is done about Thrombasson’s, his father tells him. If he could map the human genome, damn sure he’d find a cure.

The time is five oh-three. The monitor says: 73.25. He turns off the light again and stares at shadows on the wall. How long could he keep it under seventy five, he wonders?

The boy takes the ventilator from its harness over the bed and draws peppermint breaths through the machine. He studies his BPM on the monitor. The digital reading drops point zero-zero two.

He is learning to dissociate from the pain. He feels it but only from a distance. The more distance he gets on it, the more he has Venger figured out. Venger attacks different parts of his body at once. Knees and elbows. Diaphragm and esophagus with a clawing sensation in his lungs. Migraines and a cold that doesn’t go away. Flashes of pain spread across his body like a firestorm. The boy knows that if he doesn’t take the pills or get a shot they will blend together into a threshold moment, when the pain blossoms and grows to become a solid, shifting thing that swallows his world, triggers the alarm outside the door and wakes everyone up. The boy has no intention of returning to the ICU.

He is trying to bring Venger out to play. Taking control of the fear is the easy part. The dangerous part is coming to know the peaks and thresholds of pain. The boy has learned to master Venger, to play with it, even control it. He has found he can ride the wall of pain, ascend the plateau, and medicate before he hits the wall.

The therapist has taught him how. It is something he can do for himself.

He hasn’t told his father about this, or Doctor Gee. They would think it was weird. They’d make him see the psychiatrist again, even when he said he didn’t want to. It has to be a game between him and Venger. No one else can know.

It is five thirty and Venger is coming on strong. The boy feels winded and sick, like the time he swore at Jimmy Klein and took a punch in the guts. He’d blubbered then like a baby, but that was before. He struggles now for focus. He names the seabirds on the carousel over his bed. The Ninja Turtles halfway through a mission on the lightening windowsill. The porta cath hung with Red Sox flags leaning on the sideboard, where Optimus Prime guards the door. None of these things can help him now. Cough. Now it is just him and Venger. Like the character in the book. Sputnik. The kid who rules the world.

His arms coil like branches under his chin. What would Mama say if he gave into it, he is thinking? Mama’d tell him to deal with it. Mama’d said suck it up in her shrill voice. Mama said he was a baby. Except she was having the baby, so she couldn’t deal with him. The boys had been sent to stay with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Leo while Mama had her time out. Doctor Gee said it was for the best. The salt air was good for the young one. Plus there were the birds. Cough.

He struggles for breath. Cough. The threshold is coming soon. He clutches for the water and pills.

He lies in the dark, coming down the mountain.

Buzz Lightyear flashes six AM. The boy wriggles from bed, dresses awkwardly, and slips into the wheelchair by the door. He slots his forearm into the plastic cuff and presses the ignition. The electric motor whines into life. He boy trundles through the house, soft rubber tires squeaking on the polished wood boards. The door to his brother’s bedroom is a jar. He accelerates to the bedside, reaches out and shakes him awake.

Dorian props himself upon his elbow and rubs his eyes. Michael can feel the weight of the glare.

‘You promised’, he says. There is no getting out of that.

——————————–

If you had stood on the hill of the Cedar Tree Neck Sanctuary on the early morning of July 12, you’d have seen them coming up the beach towards Doggett’s Pond, zig-zagging between the tide and the line of trash on the sandbank. Dorian walked ahead with the security torch, splashing through the puddles, shattering traces of morning light. Mike came behind in the wheelchair, riding just above the tideline where the sand was dense and firm. His fingers, poking out the sleeves of his Red Sox jacket, tip-tap-tapped on the accelerator trolley he held over his chest. The wheels of the chair slipped and spun and sent spurts of water behind them in glistening arcs.

When they reached the walkway to Doggett’s Pond, Mike would not be carried. He lurched out of the seat and clambered up the slope himself. Dorian came after him with the chair, shaking his head. He ground the wheels of the chair into the sand at the crest of the dune while his brother collapsed, coughing up a lung. The morning sun rose over the island and silvered the waves to the Massachusetts shoreline.

‘Your Highness’.

Mike did his Richard the Third thing. ‘Sputnik. Lord of Seven Hells’.

Dorian didn’t like it when he spoke like that. He was too young for it.

‘Rise then, Lord Sputnik’, he said. He lifted Mike into the chair and folded the screen over his lap. The iPad lit up automatically.

The pond was the color of molasses. Small birds paddled and flapped on its surface. Dorian tugged the Steiners from the side of the chair. He raised them to his face and scanned the water and marshes.

‘Egrets’, he says. ‘Egg-rets’.

He was only ten but he was entering the ninth grade that coming semester. He had a haircut like the guitarist from My Fist Your Face. Mike was seven and looked like an old man already. He was home schooled. He liked Mozart and Gershwin. He had a secret crush on Miley Cyrus.

‘Lemme see’. Cough.

Dorian gave him the binoculars, crouching down to steady his wrists.

‘Egg and bacon city’, Mike concurred. ‘Lots of birds this morning. Hey!’

Dorian had taken back the binoculars.

‘Terns. Black terns. Lo-oons. Bunch of Fowl. Regular Fowl-party there. Well, look it. That’s an Ibis. All the way from Jamaica Bay. In-conceivable’.

‘In-conceivable’. Mike tried on an affectation for size. ‘S’cotta be a heron. Lemme look again. … No way. No freekin way’.

‘Yes way kiddo. Like I’m telling you, the climate is FUBARed. The birds down south are heading north. Soon we’ll have to go to Montreal to see the nesting terns’.

Mike handed back the binoculars. He started tapping on the iPad.

‘What’cha writin Sputnik?’

‘S’nothin’.

Dorian glanced across his shoulder but Mike shrugged him away. He pogoed on the spot for a bit to warm himself up. Pulled out a tiny cigarette, sparked it up.

‘Hey fool,’ said Mike, not looking around.

‘You sayin Uncle Bevan’s a fool?’, Dorian asked him.

‘Aunt Ellie thinks so’.

‘Aunt Ellie’s jealous. Ellie’s not a star. Not like Uncle Bevan’.

‘Uncle Bevan’, mouthed the younger one, pulling a face.

‘Uncle Bevan used to be big. Like, on the cover of Rolling Stone once. Now he’s doing stuff on the underground and stuff’.

‘Yeah, like down a mine shaft!’

‘Uncle Bevan says he’s a monster on the underground’. Cough. ‘Whoa! This stuff’s laced’. He dropped the cigarette into the sand and crushed it with the toe of his sneaker.

Mike had lost interest. He hunched over the iPad tapping away. Dorian pulled out his iPod. It was Applewar. He clicked Vampire Weekend and boogied to New York indie Afrobeat. He was thinking about the music scene on Martha’s or the lack of it. The karate classes and reading groups he was missing out on while he was stuck on the island. He was frustrated with the whole arrangement, and Mike wasn’t helping.

Dorian pulled the phones from his ears.

‘You know, I don’t know what we’re doing out here, Sputnik’.

‘Mama’s having time out. Like to see you have a baby’.

‘At this lake is what I mean. This bird thing. It’s like – seven o’clock in the morning. It’s nice you draggin me here. I mean, I could be sleeping, but for these …. freekin birds’.

It always came out wrong.

Mike stopped writing. He didn’t speak but stared at the water. After a while, Dorian noticed he was crying.

‘Hey, what’s this? What’s this? Aw, c’mon, I didn’t mean it! We can keep on coming here, right? I just wanna know why?’

He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. There were more tears, a handful of Kleenex, a honking exhalation of snot. A flock of terns rose screeching into the air.

‘What’s wrong Sputnik? I thought we were having fun?’

Mike stared at the pond, chewing his lip.

‘Tell me, kiddo’.

‘Uncle Leo says that the ponds won’t last. That in time, with the warming, the sea’ll rise and they’ll become tidal flats. So the birds’ll disappear. Some’ll migrate, some’ll die. But they’ll go away’.

He looked at his brother. ‘We gotta keep a record’.

‘Everything’s gotta die someday, Sputnik’, Dorian offered. He wished he hadn’t said it. They were quiet again, listening to the birds.

Then Mike said: ‘What if we took these birds and made copies of them in Pa’s laboratory? Huh? Like in that movie? We’d make copies of them and we’d put them someplace safe. Then the birds wouldn’t need to die. We could keep them safe. They wouldn’t need to go anywhere’.

‘That what you’re thinking? That’s why we’re here?’

Sniff. ‘Suppose so’.

‘Well Sputnik, if that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll clone these birds. We’ll put them on a big island. We’ll call it Jurassic freeking birdbath!’

They laughed about this for a while. Mike wrote it into the iPad. He tried lifting the binoculars again, but his arms fell into his lap.

‘You hear that? I can hear a falcon’.

‘Yeah. The majestic red-foot falcon. But tell me, kiddo, I wanna know. How we are gonna do this, y’know, clone these birds?’

‘We’ll ask Pa, of course’.

‘Well, y’know, Pa’s pretty busy right now. What with all his institutes and grants and projects and stuff. Plus there is Edith, right? Pa’s kinda snowed’.

Mike’s response came laced with conspiracy and design.

‘We could do it together. I’ll bet there’s a design. I’ll bet Pa has it in his laboratory. We could steal it. You could do it, sure you could. You’ve done it before…’

Dorian had been waiting for this.

‘Listen, Sputnik. Cloning stuff – it ain’t like growing sea monkeys. Only Pa knows the formula. And he’s got it up here, right?’ He tapped the side of his head.

‘Besides – only Pa knows, remember’.

He lingered on these words before continuing.

‘Like I told you, this is a secret we cannot share with others. Not Aunt Ellie, not Leo. Definitely not Uncle Evan. Ma and Pa cannot know that we know about this. It’s our secret, right? And we gotta keep it secret. Otherwise a real bad thing will happen’.

Mike squinted into the sun.

‘I’ll bet Mama knows. Even if she doesn’t know how it’s done. I bet she knows’.

Dorian licked salt from his lip.

‘Come on’, he said. ‘We should get back’.

Back down the dunes and along the beach. Back to the beach house, where Ellie was fretting about their whereabouts, filling a plate with flapjacks in anticipation of their return. Back to a life that had recently changed, with a new addition to the family, their sister, and a secret too terrible and strange to exchange with anyone. They would never return to the dying ponds. They would not save the birds. But they planted a thought that day, the two of them, in a subconscious realm that they shared between them. It sank its roots deep into the soil of their minds, plunging through their cerebellums and down their spines, binding their hearts and souls together. It was a thought that would bind them together long after the younger boy had died.

——————————–

Their father was a biochemist and genetic scientist. In the nineteen nineties, when his name was Damien Stepson, he’d pioneered the technique of shotgun sequencing that Craig Venter claimed as his own. Damien received a small fortune when he and his company were quietly absorbed under the Celera Genomics umbrella. His shotgun strategy propelled the corporation to the forefront of the race to map the human genome, yielding unprecedented results at a fraction of the cost of the publicly-funded project.

At Celera, Stepson worked with the most brilliant geneticists of the day. His research in advanced genotyping and gene expression analysis was second to none. It was a running joke at Celera that when Harry was mapped out (this being the name the scientists accorded the abstract personage of the genome), Damien would claim him as a Stepson.

When he wasn’t working, Stepson traveled the globe. He was particularly fond of Vietnam, and the eclectic energy of Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi. It was in Hanoi, in January 1999, that Damien fell in love with a Chinese princess under a cherry blossom tree. Her name was Xiao Shu-fei, and like him, she worked in genomics.

They married in New York later that year. In accordance with Chinese custom, Shu-fei retained her maiden name rather than assuming the surname Stepson, and Damien, ever-ready to flout convention, took to introducing himself as Damien Xiao. They honeymooned in Provence and Venice and lingered long on the Portuguese coast. By December, Xiao Shu-fei was pregnant and the Stepson-Xiaos were making plans for a family. Their hearts raced ahead of them into the future. Everyone said that Damien and Shu-fei had it all. They were in love, so naturally they believed it.

The first signs of a defective gene appeared shortly before the baby’s birth. It is customary for Chinese brides to retain their maiden name rather than adopt the surname of their husband. The offspring, however, usually inherit the paternal family title. For reasons that she was unwilling to explain, Shu-fei would not consent to the child – a boy – taking the name: Stepson. The boy, she said, would take her surname, Xiao.

Damien was incensed. He took it as evidence of an Oriental racism that he’d always suspected in Shu-fei. Damien realized that, from the start of their love affair, he’d assumed she was like some strange and elegant sample in a petri dish which, over time, would yield its secrets to his power of analysis. He realized that the mysteries of the heart obeyed a logic different to that of cells and genes – a logic of confluences, synergies, and distributed intensities, a logic of rhizomes, not trees. In years to come, the insight would lead his research in bold new directions. First, it stole his speech and shattered his resolve. He relented to Shu-fei’s persistence, and the newborn baby was registered, Dorian.

Dorian Xiao was a blue-eyed Asian-American boy. He was the jewel in the crown of what was ostensibly a glorious New York marriage. From Manhattan to the Hamptons, the Stepson-Xiaos were the toast of New York society. American Baby wanted Dorian for the cover. Harpers and Vanity Fair ran glossy photos on the family relaxing in their Upper East-side home. Behind closed doors, things were different. Damien and Shu-fei were barely speaking. The breach in communication that had opened in advance of the birth became a rift and then a void, engulfing their conversation and creating a tension that kept them apart for days on end. Damien locked himself in his laboratory, burying himself in work. Shu-fei locked her emotions behind a perfectly-composed public face.

Six months of simmering bitterness ensued. It wasn’t until Shu-fei developed an interest in organic sculpture and disappeared for a fortnight to Paris, ostensibly for the Biennale, that it dawned on Damien that his marriage was on the rocks. When Shu-fei returned from Paris, he broke down and pleaded with her not to leave him. They’d taken a wrong turn, it was his fault. They’d start again with a second child. Things would be different this time around. How true those words turned out to be.

This time the genetic deficiency in their union was real. The boy, Michael, was healthy at birth, if a little underweight. But at three months he developed a ragged cough, recalcitrant to treatment. This became a lung infection, and he was hospitalized. Initial tests showed that he was suffering from pulmonary hypertension – high blood pressure in the lungs. The child needed to see a specialist. Damien knew what the doctors were thinking. He assured them that he had personally screened the embryo for CF. Genetically, there was nothing wrong with Michael. If anyone should know, it was him.

Damien was right: Michael did not have cystic fibrosis. He was diagnosed, somke ten months later, with Thrombasson’s syndrome – a genetic disorder so rare that it could have been invented for the Stepson-Xiaos. Thrombasson’s was one of a glut of new disorders that cropped up around the start of the twenty first century. Some suggested they were the product of US military experiments. Others said that they were God’s revenge on the human race for having cracked the genetic code. Thrombasson’s was relentless, unremittingly painful, and without a cure. A pharmaceutical cocktail could treat the pain, but until the cure was discovered the child’s days were numbered. The savage twist was that Damien carried the recessive mutation that was responsible for Thrombasson’s syndrome. The frontiersman of the human genome project had carried in his own genetic code a fatal disorder that he’d passed to his son. It was a tragedy worthy of the Greeks.

Shu-fei had little taste for literature or dramatic irony. She blamed Damien for the dying child unreservedly and without respite. From that point, she began to see him in a different light. She became disdainful of Damien’s positive side, his virtues and achievements. She disconnected herself from him, physically and emotionally. And she dreamt of taking revenge. Contrary to the Chinese meaning of her name, Shu-fei was a cruel woman. The couple did not split, but it was not a happy home.

——————————–

Beacon Hill, Boston
February 11, 2010

His parents were arguing downstairs. Dorian lay in bed, listening to the rat-a-tat-tat of his mother’s voice and the hiss of his father’s dissuasions slip about the polished wood and naked stone of the family home. Mike’s Buzz Lightyear clock said twenty past two. Why did they always argue after midnight? Since Mike had been in treatment, his parents had been staying up all ends of the night – Mama stretched on the couch, bathed in a Foxtel glow; Pa locked in his lab, Mozart leaking under the door. All day and night until the witching hour they were lost to one another. After twelve, they’d find one another and the ruckus would begin.

Dorian climbed from bed into his slippers and gown. He crept from his room and sat for a while at the head of the stairs, peering down into the darkness below. They had been drinking again – he could tell from their voices and the volatility of the discourse. He tip toed down the stairs and across the living room, flattening himself against the wall by their bedroom door.

They were arguing about genetics, as usual. For as long as Dorian could remember, his parents had converted their stress and frustration into formulae and theorems, arguing on a terrain of diagnoses and case studies he knew nothing about. But tonight, something was new in the tone of their argument. Typically, his parents fought like sumo wrestlers, crashing and bouncing apart, then locking arms until one or the other was forced to the ground. Tonight, Mama was dishing out lessons in Chinese karate and Papa was taking a beating. The rules of engagement had changed. Dorian was intrigued. He listened closely.

They were in the on suite bathroom. Dorian heard a burst of tap water. His mother was declaring in a tremulous voice.

‘An egg cell taken from its donor has its nucleus removed. Another cell with the genetic material to be cloned is fused with the original egg cell. You know this can be applied to a human being. There we have it. ABC’.

His father sounded nervous, conciliatory. ‘No. Not for us’.

‘Not for us – for me. For what is mine. You of all people should have known what you were passing to our son. You of all people should be able to make a sister for your sons’.

