Doomware (6 page)

He entered the hallway. Dark wooden floorboards – or something that looked and sounded exactly like wood, possibly morpher-made – stretched off in all directions, up a curving staircase with a beautifully carved balustrade, and into the adjoining rooms.

He explored. The place was dingy but plush, dusty but immaculately tidy. He liked the house at once, not least because he knew it would prove to be a treasure trove: there were old things everywhere. Really old. He had to look twice at some of them before he could work out what they were, and others he could only hazard a guess at. He wondered what kind of people had lived here. The old-fashioned photographs dotted here and there gave no clue, mostly showing sepia-toned images of people of an age that meant they were sure to be long dead. Whoever the owners of house had been, they had certainly been lovers of bygone times. And there was no doubt they had been rich. There was a huge amount of food in the kitchen. Food in tin cans. Food in glass jars. Food in foil packets. Frozen food in an old-style chest freezer. Bottles of wine in a wooden rack. Some of the provisions had spoiled, but even the usable stuff was still way too much for him to carry in one go. He looked around for an micromorpher, but there wasn’t one. Who on earth lived without a morpher? That really was taking a penchant for the past too far. Still, he gave a silent thank you to the owners, whoever they were, offering up a simultaneous prayer that he wouldn’t have to meet their zombified arses.

After quickly checking all four floors and their rabbit warren of rooms, he was satisfied there were no bodies. They must have been away when it had happened. He thanked them again.

In the first-floor drawing room a grandfather clock ticked away loudly. A closer look revealed it had a power supply; it was a modern piece of equipment designed to look old. Nearby, a huge bookcase held row after row of books. He’d always been a keen reader, subconsciously trying to accomplish the impossible feat of cramming his head with the library of books other people carried around in their cybernetic brains, and the trait had been given free rein over the past six months. He scanned the titles with interest. They were mostly classics, and he selected a few he couldn’t recall reading, at least not for a long while:
Lorna Doone
,
The Call of the Wild
,
Northanger Abbey
,
Far From the Madding Crowd
,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. This last one he dithered over, wondering whether he felt like reading Orwell’s dystopian vision. It was hardly worse than reality, he thought. Give me the Ministry of Love and the Thought Police over cannibalistic cybernetic zombies any day of the week.

A smaller bookcase held neat racks of music disks. Some contained music by classical composers, but most were by artists he’d never heard of. There were racks of video disks too. Again, they contained films he didn’t recognise, and there was a large range of feature-length documentaries which sounded, from their descriptions, as if the makers had gone to the greatest pains to choose the most esoteric subject matters imaginable. He put a load of the disks into his holdall, only to remove half of them again. He had more than enough to be going on with, and he’d have to come back here anyway.

In a cabinet he found a case of huge old vinyl disks – “records” he believed they’d been called. He hadn’t a hope of playing these. Or did he? He looked around the room. Then he realised that the top of the cabinet lifted up, and beneath it was a turntable. He grabbed the first record – the date on the cover said 1974 and the artist was somebody called Ella Fitzgerald; he thought he’d heard the name before but he couldn’t be sure – and carefully slipped the disk out of its sleeve. It took him a while to figure out how the turntable worked, but as soon as he did the room was filled with jazz-style band music. After a while Ella joined in, and he was immediately taken by the velvety beauty of her voice. He listened, entranced. 1974, he thought. An interwar period. If only they’d known back then. If only they’d known about the disaster that awaited mankind, the great technological holocaust that grew nearer with every passing year and every new advance. Would they still have played instruments and sung beautifully if they had known what lay ahead? He supposed you couldn’t really worry about the future when you were busy making music as gorgeous as this. It struck him that the music was the sound of a dead world playing in a world of the living dead, where there was no one to appreciate it but him, and for a moment it was almost unbearable. He made a move to turn the turntable off, but couldn’t bring himself to.

