Bad Dreams (50 page)

Lynch had to stop himself getting excited.

‘You hate the company?’

‘Naturellement
!’

‘You know they’re trying to kill us all?’

‘What do you mean, “us”,
kimosabe
?’

‘We’re all expendable to Josh Unwin and his arsehole cabinet minister fuckbuddies, 125. They’re sending me a suitcase. In order to clean this up, they’ll lose ten miles of English coastline. They’ll have to find somewhere else to have the party conference next year, but that’s probably their idea of an acceptable loss.’

‘And you?’

‘They’d kill me like you’d kill a cat. Like you’d kill a person, in fact. All my people are just components. They get us out of the shrink-wrapped pack, warm us up in the microwave, and send us out to get creamed, to cover their rear ends when the shitstink gets too bad.’

‘A suitcase?’

‘That’s a suitcase-sized battlefield nuclear weapon. UCC makes them too, along with cheap fountain pens and laser video projection systems. The story will go something like this: anarcho-muslim terrorist group grabs some weapons-grade plutonium and tries to cook up a bomb so they can blackmail the Western world, but the clumsy little mullahs – who just happen to be working out of a secret cell based on this campus – make a few little slips and there’s a fuck of a big bang. It’ll be on the front pages forever.’

‘Hmmmmmmn.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m thinking.’

One of its hands was drumming fingers on a tabletop. Lynch saw it was wearing a woman’s ring.

‘Any idea whether you could survive a nuclear explosion? Like cockroaches can?’

The thing did not reply.

‘125, how would you like to make a deal?’

* * *

What they found outside the cottage killed Brian.

It was as if he had been drop-kicked in the chest by Bruce Lee. He felt his heart stop. Pain spread through his ribs, and his limbs stopped sending signals to his brain. His ears popped as if he were undergoing severe depressurization in a crashing Concorde.

Abigail lay on the front path, a smoky hole above her eyes, the back of her head fanned out on the gravel behind her. Jason was in the doorway, in segments.

He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. His jaw ached and the hammering at his temples increased. He tore out two fistfuls of hair, and ripped at his shirt with bloody fingers.

Then the scream started. First, it was a whistling, gulping cry somewhere in the back of his throat, then it took hold and boomed forth, emerging from his mouth like solid vomit. Inside, his lungs tore, his windpipe distended.

In that wordless screech, Brian cursed the world. He damned God, the University, the Unwin Chemical Corporation, the Vice-Chancellor, Abigail, Lynch’s Zombies, the fucking disease, Jason, Jean, Monica, Debbie, blind moronic chance. And, most of all, himself.

The scream finished coming out, but hung in the air around him. He was racked with deep, paralysing sobs. He knew he was spitting blood. He bit his lips. They were lumps of raw meat. He scratched the skin of his exposed chest, trying to dig in and get to his dead heart.

He could not breathe. His mouth, empty of scream and dry as the desert sands, filled with bloody bile. His stomach came up in lumps. His throat clogged.

Someone – Monica – touched him, tried to get a hold on him.

He struck out, beating her away from him.

He rolled on the ground, hitting the earth wildly. Grass and dirt mashed beneath his blows. Stones tore his knuckles.

He began to headbutt the ground. He saw it come up and go away again, not connecting it with the jarring in his head. He was trying to make his brain go out.

He got grit in his eyes and did not flinch.

A red filter developed over his vision.

He made a brown dent in the earth, devoid of grass, packed hard and smooth as clay.

The earth, the Earth. He hated them. He would make them suffer.

He emptied his mouth into the indentation. Then added more red froth to the porridgy mess of spew.

Before the end, he excepted Monica from his curses, but everyone, every
thing
, else stayed on his shitlist.

‘Monica,’ he said calmly, just before the vein in his temple burst, ‘I give up.’

He was gone before his face hit the ground again.

* * *

Before they could get their meeting going, someone too wrapped up in Union politics demanded a head count on the ground that they had to be quorate to make a decision. Cazie had him thrown off the roof. He made a satisfying splat on the tarmac below.

She was still the best they could come up with, although she was already thinking about the ways she would have to deal with the inevitable challenges to her leadership of the New Humanity. There should be no problems, only learning experiences.

