Jaarfindor Remade Novel Excerpt - by Sean Wright
"Oh, I am fortune’s fool!"
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Act III, i)
ONE
The day Dr Lars Handel died to his world of words, the assassin-artist Domino Fortune stood alone in another world. He made ready for death, a death that he knew would surely come like a holo-benediction. Yes! In that impressive top floor office suite, Domino Fortune waited for the bitch’s decision: should he live or should he die?
Once, he recollected with a touch of twisted nostalgia, many years ago, he would have looked out from this surly bastion and laughed. He would have laughed insanely at the impossible and succulent peach sky, its juices dribbling down provocatively as if thinned oils upon a stark virgin canvas. It was the first surreal inkling of an opening between the invisible worlds. The day the sky melted was etched indelibly upon Fortune’s mind, as though a dome of wax to a searing flame, remade with light and sound and the stench of burning skin; remade with the sickening, holocaustic barbarity of screaming skulls, stripped of flesh and muscle to the charred bone. Billions died on that impossible day, a few survived, less than two thousand perhaps. For those who continued to exist nothing could ever be the same, not for them, hidden underground in the vast network of sewers and abandoned train and mining tunnels, not for them or their off-spring, skulking in the dark, and the generations who came afterwards.
Did they need the Jaarfindorians’ domination rammed down their throats with such visual vindictiveness?
Multiple-viewpoint image technology, invented by Jaarfindorians, had captured the utter destruction of planet Earth from the relative safety of the stratosphere. These hovering organic, AI cameras recorded for posterity the systematic annihilation of an entire race – almost. That horrendous event was engraved terribly within his subconscious, scored upon all their minds, replayed on colossal public screens in the open forums and market squares as a relentless reminder of the miracle that had come to pass.
What a miracle!
What miracle?
To Fortune, the Clerics of Information’s ironclad insistence on the twenty-four hour image feeds of the monumental event were a sick joke; repeated over and over, ever-present, forever presented in biblical proportions. To his mind this propaganda was an outrage. This was no miracle, but a continuing, looping nightmare, a nightmare he longed to wake from, a nightmare he planned to break.
Nature had fought back, as she always did. She fought back first with the brambles and vines, the weeds and the hardy perennials, the fast-growing species which dominated jungle and swamp. These had flourished, re-carpeting the planet. Then the winged creatures had returned, although not as before. These were cross-breeds, mutations, abominations mostly, avian-reptilian things that swooped and spat or squawked and hovered in immense flocks of blurred blackness.
For invention in nature astonished him, before and after the meltdown of the sky. It thrilled his blooming artist’s eyes, enchanted his assassin’s sense of timing, his sense of destruction like a blaze of malleable, rose sunlight illuminating a forest clearing, fleeting; then diminishing, and departed with the passing over of a cloud bank, shading the area.
Benediction.
Reverential.
Awe-inspiring.
To the many, a commonplace blaze of yellow light, illuminating a patch of forest. To him, his artist’s mind afire – revelation! Swift brush strokes upon canvas, paint pushed and pulled, shaped into his vision. Hurrying, before the light faded, the cloud invaded, covered and ruined the moment with thick greyness.
Fortune’s mind slipped again, pushing momentarily the bitch, Lia-Va, from it. She was coming. He could almost touch her vindictiveness before she arrived; almost see it as though a flock of angry, shrieking gulls rising up to evade an approaching storm. Soon she would be hurtling up the lift shaft towards him.
Staccato, dragged without resistance.
He thought about the underground forests of his childhood, considered the spine-tingling, shadowy playground, the climbing trees, the creaking, bending boughs that threatened to snap, threatened to send him tumbling to the leaf-littered undergrowth, but never did. His footholds were sure, his handgrips vice-like, locked tight. He would always reach the highest crotch, and dip his fingers inside the nest, stealing the avian-reptilian eggs. On the ground, pricking the egg with a rusty needle, right the way through, and blowing, blowing, blowing. The yolk and white would cling to the outer shell for its ruined life, a sticky glutinous blob which he’d suck away from the back of his hand. Another empty egg for his growing collection!
Jump, flip, loop.
Switching his mind now, speeding forward in time to adulthood. There, between the parting silver mists, an overwhelming underground forest, an emblem of his worldview after meltdown: the archetypal dark symbolic forest of myth and art and literature. Even though Fortune was a trained killer, (and possibly because of it, the need to balance the scales) his love of art in its many forms inspired him, enriched him, consoled him in times of deep despair and self-loathing.
He sighed long and hard through barely pursed lips, released the spring-like coil of tension from his mind, exhaled the tensile stress. A long-forgotten author’s words slinked to mind, issued in a quotation from his lips with a soft whisper, images of the ancient forests of old, before the flood came welling and gushing and murdering billions of screaming humans; before the apocalyptic deluge claimed almost every creature that couldn’t fly off the planet, sustaining flight, finding a place to rest.
Wave upon crushing wave, washing the world clean.
‘They are, it seems, savage and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent, and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow. Naked, they dress only in their majesty and their mystery.’
Domino Fortune yearned for the underground forests of his childhood – especially the one dappled with shadow and light, discovered after months of traversing the multi-levelled underground tunnels and sewers and caves; passageways barely wide enough to crawl along. Although he did not miss the dark, cold hardness of the rock against his scuffed knees, his callused hands. Inside those constricted tunnels, he felt at times a devastating panic. Would the rock crush him? If so, why didn’t it do it now? Get it over and done with! Was the rock tormenting, pushing his mind to its limits, attempting to break his resolve? Many times he felt that his mind would shatter, such were the mad images conjured from his subconscious. The dark was crammed with illusions, masks of beasts and bizarre creatures, ethereal things that floated in and out of view. In depths of fatigue and sleep depredation, the rocks whispered to him. Mouths appeared, tongues wagged, lips smacked. He never understood the rocks’ language – a harsh, sibilant hiss. Yet within those confined nightmare spaces he’d learned to see in the dark and he’d learned how to tame his fear, in spite of his tears of terror. Some child-like sensitivity had been yanked from him down there. A husk of insensitivity had grown without his knowing.
For one day (or night?) his sobbing and panic-attacks ceased. He’d surrendered to his fate, to his helplessness, always in the middle of the crawling chain of his family. But when that glorious day came, he’d volunteered to lead or bring up the rear of the crawling chain without dread. When they discovered caverns so many of them – he’d been the first to celebrate with whooping, jubilant cheers. He was no longer afraid of those echoing, shadowy cathedrals. In life’s lottery such moments elevated his status – no, their status – to millionaires. They rejoiced at the sight of the giant’s teeth, dripping stalactites, creating twisted stalagmites.
Unexpectedly, close to starvation, emaciated and malnourished to skeletal proportions, they stumbled upon a lost paradise – following for days a warm up-thrust of fresh air, scented with pine and leaf mould. The light which greeted them blinded, its rays like needles in their eyes, but they foraged through the undergrowth searching for fallen fruit, hands cupped to shade.
In his very own paradise lost, Fortune settled with his extended family (mum, step-dad, sister, aunt, two male cousins, and his dog, Levi) in the cavernous belly of a dormant volcano, high above sea level, a fertile environment. Succulent seasonal fruit and berries grew as well as large, meaty rodents. Meagre though nature’s provisions had been, they had managed to survive long enough to utilise their own productivity. They farmed crops of wheat and maize in clearings created by tools honed from wood and rock. They had thrived from a handful of seeds that Fortune had had the sagacity to snatch whilst running for his life through the fields on the outskirts of town, the peach sky melting, the huge waves rolling from some unseen epicentre miles out to sea. He’d instinctively known that the apocalypse was upon them, and that seeds could be used at some later date, if he managed to get to the mountains.
Oh the mountains! Just look at them, he mused. Vibrant, shifting, purple peaks of snowy shadow, his eyes forever failing to capture the play of light on the landscape so harsh and solid, yet damned to tease the mind’s eye into an artistic madness that demanded a canvas and a brush to hush the moment, to instill a sense of order upon the light, light strokes that merely paid an oily lip-service to the wonder of the skipping shadows that toyed with the mountain’s frozen troughs and crevices and thawing tips.
Now they were here, inside the belly of a volcano. They lived in two tree houses, built in between forked boughs, and climbed ladders made from vine to gain access. Now and again they’d trapped a hissing rodent, more snake than overgrown rat, slaughtered it, and fed with sick relish on its chewy, pungent roasted flesh.
The present-day Domino Fortune yearned for the underground forest, sunk deep in the bowels of the volcano, a narrowing vase which pointed to freedom. Yearned so much that a small mewing sound ran away from his lips, a primordial hunger, growing to become a raging raw howl! His past clawed him back.
Oh how he ached for the rough bark against his bare back, his mid-summer dreams laced with perfume of pine and wild, entwining honeysuckle, the luxurious feel of waxy ivy leaves between his thumb and forefinger. He’d peer up for what seemed like hours, through the canopy to glimpse the cerulean sky impregnated with sunlight, (frustratingly, so far away to the lip of the volcano!) scattered with high, white slowly drifting clouds. The longing for escape was giddying, the yearning of his formative years gripped his stomach like a talon, ripped at it unmercilessly like slow-feeding carrion.
That impossible day had created a new lattice veneer, Fortune considered, forged a new alien world. And right now he stood at the very pinnacle of it, waiting for the bitch who, like her predecessors, had command of humankind’s fate, command of many minds, command of individuals’ worthless lives. She would soon appear, he knew, and then…
Dreams, distant and dead, like every member of his extended family. Outrage! Murder! Ambush! But he couldn’t allow himself full rein of his anger right now. After all, he’d settled that score long ago, hadn’t he? Who was he trying to fool? He knew the score would never be settled until his eyes were at last covered with coins and a cold, damp hessian sack.
They were, he recollected, the first folk they’d encountered above ground, after the escape from the plentiful volcano, following the silt banks of a river that meandered mile upon mile. The river’s banks and meadows were flooded in places, wide swathes of blue-green, shining sheets of shimmering water which reflected the unblemished white-cerulean sky. Naked, heat-withered trees and bushes cast long deep shadows of purple, spread across the banks like split fingers. Leaf litter had long since blown across the flat desert landscape that hemmed in the reclaimed banks, just narrow strips of fertile black soil where spasmodic wild wheat now grew, swaying, rustling in the warm breeze.
They had met Fortune and his family with such unabated, wild hostility that the speed and malice of the ambush had stunned him, still a teenager; a kid really. It was the blood that he remembered most vividly. So much of it spurted from his mother’s neck, from his sister’s head, his step-father’s chest that his own laser wound to his upper arm melted from his consciousness. He recalled little of the attack but for the blood, blocking the anguished screams from his mind. He recalled, however, his desperate lunge at the assailant – an insectiant – who’d towered over his mother, gloating as she squirmed beneath him. But the insectiant had been quicker than Fortune, hovering to one side, bringing the butt of its laser rifle down hard on the back of his head. Fortune collapsed in a heap, limp, unconscious.
Later, surprised to find himself still alive, he’d burned the corpses, knowing that some creature or other would take its fill if the bodies were buried or left where they had fallen. Almost ritualistically he’d gathered his family’s regurgitated roots, and slipped them into his shoulder bag. Refusing to look back at the billowing black smoke that filled the sky, he strode purposefully after the killers. It was already too much to endure that his nostrils were stuffed with the stench of his family’s burning flesh, their grey ashes rising and tumbling from the sky, blown by a stiff warm breeze, falling upon him like defiled rain. Sobbing, snot and tears coursing down his face, he hunted down the insectiant scum who’d killed his family in cold, calculated blood. It took him the best part of a day and night, picking up the scent of their drug habit on a balmy northeasterly. He would later come to think, many times, that what he did next was surprisingly simple, but completely deranged.
