PAUL COLLINS
Paul Collins was born in England, raised in New Zealand and at eighteen emigrated to Australia. Since then his stories have been published in over 140 magazines and anthologies; some of his best fiction can be found in his collection The Government in Exile. He also writes adult novels, children’s novels and non-fiction books. Some of these titles are Cyberskin, the Cyberkids trilogy, The Wizard’s Torment, Out of this World and Dog King. Collins is the editor of Metaworlds, Dream Weavers, Fantastic Worlds, Tales from the Wasteland, and other anthologies and series. His most ambitious work was the definitive Melbourne University Press Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy. He has recently coedited, with Meredith Costain, fifteen anthologies of science fiction, fantasy and horror, called Spinouts.
The next story “Wired Dreaming” is dark, gritty, and edgy — and reads like Sam Spade on speed.
* * * *
“Angel, we have another one for you.” It was a soft murmur inside my temporal lobe unit.
Okay, let me have it. I jacked into the public node and took a download, then within the hour was at the victim’s flat with all the relevant details ordered and accessible within my mind. Caucasian male, thirty-three, sex offender with a chip full of priors.
The Forensic Field Crew had bagged and tagged everything, including the body.
“Hey, Angel! You’re late for the party. Everything’s been gift-wrapped already!” Spurious laughter.
“You’re a strange man, Burbank. I bet when you were born the doctor slapped your mother.”
Burbank’s grin didn’t falter. “Have a good night, Angel.” The detective looked over at the body bag. “You ask me, someone’s doing us a helluva big favour whacking this scum.”
Burbank and his FFC boys moved out, and I wandered about the room before taking a look at the victim. Blinds drawn at half mast, rusted 70s chrome formica table and chairs, kipple stuffed into vague bed shapes. And a rank smell that persisted despite the cold wind creeping through the broken windows. Fear.
A VR system was near the body, as had been the case with the other victims. Virtual sex was on the way up. For all its electoral clout, the League of Decency was fighting a losing battle.
As with all the others, the unit was not connected to him. The derms were lifeless anchor lines wound around the black and grey Sanyo like a squid hugging itself.
I unzipped the bodybag quickly, and closed it even faster. I preferred the imager photo of Derrick stored in my TLU to the tortured face in the bag. In any case, I knew it wasn’t the man I’d been looking for these past six years.
The FFC carrier stuck his thumb out toward the bodybag. “You finished with it?”
I walked out into the cold night without answering.
* * * *
I spent the next two shifts and much of my own time sifting through files and records. Protocol these days is to let the TLU assess everything and give you logical conclusions, but old habits die hard. I simply don’t trust some technologies: fuzzy logic can mean fuzzy results.
The similarities between the deaths were there, but told me nothing. The victims had died of shock. Each had been a sex offender with priors. Two had been on parole at the time of death. All were males in their thirties. A search of their residences showed nothing out of the ordinary, but they all shared a propensity for low budget porn disks. Three of them even had Private Predator, a “slash ‘em/slay ‘em” title. But Trevor Derrick hadn’t owned a copy.
I checked the producer’s name. It figured. Private Predator was the sort of vid scumbags like Jerry Anderson’s SpaceScape specialised in. Hardcore dildonics. I’d check him out.
Each of the victims was enrolled in a Corrective Censure Programme, and they shared the same service psychiatrist.
I mulled over this last fact. It was feasible that someone with enough savvy could install a limbic virus designed to activate at a certain time then self-destruct.
I quickly scanned my working file for the times of death. They’d all died at night in their sleep, but at different hours.
More hack work took me through to 0300 hours, then I slept soundly into mid-morning. Showered and sharp, I asked the bureau to book me a meeting with Dr Gabrielle Serguson at the CCP. In the cab I flashed her dossier through the TLU. Nothing of significance came up.
I patched into the priority news. Giselle Brash, newsreader for CNA, came on line. She smiled with well manicured geniality, an all-teeth smile, a lower half smile at odds with the rest of her face.
“Thousands are feared dead after today’s earthquake that rocked eastern Taiwan. Measuring 8 on the Richter scale, the earthquake toppled buildings —”
I swapped to In Depth.
