Artie was currently crushed in the middle of the seat between Mico and Alex, and Mico was demonstrating his new trick for the fifteenth time: smashing his fingers against the jamb of the spill-hatch and twisting the resulting fractured mess into a halfway-recognisable set of male genitalia-as he remembered them-before they reset under the Bug.
In the hysteria immediately after the Rapture Bug had hit, after the Quarantine and Containment that would form the basis of the Dome had come slamming down, that sort of thing had become quite commonplace. In the higher-end of the art circles-so far as a city like Des Moines had had a high-level circle of art-there had been a brief vogue for the kind of body-modification that put the Theatre of Mutilation to shame… brief, of course, because the reset mechanisms of the Bug made such changes ultimately meaningless even in the terms of the avant garde. If the transformations don’t stick, and nobody gains or loses the slightest thing because of them, then there’s simply no point.
In general life, of course, the world had for a while become full of people hurling themselves off rooftops or under trucks, hitting each other with sledgehammers and axes purely for the hell of it. For several months it had been a bit like living in a Road Runner cartoon without the invention or the wit.
Those who were naturally inclined to jump in front of trucks in any case soon tired of the sheer futility of it, gradually followed by the rest of the Contained. Only complete retards like Mico found sufficient amusement in such things to even bother now.
Alex was driving with a kind of teeth-gritted concentration, fighting blind impulses that might have had her hurling the Wagon through traffic, careless of what it might hit… and the darker impulses that might have her aiming the thing directly at a wall in the vain hope that this time suicide might work.
Alex had once been, functionally, female, and now looked even more so in certain secondary aspects. Excessively, freakishly so in terms of the days before the Bug-though of course that was absolutely standard here and now.
It was just another of those not exactly well thought-out, blanket customisations to the genome, reinforcing the suggestion that the mythical designers of the Bug had been male. Artie had vaguely wondered, more than once, if the enthusiasm with which Alex treated her work might come from some form of sublimated impulse of revenge. It was far more likely, though, that after all this time Alex was merely working on the same basis as anybody else.
Logging up the hours on her Account. Working herself to death.
Now, Artie tried to ignore Mico’s rather asinine antics by making a show of reading his clipboard, skimming through the client-list of those fortunate souls who had made enough on their Accounts to warrant the Welcome Wagon’s current attention.
The process of monetary commerce was as good a way of keeping score as anything else-always provided that there was some mechanism for circumventing that process by pure luck.
One of the names on the list was marked with a cheerful little skull-and-crossbones. One of the truly lucky souls, picked completely at random from the general populace whether they had enough in their Account or not.
It had been months since Artie had been handed a genuine charity case-and he decided that it was just the thing to make him feel happier about the world, however temporary that happiness might be.
He’d been feeling so down lately. This might be just the thing he needed.
Artie Newbegin basked for a moment in the warm glow of anticipated altruism. Then he gave Alex the target and she punched up a location.
It was later. Artie’s shoulder was still quite painful-a kind of ghost-injury pain in the way that amputees had once had ghost limbs. It would fully take a half hour or so to clear up.
The procedure had started out well. They had parked the Welcome Wagon in a dedicated slot and deployed; located the precise position of the client in his apartment by way the ultrasonics, knocked a hole in the wall by way of clamp-mines and burst inside, Artie diving in low and doing it all totally by the book.
It had to be quick and sudden or you lost half of the point of it. Artie had smack-shackled the target’s ankles to the floor, the electromagnetic concussion-bolts biting solidly into old, cured wood, and then gotten out of the way in a hurry so that Mico could shove the target over like the schoolyard bully that Mico once, presumably, at some point, had been. Mico’s aptitude for this part of the procedure, and his general demeanour, strongly suggested this.
Mico and Alex held then the client-he was a client rather than a target, now-while while Artie used the buzzsaw, then hauled the upper body back, fighting against the phenomic homing-mechanisms that were even now, not to put too fine a point upon it, cutting in.
More smack-shackles on the arms and then back to the lower body to nailgun in the spikes and crampons that would secure it while they dealt with the tricky business of the head.
Using the buzzsaw, though, was always a risky business. It was quick but imprecise. Artie found that he had cut right through a vertebra, the smaller part of which chose that moment to detach and physically shoot for the larger part still attached to the pelvis… blasting through Artie’s shoulder in the manner of the sort of pistol round that, in the old days, left people’s arms hanging off.
And for just an instant, it had.
It had been a messy, complicated wound. It had taken almost a full minute for Artie’s arm to reattach itself and for the gross physical damage to heal. The subtleties of trauma-healing had taken a few minutes more, and Artie’s clumsiness had slowed them down in completing the first-stage vivisection.
It had not, to cut it short, been a clean kill. They had lost points on the timing. Credit-points they’d never see in their Accounts.
They were back in the Wagon again, the client safely packed away in the GenTech containment cells, heading for the depot, the multiple airlock access-hatches in the side of the Dome.
Sometimes, Artie thought, he could hear the head and hands and feet and jointed sections of arm rattling around and hammering inside the cells, but that of course was nonsense. A failure of containment to the point where even sound waves could escape would probably result in a fusion-cell blowout that would level buildings (though not of course, ultimately, the people in them) for half a mile around.
At the depot, by way of classified and carefully-controlled procedures, the various bodily components would be obliterated on the subatomic level and the lucky client at last given respite. An end to a life turned utterly meaningless and which, ordinarily, so far as humans reckon time, would have simply never stopped.
The procedures were extraordinarily expensive and complex, thus explaining the comparative rarity of their use, and why the likes of Artie, Alex, Mico-and for that matter every other living soul under the Des Moines Quarantine-and-Containment Dome-worked like dogs in the hope of one day being able to afford those procedures for themselves.
It had never occurred to them to wonder just what GenTech itself got out of the arrangement-and even if it had, it was doubtful that they would have cared.
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. They had seen the future and what the future held… and it held nothing but an endless, sleepless night of small, unwanted resurrections.
Default Settings: Tooling Up
The Severcy Sisters hit them as they went through Checkpoint 9.
The gangcult had been stalking them for maybe ten miles, segueing in on one or other of the outriders to have an exploratory crack then peeling off, weighing up the defence-response. Now the core mass of them piled it on, coming in from both sides.
“The Sisters are small fry,” Eddie Kalish said, quick-scanning the pattern-recognition specs and stats streaming across his Testostorossa’s HUD. “They’re just little girls with a grudge. No real kill power to speak. They don’t care about the Brain Train-they’re just coming in pincer-wise to knock off the front-runner.”