He found them in the midst of the vast desert that horseshoed Queen’s Lynn, New Jaarfindor’s capital city. The city itself was perhaps two or three miles away, enveloped in thick shifting fog, with the odd spire and tower poking through, glinting with a strange amber-grey evening sunlight.
Glass?
Gold?
Steel?
He was too far away to know for certain.
The insectiants were settled around a smouldering campfire, high on Krassgar and their own self-importance. He crept slowly on his belly, digging his elbows and splayed knees into the soft sand to give him leverage. Once he was close enough, he waited on his back behind a nearby sand dune, waited until night came. He watched the sky, mesmerised as the twilight faded to a velvety purple and almost simultaneously the stars shone out, the Milky Way and galaxies clustered together like sparkling gold dust. Three shooting stars exploded into view and then were gone.
It was time.
All had been quiet around the campfire for half an hour or more.
Do it now! He raged inside his mind. He breathed in slowly, deliberately controlling his racing heart. Blood thundered in his ears, and his eyes seemed to pulse their own ferocious beat. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His vision narrowed, his own personal fog obscuring his view, pin-pointing it to the creatures sleeping below him. Stealthily, he slithered down the sand dune like a sidewinder, light-footed and incisive.
Taking his only weapon from a sheath strapped to his ankle – a small bone-handled hunting knife – he slit each insectiant’s windpipe. What he found most remarkable was that as he killed the first, the other two insectiants were unaware of his presence. It was probably, he now thought, a pivotal moment in his own development as an assassin-artist. He felt rage as he killed them, but it was controlled rage, for fear of waking those who slept. Once he’d finished the job (though at the time he never considered it a job, but a necessity, a duty, an all-consuming narrow tunnel) he became insane for thirty minutes; perhaps more. Time lost meaning, became a void of violence – mindless, senseless, unforgivable. What he did to those three bodies made him shudder, even today – a paid killer with over one thousand Jaarfindorian hits to his credit. The depths of his own hatred, the smashing and mutilating of body parts, the insane bloodlust as he vented his raw, wounded emotions, was despicable, worrying, shelved again.
Finally, he tossed the insectiants’ regurgitated roots into the heart of their raging campfire. But they didn’t burn. Hot to the touch, he flicked them out with the end of a stick, and kicked them across the sand to a flattish boulder. He picked up a large rock and pounded the roots to rough dust. His arms trembled and his muscles ached when at last he finished the utter destruction. He pissed on the root dust, washed it away to fuse with the sand, their memories lost and faded forever. He backed off then, crumpled to the grainy softness, and with his head in hands he sobbed and threw up bile by turns until exhaustion claimed him.
He slept for a long time amongst the sands of the dead.
His mind swirled, rotated by degrees in his memories like a carousel. He had to think of kinder things, of his loves and achievements. Balance demanded it. His mind slowed to consider his passion: art.
That’s better, calmer, happy thoughts.
And what was all art at its most effective? Precision timing? Subtle technique? Masterly application? Perhaps all, perhaps none. And the viewer? What perception? What of appreciation? An eye and a mind and heart worthy of veneration? A depth of historical knowledge? An understanding of art’s vital role in life’s flush fabric?
He who beholds the art, scorns yet adores the artist, craves the object, not its beauty.
Strange paradoxical thoughts.
He relocated his eyes to the view out of the window again. He could have wondered at the tall, gleaming citadels, alabaster white, and cooed favourably at the bright resplendent sky-ships that invaded the planet and festooned its airspace; perhaps even sighed contentedly at the vast expanse of shimmering ginger desert far beyond the Grandlian Ocean, an unforgiving, featureless landscape that slipped beneath the keel of many a cargo sky-ship, but the fog had invaded New Jaarfindor like a terminal infection, enveloped it, sealed the domain in a suffocating malady. Even though an immeasurable amount of time – shrinking and expanding by turns – had past since the flood and the merging of the worlds, the fog of change, the fog of the new order stifled the few truly human survivors, gave advantage to the creatures which floated like apparitions within the miasma.
Inside the city, time dragged, slowed so that an old Earth year might be twenty by the Jaarfindorian clock. Beyond the city walls, out there in the wilderness (if the rumours were to be believed), a man could age a thousand years in the time it took to swallow the thick, dried spittle of panic that coated his mouth. This advance or regression from one millennium to another, creating either ancient or pre-foetal, was at the whim of whatever haunted the desert and beyond. Those of a religious bent termed that power a ministry of whimsy.
All that had changed, in Fortune’s opinion, had not changed for the better but for the worse in too many ways. The merging of New Jaarfindor and Earth had become a cankerous alliance, uneasy, distrustful of the abyss between the two cultures, a vast stinking chasm of bitterness and betrayal. Both considered themselves superior technologically, morally, and artistically; yet the New Jaarfindorians held greater sway, in reality, held power in most walks of life, from the political arena to the Artistic Quarter, from the market squares to the marbled museums, and most assuredly from the universities and colleges to the financial district and capital – Queen’s Lynn. They claimed they’d bred the best poets and painters, trained the best doctors and scientists, administered the best legal system there was ever likely to be, (such sweeping generalisations issued forth from the Clerics’ lips like a President’s spin machine) fervently proud of its low-tolerance, swift-justice mentality toward anyone who dared to speak out or rise up against it.
Domino Fortune was not stupid enough to speak out in public against the New Jaarfindorians. He kept his pro-active revolutionary operations secret, functioning with stealth and anonymity from within. He considered himself a powerful and slick weapon, a subversive cell, an invisible leviathan in the face of an overwhelming enemy, but had she un-wrapped his mystery, his secret identity?
Fortune waited and pondered, mulled over what she had said, her unfulfilled promises, marvelled at her fork-tongued ingenuity. Her pledge of allegiance to a socially just New Jaarfindor arrived like ranting missionaries in a jungle of perceived chaos, but her unwillingness to see it through to the end, to really make a difference, rattled him, for she changed her mind on a quirk; her social conscience no more than a politician’s façade, dissipating, running dry of emotion and meaning as if the drought-riddled river Tundru.
Lia-Va said it wouldn’t happen, but it did.
She lied. She lied like the heady mix of fake and real masterpiece art, the surrealist pieces that adorned her walls, the fraudulent Ernst, Dada, Picasso and Klee, the genuine Miro and Masson. There were other important works of art, which mirrored the surreal of Earth, such as the Old Jaarfindor masters – Glin, X-iuy, and Zagr. But their holo-art was jaded, with the phoney life and mind of its own, caged by bars or imprisoned within glass chambers, (as was the stylist wont of the time) and precariously suspended from huge wooden rafters in open-plan white spaces, barely resembling the surrealist at all except as a prosaic statement of inter-dimensional time.
No, that’s a little harsh, Fortune reflected. Her lie was a calculated misrepresentation of a half-truth. Or that’s what she’d like him to believe. That’s right. She didn’t lie exactly – she got the truth all twisted. Total bullshit! She usually claimed something similar. That’s what she said – over and over. The truth got twisted. Like a criminal who reiterates the same guilty denial until even the interrogator believes her.
Domino Fortune shook his head in bewilderment and puffed out dismay. We all did; back then, he thought. We all believed Lia-Va, believed she was doing the right thing, the honourable thing to bring back some small bastion of order to a world gone mad. Good and bad men and women had died because of her addiction, her tunnelled obsession, her blood-lust. What was it she had said? Oh, yes, that’s right. She claimed she was trying to clean up the planet, clean up New Jaarfindor for future generations, save it from the shamutant scum who rode god-like on their techno-devices beneath the ground. Psychic sewer rats, that’s what she called them. Mind magicians, illusionists and second-rate conjurors, nothing more or less. Domino Fortune and his fellow assassins had agreed. Why not? She paid almost double the accepted fee for a hit. Those they had managed to corner in the dark stinking sewers had proved easy targets. She was boss, after all. A lying boss who couldn’t be trusted?
Perhaps.
But he wasn’t sure. A lot had happened in her employ. They had begun the systematic murder of the shamutants, to purge the underground of its most potent and dangerous threat. A few of the assassins had been killed, strangely lured like fish baited over days in deep water. But Fortune had considered the shamutants an all too easy prey, considering their formidable place in Jaarfindorian mythology. Perhaps they had sacrificed a few so that the many could retreat, regroup in the darker depths of the sewers, hidden from prying eyes to continue their unknowable way of life? Part of him hoped, a darker depressed part, that the shamutants would emerge from the manholes to take control of New Jaarfindor, or as legend foretold, emerge to poison the water supply or squirt noxious gases up through ventilation shafts in the dead of night.
Ultimately, he’d been lost, confused, upset. He reflected, what had seemed on the face of it a simple, clean multiple hit had in fact turned out to be a shambolic bloodbath, which he’d escaped by luck and a gadget implanted in the base of his skull that he’d activated to mask his vital signs. To the insectiant counter-forces who’d carried out the ambush on Fortune and his fellow assassins, he’d checked out as dead. His vitals were flat-line. They should have shot him in the head just to make certain, but they were stoned out of their heads on Krassgar. The insectiants’ nano-infa scanners had been fooled. Fortune’s XTC8-0 anti-vital sign masker had worked without a flaw, as it was designed to do. When they had dispersed and he’d got up, shook off the rubble and Frank Belloni’s guts from his clothes, he’d vomited at the sight around him.
It should have been a simple multiple hit, carried out in a derelict recycling warehouse on the outskirts of the city, the shipping district. She’d set up the deal with the Krassgar drug-baron – Mathers. The tyrannical insectiant was renowned for his brutality, his mob-like mentality, and his callous disrespect for species other than his own. No one troubled Mathers more than once. They simply vanished or were dragged up from the ocean floor with a collar of hardened silicone bolted around their necks. Mathers was not a pleasant fellow. But he had what she wanted at an inflated price.
It should have been simple, but while he and his fellow assassins crouched in the thick shadows, Frank got a call from the bitch’s 95th floor HQ – Highfeld Corporation – on his microbile. The idiot had forgotten to turn it off!
Even more incredible then, (he was so stunned by the caller’s naked body writhing provocatively before him on the microbile’s 3D imaging screen) that he’d actually answered it!
Milliseconds drifted like slow-motion leaves tumbling from an autumnal tree, as though time had been stretched, elasticised and rendered most pliable. Perhaps the legendary Tree of Life and Death? Perhaps not. All life stopped, frozen, speeded up, slowed down, floating like jetsam in the Grandlian Ocean.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
It was over in seconds.
Fortune stood there now in his memory, in the depths of planetary waste, trembling, as if his legs had exhausted all strain, staring with a glazed expression at the bloody, ruby carnage.
He’d tracked down the insectiants before they left the recycling warehouse. He’d crept up to within a few yards of them, positioning himself behind a huge, wire mesh container that was crammed with glistening broken glass. The insectiants’ faces distorted, reflected as if some decrepit Hall of Mirrors. They were getting high on Krassgar, high on their premature celebration, the drug popped deftly into tiny orifices where a left breast would have been situated on a human. They resembled seven-foot high cockroaches.
Fortune’s action was swift and calculated. He programmed the ball-sized device in his hand to discharge three seconds after he’d released it. Twelve of them were killed in a single blast from his hand-thrown explosive. He buried his head in his palms, ducking lower behind the shield of glass. Their fragile flesh sizzled, roasted alive, mouths opening and closing as they gulped desperately for air, screaming in high-pitched clicks and hisses, incinerated wings and membranes, twisting, flailing arms, falling, crumpled and jerking with the final vestiges of life.
