The Recycled Man - Rob Sharp

Illustrations (c) 2009 Carmen

The wind up on the dike cut through the Tallyman like a thousand knives, as he crawled along its top, hugging whatever shelter he could find above the drowned streets of Old London. Then it was always windy at this time of the year, which was why the citizens of Southern GB called their new home 'Hurricane City'.

Below in the darkness, he could hear the rhythmic swell of the North Sea gnawing away at the reinforced foamconcrete, as the water continued to rise a little more each year. But his thoughts were on the job rather than the state of the nation; focusing on a debtor somewhere up ahead. Ancient history wasn't his strong point.

Then to the Tallyman, the world was only eighteen months old.

Initialised on Jun8/2102.

Authorised by Company Audit Law Mar10/2099.

Due for his two year defrag, or 100 terminations, which ever came first. Eighteen months on the Company's books, after the original owner of this body had died.

The wind increased a notch, flapping Finn's all-weather coat like a bat's wings, as he inched along the lip of the concrete dike, his HeadSpace visor trying to pick up any clue to the debtor's mode of escape.

To the Tallyman's knowledge-implant of coastal weather patterns, it was too risky to launch a dirigible for the continent at this time of year. No, it was a boat this particular Meep was after. Lose himself in the ruins of London for a week or two, and then head out to Iceland, home of the creditless and the brave.

Which meant the Target1 would have help.

Finn eventually found the evidence. Ropes and climbing gear hanging down the steep slope of the dike, dropping away into the darkness. He raised his dripping HeadSpace visor and sniffed at one of the ropes like a dog. Epithelials were present. Someone was in such a fucking hurry they'd not had time to slip on gloves. The ironglass crown embedded in his brain piggybacked Hurricane City's employment register. Everyone's ID sat in that database, even if you were just passing through the new, hi-rize London for a day, the corporate peepers would pick up your ID tag. Read everything about you from three generations of ancestors to what colour socks you preferred.

Bullet points on the three samples he'd inhaled shot back into his consciousness.

An estate agent.

A surrogate-mother.

A drowned-earther.

All bucking against the Company line.

This was going to be a fucking messy one. Zealots always fought harder.

From the long holster underneath his left armpit, the Tallyman withdrew an ornately crafted weapon known as a Salamander. For luck, he kissed the bulbous gas jet ring at the end of the barrel, before gripping the rope himself and leaning back into the vicious wind. Abseiling down the dike into the unknown, he could feel the foamconcrete crunching beneath his A-top boots.

Closer to the rolling sea, the icy spray whipped around him, courtesy of the wind. With his upgraded hearing, Finn could just detect voices inside nature's roar. People shouting to each other across the gale force storm. Picking out six individuals, he compared voiceprints over HeadSpace against the employment register again.

And there was his quarry, as bright as a Scottish day.

Grinning, Finn let go of the rope and dropped the remaining twenty-five feet.

As he fell, several carbon shafted arrows whistled passed his head, embedding into the dike. Happy day. The debtor and his friends knew the Tallyman was coming.

Landing hard on both feet, he skidded slightly on the inspection jetty, which was covered in slime and crustaceans from the high winter tides. The intense smell of saline water flooded his olfactory sensors for a second or two, masking the familiar stink of human sweat. The scent of fear. Then he found his focus... They were trying to tackle him from two sides at once.

The Tallyman dipped the snout of his Salamander into the briny sea for a second. It sucked up both water and weed, thirstily accepting whatever ammunition Finn fed it. Then he fired, with an explosive crack. Propelled by exploding butane3, which heated the seawater to just over boiling point, the gas-gun's four nipple exhausts vented blue flame as it spewed the liquid out at high velocity.

There was a scream to Finn's right, as target4 was caught full in the face with the blast of scalding water. He heard the man scrabbling to retain his footage on the slick inspection gantry, before toppling into the cruel sea.

Target2 struck blindly with a D-blade, catching the Tallyman in the right shoulder. It cut through his teflaxcoat and slid through to the warm flesh underneath. Finn's morphine shunt counteracted the pain just a nano-second too late, as the ghost of a feeling made him grit his teeth against the agony, which never quite came.

