Prophet Margin (6 page)

Officer Harvey rocked on his chair, plucking a vinyl retrodisc from a shelf above his head. In the gloomy confines of the Doghouse control room, he occupied a circular clearance zone amongst a morass of sandwich crumbs and pizza-boxes. Johnny and the Kid had unearthed themselves a pair of seats, well used to Harvey's slobbish ways. The man squinted at the disc's label, face screwing up.

"It's a public broadcast for the Science Channel," he announced. "'Professor Koszov' - that's your geek, right? - 'examining the dangers of unregulated mutation.'"

He looked up at Johnny with a grin. "Watched it earlier... Turns into a right old cock-up. Bomb goes off in the audience -
blam
, just like that. Great teevee"

Johnny's eyebrows rucked up. "Koszov's dead?"

"Nah, he survived - I checked the records. But he's gone. Walked right out of hospital and vanished."

"Anything else?" Kid Knee chimed-in, attempting to be useful.

Harvey shrugged. "There's all the usual stuff on the 'net - biography, family history, genetic-validity pass, credit accounts, yadda yadda."

"What about Grinn?" Johnny said. "No hint Koszov might be involved with him?"

"Ha! You wish." Harvey scratched himself absently. "Got a file wide as your arm on all the stuff Grinn's done, scams he's pulled, people he's exxed. You know how much info we got on the man himself?"

"Enlighten me."

"Half a lousy page. We got his surname, we got his dates in the Macrojail, we got his religion-"

"Religion?" Johnny frowned. "Doesn't sound like Grinn."

Harvey shrugged. "Usual story. All that time on the inside, nothing to do but think, blah-de-blah. Warden's report said the snecker 'found God'. Model prisoner after that."

Johnny grunted. "Right up until he fragged half the prison." He tapped the screen. "Let's see the vid, Harvey."

A slow grin spread across the controller's face.

"Well now... That's what you might call... dependent."

"On what?"

"On how much it means to you." Harvey rubbed his thumb and forefinger together: the universal sign of the Greedy Bastard.

"Don't sneck around," Johnny growled. "It's been broadcast, right? We can get our own copy." He half stood, prearing to leave. He hadn't often entered the Doghouse's Control Room and its flickering lights were making him feel like a prisoner in some insane disco.

"Public domain. Heh, heh, heh..." The officer shook his head. "Listen, this recording's classified material. Withheld from broadcast as police evidence. Good thing too, for you lot..."

Johnny sat again. "Meaning?"

"Meaning your incredible Vanishing-Professor had a lot of clout with the great unwashed. So up he stands to denounce mutants as a menace-" Harvey relished the word, "-and blam, some snecker blows up his stage show. You show that on tee-vee and you got anti-mutant riots on your hands, right there."

"So you think it's a civil rights thing?"

"What else?"

"How big was the explosion?"

Harvey grunted, waving the retrodisc expressively. "Big enough. Killed half the audience. No snecking way the cops're gonna let that out on BBQ1."

"So how did
you
get your hands on it?"

Harvey smirked and buffed the badge on his chest. "Carries a lot of weight, working for the GCC."
⁴

^{4. Galactic Crime Commission. (Or "Gimpishly Costumed Clowns", depending on which side of the legality-border one operated).}

Johnny rolled his eyes. "You bribed someone?"

"Yep. Three hundred creds, that little beauty cost. So cough up, mutie."

"The message was clear, Harvey..."

"That's right. You said you wanted as much info on this 'Koszov' scientist geek as I could find. 'We're in a real rush, Harv.' We'll be arriving at the Doghouse tomorrow. Have it ready.'" He grinned, brandishing the retrodisc. "So here it is. Now wedge me."

"Harvey, I said I wanted as much information as you could find... for
free
."

"Now wait a minute-"

"Harvey, we're broke. Every Dog in the agency's broke."

The officer folded his arms. "Won't wash, mutie. You just came back from a hunt. I got the invoice right here." He flourished a piece of paper. "What happened there, anyways? Says here the body was somewhat lacking in the head department."

"You tell me. Snecker's skull just upped and popped."

"Yeah, well. Makes no odds to the contract. You're flush."

"We had some... trouble." Johnny glanced at Kid Knee, struggling to keep his voice calm. The fat lug wasn't paying attention, staring off into space with a glazed expression. "Someone... someone crashed the rental. Bad takeoff. We lost our deposit."