The music faded softly into the background as he went up to the next level. In the first room, a smallish bedroom, he went through a chest of drawers. It contained clothes mostly, which he rummaged through so perfunctorily he almost missed it: in the bottom drawer, covered by vests and jumpers, was a grey plastic case a little larger than the average hardback book. It had a metal locking mechanism, but it wasn’t locked, and when he flipped it open he nearly whooped with excitement at what was inside; instead, he said, “Yes!”

It was a small handgun, the old – and now illegal – type. He lifted it out of its case. It was made of dark, almost black, polymer, and was accompanied by a cleaning brush and two magazines that slotted into the gun’s handle. Each magazine held 17 rounds. In his hand the gun felt suitably death-dealing. Of course, his targets would be dead already, but he was certain headshots from this baby would stop them in their tracks nonetheless. He’d never fired a gun in his life, but he thought it couldn’t be that difficult. Besides, there was an owner’s manual. It gave the manufacturer’s name as being
GLOCK
. He searched for more ammunition, but there was none. He had 34 rounds. The chances of finding any more were virtually nil since the gun was such an antique. Old as it was, it was his only option: modern weapons interacted with brainware, only firing when in the hands of their registered owners, but this thing anyone could use. He prayed it still worked, and decided he’d use up to four rounds as test shots.

The music continued to play as he went into the next room, which was probably the master bedroom. There was a large, iron-framed bed clad in a thick bedspread with a floral design, and a wooden dressing table with a tilting oval mirror attached. Despite the old appearance of everything, he was reminded strongly of his parents’ bedroom back home. He placed the holdall on the floor and took a seat on the bed. Something about the room and the bed, or possibly the music and the rain on the window, made him remember one morning when he’d been a boy. He didn’t know exactly how old he’d been, but it was the first time he could recall talking about a topic that was to dominate his life.

His mother had been sitting in bed eating breakfast from a tray while his father worked downstairs. He thought that it must have been her birthday or Mother’s Day, since it wasn’t where she normally ate breakfast.

“Why does everyone have a computer in their head except me?” he’d asked her.
 

His mother placed her cutlery down purposefully, avoiding his gaze, looking as if she’d been expecting this moment yet was still taken aback it was here.

“Well, they tried to put a computer in you when you were younger, but you rejected it,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Aw, it wasn’t your fault, silly.”
 

“I don’t even remember it.”
 

“You were just a baby, darling. Three times they tried, and every time you got ill so they stopped.”
 

“But why?”

“They gave up. Three strikes: you’re out, darling.”

“No, why did I get ill?”

“Nobody knows. They said it must have been something to do with the way your body was made up, but they couldn’t say what. So you’re a little ol’ mystery to medical science, darling.”

“Won’t they try again?”

“No, darling. You’re too old now.”
 

He fell silent. She peered at him.

“You don’t
need
brainware, you know?” she said gently. “The human race survived perfectly well without it for millions of years. The only thing is you can’t control sickness or pain so well, so that’s why you have to look after yourself and make sure you take your pills – to keep your immune system nice and built up.”

“But there’s so much I can’t do.”
 

“Like what?” she asked, though she didn’t wait for a response. “You’re just as capable as anyone else, just as good. In fact, you’re something most people would give their eye teeth to be … do you know what it is?”
 

He shook his head.

“You’re special, darling,” she said. “You’re one in a million – more than one in a million. Don’t you see how special you are?”

He looked at her. There was so much he wanted to say, but he didn’t have the words. He wanted to tell her about the way other kids played games he couldn’t join in with; about how they asked him questions and laughed at how he didn’t know the answers; about the unending multitude of insulting names they had for him; about how he was an exile in a world of telepaths, making him different, not special, and being different wasn’t good; about how he was only a kid but somehow he knew that what he lacked had handed him a lifetime of heartache in its place; about the doubt and distrust and pity he saw in other people’s eyes – even his father’s eyes. Especially his father’s eyes.

There was so much he wanted to say to her, but instead he said, “Yes, I see.”