The acrid stench turned his guts, and he vomited.
Luckily for him, the merchandise he’d come for had fallen from an insectiant’s sticky grip. Unluckily, never one to remain still for long, Mathers had escaped, ahead of Fortune’s victims. That fact alone put his life in even greater danger now.
He shrugged off dust and rubble as he picked up the merchandise. It was all in a day’s work.
Yes, he’d been upset. And set up! It was easy to do, the easiest thing in the world. Yes, they’d all been set up. He knew it deep in his bones. Call it a hunch, or intuition. He knew. She did it. And he wanted to know why.
In less than a few minutes, he would find out.
Perhaps.
His name was Domino Fortune, and in a mind of uncertainties he was certain of one thing: he’d been set-up by a twisting non-human who denied the truth of her own making… cunningly. Oh, yes – she claimed she was all woman, all human, all flesh and blood. She even had a birth certificate to prove it.
So what? She wasn’t an android, or a computer-driven brain, or a techno-flesh. She wasn’t a shamutant, or an insectiant, or any other robotic, chipped-out look-a-like. Had she been genetically modified? No doubt. We all had in some way or other. The Old World Government made sure that our enhancements were as pure and healthy as possible. It was wonderful for a generation or two. No disease could penetrate our cells. Our immune systems were state of the art killing machines. Virus and bacteria didn’t stand a chance. But there had been a terrible price – a world of ever-increasing perfection. Most people lived until they were 150 years old quite un-naturally. Cryogenics placed the still warm body in a kind of stasis – ready for the day science came up with a life-enhancing drug. We were still waiting, and the genetic modification program had proven to be another expensive government failure.
But the over-population of the genetically modified soared, soared higher than planetary resources could cope with, soared higher than planetary debt. That’s when the Pardoners were let loose. The head-bangers and suicide bombers were no longer let out once a year from mental institutions and prisons as part of a weird religious ritual, to create their own perverse havoc on the population gathered at the Church of Our Lady in Brafindor. Their kind was bred as a new virus, an epidemic of clones, replicated to wipe out vast swaths of the populace. The Clerics of Information of course denied as usual that the Pardoners were funded from their bulging coffers. But rumours spread far and near: the Clerics denial was taken as an affirmation of guilt.
Then arrived a new breed of GM creations, as far away from bi-peds as any scientist could imagine. Disgusting to most folks’ eyes – the new GMs dominated society intellectually, no doubt. But what a price they paid! Fortune shuddered at the thought of them, at the thought of the bio-engineers’ capriciousness. What an unspeakable legacy!
Instead, he spliced his thoughts to the woman who was hurtling up the lift shaft toward him, toward the floor he was on. She was something else. What precisely he wasn’t sure. From the long to come future? Or from an ancient past? Rumours, gossip, superstition.
Uncertain.
But not human.
Certain.
Domino Fortune rubbed the back of his tired, tense neck roughly. His shoulders ached and he could feel a headache building from somewhere deep inside his brain. It was probably the after-shock of the XTC8-0 anti-vital sign masker.
It was a mess, complex, cruel. What else should he have expected from her, with her dubious pedigree? She’d offered him the assignment and he’d gratefully accepted. The credits were generous – enough to buy him time off work for two years, perhaps more if he was careful, didn’t gamble, shunned the drink and kept clean for awhile. He could hitch-hike around the globe, take a cruise on a sky-ship; even join the crazies who ventured fearlessly (or was it drunkenly?) into deep inter-dimensional space. They were the folk who never returned. All of this was his if he wanted it.
But the truth hurt less than lies. Domino Fortune knew that was true, knew what he must ultimately achieve: he would kill her when the odds were in his favour. Bang! One simple shot to the head.
Giddy now from his own thoughts, Fortune slips into a deeper reverie, slips effortlessly across the wooden floor as if a slow-motion ballroom dancer. His past coagulates with strange dislocated facts. Or are they fictions? Memories remade, reconstructed to fit his new personality? Some reminiscences focus into sharp images, others obscured like dust-covered photographs.
Every time he steps on the planking, a burnished honey-colour, dappled with dark knots which peers up as if voyeurs’ eyes, they give and groan, squeal like mice shaved for some arcane perfume-testing ritual.
Looking up through the wide shatterproof window, a filthy reflective pane, huge flakes of snow vent from grey blankets of ash-packed cloud like a ticker-tape nature parade. Late autumnal mottled leaves barely cling to dark, smooth boughs, waving, trembling in the stiff north-easterly wind, accepting, then rejecting sticky snow by turns, sending its temporary crystalline matrix swirling, crashing softly to ground. There, covering the sandstone edifices, the mix of monoliths and baroque, of gothic and New Jaarfindor modern architecture, the thick snow, thickening now in a blinding flurry, settles on the pristine aspen-lined avenues, carpeting flat roof gardens and domes and angled wooden spires. Away, away from the affluent heart, the snow settles on the leaking bladder and bloated bowels of the city, the soiled and stinking suburbs beyond the city wall, where the freak show really begins…
Fortune stands Out There, beyond the wall, in his mind’s eye. He is a freeman, one of the multitude who scratch their livelihoods from all manner of illegal activities. And there, can you see it? Yes, there is Thieves’ Bridge, the scene of many brawls from the two neighbouring quarters; a territory not really worth fighting for, let alone the sacrifice of boundary deaths. But many a youthful squire and page, artisan and bum has died there over the years of conflict. Thieves’ Bridge! It ascends like a wooden hump of despair, arching the garbage-choked canal, its still and stagnant water the colour of tar. On its eastside broken, weedy pavements buttered as if burning toast with slurry and grime from the nearby industrial core, whose smog pollution is sucked down into the ever-expanding fog. Here, in this forgotten quarter, live the hardened junkies, the socially rejected, the misfits, the bio-engineers’ burgeoning stem-cell mistakes. In essence here lives science’s abandoned offspring, tripped-out insectiants, depressed dymapeds, the skank and the refuse of creation without ethical restraint.
Deeper into his past he recollects the Southside of New Jaarfindor. The sprawling Ley City is coiled like a sleepy boa, its tight yellow and brown brick terraced houses fixed row upon row, skirting the canal like tarnished medals on a lapel of reclaimed land. Lime green moss clings to damp grey slate roofs, thickening near the gutters and drainpipes. The cobblestone roads are book-ended by grey pavements, cracked and rising here and there.
Ley City had once claimed to be the capita; of the Lowland District, a yellow stone cathedral far out-weighing in size and majesty the quaint rural township. To claim city status was arrogant and absurd, despite the ancient Clerics of Information’s original stronghold. But such prominence was now a holo-vid archive. Gone the prestige and privileged lifestyles of its citizens who served the Clerics, washed away by the deluge of the opening of the sky.
Further on, slipping back, to his home and neighbourhood, where crumbling yellow walls lean like drunken jaundiced giants, threatening to collapse into the canal; where terraced tenements, one up and one down, with roofs that have shed slates, a gaping wound to the elements, gawp in wonder and suspicion at the upsurge of industry whose filth and grime spew like Regeneration Treatment vendettas. In now – through the openings some call doors, hanging from hinges, rotten boarded frames mostly, as are the windows, a few panels and broken, pointed shards yawning as if dark mouths crammed with tiny splinter teeth. Inside the guts of his house from long ago, he crouches, rocking to the rhythm of injustice, to the deafening beat of the factories and thrum of machines which feed New Jaarfindor’s insatiable appetite for new technologies and gadgets and the depleted fossil fuel...
Dragged back to the office block, he glimpsed his reflection in the massive, oval mirror ceiling. It magnified his head so instead of his black skull and broad nose, his piercing GM lion’s eyes looking back, he resembled a freak-show monster from a human Hollywood 1960s B-movie. She of course had had that ceiling installed to bring out the worst in people – the worst in humans. It made sense. It fitted her mentality. She was boss, but she was also a bitch. What was she hiding beneath her synthetic flesh?
She was before him now, appearing from the swishing golden doors of the marble-clad lift into the spacious suite. Her glimmering torque revolved around her throat, enabling her to speak, amplifying her wafer-thin vocal cords. She walked regally on red plush carpet; a fifty foot square sonic plasmatic TV screen on the far wall magnified her like a goddess of the antediluvian silver screen. Hovering auto-cams – three in all – busied themselves around her, recording her every move for posterity, for her future generation of clones to ogle and admire. She played to the cameras with celebrity-like glee. They were also there as an instant recording of her life, a kind of visual insurance policy against would-be assassins. The city was rife with them. Assassination was almost a national sport, and Domino Fortune was top of the Premier League. Strangely anonymous, as only the best killers could ever be, but at the top nonetheless.
She strode confidently past her twenty seat boardroom table, a genuine solid oak desk that almost over-looked the angels it was so high above the surrounding coastal landscape of Queen’s Lynn, (once King’s Lynn) now capital of England. They were the only physical people in the room, but there were more wall-mounted cameras, as well as the auto-cams and security eyes all over the place, scanning. The light was subdued, tweaked, a whore-house glow of red radiated from the strip-lighting, which circumnavigated the room.
Fortune could not take his eyes from her for one second. The electromag field around her was obviously calibrated for maximum sexual appeal. She was stunning in her reconstructed synthetic beauty. She was also deadly. He’d seen her kill before. Swift, no warning, ruthless. Her favourite weapon was a hypodermic needle squirting some arcane poison, sunk rapidly into a main artery or eye socket, all under the pretence of sex. Instant death, or an over-dosed high or low, was followed by a screaming hallucination which ended in cardiac arrest.
It paid never to let Lia-Va too close unless she was naked. Only then could you be almost certain that she did not hide her weapon in a concealed pocket. There were other places, of course, where she could secrete weapons, blades, or maiming implants, but Fortune preferred not to ponder upon the matter for too long.
He smiled with wry irony and gazed searchingly out of the window – Queen’s Lynn might once have been the bustling port of King’s Lynn and before that tiny Bishop’s Lynn. But the inter-dimensional worlds of Elriad, Finnigull and Jaarfindor had swallowed wholesale what had been left languishing of the material world, after the Earth had all but destroyed its population in the Great Final World War – mammal, avian, insect and amphibian were wiped out by chemical wars that simply became uncontrollable when the know-how was sold to the radicals. But now, (almost three hundred years on from The Merging) the port had grown into a sprawling city that wasn’t too dissimilar from New York in the late 20th Century, yet instead of the Statue of Liberty presiding over matters, Queen’s Lynn’s very own Queen Boudicca rose out of the river Great Ouse, her stone red tresses splayed out wildly, her victory crying mouth twisted with bitter paradox. The Romans had failed, and the Iceni had triumphed. That fact was everywhere to be seen: architecture, religious beliefs, rules, regulations and clothes. But that was a long time ago, before the compu-mechanas took hold; before the standardisation of silicon implants; before pre-birth genetic enhancements; before the plasma-driven techno-devices dominated the skyline; and most certainly before the albino cult scum – the shamutants – dominated the underground network of ancient, abandoned sewers just as they had once dominated the original underground Jaarfindor.
But time was a strange bitch. Just like Lia-Va – her princess pretensions erased from her memory by the shamutants in another time and space. So long ago since suicide Pardoner head-bangers ravaged the Holy Pilgrimage of Brafindor, yet a sick spin-off still existed even today. Distant recollections of Runeroot puzzles, insectiant mutiny, and sky-ship pirate shenanigans. All gone – all told! Part of Old Jaarfindorian myth – Lia-Va’s death-moment addiction had been washed away like a russet leaf on a white sand beach. Or had it? Could it be totally erased in the genetic sense? Did her addiction live somewhere in her cells?