Had he heard right? Pa’s answer was muffled by something smashing on the ground. Dorian blanched as his mother shrieked:

‘I’ll take my life before I give birth to another of your sons! Give me the girl you’ve denied me! Give me my life again!’

Footsteps hastened towards the door and he sprang behind the sofa. Pa’s bulky shape threw a shadow across the wall and vanished as he slammed the door. Dorian curled in a ball until the coast was clear. He scrambled up the stairs to bed. He lay shivering in the dark wondering what it meant. He felt certain that something terrible was upon them. There was an evil in the house – something colder and crueler than divorce.

A few days later Pa announced that he was taking time off work. He hadn’t had a holiday in years, he said – it would be good to get some things done about the house. But rather than work about the house, Pa locked himself in his laboratory and didn’t come out for a week. The more he worked, the happier Mama seemed to become. They no longer argued and fought. Dorian rarely saw them together together. He had the sense that Mama was waiting for something, something that Pa was making in the laboratory. What could it be, he wondered?

He hacked into his father’s computer and puzzled over the research. Dorian had yet to engage the world of molecular genetics in earnest. But he knew enough about reproductive medicine to know a germline study when he saw one. He logged off the computer feeling more disturbed than ever.

There was no doubt about it – Pa was trying to clone a human being.

Then Mama got pregnant. Everyone but Dorian was happy. Pa came out of his laboratory and started doing real work about the house – hanging lights, carpeting rooms, and papering walls as if he intended to redecorate the house from bottom to top. When Dorian asked why he didn’t pay someone else to do it, he lectured him on the joys of creating with one’s own hands. Even Mike seemed to get better in this period – so much so that Pa considered lowering his daily dose of morphine. Mama stayed at home reading magazines. She would fall asleep in the box seat by the window with her hands across her belly and a satisfied smile on her face. She reminded Dorian of an animal that had eaten more than its fill. Or the witch in Hansel and Gretel who ate little children, with a predilection for babies.

The child was born in the early hours of July 1, 2011. It was a home birth; Pa delivered the baby himself, assisted by a team of colleagues and friends. The brothers had been sent to stay with Nan and Pops in the days before the event. Uncle Leo drove them home through bumper to bumper commuter traffic.

Mama was tucked up in bed, her face puffy and pale. Pa cradled a tiny, peaceful form in his arms.

‘Boys’, he said. ‘I’d like you to meet your sister, Edith’.

The boys cooed and smiled and petted the child. After a while, Leo led them out again. ‘Go ask Ellie about the waffles’, he suggested with a wink.

As they descended the stairs, Dorian seized Michael’s arm.

‘Ow!’ Cough, cough. ‘Careful, Dor’.

‘Did you see her? Did you see her face?’

‘Yeah, she’s beautiful. I hope we have lots of sisters’.

‘But didn’t you see her eyes? Jesus Sputnik – they were Mama’s eyes‘.

Go to Chapter seven: Blankety Blank

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She is standing by the waterfall with the bonsai glade behind her. She puts her drink on the table as he comes across to meet her. They kiss and embrace. He adjusts the collar of his blazer. There is chemistry like before.

‘I gotta say, this is the last place I thought I’d see you again. Tell me you not gonna bomb the joint?’

‘Sadly my militant days are behind me. I’m establishment now’.

‘Well I sure am glad you came over. How long you been working for the man?’

‘Oh, you know. Since that climate thing’.

A psychiatrist, he defers to silence.

They speak together: ‘It’s amazing that…’

She flashes her eyes at him. You take it from her. The psychiatrist you have already.

‘You look amazing! Age has not touched you. You’ll note I didn’t say, “retroagent”‘.

‘And I didn’t say “asshole”. Oops, it slipped out’.

‘Don’t sweat it. You think I’d keep step with this pack of running dogs without the occasional trip to the therapist? It’s a way of life down here. I swear we’re the only non-octogenarians in this room’.

‘I can’t believe I’m in this room’.

‘Nor can I. Last time I saw you, you were organizing protest rallies. Culture jamming. Then there was the hacktavist crowd…’

‘That was Indymedia. I moved on. Anyhow, I wouldn’t have imagined that I’d see you here either. What happened to the anti-establishment idealist? I recall you dreaming of a radical group therapy practice in Paris’.

‘Paris is on ice, hon. Speaking of which – another of the same?’

They had been lovers in 2022. She was majoring in Netculture at the University of Montréal, but spent most of her time in student politics. He’d been writing a thesis on Lacan with his sights set on a DEA at the Sorbonne. They met at the graduation party of a mutual friend, where he’d impressed her with his knowledge of les évenéments de soixiante huit. She’d found him intimidating until he’d referred to the image of Subcomandante Marcos on her T-shirt as Che Guevara. She’d laughed and he’d taken offence. How did she know it wasn’t Che, he said – the man was wearing a balaclava? They had both laughed and by midnight they were in bed together.

For a while it felt like love then it fell to pieces. It was a crazy year, 2022. One night, shortly before the end, they lay in each others’ arms and she’d told him of a dream she’d had the night before. In the dream, they were in a tiny boat riding the crest of a giant wave. As the wave reared to touch the sky, they’d looked down and seen the whole world as if from space, full of animals, plants, mountains, lakes, cites and people. It was frozen in a moment of time, as if God had dropped by to take a final snapshot. Then they were crashing down from an immeasurable height, hand gripping hand, eyes fastened on the landscape below, the fury of the cataclysm in their ears.

He’d never made the Sorbonne. Instead he studied applied psychoanalysis at Paris VI, then clinical psychology at the University of London. After that he’d worked with traumatized soldiers back from the Trans-Eurasian war, and quickly earned himself a reputation as a sensitive young psychotherapist. In 2027, the US Military Veterans’ Council offered him a position at the Institute for Veteran’s Health in DC, which he’d accepted. His connections to top US military officials, some of whom went on to become Marshals of the Seaboard Federation, saw him through the Change. He’d been a Volition man from the start, and after the revolution found his therapeutic skills were easily adapted to the new economies of the Sprawl.

The psychiatrist has several clients in the Volition ballroom tonight. These include Admiral Willard Dixon, who’d latched onto him earlier in the evening and proven hard to shake off. Dixon is a basket case. His wife ODed on painkillers in the Freeze. He thinks he still sees her. Consorting with clients outside of office hours is an awkward experience. The psychiatrist had seized the opportunity to excuse himself from Dixon when he saw a familiar face across the room. He had stopped short when he’d realized who it was. He’d almost died when she’d turned to recognize him.

She has taken a longer and less salubrious route to the fundraiser at the Volition ballroom tonight. After they’d split, she’d leveraged her degree in Netculture to get a job directing political campaigns in environmental politics. Soon she was coordinating direct action events for Earth First and the confrontational political performance group DAAD (Dead as a Dodo). In the long summer of twenty six, both groups were added the Canadian Security Taskforce’s list of terrorist organizations and she’d been arrested and imprisoned without charge. By the time she had been released from prison she was part of a genuine network of eco-terrorists, stripped of every delusion she’d ever harbored about the chance of progressive political administration in Canada, and justifiably terrified of the new police and military administration. She headed north with a group of friends in June 2027, on the run from it all. They joined a commune in the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains, and watched as the world imploded.

The Change brought the Laurentian communities to life. Laurentia, as it was known, was ready for the worst. When the climate shifted, the commune went into action. The solarmesh cropculture they’d set up kept the soil fertile through the Freeze, so the land supported semi-intensive agriculture in the Thaw. Soon, masses of people were drifting north, tracking rumors of security and stable food. Determined to ensure that the growing number of refugees didn’t destroy the fragile ecosystem, the Laurentian authorities – a rag-tag band of former activists, militants, and eco-terrorists – imposed a strict order and regimen on the new arrivals, which was almost universally accepted. By 2038, Laurentia was a burgeoning network of sustainable communities run along sound anarcho-syndicalist lines, and the ‘Laurentian Clique’, whom a decade before were on the run from the law, were being touted as the visionary leaders of a new Canadian society.

The attaché thrived in this period. Her training in events management stood her in good stead. By 2040 she was an analyst in the Laurentian Ministry for Sustainable Development, with a portfolio of shares and a solar dome on Mont Tremblant. Through the subsequent decade she had played an important role in the public administration of the communities, spearheading the creation of a new energy internet, and successfully campaigning for a Prefectship in 2045.

Tonight she represents the Laurentian Minister of Energy. She has arrived in DC to sit on a bipartisan committee to oversee the development of the fossil reserves in the ice-locked Arctic. Her assignment is to ensure Laurentia’s continued access to the oil fields off the Newfoundland coast.

‘Your administration appropriated the wells by fiat’, she says to the psychiatrist when he returns with drinks. ‘They admit it. Now possession is law, so we’re not claiming title, but we do think we have some right of contribution. We have thousands of citizens who are ready and able to help operate the plants and refineries along the coast. We see it as a win-win situation’.

‘Oh, they’ll love you with that kind of talk’.

‘We live in hope. So help me out. I’m gearing up to work the room. Who are the players and who’s just furniture?’

The psychiatrist looks about the ballroom.

‘Representative Xiao, you know. Don’t be fazed by the entourage – they’re just courtiers. Anyone important makes an appointment. That cluster of men in uniform – avoid ‘em. Ex-general staff. Basket-cases, the lot of them. I should know. OK, that woman there – no, the one in the gown – that’s Camilla St. Clair, yes, wife of Andrew St. Clair, Minister of Oil and Resources. Can’t see him at the moment, but the wife is your in. As for the guy she’s talking to, stay away him. Leopold Lewis, Undersecretary of Oil and Resources. In a Disney cartoon, he’d be the viper’.

———————————————

Behind them a tiny stream burbles down the slope of a gleaming granite mesa, atop of which rises a second mesa, gilded with ferns and tropical flowers. Lavishly dressed couples wander up and down the stairs ascending the double plateau, looking at the beautiful fish in the swirling pools, drifting in and out of eddies and whorls of conversation about their edges. All eyes and ears turn to Dorian Xiao, who is fielding questions from journalists on the upper plateau. It is an hour to this evening’s session of House of Representatives, but no one is in any doubt which way they will vote.

‘Representative Xiao, there were scenes of protest outside Washington Dulles this afternoon when you returned from the Inter-Federation talks in Madrid. Did the scale of the protests take you by surprise?’

‘Protest is an occasion for anger. I affirm the right of fellow citizens to make their voices heard, whether this be though formal or informal means’.

‘But were you expecting such opposition to Initiative five?’

‘Naturally. Of course. There are people in the Sprawl who still think that democracy existed in the old United States. These people are terrified by the prospect of real democracy, which is why they call it anarchy. History has heard their case. These were the same voices that supported the Council of Marshalls in 2030′.

‘Representative Xiao. Chairman Fisher of South Sprawl claims that the schedule for reform has outpaced the implementation of the technical infrastructure required for the fifth initiative. There are still many camps in the South and North without access to Netspace, and only seventy per cent of the population has pods. Two questions. First, given these infrastructural concerns, is it prudent to advance the Fifth Initiative at this point? Second, aren’t you concerned about people being excluded from the voting system, at least in the early stages?’

‘Darlene, I reject the claim that there are camps without connectivity. Each camp is on the net. The problem concerns a proportionally small number of citizens who have chosen to live the Desolate zones, outside the camp system. These people exclude themselves – they are not excluded. As to Fisher’s claims, I would simply say that South Sprawl is, and always has been, an autocracy. If there were democracy in South Sprawl, as I hope there will be soon, we should be certain to hear a different point of view’.

‘But why accelerate the reforms at this point when …’

‘The fact remains that democracy means the rule of the people by the people. Fellow citizens, such a democracy is possible today for the first time in history. Our civilization has suffered a crushing blow; now is the time to seize the opportunity presented to us and rise emboldened from the ashes. This land has known giants – let them walk again! Those with the courage to dream support the reforms’.

‘Representative Xiao…’

‘I’m sorry, no further questions’.

———————————————

Dinner is announced and the guests moved to their tables. The attaché glances at the seating plan and realizes with dismay that she is seated beside the viper, the Undersecretary for Oil and Resources. As she reaches the table she recognizes across from her the worst of the old warhorses, Willard Dixon. She waves at the psychiatrist as he takes his seat at a more convivial table across the ballroom. He grimaces when he sees her company, and taps the underside of his chin.

Dixon has the look of a geriatric in a middle-aged man’s body, which is close to the truth. He barely speaks but drinks. By the time the hors d’oeuvres have arrived, he has assembled a flotilla of glasses and is intent on mobilizing a fleet. The attaché tries to avoid meeting his eye.

As for the viper, he ignores her until the society widow he’d been entertaining leaves the table. He turns to look at her like she was something hanging on a wall. She takes the initiative and introduces herself.

‘I know who you are’, he says. ‘Do you think I’d walk in here without a briefing?’

‘Well then, you’ll know why I am in DC, Undersecretary. The Laurentian communities are keen to assist in the redevelopment of the wells off the Newfoundland coast’.

She pronounces it Newfn-laand. The Undersecretary smirks.

‘Noo-fee land. No fee land. Drill-for-free land! Honey, I hope your people didn’t dig deep into your gas revenues to truck you down here, y’know what I’m saying? Oh, I’m sorry. You guys are commie-environazis, right? You probably took a sleigh and huskies’.

‘I’m sorry – Leopold. Your insults are childish. I had assumed you were a professional’.

‘I am a professional – Janice. You a professional?’

‘And not a child’.

‘The reason is, for a Canuck chick, you’re not bad looking. Perhaps my people should talk to yours, and we could…?’

She leaves the table. Better a scene than to suffer that kind of attitude. People are milling about the ballroom between courses, chatting and stretching their legs. The jazz band picks it up. The psychiatrist is not to be seen.

She looks for the Minister’s wife. The Undersecretary she’d been warned about – no point getting upset. She’ll keep her head and stay focused. A flash of blue through the ferns – is that her? No, it is another – but wait, yes, it is her, smiling as if she’d been waiting to say hello.

———————————————

Camilla St. Clair is an imposing woman with elevated cheekbones and a teetering stack of hair. She radiates beneficence. The attaché imagines an oversized version of Meryl Streep. St. Clair takes the attaché’s hand and holds it in her own.

‘I expect you know what brings me here, Mrs St. Clair’, the attaché begins.

‘I know all about you, Ms Chanteau. I have been waiting to meet you personally. I have been watching you from a distance’.

There is distance in her eyes. The attache fishes around for something to say. ‘Well, I wish we’d been sitting together for the hors d’oeuvres. The Undersecretary has issues. It is probably best we don’t discuss it’.

‘Lewis? I hope he hasn’t offended you. Oh dear, I see that he has. Perhaps we will arrange something for him later on? You would like that, wouldn’t you?’ There is a twinkle in her eye.

The attache feels strangely overcome, as if bathed in the attentions of a kindly aunt. She tries to speak but the breath is caught in her throat. St Clair looks across the room towards the table that she has left. Dixon is there, ignored by the others.

‘Have you spoken to Willard this evening?’ Admiral Dixon? Poor man, he’s so afraid. His wife died last year. She took her life. Since then, he’s come to think that he sees her everywhere. Like a ghost’.

Her hollow gaze falls upon the attaché, who is no longer sure what is happening.

‘It torments him, this apparition. I do believe he’s at his end’.

The attaché blinks and realizes that she is looking at Dixon, who is slumped over the table. Camilla St. Clair is gone. The staff are wheeling trays of food out from the kitchen. She rubs her eyes. How long have I been standing here, she thinks? Someone stole my time.

Run, my lovely, into the Cyclovac. Steel yourself before heading back into the viper’s nest. Lock yourself in a cubical and meditate until you hear the screams.

———————————————

Dixon sits hunched over his martini, studying the Undersecretary through bloodshot eyes. His thoughts are on the surface of his skin. You abomination, he is thinking. You slimebag. You creature of vice. He watches as the Undersecretary stirs a pill into his wine and drinks it. Too much is never enough, Dixon thinks, downing his martini.

Some people drink to forget. Willard Dixon drinks to remember the past. He closes his eyes and rides the martini rush back though time. He has managed to chart a sequence of events spiraling back to the eternal summer with Alison on board the Proteus, his father’s sloop. Dixon skips from incident to incident like stones across a stream and arrives at the far side of history without looking at the horrors to the left and right.

They were newlyweds, sailing about the Virgin Islands. He was on leave from a fifteen-month sortie in Iraq, where he’d helped facilitate the troop surge to secure control of that ailing province. The thought threatens to trigger memories of war – he shoves it away. Now it is just him and Alison again, off the coast of St Croix. He is standing at the wheel, squinting into the sun. She comes up from the cabin, slips her hands about his waist and nuzzles at the back of his neck.

‘Is that Christiansted?’ she asks, pointing at the town on the foreshore.

‘Uh huh. Nearly there’.

‘When we drop anchor, we’ll do it again’.

‘If we gotta’.

‘Willard. It’s the right time’.

‘Man’s gotta do’.

Oh, the precious moment, the gentle eye in the storm of sorrow. It wasn’t the same after the boy. As Dixon followed his father’s path from Captain to Colonel to General, they’d seen less and less of one another, and the time that they’d spent together was taken up by functions and dinner dates with simulated friends. Then the Trans-Eurasian war kicked in and he was charged with defending US interests about the globe. Crisis, calamity, crushing failure. Death, death, death.