“The effects of global warming have never been so evident as they were today as thousands fled their homes when tidal waves from the Taiwan earthquake swept the East Asian coasts. Smashing over dykes, they —”
Obvious. I switched channels and caught an ad for genetic health therapies. Then Mike Davies, reporter for HUN TV filled my imager.
“Civil libertarians today have condemned the latest of President Jason Clark’s already much criticised welfare housing reforms. Dubbed by the Opposition as ‘Draconian and tantamount to martial law’, they —”
Nothing new on the home front or globally, but the ad for HealthScape’s genetic health therapies snagged in my mind. The cab arrived at the CCP building.
Serguson’s secretary showed me into the office. “Gabby — Detective Inspector Hart to see you.” She smiled almost apologetically and left the office.
“Sex Offenders Squad,” I added.
“Good afternoon, Detective. I presume you wish to discuss the recent deaths?”
I was slightly taken aback. She didn’t waste time. Either she was very clever or she had something to hide and so took the offensive. “That’s right,” I said.
I gave her a hardcopy precis and sat back to wait.
She met my eyes after a minute. “I’ve been reading about these deaths,” she said candidly. “Bit of a coincidence.”
“Oh?”
“They’re all my clients, of course.” She accessed her desk node and worked for some moments. A disk presently slid out of a slot. “Everything I know about them is in there.”
I pocketed the disk.
“What about doctor/patient confidentiality?”
She frowned. “A thing of the past, Detective Inspector. EEG, ECG, temporal monitoring, thermal resonance scanning, even monitored sessions of them doing slash VR — it’s all in the files.”
“Any theories?” I asked. “A serial killer it isn’t. We know it’s not a virus, there are no residues. I’m thinking maybe something along the lines of neural-induced hypnotherapy.”
“An REM-triggered response that kills its victim leaving no trace?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Well?”
“If I think of any, I’ll let you know.”
I got up. “Thank you.”
“And Detective Inspector?”
I turned.
“I hope you have a strong stomach.” She looked faintly amused. “Their files make The Butcher’s Knife seem like a post-modern romance.”
* * * *
“Angel? You’re on duty.”
I jerked awake in my darkened bedroom at the neural call. Damn them. It wouldn’t be long before they could read our thoughts.
“Calm down, Angel,” said the chip tone. “Doesn’t pay to get all unfocused.”
I downloaded the emergency brief. I think my heart missed a beat when I saw Miles Rogers’ name. One of Burbank’s boys had just died.
* * * *
Burbank glared at me when I arrived. He was dressed in a tuxedo and his face glistened with the afterglow of a heavy night on the town.
“How you going on this case, Angel? You getting a target or what?” He waved his FFC men out of the room.
I faced him squarely. “I just got here.”
“You’re a right comedian, Angel.” He took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. His breath was redolent of whisky. The bureau was monitoring him, he was even acting for the monitors. I side-stepped and made straight for the body bag that contained Rogers. Different face, same expression of terror.
“Harrison?” I called. “You got a list of all Miles’ stuff?”
Burbank’s partner, Dale Harrison, came over and handed me a disk. “Everything down to the last knife and fork, Angel.” He shook his head discouragingly. “Nothing unusual.” He looked over to Burbank. “No illegal substances. Nothing.”
I smiled briefly. “No worries, I’ll just look around now. You’ll get my brief by 1600 hours.”
Dale left and took Burbank with him.
And that’s when I spotted Private Predator on Miles’ disk. Iridescent green flag-marked the title. It matched with three of the four previous victims, and it had probably belonged to the fourth. That didn’t make the connection conclusive, but it was another lead.
I obtained a new copy of Private Predator through the services of a gofer called Harvey.
“Research, is it?” he enquired.
I noticed the silver security tab had been spliced. “You seen it?” I asked. “Before bringing it here?”
“Not me, mate. I’m a natural-born victim. You guys know that.”
I transferred credits to his account and he left the office. Rather than view the disk there, I took it home. Harvey’s insinuation of my own interest in such filth left me queasy.
* * * *
I watched each of the five Private Predator disks on “view only”. I could not even contemplate the “participation” option. The plotline was as one would expect: sleazebag meets girls in lowlife bar scene.