He hadn’t understood back then just how much worse it would get. The dirty looks, the name-calling, the exclusion from play were just for starters. Kids were cruel. When he was older they’d started inflicting physical pain on him, just to be entertained by his reaction. No matter how many times they were told not to do it by adults the tormenting continued. Children couldn’t understand the true hatefulness of pain. Nor, for that matter, could adults. He believed that, secretly, they were just as entertained by his squirms and yelps and angry remonstrations as the kids were. His entire adolescence had been like being forced to walk a winding, tripwire-strewn path while wearing a blindfold. There was always something new to single him out, always some new cross he alone had to bear. The hair that kept growing, no one skilled enough to cut it properly. The braces on his wayward teeth. The terrible acne that had marred his teenage skin. How jealous he’d been of everyone else. He could still feel it now: the crushing, crushing jealousy…

Well, no more, he thought. The time of Homo cyberneticus had come and gone, and the age of Homo sapiens had returned.

Looking around the room, he thought about the house’s owners again, feeling a strange kind of affection for them, as if they’d left behind all these possessions – the food and the books and the music and the gun – especially for him. They were his anonymous benefactors. He didn’t feel bad about taking their things: he felt they would have approved, since they would have approved of him. Unlike everyone else, they wouldn’t have minded about the technology missing from his body; in fact, they would have revelled in it, and maybe, with their love of all things old and vanished, they would have even envied him. They would have seen him as being 100 per cent human, 100 per cent natural (apart from the genetic modifications). To them, he would have been like a time traveller, reminiscent of the way the human race had once been: those ghosts by the billion who had lived fast, brief and pain-filled lives, who had borne witness to the passing of time written on each other’s faces, and for whom history had bequeathed a slew of epithets: the agers, the diers, the short-timers, the mortals. The plain old unlucky. They would have regarded him as somebody who was fascinatingly whole rather than pitifully deficient. They wouldn’t have assumed he was a mental cripple or a criminal. Perhaps for centuries they’d been living here, within easy walking distance, but he’d never gotten to meet them. And now he never would.

* * *

In the ground-floor living room he tested the weight of his holdall. It was heavy. He’d have trouble running with it if he had to. It was still raining, so he hoped he it wouldn’t come to that. He hefted the holdall onto his back and made sure the straps were comfortable.

He left the way he’d come in, slamming the door shut behind him. Instantly, he knew he’d made a mistake: he hadn’t even checked to see if the coast was clear before stepping outside. He felt eyes on him and heard a voice. He froze, eyes darting this way and that, the rain thudding irritatingly on the peak of his cap.

It was a moment before he saw it. Across the road, sitting on the arm of a bench under the shelter of a porch, was a female zombie. It was oriental-looking, with a dark but sickly-looking complexion and thick matted hair plastered to its scalp. Its clothes were torn and frayed and its blouse had flopped down on one side, revealing a bloodied breast. One hand was behind its back, while the other was slipped down the front of its skirt. The mercurial pinpoints of its pupils were locked onto him.

“You me fuck!” it shouted across the street in a coarse, heavy accent. “You me fuck! You want? You
fuck!
”

The hand down its skirt was moving; evidently it was playing with itself. He bristled with contempt and revulsion. He’d seen this kind before. He called them “honeytrappers”. The hand behind its back would be holding a knife or a hand tool or some other implement, and if he got close enough it would launch a frenzied attack on him with it. He’d seen it happen to zombies more than once. He stared at the creature with hatred blazing in his eyes. It was trying to lure him with the one thing it thought he couldn’t resist, mocking his mindless uncontrollable maleness, taunting him with its sex the way women always had. It was representative of the lot of them. They’d all known that people of an acybernetic persuasion made poor lovers, or at least the male ones did. What good was a man without computer-controlled climaxes and erections as indefatigable as Everard’s? But the trap had never stood a chance. He wasn’t a hormonal youngster any more; he’d be in his 100s soon. He’d done battle with his impulses and conquered them a long time ago. He wished he could use his test shots on the creature, but the gun wasn’t loaded and he didn’t know how to work the safeties yet. He’d have liked to have put a couple of bullets right between the bitch’s eyes.