Lia-Va was a direct blood-descendant of Queen Boudicca. Her DNA exploration had proved it conclusively, so she said.
But Domino Fortune did not believe her. Lia-Va lied habitually, threw up smoke-screens and webs of deceit as part of the corporate power game. Lia-Va was no princess. Her blood was not noble or royal. She was a fraud – and once and for all, Domino Fortune, would prove it, if he lived beyond this day.
‘Twist the truth into lies.’
‘It’s what I do best. I have no choice.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s why we hired you, Bentley.’
‘My name’s Fortune, not Bentley.’ He narrowed his eyes and stared out the window of the Highfeld Corporation’s 95th floor executive suite. The fog and low cloud had descended, as it did at about this time every day. He saw nothing but a thick silver-grey swirl. They called it fog, but it was more than that. He shuddered at the thought of the myth, and was glad he was indoors.
He angled his head toward her again and faked a smile.
‘But I love that name – Bentley. Please keep it for me. Call it a pet thing. Anything. Just let me use it – in private. Please.’
Domino Fortune sighed heavily. He was sick of her mind-games and half-truths, her lip-service and toying. Why didn’t she cut the crap and say what she meant? He had many aliases – but Bentley was not one of them. Warped bitch!
‘So?’
Her voice sounded like a plea to him, but he knew that Highfeld Corporation president Lia-Va never pleaded. She was incapable of it.
Fact.
Illusion – wishful thinking on his part. Whatever else happened in this meeting, he had to remain calm. His life depended on it.
‘So, Bentley, tell me about the hit.’ She smiled seductively, teasing, moistening her lush red lips with the tip of her tongue just once. ‘What happened? Details, please.’
He couldn’t help himself. She gave out an overwhelming aura of sexuality, a scent of bliss. Fortune considered her ample breasts, her narrow waist, her genetically altered facial features. She was perfect for a non-human. She looked like a beautiful young woman, but she was far more than that. In the depths of her eyes he saw something ancient and cunning. But he didn’t know what. That worried him immeasurably.
‘So did you kill them?’
‘Yes,’ Fortune said flatly. He resisted the desire to ask her what in Boudicca’s name she thought she was playing at, phoning Frank like that just moments before the hit? She had got the rest of the assassins killed. But she knew that already. He could tell the moment she walked into the suite that she was annoyed that he was still alive. Pleased, no doubt, the rest were dead, but livid that he had out-smarted Mathers and out-smarted her.
‘All of them?’ she repeated incredulously.
‘All of those who were left in building, after we’d got ambushed,’ he said levelly. ‘It was easy.’
Lia-Va considered him, checking for facial expressions that might reveal a jape.
He stared back. Her eyes were mesmerizing. Her electromag field was tossing out big sexual pulses. He wanted her. Badly.
‘Easy?’ she said. ‘Really?’
He ignored her condescending tone. It was obvious she didn’t believe him. But here he was before her, alive. She was wondering how he’d managed to get out in one piece without Mathers’ knowledge. She’d set him up, but still he survived. She was annoyed and surprised, but she wasn’t going to admit that she’d planned the set up, now was she? No doubt Mathers had already informed her that he was dead, that his cronies had murdered each and everyone.
‘Easy? Are you sure?’
She was sniffing for something, he could tell. She wanted to know how he’d pulled off the hits and walked out alive.
‘Yes.’ He smiled a big fake smile. ‘It was very easy.’
Fact. It had been easy after the initial surprise ambush. The killing, that is. He didn’t hate himself for it. He felt nothing. His implant subdued his guilt as it was designed to do. Assassination was a business to him. Some people got up before the sun shone and staggered home to sleep long after the sun’s light had faded. Some people worked hard, long hours to scrape a living. Life was not equal. He admired people’s tenacity and guts to get up day after day and struggle. Working class heroes, something to be. This troubled him much more than murder. ‘I killed them all. No witnesses, as you requested.’
‘What about Mathers?’
You already know he escaped with his life, he thought, so why the façade? ‘He got out before I killed the rest. He thinks I’m dead. He thinks he killed us all.’
She nodded, perplexed.
Her torque revolved slowly and momentarily she closed her eyes, touched the bare flesh of her upper right arm.
He studied her. This complicates things for you, he mused to himself. You want me dead. You wanted me and Frank and the rest dead more than you wanted your precious merchandise.
Why?
‘You did well,’ she said at last.
He nodded acknowledgement of her mock praise. What else could she say? She was in a hole. I did better than you expected, he thought. Bitch. I should kill you where you stand. But he knew that her death would be his death. Cameras crammed the room. It was no way to die – hunted by flying, toxic gas-squirting robots.
‘And the books? Did you get them?’
Domino Fortune was disturbed by the avarice in Lia-Va’s eyes. Her greed for paper was sickening.
‘Yes, I got the books.’
‘Give them to me.’
Fortune slipped the black holdall from his shoulder and unfastened the flap. One of the hovering cameras zoomed in. The contents of his bag magnified on the screen. He took out three bubble-wrapped books, paused for a second, then handed them over. He had already scanned the contents of each book onto the hard drive of his microbile Nokia communicator – phone, text, 3D visual, with a potentially lethal mindmesh-interface capability. He had decoded, re-coded and counter-coded it with encrypted sly-binary language that even Microsafe’s finest hackers would take months to unpick. By which time, he’d be long gone, and the contents of the books would be downloaded onto a back street POD machine, copied, then sold on in a private auction to the highest bidder.
Lia-Va carefully unwound the plastic like an archaeologist un-wrapping an ancient Egyptian mummy with her hands protected by gossamer thin gloves. ‘Such rare things,’ she whispered. ‘Beautiful.’
‘I’m glad you’re satisfied,’ he said, not meaning it. He really detested the sight of her.
As if in-tune with his thoughts, she flared up. Something alien had suddenly possessed her. Something crazy and wild. Her eyes were hollow liquid voids.
‘Go now,’ she said. ‘Get the fuck out of my life, you hybrid arsehole. Leave.’
He turned to go but her voice halted him.
‘The insectiant Mathers called a few minutes before I met you,’ she said, a smile on lips. She paused for effect: ‘He thinks you’re dead. ’
Fortune was stunned momentarily, his mind grasping for words and coherence. He rehearsed his response quickly in his mind before speaking.
‘So you didn’t tell him that I’d survived?’
‘No.’ There was no sign of deception in her eyes, but he didn’t believe her. She was impossible to read. She probably knew all the psychological masks, the conscious cover-ups to fake innocence.
‘So who does he think killed his cronies?’
‘He suspects another assassin, maybe two or three killers, who came in after he’d left. He’s unsure, but he suspects a second wave of assassins.’
‘Does he think you had anything to do with this fictitious second wave attack?’
‘Probably,’ she said, with a small nod of acknowledgement. ‘But that’s not your problem, Bentley.’
‘Sure it is,’ he said, thinking: you’ve just told me another string of lies. Mathers knows I killed his cronies. You would have told him that I was still alive, that I had delivered the merchandise. So why let me go? It doesn’t make sense. Unless. She’s setting me up, sending me out there to my death. Mathers and his insectiant henchmen will be waiting, probably outside the building, secreted by the fog.
Domino Fortune walked slowly to the open lift doors and paused, thought briefly about turning round to ask if she’d transferred the credits into his bank account, but thought better of it. It wasn’t wise to push Lia-Va. She was a cruel and ruthless bitch. But she’d never welshed on a deal. Tried to kill him evidently, but she was a good payer. The irony washed over him, revealing itself as a brief smile with his eyes.
‘Before you go, I forgot to mention…’
Fortune waited a moment before turning to face her. He’d half expected this – she was never totally satisfied. Games, games, games. Inside and outside of the pseudo-satin bedsheets. His mind grappled with the frantic, erotic memories of their on-off love affair, a nano-sex fest whose only boundaries were their warped imaginations. The holosex-toys had been surreal, but the programming superb – detailed psychological profiling guaranteed the ultimate multiple orgasms, tailor-made for each individual’s preferences.
‘What do you want?’ he said, trying to sound easy and unruffled.
‘One more job. Complete it and I’ll double your credits.’ Lia-Va’s smile was crooked.
You’re planning to kill me again, he thought. Why not call up your armed security goons and have them do it right now? Although your sick mind loves the thought of Mathers and his cronies dealing with me – insectiant style – grabbed by each limb, hoisted aloft to the nearest tall building, slammed against the 80th story wall, to crawl up or down, or stuck to the bricks like a pelted tomato, or perhaps just simply dropped to fly Icarus-style! Dead whichever way you tried to scramble for life, while they hovered just a few feet away, hissing and clicking with insectiant laughter.
‘And leave me in peace for awhile?’ he said, still playing her game.
‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘We’ll see.’
He would have argued with any other human or non-human on the face of the planet right then, but not her. It was time to leave without fighting. He was coming away with his life today, and he hadn’t expected that. It would give him time to reconsider, to amend his plan. ‘What is this last job?’
‘This job will be easy for a man of your talent.’
‘It’s dangerous, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said smiling. ‘You’re going to fucking adore it, lover boy. All the details are on your home computer. I had Frilek download all you will need.’
‘Thanks,’ Fortune said, unable to hide the thick gloss of irony coating his voice. He thought sourly: thanks for sweet FA! ‘I’ll pick up the info in the morning.’
Her smile dilated like a drugged pupil.
‘Going out on the town, Fortune? Feeling a little horny? Feeling a little adrenalin-high after the kill?’
He shrugged, not caring to answer.
She ran her long fingers across her breasts in a circling motion. ‘Why go out for a take away when you can eat in?’
He felt his vitriol rise. It was such a corny line, yet it wasn’t the words but the force behind them that rocked, that angered Fortune. She was such a drama queen, such a manipulator, a twister. He’d succumbed in the past when it suited his sexual urges, but not today. Today had been a bad day. There was too much blood on both of their hands, the kill was barely cold. It didn’t feel right. The blank void of her eyes frightened him.
Her clothes vanished from her body at the push of a button. She was naked but for the torque. She was perfection, taut, smooth, radiant. She touched herself. Sighed slowly.
‘Another time, maybe,’ he said, his voice barely audible, and he got into the lift and punched the ground floor button – hard. He reached for the regulation gasmask, attached to his belt. Every citizen carried one unless they had a death-wish. He pulled the strap over his head, checked the filter was live, and adjusted the mask to form a tight snug fit.
He slid his gun from his inside jacket pocket, expecting Mathers’ attack at any twist and turn of his route ahead. He thumbed the damage-setting to kill.
As the lift stopped, he stepped out into the fog, running as fast as he could across the Highfeld car park, gun raised in anticipation, eyes darting this way and that. He nimbly skip-jumped down a flight of stairs, and then hurried underground into a graffiti-free subway that would bring him to the nearest sky-ship terminal.
He hated the gasmask, but it was necessary for several reasons. Myths unbound – toxic pollution, killer viruses, mutated from ancient bird flu, bovine foot and mouth, hybrid spores, chemical warfare residues, watery creatures that inhabited the fog like sharks in deep water…the list of nasties ran on and on. And if it wasn’t Lia-Va and her Highfeld stranglehold cited as instigators and prime suspects, then the Clerics of Information, or Klaus Kindred were high on the list of every conspiracy theorist in town.
Yet Fortune was certain of one thing: the only safe place was indoors, sealed, genetic air streams pumping into all buildings, both public and private, from air-conditioning units mounted in every room, whether those rooms were above or below ground. He was sure that the fog harboured more than blurring, moisture molecules. It harboured death; harboured destruction. He expected Mathers or Graffiti Slashers to be standing around every corner.
