Smoking in the haze of a Waisheng dump; the club’s name was JET OFF. Old junkyard in the midst of their side of town, near Prosperity Plaza where it all stank of old machine parts and rust, where once the great ships that had threaded together astro-socialism were hewn from material into godly forms, enormous rocket ships and soaring shuttles and the grand shape of the battlecruisers that had mounted cannons that could level whole planets; now, due to budget cuts to all parts of the federal military except internal security, all those ships had been scrapped or scuttled or given to colonial authorities who let them rot. But the enormous ugly factories remained and JET OFF was within one of them, still occupied in part by half the hull of a StarCrusher, knife-shaped hulking military-industrial corpse with all its guns stripped bare looking naked and sad. Beneath that – beneath the walkways and the old machines and the chains and levers and abandoned security systems – were the masses of a Waisheng rave, all fucked up and losing it. Waisheng had dovetailed with Junsha itself, with the primitivist ideology of men like Dragon – return to mecha-caveman syndrome! etc. – so now you had this, periodic blood orgies all over the old artificial guts of the dead world.
Marxist-Ghanist fetishization of tech had warped these kids the wrong way, spat them out into a post-machinery universe where unless you wanted to rot away in one of the old industrials pits that were falling apart by the year that didn’t even produce much of any worth anyway where all there was to do was get out or die, and for them the memories of Ghani’s fabled robofucker paradise had mingled with their pigshit-stupid nationalism for this decaying shell of a mining colony, so that sad old Junsha had become the cunt or cock of a teenage them-they, was the hermaphrodite murderous perfect body of an old StarCrusher, was the bile sprayed out by smoke stacks and sludge-pounders, was their own diseased flesh coming to conquer the universe by doing a lot of drugs and getting laid and fighting.
They were doing all three alright; Mel had come here on the cheap bus into the nasty part of town and now safely inside she could catch hudie the intravenous butterfly drug and TapeDeck which scrambled your brains with sound files and a whole lot of terrible heroin-derivatives and Hello, Junsha’s own petrol-derived homebrew alcohol, named after a time in the socialist period when official John Katanga had come in to quell some or other unrest and being dead drunk had gotten off his ship and stood there before the union reps and the workers and the local officials and stared with glazed-over eyes at the lot of them and said “hello” in a strained voice and then done nothing for thirty seconds and then fallen over and died of alcohol poisoning. She could see the sex in flickers of light, wet squelching of bodies together to the music which was holocaustic grinding, little moans and oohs and ahhs and etc. And the fighting, the violence of the Waisheng, was not as persistently visible but rose in peaks over everything else as someone decided someone had to get hurt and there were shrieks and slap of flesh – the other kind – and then blood, and Goodwill’s boys wheeled out the loser and let the winner come as they rubbed gore all over themselves.
Well, some of that was her imagination. The red light made all of it more lurid; hot touch of crimson across old metal, melded bodies, every sense flooded with death-colour. The feeling of a man’s face torn apart by her fingers. YOU LOVED HER.
“Love her. Present tense.”
SHE OUTGREW YOU. IT IS APPARENT.
“Well, I never grew anyway.”
ALSO APPARENT.
“How’d you figure?”
YOU STILL TALK TOO FREQUENTLY TO YOUR FATHER.
“Fuck off.” She smoked and dribbled coloured fumes up towards the far-off roof. Pounding music in her ears but she could hear the invader just fine. A PHRASE I FOUND.
“Oh? When you were digging around in my head?”
‘BE READY TO SERVE THE PEOPLE’. THE SLOGAN OF YOUR YOUNG PIONEER MOVEMENT.
“Oh, yeah. Every morning.”
YOU HAVE UNDERGONE MUCH INTERNAL POLITICAL STRUGGLE. YOUR SPECIES.
“Yeah.”
WE KNOW NOTHING OF THIS.
“Well, I’m sure we don’t know what you guys get up at home. Wars are like that.”
ONLY YOU CALL IT A WAR.
“So what do you call it?”
WE MADE A NEW WORD FOR WHAT YOU DO TO US. ITS EQUIVALENT IN YOUR TONGUE WOULD BE SOMETHING LIKE THE PHRASE ‘THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE STORM OF BLOOD’.
“It occurs to me,” she studied the throbbing crowd below her from her walkway, atop a spiral staircase leading up from the bar where she had just slammed back a Hello and now was feeling that furnace-burn in her chest and feeling a little bit ready for what she had do, and she looked for the men – Waisheng men, with their augs like Shan but not poncy musicians but killing machines – who would help her with getting into the downstairs, “that if you’re learning all my shit I could learn some of yours. I could learn all the secrets of the Asura.”
