White and Other Tales of Ruin (50 page)

“
Come with me and give me a chance to show you.”

She was silent again, staring at him, and Tom felt as though he was being appraised inside and out. Could she see inside? he wondered. Could she penetrate to the deepest parts of him, the secret centres where even he did not hold reign?

“
I’d risk everything,” she said. Tom wasn’t sure whether it was a statement of fact or intent.

“
Then come —”

“
I can’t, not now. Kiss me.”

Tom leaned forward and kissed Honey, and she tasted of her name. Smoke and cheap food and himself, she tasted of that too, but it was all sweet. He held her head and pulled her to him, kissing her, his eyes closed, the skin of his palms and fingers tingling where he touched her skin.

She pulled away at last. Her eyes were wide and moist, her breathing fast. She glanced at the clock. “Time’s up.”

Tom sighed heavily, wondering what to say. He was running out of time and needed a plan, but his brain didn’t function. He shook his head angrily, furious at himself, unsure of where the fury came from.

And then Honey saved him.

“
Tomorrow,” she said. “Lunchtime. I’ll say here instead of going down the street for food. There’s a back door, down an alley next to
Hell’s Bookstore
on Ashley Street. You know it?”

“
I’ll find it.”

“
Come here then. And take me away.”

“
You’re sure, you believe me, you’re sure?” Tom gushed, stumbling over own thoughts.

There were footsteps on the landing outside the door, and the handle rattled.

“
Go!” Honey said. And in an instant she was a ragged, hard whore once more, a plastic bitch built for sex and sucking and little more, sitting back with her legs splayed and another cigarette in her hand. Tom despised the transformation, and he suddenly wondered whether she’d been kidding him all along. The doubt was reinforced when he tried to discern hope in her eyes: there was nothing there. Only a vagueness, a vacancy, waiting to be pumped full of the desires and fantasies of her next client.

“‘
The
fuck
?” a voice said from behind him. “
Time’s up, shithead
.”

Tom turned around, and Hot Chocolate Bob stood in the doorway.

“
I was just leaving.”

“
Best you do. Got a lawyer outside, real slimy type, top dog, criminal defence, ready to stick it in Honey’s ass. Like that, don’t you Honey?” He grinned as he spoke, and the paleness of his skin was countered by his black, rotten teeth. He was bald, no eyebrows or facial hair, and his eyes were networks of broken veins. Tom wondered which drugs he did. Probably all of them.

“
You know I do, Hot Chocolate Bob.” Her voice was low and sultry. It dripped sex.

Tom didn’t want to turn around and see Honey like this. He looked at the pimp instead and felt his rage building, percolating through the layers of apathy he’d drawn around himself over the years and filling him with energy.

“
Out. Now.” The pimp wasn’t joking. Tom could see the bulge of a piece on his belt and his eyes glittered like loose diamonds, the sign of a military-level optical chop. If he’d had his eyes done he’d likely had other stuff as well, and Tom had no desire to mix it with him right now.

Later, maybe.

But not now.

“‘
Bye sweetie,” Honey called mockingly as he passed the pimp at the door. “Your juice tasted good, Honey wants more, come back soon.”

He needed to turn around and see her one more time. Just in case he was wrong. Just in case she’d lied. But the pimp had pushed past him into the room, and the two of them were muttering together like lovers, and there were wet sounds that Tom didn’t wish to know.

“…
like it like that…” Honey said.

Tom hurried away from the room, passed a dozen more just like it, and walked quickly outside to find escape.

The sun was setting by the time he approached his street, and the night people were out. It was as if the dusk dictated style: the roads heading into town filled, and the people almost all wore black. A dark tide of humanity flowed into the city, accompanied by the clinking of chains, the buzzing of zips, the musical tinkling of jewellery, visible or otherwise. Some of the people had been professionally chopped — eight feet tall, three arms, four breasts, one guy with a huge dick swinging unhindered between his feet — but most had chosen merely to adapt themselves. Tattoos and piercings were the least of it. Amputations, scoops of flesh removed, dyed skins, divided penises, all manner of mutilation was at home in these crowds. Nothing was a surprise.

It made Tom wonder just where these people would go next.

He’d seen it all before, but it never ceased to fascinate him. That people should act like this — tear themselves apart, wound for pleasure or pleasure through pain — confused him. But sometimes, just sometimes, he wondered whether being artificial simply meant that he could never understand.

They were heading for the clubs. There were dozens in the city, most legal, a few not. They buzzed every night and bled every day, bled money to the law and literal blood from their cellars and other hidden ‘rooms’. Tom had visited them a few times in his wanderings and he’d seen some things … some awful things. The nearest he came to these clubs now was the occasional visit to a brothel, and always,
always
, a brothel where the whores were artificials. After what he’d seen once or twice in club cellars he had no wish to know more of what people could and would do to themselves. And to each other.

Now, walking against the flow, his vision darkened by the sunset and the stares of those passing by, Tom felt doubt stabbing at him.

It was cruel, this doubt, because it was selective in what it recalled. He knew that Honey was beautiful, but try as he might he could not see her face. He could imagine her breasts, her thighs, her flat stomach and moist pussy, but her face eluded him. And her voice, that was gone too, swallowed along with the setting sun.
Like it like that.
He could remember the words but not the voice that had spoken them. He grabbed at his head, trying to save the memories. Hands over his ears to stop any more of her voice from escaping. Over his eyes, to hold her image in.

He walked into someone and felt the sharp sting of metal spikes picking at his clothes. The person shoved by before he had a chance to look properly, for which he was glad.

“
Almost home,” he said to himself.