Scraping the gun against the crumbling foamconcrete wall, the Salamander sucked in what debris it could and Finn flipped the weapon over his shoulder, pulling the trigger. There was a bang, and the gas exhausts singed the side of his face, as another yelp told him he'd caught Target2 with a glancing blow. Finn kicked back with his left foot and felt the satisfying crunch of bone breaking beneath his boot. Turning, he had only a glimpse of his attacker before he whacked her in the face with the gun's heavy butt.

The Age of Chivalry was officially dead.

Either deceased or unconscious, Target2 slithered down the dike wall.

Two more arrows whistled through the darkness, catching him in the chest and under the ribs. Pulling them free, he felt the first arrow had collapsed his right lung. Adrenaline and painkillers flooded his system as he leapt blindly into the dark, to land on the pitched roof of some ancient, rotting building.

The lung would slow him down, so he had to take out the rest of these fucking Meeps quicktime. Wheezing slightly, he loped along the slippery roof ridge, as the sea splashed across his boots, threatening to wash him away into the blackness below.

More arrows. But the shooter was becoming erratic; panicking. An old metal ladder hung down from the brick wall before him, so the Tallyman started to climb. Up and up he went, momentarily cut off from the wind that had been his friend since he had left the city gates, two hours before.

There was a piece of tile loose on the top of the rusted fire escape, which Finn jammed into the greedy barrel of his gun. He had a chest belt under his coat with a variety of nasty experimental ammunition, but they cost credits. He'd used too many rubber bullets and acid slugs this month and the fine in his life-account was already quite substantial. So he improvised.

"That is what the Salamander is designed for!" the voice of his Glaswegian arms training officer from sixteen months ago echoed around his head. "Butane3 explosive powered, it can fire bloody anything you can stuff in its gob! Use what you can find as a weapon. Goose feathers shot out of the Salamander will still bloody hurt!"

"Right..." Finn whispered back at his friend the wind as it picked up again.

The silhouette of the archer bobbed out from behind a ventilation stack across the flat, decaying roof he had now reached. Leveling his weapon, he let loose with the piece of tile. Target3 caught it in the head. He did a little backwards dance before the fool realised he was dead, and then he crashed through the wet, rotted roof.

Picking his spots carefully, Finn tried to calculate the construction of the building. Where the load supporting girders, rusting away after over 60 years, would still be. One false step and he'd be through the rotten asphalt too and falling into Jeesus only knew what inside the derelict, flooded building.

He paused to kick the dead man's crossbow across the tiles and over the side. Now he had a quiver of slim black arrows, of which he placed three in the barrel of his Salamander.

Then there it was. A small, single-sailed craft, moored between the buildings, being tossed and thrown about like a kid's toy by the ocean's swell. There were two people already in the boat, with another trying to cast off. The sail had that fucking familiar single eye motif painted on it, in red, white and blue. The mark of the Egyptian Big Brother. Whether the boat had been bought from one of Ra's people, or whether it was just a copycat, didn't really matter. This attempted removal of a loan defaulter from the country would be logged down as part of the terrorist organisation's personal debt to the Company.

To balance the books.

The gale was winding up again and Finn made a few quick calculations, which confirmed that any shot from this distance would probably miss. He would have to reclaim the loan up close and merciful.

Catching a trailing rope in his free hand, left by the fleeing conspirators, he slid down like some maniac pirate of old. Casually, he fired again on the move - Bam! - Never tiring of that hot explosive noise and the exhaust flashes of fire from the snout of his pistol. Target6 went overboard with the arrows forming a nice triangular grouping in his chest. Target5 and the debtor in question both froze.

For the longest moment, the three combatants in drowned London looked at each other. A small plastic hatchet hung from Target5's belt. The girl with the funky mass of curly brown hair was wondering if she could unhook it in time. Finn had an empty gun in his paw. Then the debtor went and spoiled the moment by beginning to blub like some juvenile found stealing sweetstuff from the people's market.