BOOKSHOP LINKS
"Oh, I am fortune’s fool!"
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Act III, i)
ONE
The day Dr Lars Handel died to his world of words, the assassin-artist Domino Fortune stood alone in another world. He made ready for death, a death that he knew would surely come like a holo-benediction. Yes! In that impressive top floor office suite, Domino Fortune waited for the bitch’s decision: should he live or should he die?
Once, he recollected with a touch of twisted nostalgia, many years ago, he would have looked out from this surly bastion and laughed. He would have laughed insanely at the impossible and succulent peach sky, its juices dribbling down provocatively as if thinned oils upon a stark virgin canvas. It was the first surreal inkling of an opening between the invisible worlds. The day the sky melted was etched indelibly upon Fortune’s mind, as though a dome of wax to a searing flame, remade with light and sound and the stench of burning skin; remade with the sickening, holocaustic barbarity of screaming skulls, stripped of flesh and muscle to the charred bone. Billions died on that impossible day, a few survived, less than two thousand perhaps. For those who continued to exist nothing could ever be the same, not for them, hidden underground in the vast network of sewers and abandoned train and mining tunnels, not for them or their off-spring, skulking in the dark, and the generations who came afterwards.
Did they need the Jaarfindorians’ domination rammed down their throats with such visual vindictiveness?
Multiple-viewpoint image technology, invented by Jaarfindorians, had captured the utter destruction of planet Earth from the relative safety of the stratosphere. These hovering organic, AI cameras recorded for posterity the systematic annihilation of an entire race – almost. That horrendous event was engraved terribly within his subconscious, scored upon all their minds, replayed on colossal public screens in the open forums and market squares as a relentless reminder of the miracle that had come to pass.
What a miracle!
What miracle?
To Fortune, the Clerics of Information’s ironclad insistence on the twenty-four hour image feeds of the monumental event were a sick joke; repeated over and over, ever-present, forever presented in biblical proportions. To his mind this propaganda was an outrage. This was no miracle, but a continuing, looping nightmare, a nightmare he longed to wake from, a nightmare he planned to break.
Nature had fought back, as she always did. She fought back first with the brambles and vines, the weeds and the hardy perennials, the fast-growing species which dominated jungle and swamp. These had flourished, re-carpeting the planet. Then the winged creatures had returned, although not as before. These were cross-breeds, mutations, abominations mostly, avian-reptilian things that swooped and spat or squawked and hovered in immense flocks of blurred blackness.
For invention in nature astonished him, before and after the meltdown of the sky. It thrilled his blooming artist’s eyes, enchanted his assassin’s sense of timing, his sense of destruction like a blaze of malleable, rose sunlight illuminating a forest clearing, fleeting; then diminishing, and departed with the passing over of a cloud bank, shading the area.
Benediction.
Reverential.
Awe-inspiring.
To the many, a commonplace blaze of yellow light, illuminating a patch of forest. To him, his artist’s mind afire – revelation! Swift brush strokes upon canvas, paint pushed and pulled, shaped into his vision. Hurrying, before the light faded, the cloud invaded, covered and ruined the moment with thick greyness.
Fortune’s mind slipped again, pushing momentarily the bitch, Lia-Va, from it. She was coming. He could almost touch her vindictiveness before she arrived; almost see it as though a flock of angry, shrieking gulls rising up to evade an approaching storm. Soon she would be hurtling up the lift shaft towards him.
Staccato, dragged without resistance.
He thought about the underground forests of his childhood, considered the spine-tingling, shadowy playground, the climbing trees, the creaking, bending boughs that threatened to snap, threatened to send him tumbling to the leaf-littered undergrowth, but never did. His footholds were sure, his handgrips vice-like, locked tight. He would always reach the highest crotch, and dip his fingers inside the nest, stealing the avian-reptilian eggs. On the ground, pricking the egg with a rusty needle, right the way through, and blowing, blowing, blowing. The yolk and white would cling to the outer shell for its ruined life, a sticky glutinous blob which he’d suck away from the back of his hand. Another empty egg for his growing collection!
Jump, flip, loop.
Switching his mind now, speeding forward in time to adulthood. There, between the parting silver mists, an overwhelming underground forest, an emblem of his worldview after meltdown: the archetypal dark symbolic forest of myth and art and literature. Even though Fortune was a trained killer, (and possibly because of it, the need to balance the scales) his love of art in its many forms inspired him, enriched him, consoled him in times of deep despair and self-loathing.
He sighed long and hard through barely pursed lips, released the spring-like coil of tension from his mind, exhaled the tensile stress. A long-forgotten author’s words slinked to mind, issued in a quotation from his lips with a soft whisper, images of the ancient forests of old, before the flood came welling and gushing and murdering billions of screaming humans; before the apocalyptic deluge claimed almost every creature that couldn’t fly off the planet, sustaining flight, finding a place to rest.
Wave upon crushing wave, washing the world clean.
‘They are, it seems, savage and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent, and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow. Naked, they dress only in their majesty and their mystery.’
Domino Fortune yearned for the underground forests of his childhood – especially the one dappled with shadow and light, discovered after months of traversing the multi-levelled underground tunnels and sewers and caves; passageways barely wide enough to crawl along. Although he did not miss the dark, cold hardness of the rock against his scuffed knees, his callused hands. Inside those constricted tunnels, he felt at times a devastating panic. Would the rock crush him? If so, why didn’t it do it now? Get it over and done with! Was the rock tormenting, pushing his mind to its limits, attempting to break his resolve? Many times he felt that his mind would shatter, such were the mad images conjured from his subconscious. The dark was crammed with illusions, masks of beasts and bizarre creatures, ethereal things that floated in and out of view. In depths of fatigue and sleep depredation, the rocks whispered to him. Mouths appeared, tongues wagged, lips smacked. He never understood the rocks’ language – a harsh, sibilant hiss. Yet within those confined nightmare spaces he’d learned to see in the dark and he’d learned how to tame his fear, in spite of his tears of terror. Some child-like sensitivity had been yanked from him down there. A husk of insensitivity had grown without his knowing.
For one day (or night?) his sobbing and panic-attacks ceased. He’d surrendered to his fate, to his helplessness, always in the middle of the crawling chain of his family. But when that glorious day came, he’d volunteered to lead or bring up the rear of the crawling chain without dread. When they discovered caverns so many of them – he’d been the first to celebrate with whooping, jubilant cheers. He was no longer afraid of those echoing, shadowy cathedrals. In life’s lottery such moments elevated his status – no, their status – to millionaires. They rejoiced at the sight of the giant’s teeth, dripping stalactites, creating twisted stalagmites.
Unexpectedly, close to starvation, emaciated and malnourished to skeletal proportions, they stumbled upon a lost paradise – following for days a warm up-thrust of fresh air, scented with pine and leaf mould. The light which greeted them blinded, its rays like needles in their eyes, but they foraged through the undergrowth searching for fallen fruit, hands cupped to shade.
In his very own paradise lost, Fortune settled with his extended family (mum, step-dad, sister, aunt, two male cousins, and his dog, Levi) in the cavernous belly of a dormant volcano, high above sea level, a fertile environment. Succulent seasonal fruit and berries grew as well as large, meaty rodents. Meagre though nature’s provisions had been, they had managed to survive long enough to utilise their own productivity. They farmed crops of wheat and maize in clearings created by tools honed from wood and rock. They had thrived from a handful of seeds that Fortune had had the sagacity to snatch whilst running for his life through the fields on the outskirts of town, the peach sky melting, the huge waves rolling from some unseen epicentre miles out to sea. He’d instinctively known that the apocalypse was upon them, and that seeds could be used at some later date, if he managed to get to the mountains.
Oh the mountains! Just look at them, he mused. Vibrant, shifting, purple peaks of snowy shadow, his eyes forever failing to capture the play of light on the landscape so harsh and solid, yet damned to tease the mind’s eye into an artistic madness that demanded a canvas and a brush to hush the moment, to instill a sense of order upon the light, light strokes that merely paid an oily lip-service to the wonder of the skipping shadows that toyed with the mountain’s frozen troughs and crevices and thawing tips.
Now they were here, inside the belly of a volcano. They lived in two tree houses, built in between forked boughs, and climbed ladders made from vine to gain access. Now and again they’d trapped a hissing rodent, more snake than overgrown rat, slaughtered it, and fed with sick relish on its chewy, pungent roasted flesh.
The present-day Domino Fortune yearned for the underground forest, sunk deep in the bowels of the volcano, a narrowing vase which pointed to freedom. Yearned so much that a small mewing sound ran away from his lips, a primordial hunger, growing to become a raging raw howl! His past clawed him back.
Oh how he ached for the rough bark against his bare back, his mid-summer dreams laced with perfume of pine and wild, entwining honeysuckle, the luxurious feel of waxy ivy leaves between his thumb and forefinger. He’d peer up for what seemed like hours, through the canopy to glimpse the cerulean sky impregnated with sunlight, (frustratingly, so far away to the lip of the volcano!) scattered with high, white slowly drifting clouds. The longing for escape was giddying, the yearning of his formative years gripped his stomach like a talon, ripped at it unmercilessly like slow-feeding carrion.
That impossible day had created a new lattice veneer, Fortune considered, forged a new alien world. And right now he stood at the very pinnacle of it, waiting for the bitch who, like her predecessors, had command of humankind’s fate, command of many minds, command of individuals’ worthless lives. She would soon appear, he knew, and then…
Dreams, distant and dead, like every member of his extended family. Outrage! Murder! Ambush! But he couldn’t allow himself full rein of his anger right now. After all, he’d settled that score long ago, hadn’t he? Who was he trying to fool? He knew the score would never be settled until his eyes were at last covered with coins and a cold, damp hessian sack.
They were, he recollected, the first folk they’d encountered above ground, after the escape from the plentiful volcano, following the silt banks of a river that meandered mile upon mile. The river’s banks and meadows were flooded in places, wide swathes of blue-green, shining sheets of shimmering water which reflected the unblemished white-cerulean sky. Naked, heat-withered trees and bushes cast long deep shadows of purple, spread across the banks like split fingers. Leaf litter had long since blown across the flat desert landscape that hemmed in the reclaimed banks, just narrow strips of fertile black soil where spasmodic wild wheat now grew, swaying, rustling in the warm breeze.
They had met Fortune and his family with such unabated, wild hostility that the speed and malice of the ambush had stunned him, still a teenager; a kid really. It was the blood that he remembered most vividly. So much of it spurted from his mother’s neck, from his sister’s head, his step-father’s chest that his own laser wound to his upper arm melted from his consciousness. He recalled little of the attack but for the blood, blocking the anguished screams from his mind. He recalled, however, his desperate lunge at the assailant – an insectiant – who’d towered over his mother, gloating as she squirmed beneath him. But the insectiant had been quicker than Fortune, hovering to one side, bringing the butt of its laser rifle down hard on the back of his head. Fortune collapsed in a heap, limp, unconscious.
Later, surprised to find himself still alive, he’d burned the corpses, knowing that some creature or other would take its fill if the bodies were buried or left where they had fallen. Almost ritualistically he’d gathered his family’s regurgitated roots, and slipped them into his shoulder bag. Refusing to look back at the billowing black smoke that filled the sky, he strode purposefully after the killers. It was already too much to endure that his nostrils were stuffed with the stench of his family’s burning flesh, their grey ashes rising and tumbling from the sky, blown by a stiff warm breeze, falling upon him like defiled rain. Sobbing, snot and tears coursing down his face, he hunted down the insectiant scum who’d killed his family in cold, calculated blood. It took him the best part of a day and night, picking up the scent of their drug habit on a balmy northeasterly. He would later come to think, many times, that what he did next was surprisingly simple, but completely deranged.