YOU COULD.
She smiled. “Do I want to?”
YOU DO.
There! Baldy giant in the area near the StarCrusher’s left side close to where the fourth gun battery had been. Mel tossed her cigarette into the crowd. “Well, perhaps later. Come on, Invader. We’ve got work to do.” Back into the crowd into sweat and oil and booze and drugsmoke, churning humanity all around her; but she was a philosophe, n’était-elle pas? Used to gliding over all. A hand on her waist a face leering at her chest. Mel slid through the masses and through the thud of the music and towards the bald-headed giant, who she saw was talking in a low mod-voice to a young dark-skinned woman who was buzzed off of her skull and whose vest had come loose so her tits were hanging out in the open. It wasn’t Andy but thinking of it that way helped, got her blood up. Mel parted the crowd and was before them. The girl with lidded drugged-up eyes saw her first and then, following that vague gaze, the giant did the same. His skin was Axolotl-hue and his eyes were behind dark shades and his not inconsiderable muscle was wrapped in tight leather and as well as all that he had fangs in his mouth. “Wanna join in, new meat?”
“Do I?” she spat. “Here for the boss-man, bozo.”
The giant turned. His forked tongue flickered in and out. “The boss-man? Who is it, then? This is who, calling for our boss?”
“Melanie Laurent-Gaston.” she said, double-barrels of her surname out and aimed straight at his forehead. The giant did not quite know what this meant but knew that it was significant. He glanced down at the buzzed-out girl and then back at Mel. “I’m a writer.” she said helpfully. “I’m going to write about Shaft 4B.”
He went all rigid and scary. “What?” he spat over the music. The drugged girl glanced at Mel with impatience. “Let me talk to your boss, huaidan.” Mel said. The giant wrestled with himself. He looked down a lot at the girl whose hand was sort of brushing against the leather of his coat near the crotch area. He frowned. “Come with me. New meat.” So Mel came with him down through the trapdoor – she had been to JET OFF before, she knew the route – and into the tunnel beneath, which was framed by hissing spitting walls of old piping that only sometimes jizzed out hot white air that would burn a man’s face off. The giant hunched over warned her when this would happen, holding her back with one arm as the steam broke free and howled and then bidding her to continue afterwards. It was not pleasant; she guessed that was part of the point, that Boss Goodwill who was – just for the invader she thought this – the de facto leader of Junsha was mostly in that position because of his reputation, which was the reputation of being an absolute fucking lunatic who neither militia or union or company or far-off colonial governor dared to cross. Mel thought that this was mostly all reputation. She thought that if the gamble was between that and waiting for the invader to involuntarily eat her brain then the odds weren’t great but were probably better than nothing. She thought hey, that high chick had been pretty, should have given her a number-
“Here.” the giant growled. The iron door before them bathed in severe emergency light – even redder than upstairs somehow – looked like it had been salvaged from a Planetary Navy submarine, or maybe from the StarCrusher upstairs. He banged hard on the door with one hand and the sound echoed all the way back down the steam tunnel. The door clicked and with a long hydraulic hiss then swung inward. All that was beyond was darkness. Mel for the first time had some misgivings. ARE YOU SURE THIS IS A GOOD IDEA? the invader asked. “No.” she whispered. “It isn’t.” And she left the giant behind and stepped through the portal to hell.
Beyond was a wide rectangular chamber of grated metal and tangled piping, lit by emergency red. Mel’s boots clanged on the floor. A figure emerged from behind one of the pipes, a shadow with red eyes. They watched one another. “You wish to see the boss.” it hissed. Not that scary; standard-issue stealth combat op augs, the stuff militiamen got when they worked for gangsters. Of course she was not a militiaman but she did have a monster living in her skull. “Why?”
“I’m a writer.” she said again. “Melanie Laurent-Gaston. I do net-blogging.”
“Never heard of you.”
“The big man outside had, and he shoved me in here, so obviously-”
“Obviously,” the shadow spat, “it would be very easy to knock you over and cut your pants open and give you a good hard fucking to death right here on the metal, like you deserve.” Slight edge to his voice that she thought was that of hudie, the red kind that made people talk about giving others a good hard fucking to death and so on. Her fist tightened. “So enough with the self-important reporter act.” the shadow said. “If you want to speak to the boss about some book you’re writing-”
“About Shaft 4B.” she said. The shadow flickered, tensed. A blade emerged from its side hovering there as a piece of glimmering silver. “About helping the company to violate union-agreed safety protocols by bringing in offworld workers. I wrote about it. Didn’t publish it. I want to talk to – to Mr. Goodwill about it. Okay?”