They already had the campus radio, and the P.A. system. Eddie Zero was keeping on the air, keeping the enthusiasm up. He played only dance music, and babbled on about expanded consciousness.

Cazie did not enjoy the philosophical waffle, but she knew it was necessary to keep her crowds in line. They had spent a couple of years searching for something to believe in – drugs, sex, politics, whatever – and now she had something they couldn’t
not
be impressed by.

Elliott Frazier was buzzing almost all over now, and people had to be careful not to brush up against him. They could lose a lot of skin that way. The professor was already feared as Cazie’s enforcer.

Some of the newborns were just sitting quietly, legs crossed, looking at her in admiration, static electricity crackling around them. In a crowd, charges tended to leap between their bodies. It was an odd effect, but added to the feeling of community.

When Cazie kissed her first consort, she felt the current arcing between their teeth. It was enough to overdose the pleasure centres of her brain. She could not touch anything or anyone without having a violent orgasm. It had gone beyond the sexual, and become as much a part of the processes of her body as breathing. She could live with it.

In her arms, the consort died. She could not see how it had happened, but there were several more – men and women – eager to take his place, eager even to join him. Electricity danced between her fingers. Hands reached towards her, and drew arcs from her. Some fainted, some died with beatific radiance on their faces, but some stood up tall and took it, their hair rising in Bride of Frankenstein permanents, sparklers in their eyes.

Eddie was playing rock ’n’ roll now. Eddie Cochran’s ‘Somethin’ Else’.

It was as good an anthem for the New Humanity as any.

Some of Cazie’s followers were not pretty, but they were all becoming beautiful in their way.

* * *

125 did not trust Lynch. It had enough of Anderton and Finch in him to remember that cruelly handsome, marked face. It could still feel Finch’s outrage as he slapped her, and it could really get inside Anderton’s resentment of his employers and the Nazis they used to get their way. Longendyke had seen Lynch in action, negotiating with Arab terrorists for time and then hitting hard, all agreements set aside.

But, in the two and a half hours it had been sapient, it had learned pragmatism.

Now it was slumped, resting, while Lynch went about his business. The CSD man was marshalling his forces, hoping to pen the enemy in one place so he could take them out. 125 did not recognize the concept of an enemy. It knew that the crowd in the Humanities Block was, in a sense, an extension of itself. Within their bodies they harboured its viral cousins.

Only 125 could bring them the awareness of their purpose. They were a part of it, and ought to be in its thrall.

Through Lynch, it would enlarge itself. Then it would see about finding something to do with its life.

‘When?’ it asked.

‘Soon,’ snapped Lynch. ‘I want the suitcase first. Then we can declare ourselves independent of UCC.’

‘Very well.’

‘Just think about your list of demands for Josh Unwin. Start with a billion pounds in gold. No, make that gold and voting stock. There’s no reason we shouldn’t come out of this with a controlling interest in this god-damned company.’

Lynch went back into a huddle with an alarmed NCO. Someone had dug up the specs for the building, and he was formulating a siege defence scenario.

125 was at a loose end.

One of the radio people was staring at it. Most human beings found it horribly fascinating, it seemed. This was a girl. Quite a pretty one, it supposed. Anderton would have responded to her. It tried an expression that was supposed to be a smile but came out as something hungrier, more threatening.

‘Hello, dollface,’ it leered, ‘what time do you get off?’

The woman turned away, and paid more attention to her earpiece.

125 was getting restless. It had heaps of unfulfilled potential lying around, and knew it was not getting any younger. It had to let Lynch play soldiers, but already it was impatient to have its day in court.

It could hear a noise that might be music, and someone claiming to be the Voice of the New Humanity. That amused it. The presumption. But at least there was a nascent awareness of the fact that there
was
a New Humanity. It would be ready to fill the gap soon.

* * *

Monica felt for his pulse. It was not there.

Trust Brian to run away when things were at their worst. It had always been a characteristic of his. This time, she could not blame him.

She had been crying for hours now. Not sobbing, not losing control. But her eyes were watering constantly. She did not know she had that many tears in her.

She turned Brian face up, and touched him over the heart to be sure. Nothing. It must have been a massive stroke. He was not even forty. Of course, he had been under a little extra strain recently.