He found them in the midst of the vast desert that horseshoed Queen’s Lynn, New Jaarfindor’s capital city. The city itself was perhaps two or three miles away, enveloped in thick shifting fog, with the odd spire and tower poking through, glinting with a strange amber-grey evening sunlight.
Glass?
Gold?
Steel?
He was too far away to know for certain.
The insectiants were settled around a smouldering campfire, high on Krassgar and their own self-importance. He crept slowly on his belly, digging his elbows and splayed knees into the soft sand to give him leverage. Once he was close enough, he waited on his back behind a nearby sand dune, waited until night came. He watched the sky, mesmerised as the twilight faded to a velvety purple and almost simultaneously the stars shone out, the Milky Way and galaxies clustered together like sparkling gold dust. Three shooting stars exploded into view and then were gone.
It was time.
All had been quiet around the campfire for half an hour or more.
Do it now! He raged inside his mind. He breathed in slowly, deliberately controlling his racing heart. Blood thundered in his ears, and his eyes seemed to pulse their own ferocious beat. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His vision narrowed, his own personal fog obscuring his view, pin-pointing it to the creatures sleeping below him. Stealthily, he slithered down the sand dune like a sidewinder, light-footed and incisive.
Taking his only weapon from a sheath strapped to his ankle – a small bone-handled hunting knife – he slit each insectiant’s windpipe. What he found most remarkable was that as he killed the first, the other two insectiants were unaware of his presence. It was probably, he now thought, a pivotal moment in his own development as an assassin-artist. He felt rage as he killed them, but it was controlled rage, for fear of waking those who slept. Once he’d finished the job (though at the time he never considered it a job, but a necessity, a duty, an all-consuming narrow tunnel) he became insane for thirty minutes; perhaps more. Time lost meaning, became a void of violence – mindless, senseless, unforgivable. What he did to those three bodies made him shudder, even today – a paid killer with over one thousand Jaarfindorian hits to his credit. The depths of his own hatred, the smashing and mutilating of body parts, the insane bloodlust as he vented his raw, wounded emotions, was despicable, worrying, shelved again.
Finally, he tossed the insectiants’ regurgitated roots into the heart of their raging campfire. But they didn’t burn. Hot to the touch, he flicked them out with the end of a stick, and kicked them across the sand to a flattish boulder. He picked up a large rock and pounded the roots to rough dust. His arms trembled and his muscles ached when at last he finished the utter destruction. He pissed on the root dust, washed it away to fuse with the sand, their memories lost and faded forever. He backed off then, crumpled to the grainy softness, and with his head in hands he sobbed and threw up bile by turns until exhaustion claimed him.
He slept for a long time amongst the sands of the dead.
His mind swirled, rotated by degrees in his memories like a carousel. He had to think of kinder things, of his loves and achievements. Balance demanded it. His mind slowed to consider his passion: art.
That’s better, calmer, happy thoughts.
And what was all art at its most effective? Precision timing? Subtle technique? Masterly application? Perhaps all, perhaps none. And the viewer? What perception? What of appreciation? An eye and a mind and heart worthy of veneration? A depth of historical knowledge? An understanding of art’s vital role in life’s flush fabric?
He who beholds the art, scorns yet adores the artist, craves the object, not its beauty.
Strange paradoxical thoughts.
He relocated his eyes to the view out of the window again. He could have wondered at the tall, gleaming citadels, alabaster white, and cooed favourably at the bright resplendent sky-ships that invaded the planet and festooned its airspace; perhaps even sighed contentedly at the vast expanse of shimmering ginger desert far beyond the Grandlian Ocean, an unforgiving, featureless landscape that slipped beneath the keel of many a cargo sky-ship, but the fog had invaded New Jaarfindor like a terminal infection, enveloped it, sealed the domain in a suffocating malady. Even though an immeasurable amount of time – shrinking and expanding by turns – had past since the flood and the merging of the worlds, the fog of change, the fog of the new order stifled the few truly human survivors, gave advantage to the creatures which floated like apparitions within the miasma.
Inside the city, time dragged, slowed so that an old Earth year might be twenty by the Jaarfindorian clock. Beyond the city walls, out there in the wilderness (if the rumours were to be believed), a man could age a thousand years in the time it took to swallow the thick, dried spittle of panic that coated his mouth. This advance or regression from one millennium to another, creating either ancient or pre-foetal, was at the whim of whatever haunted the desert and beyond. Those of a religious bent termed that power a ministry of whimsy.
All that had changed, in Fortune’s opinion, had not changed for the better but for the worse in too many ways. The merging of New Jaarfindor and Earth had become a cankerous alliance, uneasy, distrustful of the abyss between the two cultures, a vast stinking chasm of bitterness and betrayal. Both considered themselves superior technologically, morally, and artistically; yet the New Jaarfindorians held greater sway, in reality, held power in most walks of life, from the political arena to the Artistic Quarter, from the market squares to the marbled museums, and most assuredly from the universities and colleges to the financial district and capital – Queen’s Lynn. They claimed they’d bred the best poets and painters, trained the best doctors and scientists, administered the best legal system there was ever likely to be, (such sweeping generalisations issued forth from the Clerics’ lips like a President’s spin machine) fervently proud of its low-tolerance, swift-justice mentality toward anyone who dared to speak out or rise up against it.
Domino Fortune was not stupid enough to speak out in public against the New Jaarfindorians. He kept his pro-active revolutionary operations secret, functioning with stealth and anonymity from within. He considered himself a powerful and slick weapon, a subversive cell, an invisible leviathan in the face of an overwhelming enemy, but had she un-wrapped his mystery, his secret identity?
Fortune waited and pondered, mulled over what she had said, her unfulfilled promises, marvelled at her fork-tongued ingenuity. Her pledge of allegiance to a socially just New Jaarfindor arrived like ranting missionaries in a jungle of perceived chaos, but her unwillingness to see it through to the end, to really make a difference, rattled him, for she changed her mind on a quirk; her social conscience no more than a politician’s façade, dissipating, running dry of emotion and meaning as if the drought-riddled river Tundru.
Lia-Va said it wouldn’t happen, but it did.
She lied. She lied like the heady mix of fake and real masterpiece art, the surrealist pieces that adorned her walls, the fraudulent Ernst, Dada, Picasso and Klee, the genuine Miro and Masson. There were other important works of art, which mirrored the surreal of Earth, such as the Old Jaarfindor masters – Glin, X-iuy, and Zagr. But their holo-art was jaded, with the phoney life and mind of its own, caged by bars or imprisoned within glass chambers, (as was the stylist wont of the time) and precariously suspended from huge wooden rafters in open-plan white spaces, barely resembling the surrealist at all except as a prosaic statement of inter-dimensional time.
No, that’s a little harsh, Fortune reflected. Her lie was a calculated misrepresentation of a half-truth. Or that’s what she’d like him to believe. That’s right. She didn’t lie exactly – she got the truth all twisted. Total bullshit! She usually claimed something similar. That’s what she said – over and over. The truth got twisted. Like a criminal who reiterates the same guilty denial until even the interrogator believes her.
Domino Fortune shook his head in bewilderment and puffed out dismay. We all did; back then, he thought. We all believed Lia-Va, believed she was doing the right thing, the honourable thing to bring back some small bastion of order to a world gone mad. Good and bad men and women had died because of her addiction, her tunnelled obsession, her blood-lust. What was it she had said? Oh, yes, that’s right. She claimed she was trying to clean up the planet, clean up New Jaarfindor for future generations, save it from the shamutant scum who rode god-like on their techno-devices beneath the ground. Psychic sewer rats, that’s what she called them. Mind magicians, illusionists and second-rate conjurors, nothing more or less. Domino Fortune and his fellow assassins had agreed. Why not? She paid almost double the accepted fee for a hit. Those they had managed to corner in the dark stinking sewers had proved easy targets. She was boss, after all. A lying boss who couldn’t be trusted?
Perhaps.
But he wasn’t sure. A lot had happened in her employ. They had begun the systematic murder of the shamutants, to purge the underground of its most potent and dangerous threat. A few of the assassins had been killed, strangely lured like fish baited over days in deep water. But Fortune had considered the shamutants an all too easy prey, considering their formidable place in Jaarfindorian mythology. Perhaps they had sacrificed a few so that the many could retreat, regroup in the darker depths of the sewers, hidden from prying eyes to continue their unknowable way of life? Part of him hoped, a darker depressed part, that the shamutants would emerge from the manholes to take control of New Jaarfindor, or as legend foretold, emerge to poison the water supply or squirt noxious gases up through ventilation shafts in the dead of night.
Ultimately, he’d been lost, confused, upset. He reflected, what had seemed on the face of it a simple, clean multiple hit had in fact turned out to be a shambolic bloodbath, which he’d escaped by luck and a gadget implanted in the base of his skull that he’d activated to mask his vital signs. To the insectiant counter-forces who’d carried out the ambush on Fortune and his fellow assassins, he’d checked out as dead. His vitals were flat-line. They should have shot him in the head just to make certain, but they were stoned out of their heads on Krassgar. The insectiants’ nano-infa scanners had been fooled. Fortune’s XTC8-0 anti-vital sign masker had worked without a flaw, as it was designed to do. When they had dispersed and he’d got up, shook off the rubble and Frank Belloni’s guts from his clothes, he’d vomited at the sight around him.
It should have been a simple multiple hit, carried out in a derelict recycling warehouse on the outskirts of the city, the shipping district. She’d set up the deal with the Krassgar drug-baron – Mathers. The tyrannical insectiant was renowned for his brutality, his mob-like mentality, and his callous disrespect for species other than his own. No one troubled Mathers more than once. They simply vanished or were dragged up from the ocean floor with a collar of hardened silicone bolted around their necks. Mathers was not a pleasant fellow. But he had what she wanted at an inflated price.
It should have been simple, but while he and his fellow assassins crouched in the thick shadows, Frank got a call from the bitch’s 95th floor HQ – Highfeld Corporation – on his microbile. The idiot had forgotten to turn it off!
Even more incredible then, (he was so stunned by the caller’s naked body writhing provocatively before him on the microbile’s 3D imaging screen) that he’d actually answered it!
Milliseconds drifted like slow-motion leaves tumbling from an autumnal tree, as though time had been stretched, elasticised and rendered most pliable. Perhaps the legendary Tree of Life and Death? Perhaps not. All life stopped, frozen, speeded up, slowed down, floating like jetsam in the Grandlian Ocean.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
It was over in seconds.
Fortune stood there now in his memory, in the depths of planetary waste, trembling, as if his legs had exhausted all strain, staring with a glazed expression at the bloody, ruby carnage.
He’d tracked down the insectiants before they left the recycling warehouse. He’d crept up to within a few yards of them, positioning himself behind a huge, wire mesh container that was crammed with glistening broken glass. The insectiants’ faces distorted, reflected as if some decrepit Hall of Mirrors. They were getting high on Krassgar, high on their premature celebration, the drug popped deftly into tiny orifices where a left breast would have been situated on a human. They resembled seven-foot high cockroaches.
Fortune’s action was swift and calculated. He programmed the ball-sized device in his hand to discharge three seconds after he’d released it. Twelve of them were killed in a single blast from his hand-thrown explosive. He buried his head in his palms, ducking lower behind the shield of glass. Their fragile flesh sizzled, roasted alive, mouths opening and closing as they gulped desperately for air, screaming in high-pitched clicks and hisses, incinerated wings and membranes, twisting, flailing arms, falling, crumpled and jerking with the final vestiges of life.