Dixon wrenches himself back to the present. People are standing to applaud Representative Xiao as he leaves with his media team. Not Dixon. Nor does he watch as the others get up to dance. He stares hard at his drink. He doesn’t dare look around. It is that time of night when he’s likely to see her again. It was always Alison. She’d be standing at a distance, perhaps in the company of another man. As the world would freeze, she’d look his way. It was the same look she gave him, gentle as that summer on the Proteus – a look that reminded him of everything he’d forsaken and destroyed.

———————————————

The psychiatrist was having a whale of a time out on the balcony. He’d run into an old connection, a sales executive from the agribusiness giant, Organix. The psychiatrist had stepped outside for a cigarette. He’d stumbled across the executive doing a line on the balcony wall.

‘Oh! Please, help yourself’.

‘I’d be tempted but I’m working’.

‘I’m always working, buddy. That’s why I need this stuff’.

They did a bump and set to talking. Before long the executive was telling him about Organix. Organics began as agribusiness consortium at the start of the century. From 2010, it had specialized in genetically modified foodstuffs. It was boom time for anyone trading in the double-helix. Politics was increasingly taking a liberal view on genetic modification across the board, and a double-barreled assault of smart advertising and scientific studies was working to convince US and European consumers that GMOs were a healthy choice.

‘You remember the SupaTomato?’ the executive prompted, referring to the food-fight campaign of 2016, in which a starchy Dr Frankenfoods was pelted into submission by an audience armed with the new Organix SupaTomato. Organix, by this point, had already carved out a healthy chunk of the African and East Asian rice and seed markets. The PinaPineapple, VitaTato, and SupaTomato soon ensured that the Organix brand became a household name in the developed world as well.

Things had changed in 2017, when Organix was consumed by a subsidiary of US Meat. Meat kept the staff along with the name of the corporation, leading to a strange mix of Meat and Organix execs at board meets. This, it is said, is what gave Fort Stroundberg, CEO of Chicago Organix, the brilliant idea of farming meatstuff in the same way as other agricultural produce, by creating giant transgenic shafts of flesh, fifty yards from end to end, in huge underground vats. They called them Meatlogs. Living tissue grown like vegetable matter: ‘Meat without the Mammy-Pappy’. The bonus of Meatlog farming, the executive explained, was that the farms produced, in the form of fat and oil, the source of their own electric power. So the bean-counters loved them. It wasn’t long before Organix had cornered had market in cultured meat. The rest was history – at least until the end of history, the Change.

The story of Organix might have ended with the collapse of 2030. Miraculously, though, the company survived the Change by becoming part of the Seaboard Federation’s supply and relief effort. Production at the Meatlog farms was stepped-up threefold. The executive had spent these years at the coalface, sweating it out in the Meatlog farms, trying to keep up with the incredible demand.

‘Red meat for red-blooded refugees’, he grimaced, recollecting. ‘That was the copy. Didn’t think much of it myself. But at the end of the day, Organix was responsible for the survival of the Sprawl, my friend. Nothing like meat to fire up the body, keep it going. That’s why I stuck with this company – we’re fighting the good fight!’

Volition had privatized the state-sponsored meat industry in 2042. Subsequently it had been business as usual. Since Organix was floated on the sharemarket, the company had demolished its competitors to monopolize the market in cultured meat. Currently there were hundreds of Organix plants about the Sprawl, providing cheap, affordable meatstuff to citizens from Myrtle Beach to Boston Bay.

The psychiatrist glanced at the sausage roll in his hand. ‘Am I eating it now?’

The executive burst into laughter. The psychiatrist was laughing too, though he didn’t know why. He felt sick. He excused himself and headed for the Cyclovac.

———————————————

He shortcuts through the service area, down a corridor into an empty kitchen area. He is feeling worse. He looks at the sink and the corridor to the ballroom, chooses the sink. He drops his forearms on the aluminum surface, panting for breath. Not cocaine, never again!

A shadow shimmers on the wall before him. He takes a breath, pushes himself up and looks around. There is a stranger standing in the kitchen. He wears an old-world suit and carries a briefcase.

‘I’m sorry’, the psychiatrist says. ‘Can I help you?’ The ceiling light above them flickers on and off.

The stranger steps up to the bench. There is something familiar about him, the psychiatrist thinks. A flash of silver in the thread of his suit. Has he met him before? Their hands glide up and they shake like old acquaintances.

‘I have something for you to pass on’, the stranger says. ‘It’s for a friend’. He has an easy smile.

He lays the briefcase on the bench. It is a black leather case, embossed with the Volition logo. He snaps the lock and opens it.

There is a silver pistol. The stranger passes it to the psychiatrist, grip first. The psychiatrist takes the pistol, stares at it. He has a vague desire to drop it and run.

‘Give it to Dixon’, the stranger tells him. ‘Tell him that it’s from Xiao – to settle the debt. And take this for your stomach’. He uncoils his fingers and there is a pill in the palm of his hand.

Like a magic trick, thinks the psychiatrist.

He takes the pill and puts it in his mouth. It seems like a natural thing to do. There is something he has forgotten, he thinks. He searches for it, cradling the pill on his tongue.

‘Take your medicine’.

The psychiatrist swallows the pill.

‘Now end it’.

It is like something had been holding him in place. The psychiatrist stumbles, bursts, dives down the corridor – straight into Dixon, who is standing half-buried in the bushes. Dixon tumbles into the tropical ferns. The psychiatrist glances back up the corridor. The stranger is coming after him. The flickering light behind him is a supernova.

Dixon fumbles with his zipper. The psychiatrist pushes the pistol into his hands.

‘This is from Xiao … for the debt’.

He staggers for the Cyclovac. First he will be sick.

———————————————

See him now, pistol in his hands. Colt All American. Used to own one, back in the day. Before the Change. Sweet Jesus it’s loaded. Dixon rams the gun into the waistband of his trousers. What in hell is Davidson playing at? Is this a test? It is the same model as… Dixon is suddenly way too sober. How could the psychiatrist know about the pistol that he had given Xiao, a lifetime ago? What else does the psychiatrist know about their history together? Is he after a confession?

The truth is Dixon has known Xiao for decades. He is losing it now, stumbling through time. Dixon can remember the day that Xiao burst into the Chamber of Marshals at the head of his Volition forces. He can recall the words that Xiao had used to transform the situation, that brought the Federation era of the Sprawl to a close:

‘Don’t fight me, join me’.

Since the greater part of the Homeland Guard had, by this point, deserted to the Volition side, most of the Marshals had taken Xiao up on the offer. Those who didn’t were shot on the spot.

Dixon had made the wrong choice.

Yes, he’d been one of them – a Marshall of the Seaboard Federation. It wasn’t something he was proud of. The junta had been as poorly conceived as it was under resourced. It was never destined to last for long. Xiao had thrown him a life-line at the start of the revolution when he’d made it clear he was prepared to work with established powers, so long as they played it his way. Dixon was, and always will be, a player.

But there is more to the story than this. Watch him struggle to resist it, blocking it with another thought. Xiao had betrayed him, yes. The more that Xiao had established his Volition agenda, the more old warhorses like Dixon were left without power and status in the Sprawl. This isn’t what Xiao had promised at the start. Stimulus, response. See the flesh sag from his cheekbones. Dixon and Xiao went back years before the Change. And Xiao’d had his uses for him then. Oh yes.

Feel the shudder run down Dixon’s spine. He and Xiao had forged a terrible pact, and they shared a terrible secret. If only he could escape this secret, bury it in the mists of time. If only he had the courage to end it, tonight.

———————————————

Leather brogues and khaki pants. Dixon looks up. The psychiatrist is in his face again. Somehow he has changed out of his suit.

‘Davidson, this firearm…’, Dixon begins. But he can’t move his lips. They quiver and drool. The psychiatrist just stands there, beaming.

Now his sight is going. Dixon can barely make out the man. In place of a face, there is a vague oval suggesting one or many faces. They shift and meld in the shadows of the ficus benjamina. The one thing solid is the smile. There is something wrong about that smile, Dixon thinks. Something not much like the psychiatrist at all.

Then the man speaks. Dixon isn’t ready for what he says, much less the voice in which he says it.

‘Snapper! Thought you might know Terry from Organix! You guys have a lot in common, take it from me. You were making meat at the same time. Making meat. You know what I mean, Snapper? Don’t worry, mate. No one knows about Bengshala, or what happened in the Tigris. These are your secrets, Snapper. Yours to keep’.

Dixon stumbles back. He is looking at a dead man. His bladder lets go. He claps his hands across his eyes, weaves across the ballroom, and collapses into his seat at the table. Howls like a wounded animal. The other guests look about for security as he whistles and hiccups through sobs. It is an awkward moment for everyone. The attaché alights beside him to try and calm him down. The Undersecretary sweeps back to the table to lighten the atmosphere with a quip about old soldiers and the pierced genitalia of North African whores.

Few people notice as the attaché leans close and whispers to Dixon in a curious voice:

‘Willard, it’s the right time’.

Dixon starts and lurches from his seat. He stares agog at the attaché, then pulls out the pistol and pops the Undersecretary in the head. The ballroom erupts into panic and screams. Republican Guardsmen burst out of nowhere, showering the guests in a cloud of laserlight.

Dixon reverses the pistol and puts it in his mouth. The shot sends a gout of blood and brains across the adjoining table. Willard Dixon hits the floor like a sack of meatstuff.

The team leader confirms that the shooter is dead. No one is to leave the building. The maitre d’ takes charge.

‘I take it everyone here is insured for Volicom?’ raises a murmur of laughs.

———————————————

Janice Chanteau wasn’t insured for Volicom, but it didn’t matter. After the events at Volition House she was detained at an offshore facility at no personal financial expense. She was interrogated ruthlessly, deafened with Geekcore at night, and denied contact with the Laurentian authorities. It was nothing compared to the indignities she’d suffered at the hands of Canadian Security Taskforce two decades before. But it did little for her composure or state of mental health.

Fortunately, the attaché had the presence of mind to stick to her version of the truth. Contrary to the testimony of numerous witnesses, she insisted that she had not delivered those final words to Admiral Willard Dixon in the ballroom that night. She had a cut and dried alibi. She had been holed up in the Cyclovac the whole time.

The awkward thing for her captors was that the Genscan record supported her story. Volition didn’t know what to do with her. They held her until the situation threatened to become a diplomatic incident. By the time she was released, everything that would come to pass had already taken place.

Go to Chapter six: Wetlab

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He usually tried to avoid the Low after dark. Bubba’s Gate was a freakshow. Minotaur slotted the trike in the vertical stack, strapped on his vest, and pushed his way into the crowd. The pinheads, junkies, gimps, and speedfreaks milling about the security zone backed off from him like he was radioactive. He checked his rifle with security, walked through the scanning tunnel, and muscled his way through the mass of people clogging the gate. For a moment he was part of a glut of bodies surging through the gap in the seawall that surrounded the district. Someone pulled at his utility belt and he put the man down. The crowd pitched left and right and burst from the passage into the bustling streets of the Low.

Ecstasy, the blipvert started. Minotaur double blinked it away. Thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets, he strode down Rhode Island Avenue, clearing the avenue ahead of him. He felt naked without the Sabre over his back. There was a wind in the streets, and the updraft sent shreds of plastic swirling over the crowd, creating a spectral dance of refuse at the limit of the lights. The Low had a space-time all its own, Minotaur reflected. No doubt his biosecurity rating hotted up every time he set foot in the district. Up ahead, the southern seawall staved off the waters of Potomac Bay. During the day, fishermen lined the wall, trawling the tides for the remnants of the poisoned sea. Now the lights of their shanties hung like tinsel over the dense digital tableau of the Low, where the advertising was frank and direct, a cornucopia of lust and perversity. Minotaur squinted through another barrage of blipverts. Past the Speeder crew on the corner, past the kids working tricks on the street. Like Times Square in the 2020s, the Low put everything up for sale.

He took a shortcut through the Laboratory, past a skeletal albino who hovered over a blazing drum with sibilant offers of girls, girls with amputations, prosthetics and enhancements. Minotaur looked through him. If he’d been interested, there was a full selection at NuFlesh. At the far end of the alley, a motley crew of scissorkids fanned out on the pavement before him. Butterboy waved a switchblade in his face.

‘Hey boy-ee. Nice hydrosuit. I me looksee?’

Minotaur led with his elbow. The others let him past.

NuFlesh was a club and brothel on U Street run by a low-life pimp and drug-dealer named Freddy the Fly. Minotaur knew Freddy from street work. He was an erratic character – unscrupulous enough to make a good source of information, unhinged enough to screw you when it suited him. Freddy made his money where he could get it, which these days meant ice, barely legals, and blackmarket military hardware. If anyone in the Low was dealing M&Ms, Freddy would either know about it or be in on the deal.

After-dark tours of the Low made NuFlesh their first port of call. From an anthropological perspective, it was probably worth the door price. Genetic medicine got off to a slow start in the early part of the century, hampered by the interminable debate over the ethics of embryonic stem cell research. But pretty much the same time that scientists figured out how to reprogram adult calls back to a pluripotent condition, Hubbert’s peak was knocking at the global economic door and the world’s wealthiest and most well-connected citizens were selling oil shares, looking for somewhere else to invest their gillions. Staring down the barrel of an apocalyptic recession, world leaders had little choice but to brush aside the scruples of the moral majority, deregulate the biotech industries and legalize a gamut of genetic therapies. The market in genetic enhancements exploded into being in a series of global booms. By 2020, cosmetic genetics were as much a staple feature of capitalist culture as soyburgers and blue jeans.

The Volition Party had brought it all back to life. The First Initiative, enacted shortly after Volition came to power, sought to resuscitate market activity in the Sprawl starting with the industry in cosmetic genetics. Investing in genetics turned out to be a sound strategic move, creating income, investment opportunities, and a range of products for a population starved of their drip-feed of commerce and consumables. The upside was the return of the free market to the Sprawl – an institution central to the hearts and minds of the refugee Americans.

The downside was places like NuFlesh.

Waiting inside the club as the security manager went in search of the Fly, Minotaur tried not to stare at the heaving mass of orbs and curves on the dance floor. There was something loathsome about all that sculpted, lubricated, permatanned flesh, bobbing and weaving in an orgy of transgenic delight. Minotaur had the standard military enhancements, including equusized musculature and arterial function and a double-val COMT for high pain threshold. But as he tried to blink away the phantasm of a ridgebacked, snake-skinned pole dancer, and the perversity of a youth with not one but two donkey-sized cocks in a leather apparatus, he began to wish he hadn’t consented to the treatment, if only to distinguish himself from the clientele.

Freddy was in his face, screaming something under the psytrance. A flock of sequined dancers hovered about him. A blue girl took Minotaur by the arm and the party retired to a booth.

‘Minotaur, you come to see me on my birthday. Tonight I give a special gift to all my friends’. Freddy the Fly was a thin man with teeth filed into points. He wore an old-world shirt and reeked of cologne. His hands carved strange trajectories through the air as he spoke.

‘I never see you no more, Minotaur. We used to be close, hey? You not come back for the circus whore – she not forget you. Tonight I make it cheap for you, Minotaur’.

‘You’re confused, Freddy’, Minotaur said. ‘We never been close’.

‘But you not forget the circus whore, hey, you tell me lies! Where you been, Minotaur? All my girls, they been missing you, hey girls?’

Minotaur leaned across the table. He was tired, there was no point in messing around.

‘Listen Freddy, I’m after dope, not the kind you pick up on the street, right? I came downtown because I know you got friends with ears’.

Freddy showed off his serrated teeth. Minotaur pressed his advantage.

‘Somebody is dealing M&Ms, Freddy. I need a name for a face’.

Freddy laid some lines on the table. ‘Really, Minotaur’, he said, hoovering them up. ‘You know, the Fly don’t move that kind of product. You got the wrong kind of dealer, man! Nothing going on here but ice and pussy’.

‘I’m not saying that you’re dealing M&Ms, Freddy. I’m just asking what you know. And you know I can make it worth your while if you got anything you wanna tell me’.

Freddy took care of the blue girl. He did another line. He wiped his nose and left powder on his cheek.

‘You know what, Minotaur?’ he said. ‘I don’t think you can make it worth my while. Just the other day I have the Voli-gollies in here busting my balls over a little ketamine. It’s not like it’s illegal! They have horses in South Sprawl, man! This is a legitimate business. Now, I want you to imagine what happens to the Fly if word gets around that he’s friends with people who are dealing blackmarket M&Ms. Let’s say Minotaur is talking to his Voli-golly buddies: “Oh, I was shooting the shit with Freddy the Fly – he’s down with the trade in hardware”. Hah! Next thing you know Freddy the Fly is wearing a dog collar under house arrest and Minotaur, well, he solves his case and gets a pay rise! No, my friend, I don’t think you can make it worth my while. So I’m gonna take my girls here – girls!’

Everyone stood up at once. The situation was tense.

‘And have a par-tay’. A faceful of serrated teeth from Freddy. Nervous laughter from the girls.

‘Anything you hear, Freddy…’

‘See you round, Minotaur!’