“Why didn’t you publish it?” the shadow asked. Then it chuckled, a low sound like metal scraping across metal. “Oh, I see. Very well, little chick. I suppose it can’t hurt. But if I get the boss’s permission I’m very much going to give you a good hard fucking, you understand? To death.” Then it was gone, a presence vanished into thin air without so much as a sound. She exhaled and realized she hadn’t even noticed herself inhaling. BRAVE, the invader said. Melanie swallowed and with careful steps moved across the chamber, her eyes scanning every spot within the gloom for a suggestion of the artificial darkness of the shadow. She didn’t find it and soon she was on the other side of the chamber and there beneath a halogen was a small one-person lift. Her hand tapped the button and the doors shuddered open. Inside the floor was plush red and the walls were wrapped in leather. Melanie stood and watched the doors close and she saw at the last second the shadow there again, crimson eyes burning as it bid her goodbye. Intimidation, she told herself. Waisheng Power was built on theatre; it was all sleight of hand. These were reasonable businesspeople who dressed up as monsters, or else they wouldn’t have taken over the colony in the last few decades and she already would have had to kill Andy back at the Red House. Their power was built on cold hard politics and they were not psychopaths. They were rational. THEY MIGHT NOT BE SO RATIONAL IF YOU KILL THEIR BOSS.
“I know.” she said.
YOU REALLY DID WRITE AN ARTICLE ABOUT THAT CRIME OF THEIRS. The lift wobbled and shook as it took her deeper and deeper into the earth. “Yes.”
BUT YOU DIDN’T PUBLISH IT.
“Yes.”
WHY?
“In case I ever had to do anything really stupid.” The lift dinged. Mel swallowed. Both the giant and the shadow had left her with her gun – was that hubris or were they somehow that reckless? Or maybe it wouldn’t even matter. Her grandfather told her: every gangster out there is smarter than you, stronger than you, meaner than you. Even if they’re not – really, they’re not – you should tell yourself that they are. Because the ones who really are – that little number of assholes who make it to the top of such a brutal game – will fuck you up worse than you can possibly imagine, if you read them the wrong way. The doors opened and:
And the room was gilded and splendid, built in the style of a noble house from old earth, a grand piano over here and a grand four-poster bed there, an enormous chandelier above shining with light that as well floated in the air (cosmetic nano-lights, popular amongst the mega-rich – M.) and spread its brilliance to every surface, a filter across the room and the lanterns and the bookshelves and the great window on the far side which looked out over one of the old mining veins, a chasm leading to abyssal nowhere on the other side of borderless glass. A house built at the centre of the earth. In the middle of this was a pool surrounded by brilliant crimson flowers and a Japanese-style rockery with a small Shinto shrine, the one concession to the orientalism of Waisheng – and rising from the pool to greet her was the great chiselled hairless body of Boss Goodwill, master of Junsha. Six foot two and hewn of iron, scarred all over his flesh to show that these were not augs and that this body had been used for violence as both giver and receiver, with a prayer bead bracelet on his left wrist and his thin facial features glittering with a real pleasure as he saw her, he walked to the drying station, this enormous all-natural mixed-blood Eurasian specimen, and as the fans dried him he plucked a silken kimono from the rack next to it and threw it loosely over himself, tying it at the waist so that his enormous cock was a little hidden from view. Then he walked down the wooden walkway through the centre of the room to come to her. “Miss Gaston.” he said in his booming voice. “Bonsoir!”
Mel had met him before. Three times; first time had been a press conference for the announcement of Parajit Khan’s candidacy for the job of governor five years back, when he had been there shaking hands with Khan and with the militia boss Frank Geist and Eddie Chenevier of the Junsha Mining Company, pearly white smile and smart tightly-fitted business suit, when Mel then an idealist working for the People’s Daily had sought to get in and ask the boss of Waisheng Power about what he thought about the whole thing (she had been very naïve, that girl – M.) and he had given her that lovely smile and said that, hey, whatever the people voted for. The second time had been again at a press event, when he had been there for Khan’s second term and she had been much drunker and more tired, just after the election bomb but before this had really gotten her to screw with Andy and move out into the barrens; she had seen him kindly asking old Mei-mei Steiner, last union boss before Andy, the battleaxe with the grey hair and former Socialist League party secretary, how her daughters were doing, the two of them together in the lobby of the Revolution Hotel. The third meeting had been in that same hotel the next night when Mel had really been failing at the journalism thing, completely and utterly drunk with no story and no notes and half a hudie vial spazzing around in her veins. It had been in the bathroom and he had been pissing in a urinal while she had been using the squat toilet, and she had come out and leant over to look at his cock which had looked very big set against his bright white trousers the day before and she had asked him: “Holy shit, is that thing real?”