The acrid stench turned his guts, and he vomited.
Luckily for him, the merchandise he’d come for had fallen from an insectiant’s sticky grip. Unluckily, never one to remain still for long, Mathers had escaped, ahead of Fortune’s victims. That fact alone put his life in even greater danger now.
He shrugged off dust and rubble as he picked up the merchandise. It was all in a day’s work.
Yes, he’d been upset. And set up! It was easy to do, the easiest thing in the world. Yes, they’d all been set up. He knew it deep in his bones. Call it a hunch, or intuition. He knew. She did it. And he wanted to know why.
In less than a few minutes, he would find out.
Perhaps.
His name was Domino Fortune, and in a mind of uncertainties he was certain of one thing: he’d been set-up by a twisting non-human who denied the truth of her own making… cunningly. Oh, yes – she claimed she was all woman, all human, all flesh and blood. She even had a birth certificate to prove it.
So what? She wasn’t an android, or a computer-driven brain, or a techno-flesh. She wasn’t a shamutant, or an insectiant, or any other robotic, chipped-out look-a-like. Had she been genetically modified? No doubt. We all had in some way or other. The Old World Government made sure that our enhancements were as pure and healthy as possible. It was wonderful for a generation or two. No disease could penetrate our cells. Our immune systems were state of the art killing machines. Virus and bacteria didn’t stand a chance. But there had been a terrible price – a world of ever-increasing perfection. Most people lived until they were 150 years old quite un-naturally. Cryogenics placed the still warm body in a kind of stasis – ready for the day science came up with a life-enhancing drug. We were still waiting, and the genetic modification program had proven to be another expensive government failure.
But the over-population of the genetically modified soared, soared higher than planetary resources could cope with, soared higher than planetary debt. That’s when the Pardoners were let loose. The head-bangers and suicide bombers were no longer let out once a year from mental institutions and prisons as part of a weird religious ritual, to create their own perverse havoc on the population gathered at the Church of Our Lady in Brafindor. Their kind was bred as a new virus, an epidemic of clones, replicated to wipe out vast swaths of the populace. The Clerics of Information of course denied as usual that the Pardoners were funded from their bulging coffers. But rumours spread far and near: the Clerics denial was taken as an affirmation of guilt.
Then arrived a new breed of GM creations, as far away from bi-peds as any scientist could imagine. Disgusting to most folks’ eyes – the new GMs dominated society intellectually, no doubt. But what a price they paid! Fortune shuddered at the thought of them, at the thought of the bio-engineers’ capriciousness. What an unspeakable legacy!
Instead, he spliced his thoughts to the woman who was hurtling up the lift shaft toward him, toward the floor he was on. She was something else. What precisely he wasn’t sure. From the long to come future? Or from an ancient past? Rumours, gossip, superstition.
Uncertain.
But not human.
Certain.
Domino Fortune rubbed the back of his tired, tense neck roughly. His shoulders ached and he could feel a headache building from somewhere deep inside his brain. It was probably the after-shock of the XTC8-0 anti-vital sign masker.
It was a mess, complex, cruel. What else should he have expected from her, with her dubious pedigree? She’d offered him the assignment and he’d gratefully accepted. The credits were generous – enough to buy him time off work for two years, perhaps more if he was careful, didn’t gamble, shunned the drink and kept clean for awhile. He could hitch-hike around the globe, take a cruise on a sky-ship; even join the crazies who ventured fearlessly (or was it drunkenly?) into deep inter-dimensional space. They were the folk who never returned. All of this was his if he wanted it.
But the truth hurt less than lies. Domino Fortune knew that was true, knew what he must ultimately achieve: he would kill her when the odds were in his favour. Bang! One simple shot to the head.
Giddy now from his own thoughts, Fortune slips into a deeper reverie, slips effortlessly across the wooden floor as if a slow-motion ballroom dancer. His past coagulates with strange dislocated facts. Or are they fictions? Memories remade, reconstructed to fit his new personality? Some reminiscences focus into sharp images, others obscured like dust-covered photographs.
Every time he steps on the planking, a burnished honey-colour, dappled with dark knots which peers up as if voyeurs’ eyes, they give and groan, squeal like mice shaved for some arcane perfume-testing ritual.
Looking up through the wide shatterproof window, a filthy reflective pane, huge flakes of snow vent from grey blankets of ash-packed cloud like a ticker-tape nature parade. Late autumnal mottled leaves barely cling to dark, smooth boughs, waving, trembling in the stiff north-easterly wind, accepting, then rejecting sticky snow by turns, sending its temporary crystalline matrix swirling, crashing softly to ground. There, covering the sandstone edifices, the mix of monoliths and baroque, of gothic and New Jaarfindor modern architecture, the thick snow, thickening now in a blinding flurry, settles on the pristine aspen-lined avenues, carpeting flat roof gardens and domes and angled wooden spires. Away, away from the affluent heart, the snow settles on the leaking bladder and bloated bowels of the city, the soiled and stinking suburbs beyond the city wall, where the freak show really begins…
Fortune stands Out There, beyond the wall, in his mind’s eye. He is a freeman, one of the multitude who scratch their livelihoods from all manner of illegal activities. And there, can you see it? Yes, there is Thieves’ Bridge, the scene of many brawls from the two neighbouring quarters; a territory not really worth fighting for, let alone the sacrifice of boundary deaths. But many a youthful squire and page, artisan and bum has died there over the years of conflict. Thieves’ Bridge! It ascends like a wooden hump of despair, arching the garbage-choked canal, its still and stagnant water the colour of tar. On its eastside broken, weedy pavements buttered as if burning toast with slurry and grime from the nearby industrial core, whose smog pollution is sucked down into the ever-expanding fog. Here, in this forgotten quarter, live the hardened junkies, the socially rejected, the misfits, the bio-engineers’ burgeoning stem-cell mistakes. In essence here lives science’s abandoned offspring, tripped-out insectiants, depressed dymapeds, the skank and the refuse of creation without ethical restraint.
Deeper into his past he recollects the Southside of New Jaarfindor. The sprawling Ley City is coiled like a sleepy boa, its tight yellow and brown brick terraced houses fixed row upon row, skirting the canal like tarnished medals on a lapel of reclaimed land. Lime green moss clings to damp grey slate roofs, thickening near the gutters and drainpipes. The cobblestone roads are book-ended by grey pavements, cracked and rising here and there.
Ley City had once claimed to be the capita; of the Lowland District, a yellow stone cathedral far out-weighing in size and majesty the quaint rural township. To claim city status was arrogant and absurd, despite the ancient Clerics of Information’s original stronghold. But such prominence was now a holo-vid archive. Gone the prestige and privileged lifestyles of its citizens who served the Clerics, washed away by the deluge of the opening of the sky.
Further on, slipping back, to his home and neighbourhood, where crumbling yellow walls lean like drunken jaundiced giants, threatening to collapse into the canal; where terraced tenements, one up and one down, with roofs that have shed slates, a gaping wound to the elements, gawp in wonder and suspicion at the upsurge of industry whose filth and grime spew like Regeneration Treatment vendettas. In now – through the openings some call doors, hanging from hinges, rotten boarded frames mostly, as are the windows, a few panels and broken, pointed shards yawning as if dark mouths crammed with tiny splinter teeth. Inside the guts of his house from long ago, he crouches, rocking to the rhythm of injustice, to the deafening beat of the factories and thrum of machines which feed New Jaarfindor’s insatiable appetite for new technologies and gadgets and the depleted fossil fuel...
Dragged back to the office block, he glimpsed his reflection in the massive, oval mirror ceiling. It magnified his head so instead of his black skull and broad nose, his piercing GM lion’s eyes looking back, he resembled a freak-show monster from a human Hollywood 1960s B-movie. She of course had had that ceiling installed to bring out the worst in people – the worst in humans. It made sense. It fitted her mentality. She was boss, but she was also a bitch. What was she hiding beneath her synthetic flesh?
She was before him now, appearing from the swishing golden doors of the marble-clad lift into the spacious suite. Her glimmering torque revolved around her throat, enabling her to speak, amplifying her wafer-thin vocal cords. She walked regally on red plush carpet; a fifty foot square sonic plasmatic TV screen on the far wall magnified her like a goddess of the antediluvian silver screen. Hovering auto-cams – three in all – busied themselves around her, recording her every move for posterity, for her future generation of clones to ogle and admire. She played to the cameras with celebrity-like glee. They were also there as an instant recording of her life, a kind of visual insurance policy against would-be assassins. The city was rife with them. Assassination was almost a national sport, and Domino Fortune was top of the Premier League. Strangely anonymous, as only the best killers could ever be, but at the top nonetheless.
She strode confidently past her twenty seat boardroom table, a genuine solid oak desk that almost over-looked the angels it was so high above the surrounding coastal landscape of Queen’s Lynn, (once King’s Lynn) now capital of England. They were the only physical people in the room, but there were more wall-mounted cameras, as well as the auto-cams and security eyes all over the place, scanning. The light was subdued, tweaked, a whore-house glow of red radiated from the strip-lighting, which circumnavigated the room.
Fortune could not take his eyes from her for one second. The electromag field around her was obviously calibrated for maximum sexual appeal. She was stunning in her reconstructed synthetic beauty. She was also deadly. He’d seen her kill before. Swift, no warning, ruthless. Her favourite weapon was a hypodermic needle squirting some arcane poison, sunk rapidly into a main artery or eye socket, all under the pretence of sex. Instant death, or an over-dosed high or low, was followed by a screaming hallucination which ended in cardiac arrest.
It paid never to let Lia-Va too close unless she was naked. Only then could you be almost certain that she did not hide her weapon in a concealed pocket. There were other places, of course, where she could secrete weapons, blades, or maiming implants, but Fortune preferred not to ponder upon the matter for too long.
He smiled with wry irony and gazed searchingly out of the window – Queen’s Lynn might once have been the bustling port of King’s Lynn and before that tiny Bishop’s Lynn. But the inter-dimensional worlds of Elriad, Finnigull and Jaarfindor had swallowed wholesale what had been left languishing of the material world, after the Earth had all but destroyed its population in the Great Final World War – mammal, avian, insect and amphibian were wiped out by chemical wars that simply became uncontrollable when the know-how was sold to the radicals. But now, (almost three hundred years on from The Merging) the port had grown into a sprawling city that wasn’t too dissimilar from New York in the late 20th Century, yet instead of the Statue of Liberty presiding over matters, Queen’s Lynn’s very own Queen Boudicca rose out of the river Great Ouse, her stone red tresses splayed out wildly, her victory crying mouth twisted with bitter paradox. The Romans had failed, and the Iceni had triumphed. That fact was everywhere to be seen: architecture, religious beliefs, rules, regulations and clothes. But that was a long time ago, before the compu-mechanas took hold; before the standardisation of silicon implants; before pre-birth genetic enhancements; before the plasma-driven techno-devices dominated the skyline; and most certainly before the albino cult scum – the shamutants – dominated the underground network of ancient, abandoned sewers just as they had once dominated the original underground Jaarfindor.
But time was a strange bitch. Just like Lia-Va – her princess pretensions erased from her memory by the shamutants in another time and space. So long ago since suicide Pardoner head-bangers ravaged the Holy Pilgrimage of Brafindor, yet a sick spin-off still existed even today. Distant recollections of Runeroot puzzles, insectiant mutiny, and sky-ship pirate shenanigans. All gone – all told! Part of Old Jaarfindorian myth – Lia-Va’s death-moment addiction had been washed away like a russet leaf on a white sand beach. Or had it? Could it be totally erased in the genetic sense? Did her addiction live somewhere in her cells?
