Mean Streets

There was a definite sense of purpose to everything happening around us, even if I couldn't quite grasp it, but I was pretty sure there was nothing human in that purpose. Nothing here gave a damn about anything so small as Humanity.

'I was here before,' Liza said slowly. 'There's something bad up ahead. Something awful.'

I looked sharply at Kopek. 'Is that right, Barry? Is there something dangerous up ahead, that you haven't been meaning to tell us about?'

'There's nothing awful here,' he said huffily. 'You're here to see something wonderful.'

And finally, we came face-to-face with what we'd come so far to see. A single beam of light stabbed down, shimmering and scintillating, like a spotlight from Heaven, as though God himself was taking an interest. The illumination picked out one particular machine, surrounded by ranks and ranks of robots. They were dancing around the machine, in wide interlocking circles, their every movement impossibly smooth and graceful and utterly inhuman. They moved to music only they could hear, perhaps to music only they could hope to understand, but there was nothing of human emotion or sensibility in their dance. It could have been a dance of reverence, or triumph, or elation, or something only a robot could know or feel. The robots danced, and the sound of their metal feet slamming on the crystal floor was almost unbearably ugly.

Kopek led us carefully through the ranks of robots, and at once they began to sing, in high chiming voices like a choir of metal birds, in perfect harmonies and cadences that bordered on melody without ever actually achieving it. Like machines pretending to be human, doing things that people do without ever understanding why people do them. We passed through the last of the robots and finally… there was Frank, beloved husband of Liza, having sex with a computer.

The computer was the size of a house, covered with all kinds of monitor screens and readouts but no obvious controls, with great pieces constantly turning and sliding across each other. It was made of metal and crystal and other things I didn't even recognise. At the foot of it was an extended hollow section, like a large upright coffin, and suspended within this hollow was Frank Barclay, hanging in a slowly pulsing web of tubes and wires and cables, naked, ecstatic, transported. Liza made a low, painful sound, as though she'd been hit.

Frank's groin was hidden behind a cluster of machine parts, always moving, sliding over and around him like a swarm of metallic bees, clambering over themselves in their eagerness to get to him. Like metal maggots, in a self-inflicted wound. Thick translucent tubes had been plugged into his abdomen, and strange liquids surged in and out of him. Up and down his naked body, parts of him had been dissected away, to show bones and organs being slowly replaced by new mechanical equivalents. There was no bleeding, no trauma. One thigh bone had been revealed from top to bottom, one end bone and the other metal, and already it was impossible to tell where the one began and the other ended. Metal rods plunged in and out of Frank's flesh, sliding back and forth, never stopping. Lights blinked on and off inside him, briefly rendering parts of his skin transparent; and in that skin I could see as many wires as blood vessels.

The computer was heaving and groaning, in rhythm to the things going in and out of Frank's naked body, and the machine's steel exterior was flushed and beaded with sweat. It made… orgasmic sounds. Frank's face was drawn, shrunken, the skin stretched taut across the bone, but his eyes were bright and happy, and his smile held a terrible pleasure. Cables penetrated his skin, and metal parts penetrated his body, and he loved it. One cable had buried itself in his left eye socket, replacing the eyeball, digging its way in a fraction of an inch at a time. Frank didn't care. He shuddered and convulsed as things slid in and out of him, changing him forever, and he loved every last- bit of it.

Liza stood before him, tears rolling silently and unheeded down her devastated face.

I turned to Barry Kopek. 'Is he dying?'

'Yes, and no,' said Kopek. 'He's becoming something else. Something wonderful. We are making him over, transforming him, into a living component capable of being host to machine consciousness. A living and an unliving body, for an Artificial Intelligence from a future time line. It came to the Nightside through a Timeslip, fleeing powerful enemies. It wants to experience sin, and in particular the hot and sweaty sensations of the

flesh. It wants to know what we humans know, and take for granted; all the many joys of sex. Together, Frank and the computer are teaching each other whole new forms of pleasure. He is teaching the machine all the colours of emotion and sensuality, and the very subtle joys of degradation. In return, the machine is teaching him whole new areas of perception and conception. Man becomes machine, becomes more than machine, becomes immortal living computer. A metal messiah for a new Age…'

Kopek's face was full of vision now, a zealot in his cause. 'Why should men be limited to being just men, and machines just machines? Human and inhuman shall combine together, to become something far superior to either. But like all new life, it begins with sex.'

'How many others have there been?' said Dead Boy. 'Before Frank?'

'One hundred and seventeen,' said Kopek. 'But Frank is different. He doesn't just believe. He wants this.'