The girls are whoever you want them to be, and morph instantly into your own personal fantasy. Mine are dykish, genetically-enhanced Paraguayan beauties. One is in a see-through latex bodysuit; black sheen hair cropped razorboy-style, pouting lips shaded turquoise framing pearl-white teeth. Her twin is wearing a burnt orange neoprene bodysuit hugging her musculature like an immaculate golden tan.
It’s no wonder virtual sex has captured so many aficionados.
“Sweetmeat,” my character says. Suave and sophisticated he isn’t. He’s gutter-level sleaze material, but the girls just adore him.
“Oohhh!” one of them squeals. “He’s coming over!”
It’s sickening. He can’t do a thing wrong.
The rest I’ll relate in short: Man takes girls to bondage scene where adoring girls finally figure out he’s not such a nice guy after all but some kind of perverted freak who gets his kicks by hacking and slashing.
I watched this shit five times that night, starting with Harvey’s bought disk. Identical. They weren’t pirated, and no virus had impregnated the datablocks. Apart from making me nauseated and longing to turn them off, viewing them had no discernible effect. I’d seen that stuff in real life.
And snuff movies are now legal. Mostly terminals sign up with studios like Rhinestone to get killed on film — glorified consensual death. In return, their beneficiaries get a lump sum payout. It’s a superannuation for the desperate, a gift for their loved ones when the “terms” know they’re about to die and leave nothing. Some unfortunates even do it rather than suiciding. Great for charities, many of which become astonished cash recipients of anonymous donors.
When I finally wound down in bed that night, it wasn’t for a good night’s sleep. I played a few Daffy Duck vids, and they pushed the horrors away into the shadows of my mind. I dozed.
That’s when I noticed I had blood on my hands. And someone was pounding on the door.
“I heard screams coming from that room!” A frightened voice. An elderly woman’s.
“Break the door down. We’ve got the bastard this time!”
I swung around. A body was strung out like a broken marionette across the bed. Her head was mercifully out of view. Thin steel wires had cut deep into her ankles and wrists. I stubbed my toe against something else at my feet.
Another body. The same two women that I’d seen in Private Predator.
The door burst into firewood. A body stumbled forward and others fought their way through the ruined door.
I made it to a window. The drop was one storey. I leaped, braced, landed awkwardly.
“After him!” from above.
I didn’t get far. Excruciating pain ripped through my crushed ankle. I hopped across the street, stumbled over the kerb and knew it was hopeless. Footfalls closed on me.
I turned in time to duck a left hook, kicked out with my crippled foot. Tac. squad automatics fanned about me like thin black petals.
I’d rather die than be nailed for a sex crime. I lunged for the barrels, begging for death. But my tormentors dispersed like fog on a windscreen.
I woke with a start, and tossed and turned for a while, too groggy to get up. Exhausted, I drifted into sleep again, and another nightmare bore me away.
* * * *
Cloud cover masked the cityscape like some dark and potent magic as I stood gasping at my bedroom window. I killed my TLU auto-alarm. It didn’t like pulse irregularities in its host and mine must have been running rampant.
Nightmares so realistic they even fooled my auto-alarm. And my foot throbbed where I’d kicked the bed rail. Jesus it hurt. Then a thought hit me. Why hadn’t Miles’ TLU wakened him before he went into regenerative shock? I begrudgingly logged in and scanned for that information. His ECG had hit its ceiling at the time of death, yet Miles had been asleep when he’d died.
Bruised, bleeding and utterly drained, I sat in the shower and cleaned myself up. A breakfast show babbled cheerily on my antique transistor radio.
I re-read Jerry Anderson’s dossier. He had withdrawn from public view when his wife was brutally murdered back in 2004. At that time she had been the director of the embryonic science arm of SpaceScape.
The late Mrs Anderson’s maiden name had been Schepis — as had Gabrielle Serguson’s.
Voila!
I visited SpaceScape Productions.
Jerry Anderson’s voice had an almost androgynous quality: the words were softly enunciated but tempered with streetwise severity.
“Make it brief, Detective Inspector. I’m a busy man.”
I placed all five copies of Private Predator carefully on his polished agate desk.