The Tallyman took the initiative. Popping a fat rubber shell from his chest belt, he had loaded and fired before either of the two criminals could react. The rubber bullet whacked neatly off the woman's forehead, tipping her back into the sea. Ricocheting, it caught the fat, fifty-something loan defaulter on the ear.

"Ow!" Target1 exclaimed, holding the side of his head. He was already crying profusely. All dignity and whatever courage he once had in taking on the Company long since gone.

"Can't we come to some sort of... arrangement?" He hung onto the side of the pitching boat, a trickle of blood now running down his neck from the bruised ear onto his white collar.

"Don't be bloody silly," replied Finn. "With your debt, you're worth more to the Company dead than alive!" The spray was running down his angled, honey-coloured HeadSpace visor as he loaded another gift into the mouth of his ornate gun.

Here came the legal bit.

"Jon Forester of no fixed abode... For monies owed to Xiang&Whitechapel, LondonSalvage2300 and AppleVirgin, your ticket is well and truly punched!"

And with his usual coldness of heart, the Tallyman leveled his gilded and carved pistol at the fat man's head, and lovingly squeezed the trigger.

"Then he collapsed. Just like that. Had a heart attack and pegged out on me, before I could fire."

Jean4280 smiled from the opposite bed, chewing on sweetstuff. It had been Finn's turn to tell the tale. The one time Tallymen met, other than when one Company sent them up against each other, was in Refit.

"Jeesus... So how come you ended up in here?" Jean4280 cast her china blue eyes around the tiny surgical room. It was like a real hospital, but studded with Company logos and designer weapons racks. Sort of MedicLite.

"Took my fucking eyes off the Meep in the sea. As my Target1 keeled over dead, she stuck that crud plastic axe right through my boot! Lost two toes and part of the foot... Plus, with a collapsed lung, my Company sent me to Refit."

"Bet you sorted her for that!"

"Too busy hoping around, swearing. My shunt was out of painkillers. Still, they'll recycle the other five bodies from this job. I should still cream a tidy bonus off the top. Guess the axe lady'll float down the Thames later this week, and I'll claim her too. It was not a good night for a swim!"

The two professional debt collectors laughed. A moment of relaxation. A bit of companionship. Better than the carton of booze Finn usually met up with after such a case.

A nurse dressed in flimsy medical greens wandered in from the moving walkway, clipboard in hand, chewing Kato's stimgum. Finn could smell the nutmeg on her breath. Sexy.

"Jean4280. You're outta here this afternoon. Replacement left hand, ulna, bone regrowth, repaired ribs and intercostal muscles, three litres of bullsblood - account charge?"

"Yep."

"Let's hope you're good for it!" Finn chuckled.

"Shut it," the girl replied with a wry grin.

"Press here." The humourless nurse ignored the exchange and held out the charge sheet for Jean4280 to thumb. The tiny ironglass splinter embedded in the Tallyman's right digit made contact with the aluminium seal on the docket, and the book was balanced. Jean swept back the single bed sheet, oblivious of the fact she was wearing only a pair of tight paper hospital panties, and started to unpack her kit from the metal locker next to her bed.

"Finn..." the nurse came around to him. "Full name, please."

Finn ran his tongue over the top of his teeth, staring out the health worker.

"Won't that do?" he muttered, avoiding Jean4280's curious stare. "You'll be getting my thumb print in a second anyways."

"Course it won't do! You trying to pass for alive or something?" the nurse snapped back. Then her face slipped a touch and she stopped that incessant chewing.

"I-I didn't mean anything by that, guy. It came out all wrong..." she stuttered.

Finn and the female Tallyman exchanged rapid glances. Flicking the plastic ID with his forefinger, Finn spun it around like a top, the holograms straining to keep his photo-image and serial numbers in focus.

"I don't need fucking reminding that I'm bloody dead, it says Recyc right here on the tag - just under my Company name. You wouldn't be palming us off with this third-class medical shite if we were living customers!"

He ripped back the thin bed sheet and wiggled his two new toes. They were black and slightly too large. Not black, bruised black, but Negro black. Finn's skin, although tanned by the wind and the sun from his many hours outside the city walls, was definitely Caucasian.