——————————–

He left the club and wandered into a neighboring bar. He navigated a crowd of patrons swaying to kinetic ambient jazz and ordered a Voltage and Vodka. He sipped it through a straw as he considered his options. It was oh-one-hundred. The vidiscreen over the bar was tuned to House of Representatives. The sound was off so he couldn’t make out what was going on. It was a repeat of the mid-evening episode in any case. The Representatives of North, South and Central Sprawl stood behind their podiums as the votes rolled in. Larry Fisher mimed commentary on a series of bar graphs and statistics before they cut to an infomercial on negative osmosis units offshore. When they returned to the studio, voting was almost complete. Larry did his usual soft-shoe shuffle about democracy and freedom as the studio band ran through the signature tune. Then it was done: the central podium flashed bright orange light as Dorian Xiao, Representative Central, pumped his fist in the air.

Cutter girl behind the bar switched it over to the wrestling channel.

‘In the perfect democracy’, she quipped, ‘they’d merge these shows and the Representatives would sort out policy on the mat’.

Minotaur called Fisherman to see if there was any news.

‘Jeez, Taur, it’s one in the morning. Are you kidding? The Republics have a different temporality, dude’.

Early morning traffic was bleeding off the Central hub. He checked the Representative Reel. Even at this hour, there was too much to scan. He ran a FeedCrunch. Security lockdown at Volition House, but he didn’t have the clearance to investigate. Tenement war between the SkullBlockers and DefVac Crew over on Liberation Boulevard – Volition was all over it. Dozens of one eighty sevens and twenty elevens across the Low. Busy night downtown. Screw it. He ordered another drink.

MINO3GRAFXX30 updated his status.

‘Creditserv have issued a final notice prior to disconnection’, it told him. ‘Deductions as of May 29: bioscans: thirty credits. No income recorded. Negative accretion ratio: twenty one point nine percent’.

‘Block that disconnection’, he instructed. ‘I’m transferring credits from my gaming account. Taking down Riyadh in the morning – it should do us for a few days’.

The avatar tilted its horns expressing uncertainty.

‘Might be time to refinance the trike, Taur’, it said.

LOG: ON THE LEAD. MINO3GRAFXX30.

——————————–

He was back in NuFlesh. There was something weird about the way that Freddy had tried to shake him off back there. Irrespective of what he knew, they were going to talk. The bouncer came back smirking. He pointed Minotaur towards the stairs leading up to the mezzanine. Freddy stood at the foot of the stairs in a pair of bubbleglasses. He clapped Minotaur on the shoulder and threw his arms around his neck, beating his head on the plastic vest. Minotaur couldn’t understand a word that he was saying. He disentangled himself, bellowed:

‘Talk? Private? Quiet?’

Freddy skipped onto the dancefloor. He was screaming and blowing kisses to all and sundry, motioning for Minotaur to follow. Minotaur tugged off his helmet and palmed sweat from his flat-top. He could barely function in these lights. He watched Freddy shimmy through the crowd and wondered if there was any point following him. As if he’d get sense out of him in this state. Should have known it was a mistake to start with the Fly. He should’ve tried his luck with the Demolition Crew on GerryluvsGeorge, or dug Two Tongues out of the shooting gallery behind the Seawall café.

Freddy reached a doorway hung with a red bead curtain. He jerked his arm at Minotaur and went through it. Minotaur sighed and followed.

He stepped through the curtain and his world exploded in color and pain. Staggered blind but there was no saving it. The second blow took him out.

——————————–

He was Superman, flying over ice. It split and cracked symmetrically into a vertical bed of muddy tiles moving south. Stamping boots and the acid bouquet of urine. He was being dragged through the men’s room. He started struggling as his assailants hauled him into a cubicle. Took his head, slammed it once, twice, into the cistern. Flashes black, red on white. Now his face was underwater. Someone was on his back pushing his head into the toilet. Someone had his arm, twisting his wrist to break it.

He kicked back hard and struck a knee. His wrist came free. Seizing the hands at the back of his neck, he wrenched and pulled while hoisting his butt into the air, slamming his assailant into the cubicle wall. Spinning about, he saw a third man straddling the first, on the floor. The man leveled an automatic pistol. The blow to his chest knocked Minotaur from his feet. He kicked at the door and slammed it shut as the gunman squeezed off a second round. Then he was on his feet and out of the cubicle, slapping the gun from the man’s hands and driving him headlong into the mirror. The first man lay rocking on the tiles, clutching his knee, grinning through tears. Minotaur grabbed the pistol, a Serbian model, and got the hell out of there.

He collided with a cocktail waitress as he came through the curtain.

‘Freddy the Fly! Where is the son of a bitch?’

Freddy was on the stairs to the mezzanine. Minotaur crashed through the club towards him, body-slamming people out of the way. When Freddy saw him coming his face did a dance in the strobe. By the time Minotaur reached the foot of the stairs, he was across the mezzanine and over the bar, scattering bottles and glasses before him.

Two of Freddy’s heavies stood at the top of the stairs. Pinhead held a boombat. Tattoo face had a Suzi Q. Minotaur ran at them three steps at a time. Sixteen… The man to his right spun about in a shower of blood. Twelve… Minotaur firing wildly. Eight… Tattoo went down as Pinhead swung the boombat. Four… Minotaur dropped his shoulder under Pinhead’s legs and tossed him over the balustrade. One… Tattoo face was still squeezing off shots. Minotaur kicked the Suzi Q to the back of the bar as he came over the top of him.

Behind him, NuFlesh erupted into chaos.

Minotaur burst through the service door and soldiered down the corridor with the gun at ten thirty. He hugged the walls and corners, checking for security weaponry on the way.

‘Freddy. That was real stupid. This is making you look guilty, Freddy’.

He kicked in a door to the left and the right, and another pair further down the hall. A door banged about the corner. Glancing around, he saw a naked ass heading the other direction. The door to the right hung open.

He slid over to the doorway. ‘Freddy. I’m comin in there. You know that if you do not give yourself up now, I’m going to shoot yo ass, Freddy?’

No response. Minotaur spun into the doorway in a crouch. It was a narrow, high-ceilinged room, with a boarded-up window, and a bed and plastic plants arranged before a tropical wallscreen. There were black pebbles scattered on the floor. A pair of crocodile shoes tossed besides the bed.

Freddy’s shoes.

He moved into the room. There was a slurping noise at two o’clock. He spun about, pistol arcing through the air.

Freddy the Fly was stretched on the wall above the door on his elbows and knees. There were sucker-pads on his forearms and feet. Minotaur did a double-take and burst out laughing. Freddy glared down at him.

‘Now you know why they call me Fly, asshole’. He pointed at the floor. There was a remote in his fist.

Minotaur realized what the black pebbles were. Nanobombs. He dived into the air as they collectively exploded. The combination of silence and force was uncanny. Minotaur was out of range of the particle field, but the displacement of air picked him up and bounced him off the wall like a leaf. Then he was tumbling down through empty space as several tons of papercrete and steel that had previously belonged to the floor of the room collapsed into the bathhouse below. Fortunately, the bathhouse was closed for business. The mass of debris, with Minotaur in the middle of it, fell into the main pool with a mighty splash. The surrounding chambers were showered with water and dust.

Freddy the Fly came down as well. Minotaur found him at the shallow end of the pool, stretched out on a giant slab of papercrete. He made a half-hearted attempt to drown himself as Minotaur waded over. Minotaur tugged his head above water.

‘Let me do you a favor, Fly’, he said. He reset Freddy’s arm in the socket. Once Freddy’s howls had subsided, he crouched beside him and said:

‘See Freddy, all I wanted to do was talk. But it looks like you gone answered my question. Now, you are less use to me dead than you are alive, so I’m cutting you this deal. You tell me who has been buying M&Ms, and I’ll talk to Volicom and tell them the heavies you made me kill are responsible for all this mess’.

Freddy made a show of passing out. Minotaur woke him up again.

Freddy’s story was a surprise. The client wasn’t a woman, but an uberyuppie male in an old-world suit. Bizarrely, he’d insisted that Freddy keep the card that he’d used to pay for the bombs.

‘He told me there was money in the account’, Freddy explained. ‘He’d keep topping it up so long as I took care of anyone who came asking questions’.

Freddy hadn’t used the card, since the transaction could be used as evidence against him. Once he’d finished puzzling over how it was that he’d come to accept this method of payment (‘I must’ve been out of it, man!’), he decided that the whole thing was a set up by officers who’d assumed he was as stupid as he looked. He hadn’t thrown the card away, however. He handed it to Minotaur with evident relief. It was a corporate laminate in neon blue, logo at the top right corner.

The name on the card was Seritus Wetectronics.

Go Chapter Five: Dixon

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Traffic was slowed to a honking crawl outside the Manassas gate. Minotaur hung off the side of the guard truck, checking out DC on the horizon. Night was coming down and the digital advertising covering the walls of the city cast a chaotic flow of noise and images over the camps. The plain of roofing between the convoy and the city was mantled in flickering lights. Minotaur watched as the Retroagency model loomed above the Manassas gate, nestled inside banks of smaller screens that covered the fortifications. The model seemed to get younger each year. He watched her shimmy through a series of fantasy landscapes, each cut with the slogan: ‘The future is yours – live it again’.

Nanobots beamed blipverts onto the corners of his eyes. Words and images darted in the air before him: ‘Democracy begins in healthy bodies. Be part of it’. ‘Triplex your heart – and triple your life span!’ Minotaur double-blinked the blipverts away. DC you a goddamned whore. He’d like to see that up on the Retroagency screen. A little truth would go a long way in the Volition Sprawl.

YO DC. YOU OWE ME MONEY.

The drone of the media blended with the noise of the traffic as the convoy rolled through the Manassas gate. In the guard truck, the militia plugged phones in their ears, logging onto the stable frequencies of Metro Netspace. Since their reintroduction in the Fourth Initiative, personal communicators, or pods, had become everyone’s favorite means of dodging reality. Volition had given them away on a subsidized plan, and people took to them like suckling pigs. The pods had become indispensable tools for the working classes in the camps. Without a pod, it was impossible to maintain one’s professional status or ‘face’ in the Sprawl. Show your face on Netspace, the ad campaign ran. And Netspace will put its clouds at your disposal. That was the contract and everyone had signed up to it. Minotaur used his pod to score credit on BATTLEFIELD and to maintain the bullhead brand that he’d developed for contracting. He mostly ignored the political function of the pods, which was to enable citizens to participate in online democratic decision-making processes. Minotaur could remember when House of Representatives was a political institution, not a freekin game show. Minotaur was old school that way.

In less than two weeks time, the Sprawl would vote on the Fifth Initiative. History’s greatest experiment in democracy apparently. Dorien Xiao had staked his political future upon it. If the polls were right, the Volition Party would take it. Minotaur had been a Volition man from the moment he’d heard of the party, and he’d kicked some serious HG ass in the revolution, working with a guerrilla posse in the DC area. He couldn’t help feeling, though, that Volition had lost its way in the intervening decade and half. The Volition initiatives had resurrected the free market in the Sprawl, using the pods as a communication device. But the Volition Party had also set-up the satellite controlled bioscanning system – the VOLICOMSAT – and no one was happy about that. Plus, members of Volition’s private security force, Volicom, were starting to behave like Homeland Guard, which was making people who had fought the Seaboard Federation, like Minotaur, edgy.

It was a tense situation in DC, right now. But Minotaur didn’t have time to think about it. MINO3GRAFXX30 was right. He needed to log an advance on the Dubrovnik killings. He needed to close the case to get out of the red.

Minotaur high-fived the captain a half mile before the security zone and dropped off the truck into slow moving traffic. He jogged across Liberation Bridge through a tide of Humvees and armored trikes, trying to compose his thoughts. Fisherman’s voice echoed in his ears: You are saying it doesn’t show up on the grid? Scary. Right now the only thing that scared Minotaur was the thought that the DNA sample slotted into the stock of his rifle might be confiscated at security. Technically invisible, he told himself. Damn well better be. Under the bridge, tent towns built on stilts bloomed from the masonry like mushrooms on lichen. If he got busted now, he could wind up like those people in the wetlands, lost to the world, trawling through other people’s shit.

The siren exploded the moment he stepped into the security zone. Minotaur froze as a team of troopers burst from concealment and cluster-crunched a stranger, not five yards from where he stood. He had seen the man yelling though a wire-mesh screen as he came in. He was hollering for a lawyer as they hauled him away. Minotaur hurried to the security booth and synced his pod, grateful for the diversion. Taking a deep breath, stepped into the Genscan tunnel.

The scanning system used nanoswarms to harvest biodata, which was analyzed and collated to produce a running update of each citizen’s security status. In his mind’s eye, Minotaur imagined nanobots pouring from the walls of the tunnel, falling upon his body like greedy mosquitoes. They sampled his DNA and, ostensibly, the DNA of all other molar masses on his person. By the time he had made it to the end of the tunnel, his biodata had been coded, analyzed, and cross-indexed on a multitude of databanks. Somewhere in a bunker under DC, he’d been accorded a relative biostatic temperature, reflecting his real or potential security threat.

Minotaur struggled to think cool thoughts. It wasn’t easy when he knew that, by rights, the DNA sample in the stock of his rifle should have been on fire.

There was no siren. He kept moving until the security zone lay far behind him. Took the peoplemover to the Jackson stack and the chute to the fifty seventh. There his chariot awaited, freshly buffed, glistening in the sodium light. Minotaur would be nothing without his trike. Security nanites informed him he’d exceeded his allotted parking time by two and a half hours. His Creditserv account had been debited accordingly. Minotaur unlocked the wheel brace. He straddled the trike, hit the battery, sparked it up. The yellow machine shuddered and roared and powered him into the night.

The rain was coming down hard on DC, and a flotilla of garbage poured down the Germantown flyway. Minotaur cruised to a halt between trams at the Oversystem Exchange. The water rushed up to his boots as he waited for the lights to change. Machine could do with a hood, Minotaur reflected. He had picked up the trike on a low interest loan a year ago. Creditserv was going crazy with loans at the time, practically giving money away. Course, the repayments came around to bite him on the ass. He flicked on Netspace he banked for the Beltway. They were playing a prep ad for the mid-evening show of House of Representatives. Xiao’s Secretary, Tony Capella, was discussing the topics of voting for the night with host Larry Fisher.

‘Just to be clear, Tony, you are saying that citizens in various precincts will be able to autonomously determine the nature of their affiliations and network alliances?’

‘That’s what I’m saying, Larry. Those are my words’.

‘Darius Bayou, Representative South, doesn’t think the Sprawl is ready for Initiative Five. He is threatening to act against the agenda. What does Volition think of that? What is your view on Darius Bayou?’

‘Well, Larry, it seems that everyone in the Sprawl is pretty excited about Initiative five apart from Representative South. [Laughter] Representative South, I think, suffers from an … ulcer brought on by over-consumption of power [Laughter]‘.

Whatever. Minotaur surfed the credit markets. His avatar appeared with bad news: his status rating was on the slide, down 3.2 per cent. Drones monitoring the Hampton Bay Complex had picked up his appearance at the crime scene. Since his secondary insurance had lapsed, he wasn’t covered as a private operative. A sylph showed up to tell him how if he’d registered with one of Volition’s social agencies, they could have helped him keep up with his payments. Right now there was nothing he could do about it.

He switched back to House of Representatives as he slowed for the ebooth at Harvester City bridge. Lucky Larry was pumping up the studio audience for a celebrity debate. Minotaur had no idea what they were talking about. It was hard to take the show seriously.

DC was a city of bridges. Storm surges had stripped the National Mall in 2018 and turned the park area around Capitol Hill into a floodland. The city authorities had responded with a proud display of American ingenuity and engineering skill and Earthjacked everything from the Lincoln Memorial up to what was now Volition House two dozen yards into the air. ‘Earthjacking is getting off the ground’, they used to say – and it was, that and geoengineering. Most of downtown DC was jacked up through the twenties. Whole residential districts were elevated above the rising tide on gigatons of soil gouged from the Appalachian Plateau. The Greenland ice sheet was melting and the city authorities figured the only way was up.

In the decade before the Change, DC had morphed into a towering vista of stacks and flyways, rising over the reclaimed land bordering Potomac Bay. The cityscape was reinvented through the Federation era, and then again under Volition, which had maintained its headquarters in the building in the bay previously known as Capitol Hill. Volition House sat, isolated from the city by water, surrounded by and enmeshed within banks of housing linked by bridges, like a conductor at the foot of an orchestra. Few vehicles rode the flyways to Volition Island. Commerce between citizen and leaders mostly took place in the virtual realm, in the moderated flows of Netspace.

Leaving aside the island, DC was like the tenement in which Minotaur had grown up, with the dealers upstairs and the slingers and touts down below. The richest and most powerful residents of the Sprawl lived in the High Estates of DC, with passes to the Island Chute and a view of Potomac Bay. Contractmen like Minotaur worked in the mid-levels of the city, in the shadows of the flyways on the hill. The pushers and the scissormen worked their cuts in the Low. Minotaur regarded the Low as he swung into his home neighborhood. Positioned to the north of the bay, kneeling at the foot of Volition House, the district let out a ruddy glow in the shadows of its seawalls. Minotaur sometimes felt like his life since the revolution had been one long attempt to stave off being sucked into the Low. He’d known too many buddies go that way. He’d probably have to go into the Low tonight, he reflected.

The woman across the hall watched him through the slot in her door as he fumbled with his passcard. He’d never seen the woman outside her apartment.

‘Just me, ma’am, rollin’ home’, he said as he stepped inside.