“
Home is for pussies,” a voice mocked from the crowd, but Tom had no idea which of them had spoken.

He turned into his street, breathing a sigh of relief when the flow of black-clad people reduced to a trickle. He passed a final couple of leathered-up teenagers outside his house. The boy had a pierced tongue, the girl was bare breasted and frowning with the weight of chains connecting her nipples to her eyelids. They both smiled at Tom and nodded a polite greeting, the girl’s breasts jiggling with the gesture. He knew their parents. He wondered if their parents knew them.

“
Honey,” he said as he palmed his doorlock. The flat was small and compact, big enough to live in but not too large to become unmanageable. “Honey, won’t you tell me the truth?” Doubt again, buzzing at him like ghostly bees, flitting past his ears and eyes and mouth as he tried to remember her voice, her face, her taste. It felt as if she was a dream, fading away as the day wore on.

Would she be there for him? If he smuggled himself into that rank building tomorrow at lunchtime, would she be waiting with her bags packed, ready to run off with him and risk the wrath of that bastard Hot Chocolate Bob?

Tom doubted it. True, his existence felt different today. It was fresher, brighter, Honey had brought something in that had been missing or sought for so long. Not only love, but a sense of importance in himself. A sense of living, not just existing. The sun had seemed warmer and closer upon leaving the brothel, even through the smog. The streets were cleaner, the smiles more real, the adverts flashing across billboards less cynical and more concerned.

Yes, things felt so different.

But good things never happened to Tom. That’s not the way his life was built, it wasn’t how his hat had been put on. Bad things clung to him like shit to shoes.

Would she be there? He doubted it. But the very last thing he would do was not go, just to find out.

He listened to the sounds of the night, trying to perceive just how they were different tonight from the night before. There were sirens and shouts, drunken youths singing in the streets, buzzed artificials screaming as the bad charges slowly but surely cauterised their insides. At one point Tom heard gunshots from somewhere deep in the city.

By three in the morning he admitted defeat and left his bed. He logged onto the net and sat back, closing his eyes as he tried to find somewhere to go, a place that would be safe for Honey and him. It was a fantasy, of course, and he knew it. Dream tropical islands awash with happy-ever-after were not for her kind.

Not for him, either.

Later, as the sun smudged the smog in the east and turned it pink, Tom connected to the net point, closed his eyes and accessed his recharge site. He input the correct code, sat back and felt tiredness recede as his power cells gulped their fill.

Tom always watched the sunrise. However tired or run-down he was, he’d see the sun climb out of the industrialised eastern suburbs of the city and heave itself skyward on pollutant legs. It never failed to cheer him, however depressed he felt, and this morning it worked more than ever.

Because he was in love.
Love
. That elusive, haunting myth. The place he’d never thought he would be.

Love
.

The Baker had finally done it, even if it had taken fifteen years to have effect. If only he were alive to see it now. Tom smiled and closed his eyes for a moment, remembering his old friend. And then he thought of Honey and opened his eyes again.

The morning washed last night’s doubts away. Tom made himself some toast and sausages, drank a pint of orange juice, visited the toilet four times before the sun had cleared the chimneys and sprung free into the sky above the city. The smog was always dissipated in the morning. It was as if industry paid worship to the sun for the first hour of the day, and then when the main shifts began, worship turned to profit. The sun never seemed to mind. It came and went, came and went. It was the reservoirs and food chains and fields that were protesting, and strenuously. Tom was fortunate enough to be able to afford lab-grown food, but there were many who were not.

Honey, for one. What diseases could she have? What malfunctions waiting to happen, tumours biding their time, rots working away at her joints and flesh?

“
I love her,” Tom said, shaking his head to dispel the negative thoughts. And he said it again, because he liked the sound and feel of the word in his mouth.

The Baker had given him the virus of love fifteen years before. A clumsily written and input programme, Tom had actually felt it take root inside his head, spreading electron-tentacles, feelings its way into his artificial cortex and brain-stem … and then vanishing as it sought to establish itself fully. He’d never thought it would have taken so long. The Baker — Tom had never even known his real name, great friends though they were — would have been a happy man today.

He spent the next hour sitting at his window and looking out over the city. He hadn’t found anywhere to flee to, but he was sure that they’d find a good place, a safe place. He had no idea of what to do if Hot Chocolate Bob confronted them in their escape, but he was confident that they could slip away unseen. The thought that Honey would have changed her mind — or, worse, had been playing with him all along — came once, and once only. He killed it. He chased it down into the pits of his mind, drowning it in other, more established forms of hopelessness and fear.

Totally unprepared, lightened by a love he had never been designed to feel, Tom set out just before noon to rescue the plastic bitch that had stolen his heart.

The change in the streets was as breathtaking as ever. Last night they had been flooded with people in black, a tide of leather and metal and mutilation with one single, enveloping thought: pleasure. It was as if that flow of people was a solitary organism, pushing through between buildings and parks and walls, penetrating the city to plant its thoughts and intentions, leaving the pale residue of hopelessness behind as dawn drove it away.

By morning, the streets belonged to the workers. People thronged the pavements and cars coughed their way along roads, filled with people heading for work. Thousands flocked east towards the factories — those who could not afford monorail or tube tickets — with many more filtering into office buildings or sweatshops built in deep, cavernous basements. Steam hissed from manholes and there was the intermittent
thud
of accumulated gases burning off in the sewers. Something flew by just over Tom’s head, and he saw the trailing heat-stick of a policeman. The platform dipped and bobbed before accelerating away and disappearing down a side street, aiming to ruin someone’s day.