He scribbled the numbers '5612' after his given name. The 5612nd Finn registered as recycled on the Greater Mergers and Acquisitions Register. 5612 dead men, brought back to life again with an ironglass crown spiked speared into their brains, filling their minds with false identities and Company line values.

Jean4280 made spooky noises and stretched out her arms.

"Ooooo... Get down with the xombies!"

The nurse blanched and turned-tail, leaving the unfinished tally clipped to the foot of Finn's bed. The recycled pair laughed hysterically at her expense for a good five minutes, whilst they both got dressed.

Completing the form and thumbing it, Finn smiled at the female worker.

"Don't suppose you fancy..." he got out.

She shook her head a little too quickly.

"Ta, but I'm with someone at the moment... Fills the gaps between jobs, if you catch my drift."

They both laughed nervously. With someone.

Finn would have bet his weeks' wage that she was sleeping with some live stiff. Even the dead thought twice about screwing with the dead.

"No problem, girl," he said, as they both left the Refit hospital. The toes would have to do for the time being. He'd bargain a discount next time he was in. Who knew - he might just get a new fucking leg and sort the problem.

The corporate man-hunters both emerged into the neon mall, self-consciously adjusted their HeadSpace visors and went their separate ways, to avoid any more embarrassment. Pressing his visor to opaque and letting part of his consciousness slide into the numbing synth-muzak, he wound his way down from the seventy-third floor of Hurricane City to the Accelerator north... and home. The tag Finn had transferred to his coat glittered in the shop lights; cheap and gaudy. Occasionally someone would give him a funny glance, or walk around the space he was heading for. Despite human recycling being the law for the last seventeen years, normal folk were still none too comfortable at sharing their lives with the living dead.

Finn5612 was only 18 months old.

That was all the information the Company would give him. Like every other resurrected body in Hurricane City, he had no memory of who he had been, what he had been called, or how he had died. Neither did he have the right by Company Law to find these simple facts out. That was the deal with recycled men.

In the Great Credit Crash of 2052, what laughingly remained of the world's governments had folded like the piss-poor poker players they all were. Out of the 24 hours of bitter ashes, had risen the Pan-Corporations, the Global Conglomerates (who had been running the puppet show from behind the stage anyway,) here to save the world - for a reasonable fee, plus tax, plus 30% on the top, all with free airmiles and a brand new Citizen's ID.

Now everyone was a Company Man.

But in a country already blighted by thirty years of African Corporate wars, followed by human sterility problems and three cat flu pandemics, GB needed its living dead to fight, to police, to do its fucking shitty jobs. Hell, they had to recycle every other damn thing in this used up world, right down to the air, so what was so wrong with recycling valuable human cadavers?

As a study in the late 2080's had first pointed out, the wealth of raw materials, energy footprint and Corporate Dollartime invested in raising a human being, made Man the most expensive, least cost-effective thing produced on the planet today. So the Pan-Corporation law was passed to recycle the dead.

What few religious voices shouted out against this action were soon silenced. According to all current beliefs, once a corporate form died and its soul moved on, it became so much meat. Meat that could be refitted, a brain that could be lobotomised and an artificial Corporation-owned personality placed in the cadaver's head, via ironglass technology.

Investment repaid.

The books had to be balanced.

What the dead thought about all of this, was of no consequence whatsoever.

"And how did you feel about killing the woman by the sea wall?" the psychotherapist asked, in that sugary, disinterested way she always had. That they all always had.

"Not a lot. She'd just stuck me with a frigging D-blade, so I didn't have time for finesse. Could have been XNA'd or poisoned. Desperate felons don't give a tinker's cuss what they do to us Recycs. Anything to get the dead men off their cheap coat tails."

Finn lay on the soft couch, staring at the ceiling. Sixteen months of therapy later, it still needed repainting. That crack in the plaster between the light panel and the architrave was getting worse.

After a retrieval of a debt like his last one, the Company always insisted on a psych-evaluation. Not out of the kindness of their little Corporate hearts, rather as a way of protecting their assets. A recycled man was Credits in the bank. A sane recycled man, anyway.