He unclipped the sample from his rifle and stowed it at the back of the fridge. He zapped some noodles and stared through the window as they cooled. A helicopter gunship slid down the side of the building. Minotaur shielded his eyes as its floodlights pierced the screen. He was exhausted. The gunship rolled away.

Across the freeway, the mid-evening session of House of Representatives was screening from the side of Trump Tower. Minotaur picked up his pod then changed his mind. He slotted the pod into the kitchen system and checked his mail instead. There was a message from Harry Brags amongst the spam. Brags face was distended on the screen.

‘We have a lead from Hampton Bay. Call me’.

Brags was working from home. He picked up the call in his nightgown.

‘Nanobombs’, he barked at the screen. ‘Creep took out the alarm system on the penthouse level with a bunch of em. Shock and freekin awe. He had made it into the control room – all he had to do was pull some wires, fucks sake. He’s leaving a trail for you, Taur. Typical freekin psychopath’.

Minotaur popped a beer. ‘How come we’re only hearing bout this now? Why wasn’t it in the report?’

Brags displayed a wall of yellow teeth.

‘Penthouse level didn’t have a backup alarm system. Hampton Bay was trying to hide the fact that some of its most wealthy tenants were without security for ten hours. This morning some schmuck walks into his apartment, doesn’t trip the system. Litigation city, as you can imagine’.

Minotaur didn’t know about litigation. But he knew about nanobombs, or M&Ms, as they called them in the military. M&Ms worked like a shockwave version of the fragmentary grenade. A chemical explosion released a dense cloud of nanites in a concentrated spherical radius. Individually, the nanites did nothing at all. They passed through matter almost instantaneously. But the collective force emitted by the displacement of nanites upset the stability of matter at the molecular level, and turned everything within the sphere into gooey sludge. The advantage of M&Ms for military purposes lay in the precision of the blast. M&Ms decimated everything within a three foot radius. Everything outside of that was just knocked about by the blast of air.

Minotaur had no idea why the SAD would use nanobombs to disable the security system in the apartments. At this stage, however, he was thinking more about where it was the SAD had got them. The woman, if it was a woman, could have plundered, or requisitioned, them from a police or military stockpile. But it was more likely they’d been purchased on the blackmarket. Minotaur drew up a mental list of figures he knew downtown who dealt in military hardware. He checked the time on the side of Trump tower. Ten thirty. He’d drop in on a couple of names before calling it a night.

—————————-

Minotaur was running through the details of the case in his mind as he fired up the trike and slid into the traffic. So far as he knew, the killer had struck three times. Each of the victims was a powerful, well-connected, figure in the Sprawl. Each of them had been killed in an unbelievably sadistic way.

First on the list: Miriam Analise Dubrovnik. Age 60, Biostat D1011.

Dubrovnik had a ministerial CV dating back before the first Initiative. At the time of the murder, she was Executive Director of the Therasa Institute, a satellite of the Ministry of Health and Welfare in DC. The Institute ran a set of private hospitals in Central coast precincts that specialized in euthanizing the terminally ill and whoever else could afford to take a Happy Trail™ out of the world. On the morning of Sunday May 9th, Dubrovnik had slipped past security into one of the Ministry’s underground R&D labs. She had disabled the security system monitoring the interior of the complex, descended to the basement level and sealed herself in an airtight room before injecting herself with one of the nastier viruses left over from the Trans-Eurasian war. Within minutes, her body was a seething mass of pustules; within half an hour she was spread across the walls and floor.

Minotaur had had the unfortunate duty of watching a vidiclip of the episode. This is how they knew it was a homicide and not a suicide – someone had reactivated the cameras in the room shortly after Dubrovnik had gone inside.

Second victim: Professor Toby Sutton. Age 89, Biostat F9478.

Sutton had lived in Broadway Beaches, a coastal complex in Upper NYC. Prior to retiring last year he’d been CEO of Minutiae, a leading wetectronics firm set up in the first wave of Volition initiatives. Before the Change, Sutton had been a director of the Harvard Center for Nanotechnological Studies. He had been missing a few days before anyone noticed the smell coming from his office. It turned out that he had been infected with one of his own designs, a nanoagent that transformed bone to a substance as soft and malleable as rubber. He’d then been fed into the shredder.

VOLICOMSAT records suggested that the whole thing was suicide. According to the system, Sutton was the only bioform bigger than a rat in the apartment when it happened. But the story didn’t add up. How did Sutton put his fingers in the shredder if his arms were like rubber? It wasn’t a rat, in any case, that had bagged the gore and stowed a roll of sheeting in the bathroom. Minotaur didn’t know what it was. He felt sure that the DNA sample that he’d given Fisherman was the key to finding out.

A horn and blast of air knocked him sidewards as a nuclear-cell roadtrain rocketed past, hotdogging with a megatruck down the highway. POWER TO THE PEOPLE, said the sign on the back of the truck. VOTE INITIATIVE FIVE. Minotaur rolled off the road into a rest booth. He stopped the trike and tugged off his goggles. He needed sleep. Either that or to get back on the retroagents.

Victim three: Rex Butler. Age 80, Biostat 3612.

Butler had been found butt-naked on his living room floor with a length of plastic tubing up his ass. His intestines lay in a putrid heap beneath him.

Butler was an odious character. His occupation before the Change reflected the cynicism of the final days. Retiring from duty in 2025 with the rank of Colonel, Butler had used his contacts to set himself up as a major player in the African and Eurasian arms trade. He’d established a controlling interest in Blue Berets, one of the numerous private peacekeeping operations that had sprang up to fill the void left by the disbanded United Nations, and reaped the corporate synergies.

The question that intrigued Minotaur was how Butler had managed to hold onto his wealth through the Federation and the Volition revolution. He wasn’t involved with the Council of Marshalls, so far as Minotaur could tell; nor did he establish himself in business after the rise of Volition. There was someone looking out for him. Minotaur was onto it. Whether he’d access the appropriate records to find out anything interesting was another story.

He fired the engine and eased back into the traffic. The roadtrains disappeared as he circled into the Low. Trucks became flat-decks and vans. Humvees became cars, trikes, and pedicabs. Up ahead, through a veil of rain, the inland sea-wall loomed, crested with the lights of DC South. Minotaur drove into the Low as the horizon rose to swallow the sky.

Go to Chapter Four: NuFlesh

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Minotaur woke with a sense of defeat. Fisherman snored in the dark. He dropped from the hammock and stumbled to the bathroom. Gave some water, took some back, popped an Amphal and a Trill to take the edge off. In the blue light, his eyes looked hard as stones. He grabbed a coffee from the pot and took it upstairs while Fisherman slept.

It was raining outside. Minotaur sat by the door and logged onto Netspace. He skimmed the morning traffic coming off the Central hub, checked his mail, cruised the C-lists for opportunities. Nothing, as expected. He had entered a virtual death spiral. He needed to advance the case or score a major win on BATTLEFIELD to turn it around.

His avatar showed up to deliver an update. Some good news, some bad.

‘Volition Data reports you’ve gained twenty points for getting traction on the BUTLER3010PP murder in advance of network release’, it informed him. ‘Deductions as of May 28: rent, sixty five credits; passage, thirty credits. Return on services, eighty one credits. Negative accretion ratio: eight point seven percent’.

Minotaur thumbed: INFO: HBBRAGS/MINO3GRAFXX30. No new developments. He stared into the rain.

‘Maintaining full-spectrum professional services coverage, central and coastal districts’, the avatar said. It snorted and thrust at him with its horns.

Minotaur checked the Representative reel. The Central feed led with an article on the Fifth Initiative. Dorien Xiao was on every major news channel selling the agenda. A pretty sylph invited him to check into the House to cast his vote. Minotaur didn’t have the stomach for it. He’d do it later. He was only voting for points, in any case. He logged onto BATTLEFIELD and sleepwalked through the siege of Riyadh instead.

———————————–

The gas and goods convoy pulled out of Roanoke an hour later. The rain had abated. A crowd of children ran alongside the trucks as they left the supply center. At first they laughed and waved, splashing through the puddles and mud. They started begging as the trucks neared the outer perimeter. ‘Please mister. My daddy died in the Freeze’. Minotaur pretended not to hear them. The convoy rumbled through the razor wire and the children vanished in the drizzling haze.

Minotaur had drawn the short straw and assumed the task of lookout for the first leg of the trip. He sat alone in the glass canopy on top of the truck. Fisherman had given him an endorphin shot before he’d left, which had killed the hangover but reactivated the cocktail of chemicals in his system. Wired and blinking away the occasional hallucination, he studied the Sprawl through the rivulets of rain on the glass.

The Sprawl was a vast favela of slums and dormitories extended like a cancer down the east coast of the former United States of America. On a good day it was a garden of human misery. Wind farms loomed like skeletal flowers over the ruins. Rain beat on iron and plastic roofing that stretched to the horizon. Outside of DC and Upper NYC, the citizens were clustered into regimented precincts, surviving on a weekly drip-feed of hydrocrystal and meatstuff from the centers. They harvested the ruins of neighboring towns for materials, building the new world out of the old. They harnessed wind and solar and sold it on the grid. In the Thaw, when the weather was cool, they grew vegetables in pits irradiated with solar lamps. When the soil went bad, they used the pits to burn their trash and bury the dead.

The gas and goods convoy rolled past Crepshaw B, where children played in the carcasses of cars. Minotaur returned the hollow gaze of the gunmen above the gates. When he met them on BATTLEFIELD, he’d kill them all.

This was the remnants of America in 2055 – a stinking sea of prefabs choking the horizon, crammed full of hungry folk in wool hats, ski-parkas, and military-issue thermals. The eternal rambling campscape of the Sprawl. The Sprawl hunkered low on the weathered coast, focused inwards for the most part, struggling to sustain the flame of life.

A team of jets screamed over the convoy heading north. Minotaur watched them disappear into the browns and ochres of the northern horizon. It was hard to believe that the most desirable real estate in the Sprawl lay under that pallid sky. The domes and tunnels of North Sprawl supposedly represented the future of society, for those who could afford it. Life was cheaper, in all senses, in South Sprawl, where residents carved out a precarious existence in and above the inland tides. The North attracted citizens with knack for capital ventures. The South was home to a different sort of adventurer, committed or condemned to a different order of reward.

Most of the population of the Sprawl lived between these geographical extremes, in the chunk of land extending from DC, on the coast, two hundred and fifty miles inland to the foothills of the Appalachians. This was the Central Sprawl. Central Sprawl was the only home that Minotaur had left. He knew that success or failure in the region depended on how you plugged yourself into the network of service providers that formed the beating heart of the camp system. Fall into the cracks and you were good as dead. The Desolate zones dotting the landscape between camps were a grim reminder of this fact. Here faceless communities lived and died in shanties built in the sides of endlessly burning mountains of trash. Their sinuous spires strafed the morning sky, sending an SOS to a world incapable of answer, locked as it was in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of desolation across the campspace as a whole.

The logo on the gun turret waved and morphed. Minotaur was loose. He studied the logo, trying to focus his thoughts: Cherrycom is a company contracted by Volition Supply to service the Manassas 16 to Roanoke 7B route… It was an old route, set up in the early years of the Change under the Seaboard Federation. After the revolution, Volition had commercialized the entire aid operation, turning it into a line of business. More shit changes, Minotaur thought. Through the forties and fifties, competition between different convoys had thinned out the competitors, reducing the number of supply routes by a third. No doubt the revolution had improved the lives of people living in the big camps and centers like DC. But whole sectors had fallen off the grid in the twenty forties and no-one knew what happened to the people in them. Some moved on, some stayed and dealt with it. Minotaur couldn’t think about it. Life moved on.

The C30 Road was quiet. Minotaur studied the ruins of a passing urbscape. Reinforcing beams lay like dead trees, mired in debris. Next, a slope of burning tires slid by. Beyond the tires, framed against a steel-grey sky, a red brick mountain of shipping containers was hung with nets and ladders. People draped laundry from gunshot windows. Minotaur could see Best Buy on the horizon, surrounded by tent slums.

How did this happen? asked a voice in his head. How was it that less than thirty years ago, this land had belonged to the wealthiest, most kick-ass powerful nation on earth? Minotaur’s thoughts drifted back to another time, another world. Eyes on the horizon, he remembered the Change.

———————————–

He signed up on St Patrick’s Day, 2019. Mosdef Junior, a.k.a. Minotaur, was ready to serve. Training for war took Minotaur’s mind off everything that was falling apart in the world. Everywhere you looked it seemed that things were going from bad to worse. Global warming had set in faster than people expected. By twenty eighteen, NASA scientists were saying that ninety five per cent of life on the planet was doomed to extinction. By the time the US-Eurozone coalition went to war with China, in November 2018, the Amazon jungle was in flames and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-shelves were falling into the sea. Fifty million Americans, mostly ex-farmlanders from the Midwest, were making a bitter pilgrimage to the east, where the government had built the first generation of camps to house them. Minotaur’s neighborhood in west Atlanta was part of a strip that was razed to the ground to clear space for the camps. The campscape would spread like mould up the flank of the Appalachians the following decade. After the Change, it was all there was left.

Minotaur got the hell out of there before he became a camptramp himself. Age eighteen, he had no fixed abode, a minimal education, and zero prospects for the future. He decided that, if the world was going to hell, best place to be was in the army. Least you got a gun. Nice thing about the forces is that they censored the media, so you didn’t have to deal with the endless feed of bloggers telling America how bad everything had got. Damn, every time you logged on there was someone with a new set of statistics saying: ‘we’re fucked’. It was like America invented a new profession in the twenty teens, the celebrity expert. Know-it-all assholes got us into this mess, yo. Minotaur had seen through those experts from the start. Scientists and experts didn’t see it coming, did they? No one saw it coming, the Change.

The Atlantic Gulf Stream had kept the northern continents of the world in a climactic sweet spot for eons. By 2025, it was slowing considerably. Rising global temperatures were warming the seas, which contained the planet’s cooling agent – ice, in the form of frozen water. As the ice caps melted, cold water flooded the Atlantic and Pacific basins, transforming the dynamics of these thermal hubs, and the operation of the Atlantic conveyor. Everyone knew the tide was turning. No one thought it was a big deal. President Cleaver famously suggested that the Gulf Stream’s shutting down might actually be a good thing for the United States, in that it might knock a few bars off the thermometer and give people on the beaches of Miami some relief. Sure enough, with global temperatures going up, the economy in recession, oil prices on the hike, and protesters knocking down the gates of every waste-of-time climate summit in the world, there seemed to be more important things to worry about than ocean currents. No one thought that the Atlantic Ocean would turn around. No one even knew it could happen.

Legend has it that a Danish frigate aligned with the fifth fleet, stationed off the South Sandwich Islands in preparation for the offensive on Buenos Aires, reported surface water agitation north of Antarctica on New Year’s Day, 2030. By the time the story made it out on Wikileaks, the impossible had happened. Major undersea flows were colliding in the southern Atlantic, where the ocean rolled and threshed like a hot tub. The Atlantic conveyor was turning around. No computer model had predicted it. It was a singularity, an unprecedented event. The Change threw Mother Nature into chaos.

Minotaur was with the Fighting 24th north of Madrid when news of the Change came through. He’d watched early reports on the holcrom unit in his headpiece. The military channel played up the state of things back home and dismissed what it called ‘disinformation’ about the fall of the government. He didn’t find out the truth of what happened in the US until later on.

Fact is, when FEMA forecast a climate shift on the horizon, US society fell apart. It was mid-April 2030, things were barely holding together as it was. The news of an impending climate shift triggered an apocalyptic fervor up and down the campscape on the Eastern Seaboard. People wept, clutched at Bibles and threw themselves off the top of buildings. Chanting mobs stormed shopping malls and waged open war with security staff in Walmart and Sears. Members of the Manhattan Shanhayaa Buddhist Church staged a mass immolation in New York’s Central Park. The fundamentalist Christian group Hosea 8:7 shuttled congregation after congregation straight to heaven in a grisly series of fire-bombings down the east coast.

Then, a week after news of the Atlantic reversal went public, the skies across North America turned purple-back and the thermometer dropped below fifty. An angry rumble filled the air. The people in the eastern camps stopped and listened to that sound. It was like a giant hole had opened in the Midwest and the entire continent was crashing into the pit. Then the wind picked up and the rain came down in black fat drops that morphed into hail and then blocks of ice were crashing from the sky and nothing out of cover was safe. The Big Freeze had begun.

Tornadoes ripped through the campscape and left it in tatters. Tenements collapsed and cars flew about on the street. Giant waves battered the coast and floods swept whole suburbs into the sea. People hunkered down where they could. Millions were dying and nothing could be done. President Cleaver and his advisers were taken to a secret bunker in Virginia, where they spent three days blasted on pills and booze before being dispatched in a coup d’etat by a team of officers with the backing of the General Staff. These actions marked the end of the legitimate constitutional administration of the United States of America. They marked the birth of the brutal, short-lived, American Seaboard Federation.

———————————–

The blast of a horn and the guard truck below him burst into life. Minotaur shook sleep from his eyes. He’d dozed off. He struggled to get his bearings. They had reached the stretch of road on which they had seen the band of figures the day before. In front of the convoy, about a mile ahead, a similar group was blocking the highway. Minotaur could make out a mix of people in a sorry state. A man in a red jacket was at the head of the group walking down the center of the highway towards the convoy. The man waved a rag on the end of a stick.