Lia-Va was a direct blood-descendant of Queen Boudicca. Her DNA exploration had proved it conclusively, so she said.
But Domino Fortune did not believe her. Lia-Va lied habitually, threw up smoke-screens and webs of deceit as part of the corporate power game. Lia-Va was no princess. Her blood was not noble or royal. She was a fraud – and once and for all, Domino Fortune, would prove it, if he lived beyond this day.
‘Twist the truth into lies.’
‘It’s what I do best. I have no choice.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s why we hired you, Bentley.’
‘My name’s Fortune, not Bentley.’ He narrowed his eyes and stared out the window of the Highfeld Corporation’s 95th floor executive suite. The fog and low cloud had descended, as it did at about this time every day. He saw nothing but a thick silver-grey swirl. They called it fog, but it was more than that. He shuddered at the thought of the myth, and was glad he was indoors.
He angled his head toward her again and faked a smile.
‘But I love that name – Bentley. Please keep it for me. Call it a pet thing. Anything. Just let me use it – in private. Please.’
Domino Fortune sighed heavily. He was sick of her mind-games and half-truths, her lip-service and toying. Why didn’t she cut the crap and say what she meant? He had many aliases – but Bentley was not one of them. Warped bitch!
‘So?’
Her voice sounded like a plea to him, but he knew that Highfeld Corporation president Lia-Va never pleaded. She was incapable of it.
Fact.
Illusion – wishful thinking on his part. Whatever else happened in this meeting, he had to remain calm. His life depended on it.
‘So, Bentley, tell me about the hit.’ She smiled seductively, teasing, moistening her lush red lips with the tip of her tongue just once. ‘What happened? Details, please.’
He couldn’t help himself. She gave out an overwhelming aura of sexuality, a scent of bliss. Fortune considered her ample breasts, her narrow waist, her genetically altered facial features. She was perfect for a non-human. She looked like a beautiful young woman, but she was far more than that. In the depths of her eyes he saw something ancient and cunning. But he didn’t know what. That worried him immeasurably.
‘So did you kill them?’
‘Yes,’ Fortune said flatly. He resisted the desire to ask her what in Boudicca’s name she thought she was playing at, phoning Frank like that just moments before the hit? She had got the rest of the assassins killed. But she knew that already. He could tell the moment she walked into the suite that she was annoyed that he was still alive. Pleased, no doubt, the rest were dead, but livid that he had out-smarted Mathers and out-smarted her.
‘All of them?’ she repeated incredulously.
‘All of those who were left in building, after we’d got ambushed,’ he said levelly. ‘It was easy.’
Lia-Va considered him, checking for facial expressions that might reveal a jape.
He stared back. Her eyes were mesmerizing. Her electromag field was tossing out big sexual pulses. He wanted her. Badly.
‘Easy?’ she said. ‘Really?’
He ignored her condescending tone. It was obvious she didn’t believe him. But here he was before her, alive. She was wondering how he’d managed to get out in one piece without Mathers’ knowledge. She’d set him up, but still he survived. She was annoyed and surprised, but she wasn’t going to admit that she’d planned the set up, now was she? No doubt Mathers had already informed her that he was dead, that his cronies had murdered each and everyone.
‘Easy? Are you sure?’
She was sniffing for something, he could tell. She wanted to know how he’d pulled off the hits and walked out alive.
‘Yes.’ He smiled a big fake smile. ‘It was very easy.’
Fact. It had been easy after the initial surprise ambush. The killing, that is. He didn’t hate himself for it. He felt nothing. His implant subdued his guilt as it was designed to do. Assassination was a business to him. Some people got up before the sun shone and staggered home to sleep long after the sun’s light had faded. Some people worked hard, long hours to scrape a living. Life was not equal. He admired people’s tenacity and guts to get up day after day and struggle. Working class heroes, something to be. This troubled him much more than murder. ‘I killed them all. No witnesses, as you requested.’
‘What about Mathers?’
You already know he escaped with his life, he thought, so why the façade? ‘He got out before I killed the rest. He thinks I’m dead. He thinks he killed us all.’
She nodded, perplexed.
Her torque revolved slowly and momentarily she closed her eyes, touched the bare flesh of her upper right arm.
He studied her. This complicates things for you, he mused to himself. You want me dead. You wanted me and Frank and the rest dead more than you wanted your precious merchandise.
Why?
‘You did well,’ she said at last.
He nodded acknowledgement of her mock praise. What else could she say? She was in a hole. I did better than you expected, he thought. Bitch. I should kill you where you stand. But he knew that her death would be his death. Cameras crammed the room. It was no way to die – hunted by flying, toxic gas-squirting robots.
‘And the books? Did you get them?’
Domino Fortune was disturbed by the avarice in Lia-Va’s eyes. Her greed for paper was sickening.
‘Yes, I got the books.’
‘Give them to me.’
Fortune slipped the black holdall from his shoulder and unfastened the flap. One of the hovering cameras zoomed in. The contents of his bag magnified on the screen. He took out three bubble-wrapped books, paused for a second, then handed them over. He had already scanned the contents of each book onto the hard drive of his microbile Nokia communicator – phone, text, 3D visual, with a potentially lethal mindmesh-interface capability. He had decoded, re-coded and counter-coded it with encrypted sly-binary language that even Microsafe’s finest hackers would take months to unpick. By which time, he’d be long gone, and the contents of the books would be downloaded onto a back street POD machine, copied, then sold on in a private auction to the highest bidder.
Lia-Va carefully unwound the plastic like an archaeologist un-wrapping an ancient Egyptian mummy with her hands protected by gossamer thin gloves. ‘Such rare things,’ she whispered. ‘Beautiful.’
‘I’m glad you’re satisfied,’ he said, not meaning it. He really detested the sight of her.
As if in-tune with his thoughts, she flared up. Something alien had suddenly possessed her. Something crazy and wild. Her eyes were hollow liquid voids.
‘Go now,’ she said. ‘Get the fuck out of my life, you hybrid arsehole. Leave.’
He turned to go but her voice halted him.
‘The insectiant Mathers called a few minutes before I met you,’ she said, a smile on lips. She paused for effect: ‘He thinks you’re dead. ’
Fortune was stunned momentarily, his mind grasping for words and coherence. He rehearsed his response quickly in his mind before speaking.
‘So you didn’t tell him that I’d survived?’
‘No.’ There was no sign of deception in her eyes, but he didn’t believe her. She was impossible to read. She probably knew all the psychological masks, the conscious cover-ups to fake innocence.
‘So who does he think killed his cronies?’
‘He suspects another assassin, maybe two or three killers, who came in after he’d left. He’s unsure, but he suspects a second wave of assassins.’
‘Does he think you had anything to do with this fictitious second wave attack?’
‘Probably,’ she said, with a small nod of acknowledgement. ‘But that’s not your problem, Bentley.’
‘Sure it is,’ he said, thinking: you’ve just told me another string of lies. Mathers knows I killed his cronies. You would have told him that I was still alive, that I had delivered the merchandise. So why let me go? It doesn’t make sense. Unless. She’s setting me up, sending me out there to my death. Mathers and his insectiant henchmen will be waiting, probably outside the building, secreted by the fog.
Domino Fortune walked slowly to the open lift doors and paused, thought briefly about turning round to ask if she’d transferred the credits into his bank account, but thought better of it. It wasn’t wise to push Lia-Va. She was a cruel and ruthless bitch. But she’d never welshed on a deal. Tried to kill him evidently, but she was a good payer. The irony washed over him, revealing itself as a brief smile with his eyes.
‘Before you go, I forgot to mention…’
Fortune waited a moment before turning to face her. He’d half expected this – she was never totally satisfied. Games, games, games. Inside and outside of the pseudo-satin bedsheets. His mind grappled with the frantic, erotic memories of their on-off love affair, a nano-sex fest whose only boundaries were their warped imaginations. The holosex-toys had been surreal, but the programming superb – detailed psychological profiling guaranteed the ultimate multiple orgasms, tailor-made for each individual’s preferences.
‘What do you want?’ he said, trying to sound easy and unruffled.
‘One more job. Complete it and I’ll double your credits.’ Lia-Va’s smile was crooked.
You’re planning to kill me again, he thought. Why not call up your armed security goons and have them do it right now? Although your sick mind loves the thought of Mathers and his cronies dealing with me – insectiant style – grabbed by each limb, hoisted aloft to the nearest tall building, slammed against the 80th story wall, to crawl up or down, or stuck to the bricks like a pelted tomato, or perhaps just simply dropped to fly Icarus-style! Dead whichever way you tried to scramble for life, while they hovered just a few feet away, hissing and clicking with insectiant laughter.
‘And leave me in peace for awhile?’ he said, still playing her game.
‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘We’ll see.’
He would have argued with any other human or non-human on the face of the planet right then, but not her. It was time to leave without fighting. He was coming away with his life today, and he hadn’t expected that. It would give him time to reconsider, to amend his plan. ‘What is this last job?’
‘This job will be easy for a man of your talent.’
‘It’s dangerous, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said smiling. ‘You’re going to fucking adore it, lover boy. All the details are on your home computer. I had Frilek download all you will need.’
‘Thanks,’ Fortune said, unable to hide the thick gloss of irony coating his voice. He thought sourly: thanks for sweet FA! ‘I’ll pick up the info in the morning.’
Her smile dilated like a drugged pupil.
‘Going out on the town, Fortune? Feeling a little horny? Feeling a little adrenalin-high after the kill?’
He shrugged, not caring to answer.
She ran her long fingers across her breasts in a circling motion. ‘Why go out for a take away when you can eat in?’
He felt his vitriol rise. It was such a corny line, yet it wasn’t the words but the force behind them that rocked, that angered Fortune. She was such a drama queen, such a manipulator, a twister. He’d succumbed in the past when it suited his sexual urges, but not today. Today had been a bad day. There was too much blood on both of their hands, the kill was barely cold. It didn’t feel right. The blank void of her eyes frightened him.
Her clothes vanished from her body at the push of a button. She was naked but for the torque. She was perfection, taut, smooth, radiant. She touched herself. Sighed slowly.
‘Another time, maybe,’ he said, his voice barely audible, and he got into the lift and punched the ground floor button – hard. He reached for the regulation gasmask, attached to his belt. Every citizen carried one unless they had a death-wish. He pulled the strap over his head, checked the filter was live, and adjusted the mask to form a tight snug fit.
He slid his gun from his inside jacket pocket, expecting Mathers’ attack at any twist and turn of his route ahead. He thumbed the damage-setting to kill.
As the lift stopped, he stepped out into the fog, running as fast as he could across the Highfeld car park, gun raised in anticipation, eyes darting this way and that. He nimbly skip-jumped down a flight of stairs, and then hurried underground into a graffiti-free subway that would bring him to the nearest sky-ship terminal.
He hated the gasmask, but it was necessary for several reasons. Myths unbound – toxic pollution, killer viruses, mutated from ancient bird flu, bovine foot and mouth, hybrid spores, chemical warfare residues, watery creatures that inhabited the fog like sharks in deep water…the list of nasties ran on and on. And if it wasn’t Lia-Va and her Highfeld stranglehold cited as instigators and prime suspects, then the Clerics of Information, or Klaus Kindred were high on the list of every conspiracy theorist in town.
Yet Fortune was certain of one thing: the only safe place was indoors, sealed, genetic air streams pumping into all buildings, both public and private, from air-conditioning units mounted in every room, whether those rooms were above or below ground. He was sure that the fog harboured more than blurring, moisture molecules. It harboured death; harboured destruction. He expected Mathers or Graffiti Slashers to be standing around every corner.
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