The tiny box of a room had changed subtly since Finn's last session. It had become a sort of hobby with him, observing other people's trinkets. Feeding off other people's lives. Inset into the walls, the illuminated niches now contained a slim glass vase with a single modified rose in it, a polished pebble from the ancient Brighton beach, (now under twenty five foot of sea,) and a toy car made of metal and plastic, as bright as the day it had been made over 150 years before, excavated from one of the northern land-fill mines.

Such stuff was priceless in this sanitised age.

"Am I tickety-boo?" Finn finally interrupted the silence. The psych was too busy filling in her forms on a tabletop Babbage.

"Oh... Yes, you're clear," she muttered, abruptly realising he was still in the room. "Er, no more of those odd dreams, by-the-by?"

Finn shook his head, pulling a face.

"Fine. Same time next week?"

"Sure thing."

Outside the crumbling offices of the medical tower, the Tallyman finally let out his breath. Why he had just lied about the dreams, he wasn't really sure. Maybe it was some form of childish rebellion about spending his miserably short life being prodded and poked by disinterested Company payrollers.

Just a little secret to keep to himself. There was no harm in that... was there?

Hurricane City stretched above and below Finn like a forest of twinkling Christmas trees. Over the advertising slogans leaching out of moving billboards, and junk-media flash-operas starring the latest pneumatic Avatars, he tuned in to HeadSpace. He was still trussed up in his plum coloured, all-weather coat and a wide Spanish Salvador fedora pulled down to his eyes. Before him, his breath coalesced. Sometimes it was all he had to prove he was still alive... second time around.

The city was kept cold out of the balconies and walkways, to conserve energy. Its population huddled in wool and cotton garments, produced in the northern GB factories once again. Tall steaming chimneys reaching for the stars, after a century and a half hiatus in the Lancashire and Yorkshire valleys.

Energy efficiency = Home Grown.

China was so Turn-of-the-Century as a world supplier. India had had its day. The Americas were in a worse state than GB. Africa rose like an avenging angel, overpriced and over there; so GB had been forced to dig in and focused on the three things it did the best. Cheap manufacturing, queuing and complaining about the weather.

Amongst the bundled up forms of the city dwellers, dirty coloured balloon-shapes moved, bobbing up and down in a disconcerting way. These were Gonzos; multi-purpose flying robotic slaves. The eyes and ears of the Corporations. In a world where the birthrate had dropped to 0.7 per couple, Mankind needed these artificial drones to do the mindless work. And then there were the dead-men, of course. Most folk preferred the company of Gonzo-bots rather than Finn's kind.

The moving murals, wrapped around the fat towers of Hurricane, told a thousand tales of exotic climes and heterosexual relationships. Avatars of the perfect-looking guy and girl, selling you a new lifestyle. The golden city of Glasgow, with its sunny climate ten months of the year and newly opened recreational lakes, called out for custom. Finn had been there the previous year, after an identity fraudster. He had enjoyed the sunshine, but couldn't understand a word the bloody Jocks said.

As the Tallyman worked his way down the rubberised walkways that moved at a steady seven miles per hour into the Wheatsheaf district, the short hairs on the nape of his neck began to rise. Accentuated senses all quietly came on line like a dream. Someone was following him.

There was Maintenance Krew swinging from safety ropes high up above near the transparent membrane, which kept out the weather. Workers updating the superstructure of the city's neon-arteries, 25/7. Humans in simpatico harmony with heavy-lifting Gonzos, constantly rebuilding Hurricane City. They were its invisible electric-blood. A man could drop two hundred feet on a spider-rope in six seconds, if he was skilled enough. If someone were marking him, that was where the attack would come from.

That's the way Finn would do it.

But no attack came. He drew his overcoat closer and pushed passed the slowstrollers on the moving sidewalk, now anxious to get home.

Home was a living cube on the outskirts of the Wheatsheaf area. Prefabricated units, stacked deep and high like old truck containers, strapped together by plastic I-beams and cross-struts. You got in to a communal corridor by dropping down a vacuum chute and landing like a cat - once you'd given the peeper your thumb.