Harvey smirked, flashing an amused glance at the Kid. "No shit?"

"No shit." Johnny tried not to grind his teeth. Balancing earnings with expenses was all very well, but clumsiness as a result of alcoholism wasn't conducive to a healthy profit.

"Too bad." Harvey shrugged, dropping the disc into a pocket of his uniform.

Alpha stared at him for a moment, thinking.

"I'm sorry about this Harvey," he said, eyes beginning to glow. "I need to see that recording."

White light filled Officer Harvey's vision, and everything went fuzzy.

"What," the man said, "is a mutant?"

His eyes twinkled behind thick omnispecs; transforming an apparently benevolent countenance into a monstrous facade that was eighty per cent eyeball. The audience rustled uncomfortably.

"The answer," he said, "is that we are all mutants."

At this the audience's composure shattered, eliciting a volley of startled hisses, breathless denials and one or two garrulous curses, artfully filtered by the sound-system AI.

"Without mutation," the scientist persisted, "we'd never have crawled from the sea. We'd never have left the primordial puddle, as it were. Mutation is
change
, ladies and gentlemen.

"Of course, once in a while, it creates a circumstance whereby a species is improved - making it... say, hardier, more efficient. Those are the specimens that proliferate and, by surviving and breeding, gradually effect evolutionary change." He shrugged. "Generally speaking, of course, mutation creates very little except a godawful mess."

On cue the viewscreen behind him illuminated with the cluttered heraldry of the "Department of Genetic Abnormalities": crossed pipettes and test tubes beneath a rampant British Lion - albeit one with five legs and a scorpion's tale.

"Latterly, mutation has had a helping hand. With the abundance of radioactive material in our environment abnormalities are no longer the remit of fate and time. Mutation - and therefore evolution - can be synthesised."

The audience's discomfort was growing, muted anger filling the auditorium little by little.

"My department was commissioned," the scientist continued, "to demonstrate the arbitrary effects of mutation in a simple manner. We selected as our model species
Prionace glauca
, as seen here." Behind him the heraldic crest dissolved, exchanged by a videfeed of a blue watery expanse. A torpedo body slunk across the screen, stippled by sunlight from above. The audience fell silent, transfixed by the beady-eyed grace of the creature, its missile-head underslung by a wedged mouth, striated by ranks of narrow teeth. It gyrated, ventral muscles propelling it from the image, leaving only a desolation of shadows and bubbles in its wake.

"The blue shark." the scientist said, gratified by the audience's attention. "In its natural state it is programmed with just two imperatives: survival and reproduction. If we are to judge the relative success of a mutation we must do so in terms of a specimen's ability to pursue 'life goals'.

"In conjunction with the department of Cloning Studies we produced a batch of ten thousand embryos and exposed them to Strontium-90. When fully formed, ten months later, we began to collate results. They were... revealing."

The image on the screen changed to an overhead view of a dissection table. Seeing the shape arranged thereon, tagged and labelled as though paused halfway through a messy explosion, a collective gasp arose from the audience.

"Non-viable life-forms," the scientist intoned, sighing. The photograph changed, and changed again, each time revealing a new specimen, a new failure. "Approximately half died during gestation," he said, voice heavy. "The rest were ridiculous things. Pitiful."

Many of the dead shapes in the photographs were not even recognisable as ichthyoidal: hair replaced scales, valve glands replaced ventral fins, lesions and ulcers marked necrotic fishflesh. For every one that had three heads, another had no head at all.

"Of them all," the old man said eventually, hands gripping the lectern, "we judged that just one per cent were mutated in a beneficial fashion."

Again the screen changed, now showing video footage of small shark bodies in motion. In the first clip a specimen closed with a shoal of jittering fish, harshly lit in a wide tank. As it approached its jaws distended, mouth stretching with elastic slowness. As quick as lightning it ratcheted shut, gills billowing, devouring the entire shoal. The audience cried out, startled.

The next specimen circled as technicians fired bullets into its body. The ragged edges of each wound sealed with an osmotic slurp and the predator appeared oblivious to the barrage. The next used a prehensile psuedopod to lasso a fat fish, dragging it towards its grinning maw. The next swam too fast for the camera to follow. One fired tiny bolts of electricity from its dorsal surface, another writhed and ejected egg sacs in an endless stream.