The convoy shuddered to a halt. The windows of the front truck bristled with guns. A squad of troopers sprang out into a defensive formation upon the road. There was a burst of automatic fire. A mechanical voice instructed the strangers to halt.

There was banging on the side of the truck.

‘Hola. Anybody home? Little help here’.

Minotaur dropped down the ladder and fell into formation with the other men on the road. They jogged to the head of the convoy. The armed troopers had corralled the strangers into a circle in the center of the highway. They had them on their knees, hands behind their heads.

The captain of the convoy was a barrel-chested man with a scarred face. He sweated in the breeze. He mopped his forehead as he looked the map that was laid before him on the road. His second in command came running back from the prisoners.

‘They’re not Zoners’, said the lieutenant. ‘They say they’re from Baystone Camp’.

‘I thought it was collapsed into Fairview?’

‘Fairview? That’s miles away’.

The Captain scowled at the map. ‘And we’re not commissioned for it either. Christ, we’re not here to hand out food parcels. You there’, he yelled at Minotaur. ‘Go find out what the story is. And you – call Central. Who’s delivering to Fairview?’

Minotaur walked towards the circle of prisoners with troopers to either side, weapons at the ready. The group was in a bad condition. They were malnourished and underdressed; some were wrapped in blankets and shredded sheets of tarpaulin.

‘Baystone or Fairview?’, Minotaur asked no one in particular.

The man with the flag spoke with a stammer.

‘We w-was raided’, he said. ‘In th-the Thaw’. He gestured towards the mall further down the road. ‘We need medicines’. His mouth was a jagged hole under his beard.

Minotaur saw bandages under the rags. The soldiers to either side lowered their ventilators.

‘What kind of sickness you got?’ he choked. The smell ripped a hole through time.

‘W-w-what do you think?’ The man coughed and spat a bloody oyster on the road. ‘W-w-war pox. What happened to the c-c-convoy to W-wood Creek’?

Minotaur glanced back at the trucks.

‘We’re not carrying medicines’, he said. ‘You people have to get off the road’.

‘We was relyin on the Wood Creek c-convoy’, the man said.

A woman rose to her feet, oblivious to the dozen rifles suddenly trained in her direction. The scarf about her head made her look Islamic. He could see she was a Cutter. There was a child staring up from her skirts.

‘Please sir’, she said. ‘We got a girl who is sick. We need medicines’.

‘Baystone or Fairview?’, Minotaur demanded. His voice came from far away.

‘B-Baystone’, said the man. ‘W-w-we were the last ones there’.

Minotaur marched back to the convoy. ‘Stragglers from Baystone’, he said. ‘Which probably makes them Zoners. You decide’.

As the officers fell to arguing, he walked about the back of the truck and blew vomit through his fingers and nose.

———————————–

Mecca had fallen and the siege of Riyadh was proceeding. Minotaur sat in the guard truck, hunched over his pod, bathed in a holoscene glow. He slid in and out of levels, commanding units on the ground before pulling up for a helicopter view, taking in the battle as it played out across the Peninsula. He was ranking well and scoring hits. It was enough to see him into credit in zero minus five, though not enough for the bonus.

His avatar flew over.

‘You should attend to more immediate matters’, it told him. ‘Creditserv are threatening to cut you off. If you don’t settle your account in the next twenty four hours, you’ll be disconnected’.

Minotaur flew to Riyadh. MINO3GRAFXX30 followed.

‘You need to close the case, Minotaur. Close the case and you are out of the red. I’m telling you, this is the only way you are going to get out of this hole. You need to go back to basics, start building again. Think about it. You are scoring well on BATTLEFIELD. The syndicates are watching and they are always looking for new players. You’ve had a string of bad luck, Minotaur. But you’re in a good position to turn this around. Hope. Strive. Desire. You know you can do it’.

Minotaur logged off Netspace. BATTLEFIELD was nothing compared to real life.

Ten minutes later he logged on again. WORKIN FOR A LIVIN, he thumbed.

They hit traffic after Brandy Station and the convoy slowed to a crawl. Low-rise prefabs gave way to tenements and stacks. They were passing through Sweatshop Alley to the west of DC, the home of the manufacturing industries that had sprung up after the second round of Initiatives in 2044. The decade since had seen a surge of migrants to these areas, where an able-bodied citizen could earn enough to join the waiting list for dormitory quarters, or qualify for a day-pass into the city.

The convoy drifted under an overpass crowded with workers’ squats, seething with color and life. Everywhere you looked there were people. Two hundred fifty million, the fifty four census had said. Given the state of things, it was hard to credit that five hundred million had clogged the coast in the early years of the Change. Looking back, Minotaur couldn’t believe that anyone had survived this period at all. He thought of frozen corpses lined in pits. For a moment there, they’d teetered on the brink of extinction. If the latticework of supply lines had collapsed, the Federation government would have fallen fast as the US administration, and the Badlands would’ve stretched to the sea.

That was how it went down in the Eurozone. Minotaur barely got out in time. When the Spanish skies darkened and the population surged south away from the storms, military operations in the region fell to pieces. One morning Minotaur was a Captain in the Fighting 24th. By evening he just was another foreigner in uniform, battling his way through the crowded streets looking for a way out. He’d made it to the sea and managed to secure work on a gunboat doing supply runs about the Andalusian coast. The crew, a mix of Spanish navy men and Somali pirates, worked hard and tight, and after a night of drinking and shedding blood, he’d gathered those about him he trusted and let them in on his plan. Three weeks later they’d hijacked the gunboat in the port of Cádiz and rode it through the mines into open water. They broke though the refugee flotilla one hundred klicks offshore and ploughed the garbage soup all the way to the USA.

Minotaur would never forget the day that he laid eyes on the Sprawl. They’d come into Virginia Beach on a massive swell, At first he thought the coastline was encrusted with snow. As they drew nearer, he’d realized that he was looking at a sea of plastic on top of a landscape of modular huts. There were masses of people in ski-jackets huddling together in the sideways rain, crushed about kettle drums on the beach. Squads of soldiers in black uniforms crouched behind sandbags, machine guns at the ready. Minotaur didn’t recognize the insignia. He couldn’t see an Old Glory anywhere.

He’d asked a Federation officer the moment they made landfall: where is the Stars and Bars? The trooper tried knock him down. Minotaur dodged the blow but the implication struck him hard. That was when he knew it was over. That was when he knew that the nation he’d loved and served was gone.

The Federation offered him a position in the Homeland Guard, but he’d turned them down. Ever a patriot, he said. A patriot without a country. Turning his back on the military, Minotaur had focused on staying alive. He bunked up in stadiums and clustered dormitories. He spent days and nights queuing for rations in the wind and the rain. He picked up construction work when he could get it, though nothing regular. He froze and he starved and he’d watched the men and women in that ugly black uniform crush every expression of revolt. Minotaur probably wouldn’t have survived without the hate. His carbine kept him safe and the heart and enhancements kept him solid. But it was hate that got him out of the rig in the morning. Hate and anger stronger than grief.

Meanwhile the weather raged through a miscellany of unforgiving conditions. Hurricanes, flash-floods, tornadoes and blizzards launched themselves on top of one another in violation of all known meteorological logic. When the storms drew breath, thunderheads in the western skies grumbled from morning to night. It wasn’t long before the people in the camps realized that the climate had settled into a new equilibrium. The pattern was defined from 2032. November to March brought the cruelest winters that the continent had seen for ten thousand years. They called it the Freeze, after the Big Freeze, the drop in temperature that signaled the Change. When the Thaw came in April, the blizzards turned to rain and temperatures rose to a balmy fifty degrees. On a good year, the Thaw lasted to October. At the height of the season, the residents of the camps would pull off their parkas and sunbathe in the frosty glow. Mid-afternoon it was straight back into the thermals. Mostly, the climate was wet and cold, and worried by an evil wind. They said it was a Siberian climate, befitting the new American Gulag.

The Seaboard Federation didn’t have a shred of legitimacy and it knew it. Opposition to the Council of Marshalls – the military junta who had seized control in 2030 – became louder and more reckless with each passing year. Things came to a head in 2035 when the Homeland Guard turned their machine guns on rioters in DC. After that the soldiers on the street took on the air of an occupying force. When, in October thirty six, on the brink of the Freeze, the Council announced further cuts to the gas ration, the popular discontent boiled over into massive protests across the camps. The mob, by this point, had nothing to lose. They ran amok with molotovs and carbines. They raided and looted, sang, drank, and screwed in the mud. The Homeland Guard was presented with an impossible situation and restrained itself to using gas and rubber bullets in response to the protests. It was a strategic mistake. When the fires had died and the dust settled down and the protesters returned to their camps, all that anyone could talk about was what an amazing time it had been.

News media at the time was tightly controlled, so it was impossible to know the true scale of the riots. But no one in the camps had any doubt that it was the largest single political event in the history of the continent, if not the world. Almost by accident, the residents of the camps had discovered that they could be more than just a mass of aching bellies, but an awesome political force. It was the spark that lit the fires of revolution.

A week after the riots, Minotaur saw a placard bearing the slogan: VOLITION. Within six months, Volition Party agitators were spiriting copies of the Freedom Manifesto from camp to camp, and Dorien Xiao, the leader of the movement, had called for a citizen’s referendum on the future government of the Sprawl.

Three years of bloody guerrilla warfare ensued. The revolutionaries were branded terrorists, but everyone knew it was the junta who was responsible for the crimes. By the time the Volition armies stormed Capitol Hill, with Dorien Xiao at their head, the revolutionaries had united the campscape into a single entity under their red and blue flag. When the new administration was sworn in, on July 4, 2040, Xiao’s first act as leader was to give official status to the campscape name that had become coinage for the rebels: the Sprawl.

Truth be told, the Sprawl was born earlier than this, in the Thaw of thirty seven, when the Freedom manifesto was first circulated about the camps. If the revolution had succeeded, it was not just because the Volition Party opposed an unpopular and illegitimate government. It was because it reaffirmed values and ideals that had defined the old America, which many assumed had died in the period of the Change. The Freedom manifesto was a new beginning for the residents of the east coast camps. The spirit of democracy had returned, and with it, hope.

Minotaur could remember the Freedom manifesto world for word. He recited it below his breath as the campscape rolled slowly by.

The Council of Marshalls has declared that sovereign authority resides in you, the military government of the Sprawl. But it seems to us that we, the people, gave you this authority by an unspoken consensus, and in doing so we became a sovereign body with a far greater right than your own. We are well assured that the governance you have provided has preserved our lives and safeguarded the future. But we are equally assured that the future exists only so far as the present is given to change and that volition is the right of all.

We present the following truths as incontrovertible. First, that volition is the wellspring of human happiness and virtue, and should be enshrined in a universal legal code. Second, that democracy is the political expression of volition, and should be the principle ambition of any legitimate administration. Third, that free enterprise is the economic expression of volition, and the underpinning of a sovereign state.

Friends, any less than these principles is an affront to the legacy of this land. We offer you the chance to join us in realizing these principles or to break before the power of our common vision.

VOLITION!

Go to Chapter Three: Welcome to DC

Back to Lord of Swarms

Back to main page

Part I: Minotaur

1. Roanoke Nitelife
2. Aftermath
3. Welcome to DC
4. NuFlesh
5. Dixon
6. Wetlab
7. Blankety Blank
8. Democracy 2.0
9. Old Glory
10. House of Representatives

Part II: Behemoth

1. Outside
2. Basing into Heaven
3. Badlander
4. Temple City
5. Humble Pie
6. Schizoscope
7. Weather Overground
8. Beneath Temple City
9. Behemoth Rising
10. The Organon

Part III: Chimera

1. Freak
2. Leaving Temple City
3. Edith’s Dream
4. Birth of Chimera
5. Funny Business
6. Into the Labyrinth
7. Revolution of the Saints
8. Chimera at the Gates
9. Shiva Awakes
10. Festival

Epilogue: Eye of Brahma

Go to Prologue: Feast of Keres

HEADIN WEST BUSTIN ASS.

He called himself Minotaur and no one fucked with him. Clarkson and Tong at the gate didn’t know what to make of him when he loomed out of the dark. They almost let him straight on through. He wore a GI’s helmet with a bullshead on it. Man was built like a bull, classic geomorph, with arms like shells erupting from his shoulders, and ridges of muscle up his neck registering displeasure as they trained their weapons on him. Course the sync checked out. They could do with an ex-serviceman on board, they told him.

Minotaur slung his kit and Saber into a corner of the guard truck and nestled down beside them. He unclipped his pod and logged onto Netspace. The rest of the militia showed up yawning and ripe with last night’s juice. They clambered in, studying the stranger in the dark under thermal hoods. Minotaur wasn’t giving nothin away.

SLUMMIN IT WITH GEEGEE. MORNIN YA FREAKIN CESSPIT.

The fastest way to Roanoke was to run the gauntlet past Culpeper A. But the bridge was down between Westport and Bleaker and the captain wasn’t taking chances. The gas and goods convoy rumbled out of Falls Church at oh-four thirty hours. They took the freeway west through Strasberg, detouring for drop-offs at Front Royal and Broken Hill along the way. Once they’d passed the septic towers at Briney Strip they saw few other moving vehicles. Near Bridgewater, the denizens of a derelict mall wandered onto the road and lingered in the shells of cars ahead. The front truck hit them with the sonic cannon they scattered like flies. Still, the men in the guardtruck were unnerved by the incident and there was talk of a show of force on the journey home. The team leader fingered his rifle as he peered through the wire-mesh window.

‘All we’re asked is to keep the road clear. Them folks is an obstruction’, he said.

SOUL IN A CORPSE. MORE THINGS CHANGE.

The convoy rolled into the Roanoke camps mid-evening. Minotaur logged off Netspace as they pulled into the Green zone. The wind was cutting down from the north, battering the supply tents and tugging spray from the water on the causeway. Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, he jumped off the truck and slotted himself into a line of recruits unloading tubs of hydrocrystal and biofeed. The rain came down in squalls. The thickets of electrical wire overhead let off a slow sonorous moan. Anne Laurent was hunkered by the refrigerated trucks, checking out the inventory. She waved when she saw him and came over when the trucks were emptied.

‘Minotaur. What up? Haven’t seen you down here for a while’.

‘Love this part of the country, Anne. The climate, the people…’ Minotaur could lighten up around Anne. Rivulets of water fell from his hood.

‘Well, I’m glad you arrived, Anne said. ‘We got a party tonight. Dancing at the Big Room. You’ll join us, I hope?’

‘Have to see about that’, said Minotaur, hoisting his pack. ‘I’m calling in on Fisherman. Not sure he’s the dancing type. Less you mean St Vitus dance’.

’Might see you later, then. Assuming you don’t eat the fish’.

———————————————

Fisherman got a degree in Wetectronics from the University of Rochester in 2019, the same year as Minotaur enlisted in the Marines. In four years, he’d ridden the post-oil biotech boom to a senior design position in an east coast genomics firm, only to lose it in the crash of 2027. Currently, Roanoke camp council, along with a series of other less salubrious transactions, funded his experiments into transgenic foodstuffs. Fisherman’s live-in laboratory was in the basement of the Regency, a doss house off the Central Strip.

Minotaur trotted down the stairs to Fisherman’s digs. He sync with the security unit and entered a low-ceilinged space brimming with trash-bags, tanks, cables, and junked computers. The windowless room shimmered in the glow of Christmas lights, festooning the walls. It stank of fish.

Fisherman stood in the middle of the room behind a wall of murky tanks. For years, he’d been trying to engineer a species of fish capable of surviving in hydrocrystal fluid. Hence the nickname. His tusk-like mustache and sandy beard gave him the appearance of a bleary-eyed, latter-day Viking.

‘Surprised you got a permit to get out this way’, Fisherman said.

‘Yeah, pleased to see you too’, Minotaur replied. He plunged his arm into a murky tank and pulled out a bottle. Shaking ice from his arm, he repeated the maneuver and threw the catch to Fisherman. 

‘I still got some friends in high places’.

He perched on a drum and sucked on the ale while Fisherman finished up. Fisherman took a gelatinous object from a refrigerated case and dropped it into a tank. ‘You do eat fish, don’t you Minotaur?’, he inquired.

Minotaur glanced at the shapeless form hovering in fluid. ‘Only super-sized ones’, he said. ‘Eatin’ ital this month’.

Fisherman prodded the specimen with a rod. It spasmed and drifted off.

‘You need to get out more,’ Minotaur told him.

‘Hey, least I’m not gaming myself into penury!’, Fisherman barked. ‘Training World my ass! We give the blessed reader the right to redesign society from the ground up and he turns it into a casino!’

‘You make me sound like an addict. DOL is crushing my platoon. If I don’t keep training and making warheads I’ll be wiped from the game. I will be platoonless’.

‘Friend, I haven’t got time for BATTLEFIELD. See this place? I have responsibilities. This is what a grown up does for a living. See? I have a laboratory to run’.

The fact was, since the Change, Fisherman’s career had been mostly downhill. Whereas Minotaur, whose stock in trade was war, had prospered in the decade of their acquaintance, Fisherman had been reduced to picking up screening work in various out of the way locations. Roanoke was the end of the line. Minotaur felt sorry for him.

‘How are the latest syntheses?’ he asked supportively.

‘Synthesize your ass’.

———————————————

Later that evening, Minotaur remembered why it was he had come. He unclipped the chrome canister from the stock of his rifle.