It was quick, and it was clean - most of the time. Finn felt a modicum of gratitude that the Napoleon hi-rizers were barely twenty-five years old. Condensation was removed by an antique aircon system and the smell varied, depending on what day of the week it was. Today, Wednesday, the hi-rize had that familiar nosegay of madras curry with a little undertone of shoe polish.

And the phantom shit-signer had been writing in his own bodily waste on the main corridor again. If Finn ever caught the little fucker, he'd feed the Meep's plums into the mouth of his Salamander and pull the sodding trigger.

Inside his hermetically sealed cube, the Tallyman shed his outdoor clothes. Heat and light responded as he locked the sliding door behind him. It was chilly, as usual, but he kept the thermostat low to save on utility bills. Even below the legal levels.

Then, a dead man always preferred to be cold, so the urban myth went.

"Office, I'm off for the night," Finn said down HeadSpace.

"Book closed, my best boy," chatted his handler in her usual central-city drawl. "Sleep tight. Don't let the bed bugs byte."

He snorted at her cheap little jokes and un-jacked his visor from the implant behind his right ear. Peace. Detachment. The illusion of freedom.

His Mural, a slim, wafer thin thing on the one free wall that wasn't studded with storage niches, showed the constant stream of news-sport-porn that flowed like molasses from the city's central WAXnervous system. He'd managed to disable the sound five months before, and so far he'd neither been fined or had a repairman land on him.

There was too much electronic and living noise in the city. Finn enjoyed the silently moving mouths of the media-strippers and rollerball-jocks. Sometimes they made him laugh with their agonised expressions. Mostly, it allowed him to read in peace. Then there were the nubile pop-bubble-sex Avatars, each one hiding some scrawny, no-hope Citizen, living out a fantasy life on everyone's Mural wall.

The Tallyman just found the whole confusion... sad.

The niches in his walls contained recycled books and magazines. Finn lived on books. It was a common fixation for a Recyc, his shrink informed him. For a man with only eighteen months of memories, the hunger to absorb information was quite natural. He read anything and everything.

So what was the whole pet-thing about? Was that a dead hang-up too?

Pride of place in his living cube was a picture of a dog that he'd hard-copied from the Mural during an infomercial about extinct species. He liked the look of that dog, all small and bedraggled, with one black ear pointing up in an interested sort of way and a black patch around the opposite bright eye. He kept it leaning in a niche all by itself. Why, he wasn't sure.

Whether he had had a dog himself when he had been alive, sometime back in his distant childhood, he could never know. Access to past lives was against too many laws to count. But the times were right for a dog back then. It was before the first devastating wave of cat flu and the animal genocide orders.

Now only mad, rich old ladies had pets, locked away with them in luxury accommodations. Old folk's restraining-homes, bricked up from the outside world.

Finn always wondered what it would be like to pat a dog. It was something that stuck with him... even in his dreams.

The only furniture he had in his cube was an inflatable red plastic recliner chair and two tables. One to eat off, the other with an inset Babbage to latch on to sounds and stories and sexual fantasies. Whatever passed for infotainment these days.

The Tallyman dumped his roll of keys and his HeadSpace visor on the Babbage tabletop, as it floated over to his chair. Neon squares were drawn around the two objects and they interfaced. The keys were re-coded and the visor charged, as he pulled a book from one wall niche in preparation for the evening ahead.

On entering his cube, the preprogrammed kitchen had been preparing his night-meal. Something that tasted like fish and potatoes, but seeing as the last fish to come out of the North Sea had been over thirty years ago, it was the usual textured Soya creation. But the carton that came out of the kitchen serving hatch - now that was the pukka stuff.

A litre of Old Crow malt whisky sat next to the square paper plate and plastic spoon. Finn spent a third of his disposable income on alcohol; a not uncommon luxury for the recycled. He slowly poured three fingers into the thin plastic tumbler and smelt the kick with his eyes tightly shut. The familiar odour did... something inside his tired brain. Was that the phantom of a memory?