Monica caught herself thinking calmly and rationally, and wondered if that – rather than Brian’s grief, panic and self-destructive frenzy – was the real symptom of total insanity. She was going to have to deal with the fact that most of the people she knew, most of the people she had dealt with on a day-to-day basis – liked, loved, slept with, eaten with, argued with, been bored by, negotiated with, laughed at, shared with – were dead. Or, worse, were not really people any more.

Poor Brian. And poor Jason, poor Abigail, poor Vice-Chancellor Jackson, poor Cazie. Poor, poor Monica.

Monica Flint, losing it at last.

She sat by Brian, straightening his hair. Wiping the dirt and mess off his face with a tissue.

She did not sing to herself like Ophelia, or want to throw herself under a train like Anna Karenina.

Finally, she knew she would have to live up to her responsibilities. She had been elected by the student body to take care of their interests, and they deserved her attention in this chaos. It would probably mean dying with them, but that was better than sitting here surrounded by corpses, waiting for somebody to come and kill her where she was.

Outside the next cottage but one, she could see a motorbike. A dead man – one of the trendier professors – was lying beside it, a bunch of keys in his frozen hand.

Great. She had some wheels.

* * *

Eddie Zero sliced Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs out of the rack, and lined up ‘Wooly Bully’ on the turntable. He cut his rap, and let the track play.

Ideas were exploding sexually out of him. He was the music, and the music was the root cause of the whole thing.

He shook his shoulders to the tune, feeling the excitement building in his gut.

Sam the Sham (Domingo Zamudio) finished his thang, and Eddie popped back, spieling fluently into the mike.

‘I got this theory,’ he told his listeners, ‘that the music has got into our brains like a psychotropic drug, and is altering the structure of our cerebellum. It was slow at first, probably started with Elvis and Chuck Berry back before your mother was born, but it’s been snowballing ever since, gathering momentum. Now, its time has come. We’re the real reality. Rock ’n’ roll and beat and psychedelia and punk and rap were just hiccoughs. This is the ittest of the its. It’s beyond music, beyond mayhem. Just dance, mutant boppers. Dance until you drop, fuck until you faint, be until you be-bop. And here’s The Pleasant Valley Boys with “EEEEE-YAH! The South’s Gonna Rise Again”…’

He had had to barricade himself in the studio, and put down some minor hassles with the collective. They were not into the way he had outvoted that cow Posie. But Stu and Sheena were with him now, and they had dealt with the whingers. Funkmaster Dee was in the waiting room, garrotted with copper wire. Sheena kept putting the calls she was getting through to him. The external lines were out, but the campus phones were still hooked up. He had a lot of listeners, was getting a lot of feedback. Everybody wanted him to stay on the air.

‘Yo there, Homo superior,’ he said into the phone, ‘you’re on the air, talk to Eddie…’

‘H-h-hello,’ said a voice. Male, young, spotty, miserable, a loser. ‘Eddie, I’ve got a problem…’

‘We all got a problem, space kidette.’

‘…but I got a
real
problem. My legs don’t work any more. And I think my backbone is kind of…jellifying? My whole body is squishy. I had to use a pencil to stab the buttons to call you up. I’m in my flat in East Slope, and I don’t think I can move any more.’

‘And that’s your problem.’

‘Y-y-yes.’

‘Hell, is that all? I thought you had a real heartbreaking case of dribbly farts or something serious. You’ve just got to put all your old preconceptions behind you.’

‘I h-h-have?’

‘Yeah, chill out. You gotta learn to play the cards you get. So, you’re turning annelid on yourself. Well, maybe that’s the best thing you could have. Worms are hermaphroditic, you know. Are you a hermaphrodite, caller?’

‘Well… I… uh, no…’

‘Any problems in the genital area? You got a squishy sack of Jell-O and a fish finger down there?’

‘Uh… uh… uh…’

‘You just gotta get rid of this sentimental attachment you’ve got to the vertebrate lifestyle, caller. So you can’t walk, talk or do the turkey trot no more? Who cares, just so long as you can squirm, crawl, squiggle and slime your way. Just to cheer you up, here’s Burl Ives singing “Ugly Bug Ball”…’