‘Here is that sample I told you about’, he said.

Fisherman was sunk into a beanbag. ‘Why not get it checked in DC?’ he mumbled.

‘Complicated story’.

‘Secrets, more secrets’. Fisherman struggled up, took the canister, and plugged it into a sequencer. The screen looped Mickey Mouse scratching his groin as the BLAST and PLASma programs reassembled the code. Fisherman took a seat and beat a brief tattoo on the handpan as a psychedelic graph filled the screen. He stared at it for a moment then punched some more buttons. Pushed back his hat and rubbed his forehead.

‘It’s recombinant’, he said. ‘Chimera. Not listed, if that’s what you were hoping. Not sure what it is, actually. Gloop, I’d say’.

‘Gloop?’

‘Uncoded pluripotent material. They used to make babies out of it before the Change. You’d find it in wetlabs in the twenty twenties, before the Republicans rewrote the Constitution again. I’d say it’s scrap’.

‘You are saying that someone threw an embryo at the wall?’

‘If that is your story’. Fisherman smiled indulgently. ‘I’d still say it’s scrap’.

‘I want to be clear about this. You are telling me that this DNA does not code for a human being? A person, target, SAD?’

‘It’s not a human being. It’s not even close. It’s … mutating’. Points of light flickered across Fisherman’s irises as he tapped at the handpan.

‘Well, OK. Cascading flows. Someone’s been screwing with this stuff. Those are recombinant flows. Damn, I haven’t seen that in years. It looks like it’s bifurcating’.

Minotaur leaned in to catch the action. ‘Doctor got a second opinion?’

Fisherman took a slug from his bottle.

‘What you have here, my friend, is transgenic mutating gloop. It’s not human. If it codes for one thing, it codes for half a dozen.’

‘Some kind of recombinant mutating embryo shit?’

‘Neither fish nor flesh, my friend. I’m not going to ask you where you got it’.

Minotaur tugged the canister from the sequencer. He produced from his pack a cylinder the size and shape of a flashlight.

‘Check this out’, he said. He pointed the flashlight at the tanks and held it out so that Fisherman could see the reading along one side.

‘Biostuff’, Minotaur said.

He pointed the cylinder at Fisherman, who raised both hands in the air. The digits on the panel rearranged themselves.

‘Biostuff’, Minotaur said.

Placing the canister on the desk, he flipped open the lid and presented the cylinder. The panel displayed a string of zeroes.

‘Absence of biostuff’, Minotaur said. ‘So it says’.

Fisherman shrugged. ‘You’re saying your scanner is broke?’

Minotaur held the flashlight so that Fisherman could see the VOLICOM decal along the side. ‘This, my friend, is a new model Volicom scanner. Guaranteed to register molar concentrations of wet-data within a five-yard conical radius. The DNA is scanner-proof. Technically invisible’.

Fisherman cocked an eyebrow, glanced at the evolving flows on the screen. He shot a glance at Minotaur.

‘You’re saying it doesn’t show up on the grid?’

‘Affirmative’.

‘Scary. I assume you haven’t tried running a databank search on this stuff?’

‘You kidding me? It doesn’t show up on the scope. I’m thinking it’s military wetware. Or some corporate trial gone wrong. Relax, brother. We’ll keep it off the Bionet. Course, this presents the problem of how to identify it. Which, in a nutshell, is why I’m standing here talking to you’.

‘It’s scrap I tell ya’, Fisherman protested weakly. He tugged at his mustache. ‘I assume you are thinking of my friends in the Republics?’

Minotaur nodded. ‘We script the code – place a general on the sequence, just in case anyone’s looking for it. We get someone to hack into the Bionet through a Eurasian or African portal. No one could trace it’.

The Republics was the only part of the African continent to have survived the Change intact. It had evolved out of a group of east African states that had invested heavily in ICT before the Trans-Eurasian war. When Africa was knocked off the grid in 2026, these states retained a foothold in global markets through contracts with New Mongolia and India. Now the place was a seething hotbed of drug and arms dealers, anti-UEF hackers and insurgents on the run. In ironic moments, Fisherman dreamed of moving there.

‘Three days, Taur’, he said. ‘Leave it with me’.

———————————————

If Minotaur was sure of one thing, the DNA wasn’t scrap. He’d found it at the scene of a nasty murder at the exclusive Hampton Bay Complex. Rex Butler was an ex-military man who had made his money in weapons and private peacekeeping contracts. His neighbors described him as a model citizen. Butler had been found bound and naked on the living room floor with a length of plastic tubing up his ass. After immobilizing him with a paralysis agent, the killer had poured acid down the tube. Butler had died slowly over several hours from massive internal hemorrhaging.

A Caucasian woman had been seen smoking a cigarette on the balcony of Butler’s apartment on the night of his death. Volicom had failed to generate an identikit picture of the woman. She wasn’t a resident. Security had no record of her entering or leaving the building. A scan of the crime scene had failed to produce a scrap of genetic evidence. Officially, that was. Minotaur had found a slender jet of it – a thin trace of fluid, snaking across the bathroom wall. He wouldn’t have noticed it if his genetic scanner hadn’t said it wasn’t there. The Volicom team had passed right on over it. He removed the sample with a swab while the boys drank Butler’s coffee in the kitchen.

CLEAN SWEEP AT HAMPTON BAY. LOG FIRST CALL: MINO3GRAFXX30.

Five minutes later he’d got a call from Brags.

‘Stiff for you to check out, Taur. Male resident of Hampton Bay. Fits our profile. Nasty death, no biodata, no other leads’.

Harry Brags was Minotaur’s agent. When rich citizens of the Sprawl wanted services that fell outside the law, and were too nervous or poorly connected to contact the Mob, they called Harry Brags. From his offices in uptown DC, Brags called Minotaur. In the parlance of the street, Minotaur was a contract man. He liked ‘private detective’ better. Minotaur did shake-ups and SADs, but he drew the line at hits. He’d stacked enough bystanders in the Trans-Eurasian war. Besides, Minotaur was no cheap thug. He had a good head on his shoulders. He could pick up a case and worry out its leads. Dealt another hand – pretty much any hand other than the one that he’d been given – he could have made something of himself. Minotaur didn’t feel bad about it. At least he wasn’t wearing a monkey suit, working for Volicom. Or dossing at the SleepEasy, with the scissormen and small-time hoods.

There was always the satisfaction of staying one up on Brags. Usually, agents were supplied leads and contract men followed them up. Minotaur made a point of acting on his initiative.

‘Way ahead of you, Brags. Picked it up over VOLICOMSAT this morning. Leaving the place now’.

‘Any news? Sounds like our man to me’.

‘Could be our man is a woman’. He was going to mention the sample but swallowed the news. ‘Nothing else. Volicom’s sweeping the place’.

Mostly Minotaur was on the level with Brags. But the case was getting weird and Minotaur needed time to think. He hadn’t heard of invisible biomass before. Its existence seemed to erode his sense of control. Minotaur was used to tracking perps that he knew nothing about. But his current target radiated unknowability. All that Minotaur knew for certain was that someone, or something, was carving a trail through the upper eschelons of the Sprawl, dispatching victims in the most sadistic manner. Butler was number three on the list, so far as Minotaur knew. The fact was the number of victims was impossible to know for sure. The killer’s signature was invisibility. No prints, no traces, no genetic records. No leads.

Minotaur wondered who had set him on the trail of an invisible serial killer. But client anonymity was a given. Ultimately, the block letters stamped in red on the cover of his contract were the only instructions he had received. SAD: Search and Destroy.

Now a troubling thought was taking shape in the back of his mind. Minotaur was no geneticist, but he knew that you didn’t engineer something capable of slipping under the Volicom security grid with a recombinant home kitset. Whatever was going on, it was serious business. There could be any number of powerful fingers in this pie. Until he learned more, it was best he proceed with caution. He should assume that he was being monitored for start. Announcing that he had a biosample from the crime scene might be the last thing he did. Likewise, a Bionet search was out of the question.

He could think of no better course of action than to take the DNA to Fisherman. He contacted a friend who worked graveyard shift at Central Supply and negotiated a one-off contract to ride shotgun with the convoy to Roanoke.

———————————————

The Big Room was the main hanger at Roanoke airport. During the day it functioned as an assembly hall, community centre, school and day room for the numerous unemployed of the camps. Tonight it was the site of the loudest party in the world.

Most of the major camps had been set up about airports. In the early years of the Change, when the Sprawl had been the American Seaboard Federation, the Roanoke camp had been a thriving node on the network of supply lines that crossed the east coast, dispensing food and resources to millions of starving refugees. These days, the only planes the residents of Roanoke saw were Volition jets screaming out into the Badlands. Fortunately, over the years, Roanoke had ensured a relative level of self-sufficiency. Wandering to the Big Room, close to midnight, Minotaur and Fisherman walked down a corridor of hangers converted to giant wheat and vegetable farms. The solar cells on the roofs harnessed enough energy during the day to run sprinkler systems at night. Minotaur could smell tubertomatoes on the breeze, mixed with the tang of hydrocrystal and rain.

Up ahead, music pumped from the Big Room. The bonfire outside the hanger doors roared and spat sparks across the runway. The revelers jostling about the fire parted as Minotaur and Fisherman approached. The two friends walked into a vast space of light, sound, and commotion. At the far end of the hanger, a local band was winding up a cover of a pre-Change song. Minotaur looked for the bar, but Fisherman pointed towards a battered A380 in the corner of the hanger. Someone had painted over the logo on the side of the aircraft, which read: ‘Am  i an Airline?’

‘That’s our place’, he yelled, as the band struck up another tune. ‘Club Roanoke. Full of freaks but at least we can talk’.

The two friends sauntered through the Big Room, soaking up the noise and energy. It was rare to see smiles on so many faces. A bunch of kids burst from the crowd, almost knocking Fisherman down. Minotaur laughed as he brushed himself off and launched into one of his characteristic monologues.

‘Think of it, Taur! These kids born after the Change. What’s their reality, huh? What’s the left and right and up and down of it? You know, I never realized before the Change how much the sheer monotony of life, the day-to-day-ness of it all, sets up our expectations. Frames our whole sense of being in the world. Like Shakespeare, y’know – life’s a dream? Or is that players on a stage? Anyhow, point is these kids have gone medieval on us. They don’t get what’s happened. You and I, we’ve been through the Change. We’ve seen it fall apart and come together again. But these kids…’

He gestured to a boy in the crowd.

‘Hey kid! What’s it like growing up in a disaster zone?’

‘I’ll cut ya’, the boy sneered. He flicked a look at Minotaur and vanished into the crowd. Fisherman nodded like this confirmed his point.

‘The education these kids get is meaningless compared to the chaos they see about them. It’s like a nothingness has engulfed the world! It’s like the enlightenment never happened! It’s King Arthur’s court, man! For all these kids know, DC’s Camelot, I’m Merlin and you’re … Gwaine the green knight!’

‘Black knight’, Minotaur laughed. Fisherman was right. They’d seen it happen. In twenty five years, you could lose hundreds or more.

They climbed into the shell of the airplane. It was quieter inside, and the low-voltage light gave the impression of a bar or club. Anne and her friends were on the upper deck, away from the crowd. Introductions were made, drinks poured, and the conversation rolled on.

They were talking about the Church of the Brethren, the religious community that had sprung up in the Badlands in the wake of the Change. A friend of a friend was traveling to Temple City, the capital of the Brethren communities, for Pentecostal Organon, their annual festival of baptism. Opinion was divided over whether or not this was a wise thing to do. On the whole, the residents of the Sprawl admired the Brethren for what they had achieved in the Badlands. Yet there were lingering concerns about the conditions of their success – not so much the extent to which the Church demanded conformity of its members, but the extent to which it had mined the insecurity of the times to muster its flock. Despite the failure of free market capitalism to prevent the Change, and the squalor and restriction of their present conditions, residents of the Sprawl tended to espouse the secular ideology of the Volition Party, which affirmed liberty and free enterprise above all, treating forms of subservience with suspicion and reserve.

Fisherman liked to parody these attitudes, particularly when he’d hit the pipe. Not everyone appreciated his sense of humor.

‘Let me tell you something about religion. Religion’s a crutch for the weak, the needy. In pagan times, before the Christian Church, it was the little people that needed the gods, not the aristocracy. The aristocracy – they wanted to be heroes; and your hero, well, he’s out to challenge the deities. That is why the gods were always kicking his ass. Goddamned divinities, never gave a man a break!’

Minotaur translated for those lacking a Classical education.

‘What my friend is saying is basically – hey – if you’re gonna die, die with your boots on, right? With your eyes open. That’s how I see it. Better an honest soldier than a born again’.

‘Yeah, thanks Taur. Ab-solutely nuttin to do with what I was saying. But it’s good to get a serviceman’s point of view’.

‘Does this lack a point? Swivel’.

The conversation turned to the origins of the Church. Some were certain that the Brethren Church predated the Change. Others argued that a new Church emerged in the final days, around the time of the fundamentalist evictions, when the Christian right had turned to terror. Was this before or after the Salem reactor went up? Fisherman suggested that the Brethren might have been responsible for this. Anne, who had spent time in the communities, disagreed.

‘You’re wrong, Fisherman’, she said. ‘They are good people, good simple people. I think they are genuinely concerned to build a better, more equitable, world. There is nothing cultish about them – no charismatic leader, no wife-swapping, nothing illicit’.

‘I got no idea where all these good people came from’, Fisherman said. ‘If we’d had more of them before the Change, we might be in a better way today’.

The friend of the friend who was attending the Organon spoke up on Anne’s behalf.

‘Anne’s right’, he said. ‘The remarkable thing about the Brethren is that they’re looking ahead. They’re not about the end of the world – they’re about the beginning of a new one’.

Fisherman was unconvinced. ‘I’m not sure the Brethren are everything they’re cracked up to be. When have they come to the Sprawl? They don’t come. It’s like they’ve washed their hands of us. There is something distinctly un-Christian about that, if you ask me’.

‘They aren’t allowed to come’, Anne said quietly. ‘”Not within one hundred miles” – it’s their law’.

The evening picked up speed. The cycle of songs and drinks became a force of its own. At one point, Fisherman distributed wafers in a mock religious ceremony. After that, the conversation became random, chaotic. Minotaur found he could no longer focus on individual speakers. There seemed to be a voice emerging behind the chorus of voices, or somehow in-between them. It resonated about the cabin like a chant. He struggled to catch it, but it was too low and slow to follow.

Later on he dreamed he was in a field of yellow corn. A boy stood before him with a puppy in his arms.

‘I know you’, Minotaur said. But the boy seemed distracted. He tilted his head to the west, listening to voices on the wind.

Go to Chapter two: Aftermath

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Security Station Keres stood skirted by wind-farms on a jagged thrust of granite fifty miles northwest of the Sprawl. Tucked into the elbow of the mountain, the station looked west over a barren landscape of tundra and ruin stretching into the Badlands. Keres was a lonely outpost, barely accessible by road, isolated in the Freeze when icestorms threshed the peaks. The turbines studding the face of the mountain were its only companions. Their collective roar, like a horde of demons, swept up over the walls of the station and was carried east with the flow of electric power to the sea.

The staff at Station Keres fell into two groups. Most of the soldiers were new recruits, counting the days until they got away. Others in the station had forgotten the day that they’d arrived. For many soldiers, the rugged wind and roar of the turbines became increasingly harrowing as time wore on, until the nightmares set in and things began to slide. Others found equanimity in the experience and a kind of release. Many of the senior staff of the Keres station fell into this category. They were somber individuals, who kept secret histories hidden from the world, and sometimes even from themselves.

Half Nelson was in a class of his own. Nelson’s fate was to have been born between the Change and the resumption of p-godding programs in the forties. Before the Change, he would have been called ‘intellectually disabled’. Nelson’s current title depended on who was dispensing the honors. In the armory and ablution blocks, he was Captain Shit-for-Brains. The boys in the storerooms called him Curdled Milk, in reference to the games they’d have him play on lonely nights. Privates Hamilton and Beers, who manned the security post at the eastern gate, had a different game for Nelson, in which he’d earned the esteemed titles Venturer and Poet. Nothing much moved through the eastern gate except for the wind and Nelson on his ventures. Hamilton and Beers spent their days smoking blunts and playing ball in the courtyard behind the gates, using the security system to monitor the movements of officers. Not infrequently, the ball would fly between the top of the gates and the wall in which they were set.

‘Go get the Poet’, Beers would snigger, and Nelson would be summoned for a venture.

Nelson knew that Hamilton and Beers were fooling with him, but he didn’t mind the gaming. They were a funny couple, these two – always grinning and joshing. Nelson appreciated the chance to demonstrate his hardiness and skill. He would plough out the gates into the wind, down the slope in search of the ball. By the time he’d come back, his hands would be frozen and his breathing coming fast and shallow. He’d stand in the courtyard hopping and shivering as Hamilton and Beers fell laughing about him.

‘Say Nelson’, Beers would inquire. ‘How cold’s it out there?’

‘Yeah Poet’, Hamilton’d say. ‘Give it to us in verse’.

‘Numbly. Numbly Jumbly’, Nelson mumbled. For the soldiers, this was the payoff.

‘Numbly Jumbly! Word ‘o the poet!’

Nelson didn’t mind their laughing. He was grateful for the morsel of respect.