Three hours from now, with a cocktail of painkillers, the whisky would make him sleep. It was an oblivion he looked forward to every night. So he stirred the fake fishy meal back into the sludge it probably came from, and took his first drink of the evening.

The little dog barked with the sound turned right down. A mummer's play along the coastal path, as a chubby young hand threw a stick for the little, scruffy quadruped, time after time...

Just out of his wide-eyed vision, Finn knew mum and dad were there. They had to be there.

Then he was back in that bed again... Real sheets... Real window looking out across the sea, as a silent sun set on the repeat-dream. The blur came into his room, right on time. A faceless woman, (Still smiling despite the fact she had no mouth,) straightened the covers and shooed the little dog off the bed.

Then the kiss.

Even in his drunken sleep, the tears ran wet down his cheeks as he remembered the goodnight kiss. Then that hug, as warm as any Glaswegian day.

Now he was alone in a small red boat. Rising and falling with the tide as he slipped silently through sunken streets. Looking over the side, through crystal clear sea, he thought he could see lions, snarling underwater.

Morning came too soon.

Inside Finn's head, the alarm sounded with the sfx of a flock of geese passing above. It was meant to conjure up pictures of clear blue skies and heather-covered mountains. But all the recycled man could bring to mind were the endless lines of wind farms across the top of the cotton plantations of Scotland.

Finn took a pill to clear the dregs of a hangover, deciding to skip breakfast. Moving to the small sink and mirror in one corner, he stared at the glazed eyes of his reflection. The slightly oval face stared back, a little too heavy on the jowls, of an indeterminate age. The telltale lobotomy scar just under the dark hairline. The dark ringed eyes from too little sleep... was this what he had always looked like? He'd never really know how much plastic surgery he'd been given... once he was dead.

Smearing his jaw with depilatory cream, he winced slightly. His shoulder was still stiff where he had been stabbed, even though Refit should have put that right the previous day. He took a few more pills, then checked that the morphine shunt embedded in his right side read full.

No pain today.

The whisper of the little dog danced in the rear of his brain and he tenderly picked up the picture he'd printed out. What was its name? Was that dream just a fantasy of his refurbished mind, as all the psych's told him? Because there should be no way he had retained some of his original memories.

But it was so Jeesus damn real...

Plugging back into HeadSpace and holstering his Salamander, he slipped on his outdoor coat and went to see what joys the new Corporate day would bring. Two minutes later, he was fighting for his second-life.

The recycled woman must have followed him all the way back to Napoleon Hi-rizers. He should have obeyed his instinct and reported a suspect-tail to the Office the previous evening. As he shot out of the vacuum tube from his home, she dropped down behind him, slipping a garrote neatly over his head. Her knee in the small of his back applied the right leverage as the microthin wire began to decapitate him.

HeadSpace fired data into his suffocating brain, skimming information from the ID tag swinging from a chain on her waistcoat... most of which had been erased with acid. The usual ploy of a Citizen gone bad.

Attacker: 5.8 height, 120lbs.

Female: 26.3 yrs. Covertly armed, muscle-enhanced.

Ironglass implant by RoseLang.

Initialised: Jun8/2102.

The same day as his own artificial personality.

The thin steel band under the skin of his neck held, as the woman began to strain and sweat, even though he was bleeding furiously. It had been well worth the money, Finn thought, in a detached sort of way. He swung around and caught his attacker three sharp jabs in the ribs with his right elbow. On the third hit, something snapped. She let out a stifled cry.

No morphine shunt then, he added this to his growing knowledge.

Now, why the fuck was there a Delete out on him?

Finn's HeadSpace jack worked overtime, linking his ironglass implant to the Office, with a call for aid. Lurching back, his head collided with hers and there was another satisfactory crunch as he smashed her nose. She dropped the garrote and went stumbling away, temporarily blinded.

His hand fluttered over the stock of his Salamander, but to shoot the attacker now meant loosing whatever instructions she was carrying in her ironglass memory.

FaceFitt.Co software rapid-fired through the city's peeper vaults and back out via the Office. No ident came back. She'd had enough skills to fiddle with the security network and make herself invisible. If only she'd speak so that he could get her voiceprint.