'Oh, yeah,' said Dead Boy. 'Looks like he's coming his brains out.'

Liza collapsed, her knees slamming painfully onto the crystal floor. Her face was twisted, ugly, filled with a horrid knowledge, as all her repressed memories came flooding back at once. She pounded on the floor with her fist, again and again and again.

'No! No, no, no! I remember… I remember it all! I came here, following Frank. Following my husband, into the Nightside, and through its awful streets, all the way here… Because I thought he was cheating on me. I thought he had a lover here. He hadn't touched me in months. I thought he was having an affair, but I never suspected this… Never thought he wanted… this.''

'She talked her way in, yesterday,' said Kopek. 'Determined to see her husband. But when we brought her here, and showed her, she went berserk. Attacked the computer. Did some little damage, before the robots drove her off. We wouldn't let her hurt Frank, or herself, and after a while she left.'

'And she blocked out the memories herself,' I said. 'Because they were unbearable.'

'How could you?' Liza screamed at Frank. 'How could you want this} It doesn't love you! It can't love you!'

Frank stirred for the first time, his one remaining eye slowly turning to look down at her. His face showed no emotion, no compassion for the woman he'd loved and married, not so long ago. When he spoke, his voice already contained a faint machine buzz.

'This is what I want. What I've always wanted. What I need… And what you could never give me. I've dreamed of this for years… of flesh and metal coming together, moving together. Thought it was just a fetish, never told anyone… Knew they could never understand. Until someone told me about the Night-side, the one place in the world where anything is possible; and I knew I had to come here. This is the place where dreams come true.'

'Including all the bad ones,' murmured Dead Boy.

'What about us, Frank?' said Liza, tears streaming down her face.

'What about us?' said Frank.

'You selfish piece of shit!'

Suddenly she was back on her feet again, heading for Frank with her hands stretched out like claws, moving so fast even the robots couldn't react fast enough to stop her. She jumped up and into the coffin, punched her fist into a hole in Frank's side, and thrust her hand deep inside him. His whole body convulsed, the machines going crazy, and then Liza laughed triumphantly as she jerked her hand back out again. She dropped back down onto the crystal floor, brandishing her prize in all our faces. Blood dripped thickly from the dark red muscle in her hand. I grabbed her arms from behind as she shouted hysterically at her husband.

'You see, Frank? I have your heart! I have your cheating heart!'

'Keep it,' said Frank, growing still and content again, in the metal arms of his lover. 'I don't need it anymore.'

And already the machines were moving over him, mopping up the blood and sealing off his wound, working to replace the heart with something more efficient. While the computer heaved and groaned and sweated, Frank sighed and smiled.

It was too much for Liza. She sank to her knees again, sobbing violently. Her hand opened, and the crushed heart muscle fell to the crystal floor, smearing it with blood. She laughed as she cried, the horrid sound of a woman losing her mind, retreating deep inside herself because reality had become too awful to bear. I gave her something to breathe in, from my coat pocket, and in a moment she was asleep. I eased her down until she was lying full length on the floor. Her face was empty as a doll's.

'I don't get it,' said Dead Boy, honestly puzzled. 'It's just sex. I've seen worse.'

'Not for her,' I said. 'She loved him, and he loved this. To be betrayed and abandoned by a husband for another woman or even a man is one thing, but for a machine? A thing? A computer that meant more to him than all her love, that could do things for him that she never could? Because for him, simple human flesh wasn't enough. He threw aside their love and their marriage and all their life together, to have sex with a computer.'

'Can you do anything for her?' said Dead Boy. 'We've got to do something, John. We can't leave her like this.' 'You always were a sentimental sort,' I said. 'I know a few things. I'm pretty sure I can find a way to put her back the way she was, when she came to us, and this time make sure the memories stay repressed. No memory at all, of the Nightside or Silicon Heaven. I'll take her back into London proper, wake her up, and leave her there. She'll never find her way back in on her own. And in time, she'll get over the mysterious loss of her husband, and move on. It's the kindest thing to do.'

'And the metal messiah?' said Dead Boy, curling his colourless lip at Frank in the computer. 'We just turn our back on it?'

'Why not?' I said. 'There's never been any shortage of gods and monsters in the Nightside; what's one more would-be messiah? I doubt this one will do any better than the others. In the end, he's just a tech fetishist, and it's just a mucky machine with ideas above its station. Everything to do with sex, and nothing at all to do with love.'

You can find absolutely anything in the Nightside; and every sinner finds their own level of Hell, or Heaven.

THE THIRD DEATH OF THE LITTLE CLAY DOG – Kat Richardson

Team Seattle and the Denver Mob