The wind was hard and cruel on the morning of the thirtieth and when Nelson came back from his venture, his lips were blue and he fudged his lines. Beers threw a blanket over his shoulders and kicked his ass in the direction of the stove. When he turned around, a stranger was standing inside the gates. He did not carry a weapon. He wore black thermals without an insignia on the shoulder and breast. There was something unsettling about the absence of rank, an unfinished quality that pervaded the whole person.

‘Damn, where’d you come from, dude?’ Beers said.

‘I came from outside’, the stranger said. He looked at them with a neutral expression. It was like he was waiting for something.

Hamilton tugged his pistol from its holster and leveled it at the stranger’s chest.

‘Genscan’s malfunctioning’, he muttered. It wasn’t right. ‘ID, unit, hey? You deaf? Motherfucker. Beers, check the system.’

Beers shoved past the stranger into the control room. The stranger continued looking at Hamilton. His eyes dropped from the gun to the knife on Hamilton’s belt.

‘I like your knife’, he said. ‘May I have it?’

It was a golden moment, like the first toke of the day. Time slowed, the wind died, and a ray of sunlight pierced the titanium mesh of the gates. Hamilton knew that he’d never met the man before. He’d never met anyone like this man; yet he had always known this man, as if the stranger was a reflection of his deeper possibility made visceral and true. Fact was he wanted nothing more than to give the stranger his knife. He holstered the pistol and stepped forward, passing the weapon to the man, handle first.

The stranger took the knife, examined it briefly, spun it in the air and caught it again, so it pointed downwards in his fist. Placing his left hand on Hamilton’s shoulder, he rammed the blade into Hamilton’s stomach and gutted him like a pig.

————————

Joy Squad Fourteen were kitting up in the tool room when the alarm sounded through the station. Private Walker pulled his holocrom into place and stammered out a report to Corporal Smith.

‘Sir! Security violation on the ground floor, sir! East gate – shit, I mean sir! We got action, sir, coming up the stairs at East three, sir!’

Smith sprang into action.

‘OK you cluster-fucks, into formation. Bennet – get those boots on! This is not a drill! Alpha unit! I want a defensive formation at East three-zero in ten, nine, eight… Beta unit! I want backups at locations twenty-oh-two and twenty-oh-seven, on the double!’

Hoisting cannons, slamming in clips, fumbling with straps, belts and boots, Alpha unit charged down the corridor and threw themselves into position about door E three-zero at the mouth of the stairs leading up from the gate. Sounds of a ruckus echoed up from below: Beer’s bellowing voice, staccato bursts of machine-gun fire, the piercing chime of rounds on metal.

With a mad clap of boots on stairs something burst from the door.

‘Friendly!’, Walker cried.

Private Beers fell into the arms of the awaiting troopers, rifle clattering to the floor. He was bleeding from cuts to the head and chest. Beta unit dragged him about the corner as the others resumed their formation.

Corporal Smith dropped down beside him. ‘Report Beers. What’s the situation down there?’

Beers wrestled with the arms that held him down, slipping in blood.

‘It changes shape’, he hissed. ‘Don’t you see, sir? It could be any of them!’

Smith’s jaw started working left and right. He blinked and bugged his eyes.

‘Corporal?’, Walker demanded.

Smith’s eyes rolled back in head.

‘Corporal’, Walker repeated, coming at him. Smith hoisted his rifle and blasted Walker in the chest. Spinning about, he unloaded his weapon into the soldiers, hollering like an animal. Private Bremner took him down. A mesh of bloody explosions embroidered the Corporal chest to thigh. A handful of bullets threaded through to Webern and Anders at the forward post, knocking them to the floor, and Jones, assuming they were under attack from behind, threw himself about and squeezed off a series of rounds, forming a fatal cross-stitch in the closed space. Suddenly a voice was screaming: ‘Fire in the hole!’, and Spalding, in the forward group, was kicking at the grenade that was rolling in his direction. With a boom that punctured time, the corridor was strewn with soldier-parts and the conflagration was on.

Anders shot Bremner and Walker shot Jones. Shelly, who had to that point not fired a round, was shot in the stomach as Jones went down, and did the same to Marshall as she collapsed. Marshall, to the end the most cautious member of Joy Squad 14, folded to the floor without shooting anyone at all. Overwhelmed, the remaining members of Joy Squad disengaged, flapping and writhing in retreat from the scene.

Private Marshall sat slumped against the wall in a widening pool of blood. The undulating wail of the siren was merging with the pain into a feverish experience of motion and speed. When Marshall closed his eyes, he was on a rollercoaster going down, down, about and around, crushed by the g-force, shot into the air… He forced his eyelids apart. Across the hallway, Beers had shifted into a sitting position. Marshall watched as his flesh began to shiver and change; blood seeping into his skin like rivulets of mercury draining into cracks. When he turned to look at Marshall, he had no face at all. Marshall opened his mouth to scream. But the faceless creature shimmered and smiled and soon Marshall was smiling as well.

————————

In the command and control room on level two, Captain Jean Dalton watched in horror as one by one, the squadrons on the floor below collapsed into chaos. Moments earlier, she had been orchestrating the tactical retreat of Anger Management Nine. Now the line was dead and, if the evidence of the security-cam was to be believed, so were the members of the squad. Dalton had yet to see any sign of an invading force. It was like a collective psychosis were infiltrating the units on the floor, throwing them into violent disarray.

Composing herself, she patched through a call to First Lieutenant Stenson, who was escorting the station Commander, Brigadier General Hicks, to the Operations Centre at the top of the building.

‘Stenson – Dalton. Gimme the General’.

Muffled voices, then: ‘Hicks’.

‘General, we have a situation here. Three units on ground floor down already and it’s unclear where the damage is coming from. Request permission to pull back the remaining forces on level one and regroup on level two’.

‘Request denied, Captain. We have reached the Operations Centre and we are reviewing the situation. Hold your men in position until my command. Repeat: do not withdraw; hold your positions’.

Dalton acknowledged the order and stared numbly at the bank of screens before her. Now Heaven Seventeen was getting it in the neck. Private Tommy Thompson was screaming something at the security-cam as he was cut down from behind. The corridor filled with smoke and the bodies faded from view.

‘Shit! Shit! Motherfucker!’

A deep, resounding boom sent a shudder through the room. A second explosion followed hard on the first. Dalton seized the edge of the table.

‘What in hell… Wilson?’

Private Wilson stood at the security console, legs spread like a champion slugger preparing to take a swing. His fingers flew across the keypad as images of fire, smoke and destruction filled the screens.

‘We’ve lost contact with ground floor seven to thirteen. Could have been the armory…’

A third explosion, this time from behind them.

‘Scratch that’, he said. ‘That ain’t the armory’.

‘It’s mortar or artillery fire’.

‘Mines’, Wilson corrected her, stooping over the console. ‘No damage to exterior walls. Hoo-wee! Those babies just decimated everything from the front gates to the central stairs. Uh, including Squadron Fifteen, who were on the stairs at the time…’.

‘So the stairs were booby trapped?’

‘Looks like it, ma’am. But that don’t make sense if the assailants came in from the east gate…’

‘Unless they’ve been in here before’.

‘That’s a hypothetical, ma’am’.

‘Or were inside already. How bout that for a hypothetical, Private?’

‘Can’t deny it’s possible, ma’am. But right now, it’s pretty much everyone getting fucked down there. Ain’t clear who’s doing the fuckin. Your terrorist singles himself out, just before he goes apeshit. This is more like some crazyness getting into people…’

‘That’s what I’m thinking. Some kind of virus, perhaps. It makes sense. Individuals moving between groups, sparking the conflagrations’.

‘Which means that we need to separate out the squads, ma’am’.

‘Damn straight, Private’. Dalton grabbed the mike. ‘Attention all units. This is a general order. All remaining units on level one to fall back to defensive positions. No physical contact between units. Repeat: no physical contact. Spread out and go to ground’.

The call came back immediately. ‘This is Taylor, God Squad Seven. We’re already behind our position, coming up the east stairs to level two. We have casualties, in need of medical assistance’.

‘Taylor, hold your position. That is an order’.

‘Sorry Captain. Already behind the line. We hold, my men are gonna bleed to death. Coming up’.

‘Goddammit!’ Dalton swung about for her helmet and gun.

‘Once more into the fucking fray. Wilson, you’re in charge here. Toddy, Ambers, Raoul – come with me. Raoul, bring the first aid kit. No one else is to move, you got it? I want this place like ice’.

They sprinted for the east stair and reached the door just as God Squad stumbled through. Only five of the twelve troopers remained. Only three remained standing once they’d made it through the door. Corporal Taylor tossed off a salute.

Dalton stuck her head in Taylor’s face. ‘You disobeyed a direct order, Corporal’.

‘So sue my ass, Captain. Might get me the hell out of this station’.

‘Did you see what hit you?’.

‘No idea, ma’am. Could’ve been an accident. Brady’s gun went off, then everyone started up’.

‘No accident. The same thing’s been happening across the station’.

Dalton called Wilson. ‘OK, God Squad is up. How’s the situation below?’

‘Like ice ice baby, ma’am. Reports coming in. Nothing much left to move down there. Heavy casualties, ma’am’.

‘OK, send two squads of medics down the north stair. They stay down there until I say so, got it? What’s the word from the General?’

‘General’s sitting tight, ma’am. No word whatsoever’.

Dalton shook her head. She’d known Hicks to be taciturn, monosyllabic. But she’d never thought he’d freeze up under fire. It seemed that the situation, for better or worse, was in her hands.

‘Cap’n?’, came a voice. Dalton looked about to see Private Gooding propped against the wall with an adhesive balloon clutched to his gut. She immediately realized what was missing from the scene.

‘Shelby. Where’d she go?’

‘Don’t know, Cap’n. Her knee was fair blown apart. Heh. But she just up and left’.

Dalton glanced about the corner. A trail of blood ran five years up the corridor and ended. Nothing else to be seen.

‘OK, Toddy, Ambers – Taylor you fuck – get over here. Wilson, do you read? I think Private Shelby has the virus or whatever. Lock everything down and gimme a report. Where is she and where’s she headed? We’re gonna flush her out and take her down’.

————————

Shelby was walking into a trap. From the command and control room, Wilson watched as she advanced through Central four-oh-three to five, taking out the Genscan and security-cam units as she went. Her expressions ranged from serenity to elation. Sometimes she didn’t look like Shelby at all. Wilson didn’t mention it to the Captain. He was too busy relaying commands, helping coordinate the weave of the operation, and admiring the elegance with which Dalton prepared the coup de grâce.

Shelby disappeared on West six-oh-two. Dalton surmised she’d either broken into the lift shaft on six-oh-three or holed up in the armory. Either way, they had her cornered. Bunched together, Dalton’s team crept towards the armory. They ran into Heavy Duty coming the other way at the corner of six-oh-three. The unit was kitted up with enough rad-hoods for the whole team. Dalton passed them around. She instructed Wilson to lock the lift doors on levels one and two. The Double Happys, on the level above, were to sweep the shaft on her command. First, though, they’d flush out the armory. If Shelby was planning a last stand, this is where it would be.

The armory doors stood slightly apart, as if the room were drawing breath. The soldiers flattened themselves to either side of the entranceway.

‘Shelby! This is Captain Dalton. Are you coming out or are we coming in?’

No answer. Dalton nodded at Toddy and Clarke. From either side, she and Toddy pulled the doors apart so that Clarke could pump a gas grenade through the middle. There was a crack and hiss. Dalton and Toddy hauled the doors wide and Heavy Duty went charging into the room, a team of gargoyles behind ferro-plastic shields. The others followed suit.

They made it to the foremost row of shelves without incident. The soldiers took up position behind pillars, crates, and boxes but nothing came at them. Dalton waved for the advance. Through the infra-red lenses of her rad-mask, she watched her team fan out down the rows.

‘Stick together, nutt to butt’, she hissed into the mike. ‘You see Shelby, take her down but do not approach. Stay clear’.

The troopers reached the end of the shelves. Before them, a row of upright lockers loomed above tables and pallets stacked with inventory. Most of the battle-rattle was locked away. The only weapons that Dalton could see were knives and bayonets, plus some picks and drills against the wall.

Dalton gestured towards the lockers, signaling for troopers to close in from either side. The others took up firing positions from behind the shelves.

‘Shelby, this is your last chance’, Dalton called. ‘Surrender now or, so help me, I’ll bring all hell down on your head. I’m giving you three. Three … two…’

A voice issued from the central locker. A man’s voice in a cracked falsetto.

‘Circle, circle, dot, dot, now you got a cootie shot. Circle, circle, square, square, I don’t…’

‘Half Nelson? Is that you?’

Silence. Then:

‘I’m okay. I’m okay here. You jus go bout cha business. Don’t cha worry bout me’.

‘Je-sus!’ Dalton signaled for the troopers to close in. They charged the locker and threw open the door. Half Nelson tumbled out onto the floor. He writhed like a worm, keening in the gas, burying his face in his hands.

There was nothing for it now: ‘The other lockers – go go go!’

The soldiers charged from left and right. Within seconds, the locker doors hung open, but Shelby was not inside. Dalton’s hunch had been wrong. She glared at Half Nelson, sobbing on the biocrete floor, snatched a mask from a shelf and shoved it in Corporal Taylor’s face.

‘Goddammit Taylor, can’t you see Shit-for-Brains is in a state? Here on, you are playing nurse’.

The lift shaft became the focus of operations. Dalton conferred with Wilson as the soldiers split into groups, standing in the dark or wandering through the shelves as if searching for something they’d missed. No one minded Nelson as he wobbled to his feet and shuffled in the direction of the door. Took off his mask and bent down to pick up a steelsaw hidden under some sacking by the wall. Shut and locked the door with a click. Smiled and vanished in a milky haze, impervious to infrared light.

The soldiers looked about. The steelsaw sneered into life.

‘Numbly jumbly’, said Nelson, coming down the aisle. He was into them before anyone knew what was happening.

————————

The troopers outside heard the gunning snarl of the saw, accompanied by a volatile chorus of shrieks, howls, screams and machine-gun fire. They threw themselves against the locked doors. In the command and control room, Wilson struggled to override the manual locking system. Within a space of moments, the doors snapped open, and the soldiers heaved themselves across the threshold. Not one made it into the room. As the doors flew apart, something shot out between them, bowling over the soldiers like kingpins. It bounced off one wall and then the other, all the while showering them in a hail of bullets. Those who survived described it as a translucent bubble or sphere the size of a beach ball, motley-hued in the chromaticity of blood, flesh and semen. There was something folded-up inside the sphere like a pupae or fetus. It cackled as it cut them down. What was truly horrific were the objects protruding from the surface of the sphere. Blossoming forth in all directions was a gory thicket of disembodied hands and limbs clutching automatic weapons that chattered and roared and released their payload until all were spent. By this point, most of the soldiers were either dead or in flight. The sphereoid whirled and spun down the corridor after them, the insane laughter echoing through the station long after the shooting had ceased.

————————

‘General, I think we should go inside’.

Brigadier General Adam Hicks stood on the edge of Station Keres, staring into the Badlands. The sound of the wind turbines ground the air like a squadron of bombers. Plumes of smoke belched from the buildings below. Hicks stared into the middle-distance, eyes empty and unfocused.

‘General?’

From the Operations Center, Hicks had retrieved his military dress blues, adorned with medals from years of service. He hadn’t worn the uniform in fifteen years. It still fit OK, but the wind cut right through it.

‘General?‘

The concrete shuddered beneath their feet as the giant hanger doors built into the roof of the station started to edge apart. The service elevator was coming up.

Hicks turned to First Lieutenant Stenson. His peaked cap caught on the wind and sailed over the far edge of the station.

‘Go back to the Operations Center, Stenson. That’s an order’.

‘I’m not sure I’m willing to obey that order, sir. With all respect, I’m not sure you’re in your right mind, sir’.

Hicks looked levelly at his subordinate. ‘Do it for me, Billy. Do it as a friend’.

Stenson hesitated and glanced at the hanger doors. A CA-190 Vampire was emerging from below, its long metal blades singing in the wind. Stenson saluted the General, turned on his heel and departed.

Hicks continued his vigil at the edge of the building. He didn’t acknowledge the footsteps behind him. He did not flinch as the creature moved to his shoulder, leaning close, breathing in his ear.

‘I wanted to kill you last’, it said. ‘The others I enjoyed killing. For you, I feel some tenderness … and respect’.

‘I’ve been waiting for you’, said Hicks.

‘Do not think of me as a friend. I am a creature of judgment now. The others, they played their part and they reaped their reward. The measure of retribution was easy to divine. But you – you refused our gifts. You came here to squander your life in this place. You wallowed in misery and regret’.

‘I have never believed that I deserved a reward for what I did. I’m not sure it was worth the cost’.

The creature stood before him. Hicks looked away.

‘Don’t', he said.

It gestured out into the Badlands. ‘Then look at the world that we have created. Do you see the order, the orchestration, the beauty?

Five hundred miles of plains, rotting urbscapes, empty freeways.

‘Come’, it said. ‘It is time to fly’.

Hicks took its hand and they stepped to the edge of the building. For a moment they stood together, balanced, cradled by the wind. Then they stepped out over the drop.

Only Hicks fell. The creature hovered, riding the wind, looking down at his body with a bitter smile on its lips.

Go to Chapter one: Roanoke Nitelife

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