White and Other Tales of Ruin

“‘Course it does,” he said. “Did you see the state of some of those artificials out there? Buzzed to fuck and couldn’t care less.”

“We need them.”

“Honey, I can access the net anywhere, we don’t need-“

Honey smiled up at Tom even though she was still leaking tears. She could stop, he knew that, she could control their shedding. But as she’d said before, she so wanted to be human.

“Love’s the answer,” she said, “whatever the question may be. I heard that once. A stupid idea, especially for the likes of me, but it made me jealous.” She stared up the stairwell, seeing nothing there and apparently liking that. “I’ve been a whore for as long as I can remember, Tom. The start of my memory is my creation. Imagine if love stopped the need for plastic bitches like me.”

“The world would be a nicer place.”

She nodded. “And that shithead pimp would be out of business.”

“What the hell are you two robots talking about?” Skin asked. Effectively dismissed by Honey, his anger was rising now, a red-faced attitude burning its way through his altered good-looks. Robots was as derogatory as he could have been.

“We need a buzz unit to bleed Tom’s virus onto the net. And Doug, I need you to let me go. You’ve had your fun. Your time’s up. Let me go.”

Skin looked at Honey, at Tom, back to Honey. There was so much potential in his eyes — for violence, hate and betrayal — but in the end he simply sighed, pulled a small egg-shaped thing from his ear and crunched it under the heel of his boot.

Honey winced slightly, then smiled. “Thank you, Doug.”

“Fucking robots,” Skin muttered as he walked back up the stairs.

Tom watched him go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh Jesus…”

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

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

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

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

A few were occupied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Those things back there…?”

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

Tom shook his head, exhausted and amazed.

“So where’s the buzz unit?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Do artificials evolve?”

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

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

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

Within seconds he knew why they became addicted.

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

Tom’s veins and synapses tingled with the stolen charge, and at the same time his senses came under assault. He smelled rose and rust, tasted pussy and spice, felt a feather touch his eyelid and a weight crush his