The images formed a cavalcade of freakishness, each one bolstering the audience's outrage. The cameradrones paid lip service to their revulsion: here a shot of a man shaking his head, there a student flaring her nostrils venomously.

The scientist sighed and tapped at a control on the lectern. The screen went black. "Ten thousand specimens," he repeated, voice carefully magnified to drown the indignant crowd, "and all of them - bar one - have since been destroyed. At my order."

That
silenced them.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, omnispecs catching at the light. "I was commissioned to carry out this study to demonstrate that mutation is not an intrinsically evil phenomenon, that it is a random force, that we cannot continue to persecute those who are afflicted by it, and so on. "In all conscience, I cannot do so."

Silence filled the studio. A hundred quizzical expressions peered from the shadows, mouths gaping.

"One of the specimens," the man said, "was extraordinary. One out of ten thousand. It surpassed the cr... No, that's not true... It
redefined
the criteria. Mutation is not restricted solely to physicality, one must also consider intelligence, perception, even dimensionality."

He struck a control on the lectern. A section of the flooring began to rise; a dais that ascended out of the floor. The audience craned their heads, watching its slow appearance with morbid fascination.

It was an aquarium tank.

"Mutants are not intrinsically evil," the scientist said, voice pompous, "but they are a liability. This final specimen has withstood every attempt at its destruction and continues to grow exponentially. Government commission or not, I would be a liar and charlatan if I stood here and endorsed the harmlessness of mutantkind. They are a menace to our society - whether they intend to be or not.

"Behold!" he shrieked. "Strontium evolution!" His finger stabbed towards the rising container.

Which was very, very empty.

The scientist said: "What's-"

Then something exploded, smoke blotted itself across the image and the transmission died with a
zip
.

Two minutes later the Doghouse controlroom opened and Johnny stepped out, followed by Kid Knee. Officer Harvey propelled himself into the bright light of the station's central concourse with a bemused expression, blinking.

"Listen, Harvey," Johnny held up the vinyl disc with a good-natured grimace, "You sure we can't give you something for this? I'd feel like a heel, just taking it off your hands."

"No, no, don't be silly!" Harvey's slightly confused grin threatened to decapitate him. "I won't hear of it! Think of it as a gift, eh?"

"You're all heart, Harv."

"If you say so, Mr Alpha. Where you boys headed next?"

Johnny threw a sidelong glance at Kid Knee - the hunched figure continued to stare vacantly into space, not listening. Johnny had planned to "accidentally" forget to take him along. Given that his discernible lack of a head was liable to make him stand out amongst a crowd (and that his binge-drinking had already cost them a very expensive rental-car deposit), it seemed only sensible to... take a break. But, as always, Johnny's pity flared up to engulf him: the Kid's downturned expression had about it the air of a puppy expecting to be kicked and Johnny couldn't bring himself to be the kicker.

"Earth, Harvey," he said, not looking back at the officer. "My partner and I are going to Earth."

Back in the office, Harvey sank into the folds of his haemorrhoid-configured easychair. He felt vaguely as though he'd been drinking.

There was something he'd been meaning to do. Something about money, maybe? Nothing was forthcoming from the depths of his mind, so he shrugged and peeled the remains of his sandwich off the console.

Dataviews from cameras across the Doghouse sparkled before him. On the screens, ogres chatted affably with hairy abominations, too-many-limbed muties arm-wrestled boredly, a crowd of optimistic freakos watched the crime report channel on the off chance of a big bounty announcement. Harvey replaced the sandwich on the side; his appetite had gone.

"Got nothing against 'em," he mumbled, as if to justify himself. "Just... wouldn't want one marrying my sister, that's all I'm saying."

On the central screen, Johnny Alpha and his pet freak strolled towards the departure lounge. The GCC ran a two-hourly transport service between London and the Doghouse, allowing staff to commute and tourists to ride from the surface. Since the previous day, when that sneckawful fly-on-the-wall documentary with Nickle Reggo had aired, ticket sales had gone through the roof. Harvey was already learning to find malicious enjoyment watching the visitors wondering about on the cameras. They came expecting excitement, weirdness, cutting edge technology, the fight against crime, blah, blah, blah. What they got was a rather bland space station with dodgy heating, no good restaurants and a sneckload of mutants doing nothing - and all for fifty creds a ticket. Suckers.