“You’re a fan? Here, let me sign those for you.”
“I’m sure your company does have its fans, Anderson. But I’m not one of them.”
“So what’s your beef? Everything here is fully licensed and above board. I’m an honest man.”
“The other side of SpaceScape belonged to your wife. Her specialty was genetic AIs.”
Anderson’s face went tight. “Her role was small. Rosie’s work was mostly experimental.” He tried to sound nonchalant.
“Yet you advertise on the net? Genetic health therapies? HealthScape is a subsidiary of SpaceScape.”
“Where’s all this heading, Detective Inspector?”
“Try this: a VR program interacts with the player’s amygdala, creating a neural feedback that acts on the victim’s brain like an intense emotional shock, inducing an Obsessive-Reiteration-Disorder. A very, very intense regenerative Obsessive-Reiteration-Disorder. A TLU can’t snap him out of it. He dies of shock, and it’s always a male victim. How am I doing?”
“You got a great imagination, Detective Inspector Hart.” He glanced at the window. Five storeys up and fusion glass impregnated with chameleon phosphors. No way would it burst. Little chance of escape there.
“You’re right, of course,” he added, in that well modulated, bland voice. “So what if the bottom of the barrel gets scraped every now and then? Private Predator? Merely my answer to a failing society.”
“How many copies sold?”
“Millions. My brainchild specifically targets men who feed emotionally on the degradation of women.”
“Fantasies aren’t illegal, Anderson. VR might be a form of wish-fulfilment, but it doesn’t turn its viewers into homicidal murderers.”
“Really?” He spread his hands and laid them flat on the table. “As I was saying, my program is designed to protect those viewers who don’t find it pleasurable. If it revolts them, they drop out. Only those who play it through become conditioned. Which raises the question: why are you still with us if you researched the program?”
“Allow me my secrets —”
“You’re an odd one, Hart, an anomaly I’ll never get a chance to examine.”
I reached forward to pin his arms but he evaded me. He sprang for the window, hit it hard, bounced and crashed sickeningly hard back onto the carpet.
“As I was trying to say,” I admonished, “allow me my secrets and I’ll allow you yours.”
* * * *
I was getting changed at the gym later that morning. Too engrossed in my personal but secret triumph, I failed to hear Burbank come up behind me. “You got a nice neat locker, Angel.”
“Like my mind, Burbank.” I didn’t shut the locker in time.
“That your sister?”
I glanced up at the portrait slick hanging in my locker. It was signed Angie, and she was dressed in her gym gear, holding up a trophy for Best All Rounder. Mum and Dad doted in the background.
“My dead twin, Burbank. Sex attack.”
“Yeah? Guess it figures, then.”
I slammed the locker door shut. “What figures, Burbank?” Our noses were almost touching, but he didn’t pull back. He got off on invading personal space.
“This hang-up you have with the SOS. It eats your gut away, doesn’t it, Angel? You been stuck in that girlie squad for years now.”
We stood there for a moment, eyes locked, his rancid caffeine-breath hot on my face.
I backed down of course. I had plans for Burbank. I left the locker room, knowing that his mind was already ticking. I wondered when he would eventually view Private Predator. That thing was a soul cleanser that I had no intention of withdrawing from its adoring public. I’d already made some creative deletions in the forensic databases, and there would be more.
No-one would check my TLU file unless I was audited, and that was unlikely.
It hadn’t been hard to change. I was an only child, and a loner. My parents worked hard to be supportive through the transition, and a whole new persona only takes months if you’re connected. Angie certainly had died during a vicious rape, and Angel had stood up amid her ashes. He had survived because he hadn’t watched Private Predator as a man.
I sat on the incline bench and got into a set of alternate dumbbell curls.
Always the loner ...
* * * *
AFTERWORD
Colin Steele once wrote in the Canberra Times that “Collins has a penchant for the hard-boiled hero, a lineage derived from Hammett and Chandler”. Angel Hart, our protagonist here, fits rather snugly into that description, although in a role quite dissimilar to that of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. The astute reader will recognise some of the science from Cyberskin, a more likely source might be from my collaboration with Damien Jones, “Supremacist”, which appeared in REVelation.
— Paul Collins