“Hello.” she said. “Mr. Goodwill.” He walked around the room and went to the drinks dispenser, where he was gifted a small glass with a little gin and tonic squirted into it out of a nozzle. “You’re looking better these days.” he said. He handed the glass to her and then took one for himself and he stood before that big ole dick half out of his kimono. “I saw you were on your way in, and I knew you were a respectable journalist so I thought ‘what the hey’. He raised the glass to her, eyes glittering. “I know you’re always – were always, before you limited yourself to the world of post-revolutionary political journals – disparaging of the organisation and I in your prose, but I think you’re at least sincere about your objections. Not only another hack looking for a way into the inner circle.” Perfect Standard; precise Waisheng kind of voice.
“T-thank you.” she said. She drank gin and tonic.
He allowed himself a slight frown. Mel could see it – perfect muscle control, the expert movements of a performer. He was frowning in a way you’d need a fucking microscope to figure out the exact physiological details of but nevertheless it was a frown, so subtle that it was beautiful. “Which is why I’m disappointed,” he said, “that it seems you’re here to barter for favours over something you’ve written about the terrible accident at Shaft 4B all those years ago.”
“You knew-?” she began.
“Please. There’s cameras everywhere. And within everyone. The whole place is wired. I know you’re here to argue about something to do with that. And I know you brought a gun. I know you, Melanie. May I call you Melanie?”
“Most people call me Mel.”
Now a little smile. A perfectly charming smile. Goodwill was close to her on purpose with his masculine enormity overwhelming her his perfume – jasmine – sticking to her nostrils his deep soothing voice haunting her ears. “So let’s talk business. What is it that you want, Mel?” Her hand twitched. She realised where it was going – straight to the gun. “No.” she whisper-spat, but the arm was not hers. SO CLOSE.
“Not now!”
NOW. I DON’T WANT TO FEEL ANY OF THIS ANYMORE. THE OBJECTIVE IS IN FRONT OF US. NOW OR NEVER.
“Mel?” Goodwill asked. “I hope you’re not thinking of-”
“Don’t you fucking-”
NOW!
She drew the gun and fired and the bullet clanged off of the sword – what the fuck he has a sword – and she was knocked onto her ass by a sweep of one of his enormous arms. All of this happened so fast that the pain came a second later, sharp sting where her head had cracked against the floor on the way down. Naked and wielding a katana Goodwill loomed over her, pressing his elbow against her throat. “Disappointing.” he said. He leant down, one knee between her legs. “Do you know, Miss Gaston, for all of your articles singing the praises of the social welfare policies, state-led economic dynamism, and general intangible sense of comradely solidarity of the old socialist Eurasian Federation, you have not once written on the topic of the New Men of the Shikaaree Program? Those advanced test-tube infants bred to be the finest Eurasian ubermenschen possible. Many of us died off after the end of the Socialist League, but you have unfortunately found yourself committed, for some reason, to trying to kill one of the few remaining specimens in existence. I do not know if it is personal hatred or some political mission that has driven you to such an exciting form of suicide, but I would recommend ceasing it now.”
“Fuck you.” she spat. FUCK YOU.
He grinned. “I will not kill you. You beautiful creature. I’m only going to tell you – etch it into the very nerve endings of your splendid body – never to try such a foolish thing again.” He reached out and snatched the gun from her grip and tossed it aside and it landed with a clatter against the wood. The air sparkled with brilliant illumination. Goodwill stood and she gasped for air and he held onto his sword, the blade shining. He was still very handsome. Mel lay there on her ass massaging her throat. “Clothes off, Mel.” Goodwill said. DO IT, the invader said, and she felt herself beginning to get unnaturally, uncomfortably horny. MATE WITH HIM. THEN WHEN HIS GUARD IS DOWN WE RIP HIS THROAT OUT WITH OUR TEETH. “No.” she said.
Goodwill cocked his head. “No?”
“Not to you. To-”
MELANIE WE ARE GOING TO KILL HIM NOW. THEN YOU CAN GO HOME.
