doubt stabbing at him.
It was cruel, this doubt, because it was selective in what it recalled. He knew that Honey was beautiful, but try as he might he could not see her face. He could imagine her breasts, her thighs, her flat stomach and moist pussy, but her face eluded him. And her voice, that was gone too, swallowed along with the setting sun.
He walked into someone and felt the sharp sting of metal spikes picking at his clothes. The person shoved by before he had a chance to look properly, for which he was glad.
“Almost home,” he said to himself.
“Home is for pussies,” a voice mocked from the crowd, but Tom had no idea which of them had spoken.
He turned into his street, breathing a sigh of relief when the flow of black-clad people reduced to a trickle. He passed a final couple of leathered-up teenagers outside his house. The boy had a pierced tongue, the girl was bare breasted and frowning with the weight of chains connecting her nipples to her eyelids. They both smiled at Tom and nodded a polite greeting, the girl’s breasts jiggling with the gesture. He knew their parents. He wondered if their parents knew them.
“Honey,” he said as he palmed his doorlock. The flat was small and compact, big enough to live in but not too large to become unmanageable. “Honey, won’t you tell me the truth?” Doubt again, buzzing at him like ghostly bees, flitting past his ears and eyes and mouth as he tried to remember her voice, her face, her taste. It felt as if she was a dream, fading away as the day wore on.
Would she be there for him? If he smuggled himself into that rank building tomorrow at lunchtime, would she be waiting with her bags packed, ready to run off with him and risk the wrath of that bastard Hot Chocolate Bob?
Tom doubted it. True, his existence felt different today. It was fresher, brighter, Honey had brought something in that had been missing or sought for so long. Not only love, but a sense of importance in himself. A sense of living, not just existing. The sun had seemed warmer and closer upon leaving the brothel, even through the smog. The streets were cleaner, the smiles more real, the adverts flashing across billboards less cynical and more concerned.
Yes, things felt so different.
But good things never happened to Tom. That’s not the way his life was built, it wasn’t how his hat had been put on. Bad things clung to him like shit to shoes.
Would she be there? He doubted it. But the very last thing he would do was not go, just to find out.
He listened to the sounds of the night, trying to perceive just how they were different tonight from the night before. There were sirens and shouts, drunken youths singing in the streets, buzzed artificials screaming as the bad charges slowly but surely cauterised their insides. At one point Tom heard gunshots from somewhere deep in the city.
By three in the morning he admitted defeat and left his bed. He logged onto the net and sat back, closing his eyes as he tried to find somewhere to go, a place that would be safe for Honey and him. It was a fantasy, of course, and he knew it. Dream tropical islands awash with happy-ever-after were not for her kind.
Not for him, either.
Later, as the sun smudged the smog in the east and turned it pink, Tom connected to the net point, closed his eyes and accessed his recharge site. He input the correct code, sat back and felt tiredness recede as his power cells gulped their fill.
Tom always watched the sunrise. However tired or run-down he was, he’d see the sun climb out of the industrialised eastern suburbs of the city and heave itself skyward on pollutant legs. It never failed to cheer him, however depressed he felt, and this morning it worked more than ever.
Because he was in love.
The Baker had finally done it, even if it had taken fifteen years to have effect. If only he were alive to see it now. Tom smiled and closed his eyes for a moment, remembering his old friend. And then he thought of Honey and opened his eyes again.
The morning washed last night’s doubts away. Tom made himself some toast and sausages, drank a pint of orange juice, visited the toilet four times before the sun had cleared the chimneys and sprung free into the sky above the city. The smog was always dissipated in the morning. It was as if industry paid worship to the sun for the first hour of the day, and then when the main shifts began, worship turned to profit. The sun never seemed to mind. It came and went, came and went. It was the reservoirs and food chains and fields that were protesting, and strenuously. Tom was fortunate enough to be able to afford lab-grown food, but there were many who were not.
Honey, for one. What diseases could she have? What malfunctions waiting to happen, tumours biding their time, rots working away at her joints and flesh?
“I love her,” Tom said, shaking his head to dispel the negative thoughts. And he said it again, because he liked the sound and feel of the word in his mouth.
The Baker had given him the virus of love fifteen years before. A clumsily written and input programme, Tom had actually felt it take root inside his head, spreading electron-tentacles, feelings its way into his artificial cortex and brain-stem… and then vanishing as it sought to establish itself fully. He’d never thought it would have taken so long. The Baker — Tom had never even known his real name, great friends though they were — would have been a happy man today.
He spent the next hour sitting at his window and looking out over the city. He hadn’t found anywhere to flee to, but he was sure that they’d find a good place, a safe place. He had no idea of what to do if Hot Chocolate Bob confronted them in their escape, but he was confident that they could slip away unseen. The thought that Honey would have changed her mind — or, worse, had been playing with him all along — came once, and once only. He killed it. He chased it down into the pits of his mind, drowning it in other, more established forms of hopelessness and fear.
Totally unprepared, lightened by a love he had never been designed to feel, Tom set out just before noon to rescue the plastic bitch that had stolen his heart.
The change in the streets was as breathtaking as ever. Last night they had been flooded with people in black, a tide of leather and metal and mutilation with one single, enveloping thought: pleasure. It was as if that flow of people was a solitary organism, pushing through between buildings and parks and walls, penetrating the city to plant its thoughts and intentions, leaving the pale residue of hopelessness behind as dawn drove it away.
By morning, the streets belonged to the workers. People thronged the pavements and cars coughed their way along roads, filled with people heading for work. Thousands flocked east towards the factories — those who could not afford monorail or tube tickets — with many more filtering into office buildings or sweatshops built in deep, cavernous basements. Steam hissed from manholes and there was the intermittent
Tom tried to keep himself to himself, which wasn’t difficult. He was an artificial, and with so many people opting for body chopping he was camouflaged by normality. And he was dressed in the uniform of a factory worker, even though he did not work: the Baker had seen to it that he had enough money to want for nothing. So he blended in, becoming one of a crowd. A crowd that shed curiosity like water from oil.
It was not a long walk to the area of the city where Honey worked. Shops and offices gave way to boarded- up buildings and plain-fronted stores, many of them selling counterfeit produce and dealing drugs, or worse. Tom knew of several places down here where an artificial could buy a black market charge, and he began to see a few of them around. The worst of the buzzed people could barely walk, let alone see and talk. They screamed; there was always screaming. Illegal charges were like fake foodstuffs: they’d feel and taste the same, but eventually they