“No!” she said, and she dug her nails into the sides of her arms and scraped, trying to dispel whatever the fucking thing was doing to her nervous system with a little bit of pain. YES. The pain only made it worse actually – whatever this was, this cocktail of sensations that was confusing her like headlights hit a deer, a convulsing spasming kind of pain/joy, and she realised at the last second that the invader was trying to knock her out, trying to overwhelm her so it could do – “This is my fucking body, you-” the glass of gin and tonic had fallen and shattered and she found a shard of it and scraped it across her arm, sting of real pain and fresh blood DO NOT FIGHT IT MELANIE I AM TRYING TO HELP YOU (you are not! you fucking parasite! – M.) and it wasn’t enough and she lifted up the bloodstained glass shimmering crimson transparency in the light and she stabbed herself in the side digging the glass in deep MEL YOU IDIOT for a second she was calm, the voice faded from a roar into a whisper. She gave Goodwill a trembling smile. “I’m fine.” she said. Her voice shook. Blood poured from her new wounds onto the floor. “I – I wasn’t – I wasn’t going to kill you. I’m sorry. Please just let me leave.”
“God.” he said. There was a look on his face that didn’t suit it; a kind of surprise, or fear. Mel thought it made sense because she had just cut herself up with a piece of glass and then she realised he wasn’t looking at her wounds. He was looking at the side of her head. She raised her fingers and felt about there. They came back speckled red. She was bleeding from her head wound. “What are you?” he asked her. She looked up at him. I DO NOT KNOW (I don’t know! – M.).
The lift doors exploded. There was a heavy crack and a thud as they sailed through the air and slammed hard into the glass of the window, splintering but not shattering it, and from the lift came three figures. “Boss!” one wailed, gripped in a long arm, and she saw it was the shadow n from earlier, now fully visible for one second and dark for three, flickering, and he was flung aside and hurled into the wall and he landed slumped over as if he were dead. Boss Goodwill still naked turned to face the invaders, katana in both hands, hunched over, really ready now to charge into battle, but they bypassed him entirely and went for her. They looked human but they weren’t; too long arms with claws stretching out of their Junsha Mining Company coveralls, faces with inhuman expressions mouths gaping, their walk a stumbling but rapid trot. And one looked to the other and mumbled something that human vocal cords did not like to do, a rasp like it was very sick, but her brain caught it and translated it for her and she thought fuck me that’s Asura language that is, or how they talk forced through a human throat, and it came from the centre and one from the right and one from the left and what it had said was: GET THE TRAITOR.
She rolled aside, or ungainly flung herself aside, the invader powering her across the room away from the trio of other hosts, things just like her (did I look like that? did I sound like that? what did Andy see when she looked at me back at the house?? – M) and they rasped in unison DO NOT RUN IT WILL BE EASIER and she flopped down onto the ground as a long inhuman arm grabbed her ankle and her face slammed against the fake marble. The three monsters rounded on her, the middle one holding onto her winching her in as its extended arm retracted. Three men’s faces but nothing like a man inside. Goodwill stood staring in amazement clearly not sure what to do with his sword. Mel spat and snarled just like the Asura did and hacked at the claw around her ankle but could not dislodge it. MELANIE I AM GOING TO TEACH YOU SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT ABOUT WE ASURA. (What? – M.) THE REASON I WAS A SHRIMP WHEN I VISITED YOU IS BECAUSE THIS IS OUR NATURAL FORM AND WE BUILD OURSELVES BODIES OUT OF MATERIAL TO USE FOR COMBAT, CONSTRUCTION, ETC. I AM A CLASS I BECAUSE WHEN I VISITED YOU FOR EASE OF INFILTRATION I WAS IN MY SHRIMP BODY BUT THESE GENTLEMEN ARE CLASS II AND SO WE NEED VERY QUICKLY TO MAKE A CLASS III BODY OR WE WILL DIE-
“Gentlemen…?” she managed but her hand had already reached out and found the outstretched leg of the shadow who had died flung against the wall and pushed aside the material of his trousers and found his bare skin. A rippling, a plunging in – she was she realised kind of eating him or the flesh was bubbling, boiling over (what the fuck – M.) liquid dissolving and not only that but in motion, a human jelly, glimpses of churned-up bone and organ as the rest of the shadow left his skeleton behind and poured – rushing like water downstream – all across her arm and over her wolf tattoo and now engulfing her shirt, human flesh transforming itself into something – else – musculature and sinew and alien biomatter now wrapping itself around her snug like tight winter clothes warm yes but wet, alive, she thought she was about to scream but then the creeping flesh swallowed her face whole.
Or-
actually
the flesh was her face
Rebirth.
Video City 