"Why did you let him out that day?" his attacker suddenly shouted nasally at him. He'd broken her nose and she was spluttering through a tide of blood.

"What? What the fuck are you talking about, girl?" Finn grunted back.

She suddenly drew her own Salamander and let off a clumsy incendiary shot. A fat Gonzo-bot behind Finn went up in flames, as he dropped flat to the walkway.

"Goody... Another Tallyman..." he muttered.

With a head-rush, her ID finally came through.

Name: Debbie8082.

Affiliation: RedAcreFarmingCo-op.

"Farmers?" he ranted to himself. "What the deuce did I ever do to the farmers?"

So it was guns then, in a crowded part of the city. Fucking brilliant - more damned fines.

He flipped out his own Salamander and lobbed a fat pellet into the thing's every-hungry mouth. Debbie8082 must have known she was finished, but she still fumbled to load her own weapon again.

Eyeball shot.

The recycled plastic pellet, made from compressed supermarket carrier bags exhumed from one of numerous landfill mines, shot out of the business end of his gun and hit its target true. Straight through her right eye and out of the back of her skull, to loose its momentum and bounce down over the balcony into the gulf between the round towers.

She fell to her knees, one hand fluttering to the hole where her eye used to be. Head slumping forward; there was pink stuff oozing out of the exit wound in the back of her skull. The glint of an ironglass prong visible through the hole.

"Why me?" Finn asked the woman, dying for a second time. "Why Delete me?"

She suddenly threw back her head, her face covered in a death mask of her own blood. Fixing him with her one good eye, he could see the pupil expanding as her life energies slipped away.

"You left the damn gate open..." she slurred, and then fell over sideways, stone dead.

The Tallyman paced around her body for a full thirty seconds, tight-lipped and still full of pumped-adrenaline. There was a flock of Gonzo-bots huddled together like a bunch of kids' balloons, blinking at him. They'd have already beamed this kill in. The regular Politz would be on their way, drowning him in red tape and fines. Early morning walkers moved around him and the fresh kill, not saying a word, wide-eyed with ashen coloured faces, doing what a Citizen did best - ignoring a bad situation.

"Office. Respond, Office. Finn5612 reporting an attempted Deletion," he croaked into his HeadSpace, dabbing at the slice around his neck with a bloodied tissue.

"Logging on, Finn5612. Report victim's ID," came the familiar vanilla voice of his handler, Kassandra.

"Me..." he muttered back, still on edge.

He calmed himself down a touch before running off a tight verbal report, whilst he waited for the Politz. He could already hear the lazy sirens closing in from the west. Somewhere in the convoluted, slightly half-baked city nervous system was a kill-order from another Company. He had to find out who they were and nix it, quickly.

A Tallyman with debts owed, was a corpse waiting to happen.

Lack of Funds = Recyc.

Looking nervously about, Finn slipped a coil of microfibre from his coat pocket. He plugged one of the shoelace ends into a jack on his HeadSpace visor. Squatting down, he did the same with the dead woman's visor. Now that both the cellular and ironglass portions of her brain had ceased functioning, her mental transmissions had stopped. She was just a corpsicle with a very expensive Babbage machine in her head.

Quickly, he siphoned all the girl's personal biog into his own ironglass implant and hastily pulled out the wire. By the time the rent-a-cops arrived at the scene to reclaim Debbie8082, the Tallyman was three city towers away and breaking into her living cube.

It was as bland as his own, which didn't surprise him. She would have been on a similar weekly stipend as him and housed in a district that was predominately occupied by Recycs. Xombie ghettos, the infofeed called them. But Finn hadn't been expecting the mess he found.

The place had been trashed. Wall niches, once filled with books and mags, emptied and in some cases parts of the wall removed, to bleed fibreglass insulation. Furniture, what little there was of it, had been smashed to pieces and the Mural had been burned off the wall. In the half melted scorch mark which marked the screen's position, was a familiar spray painted symbol.

The red, white and blue eye of Ra.

It didn't fit. Why would any other Corporation target such a low-level Tallyman as himself? Could this Debbie8082 have been an urban terrorist?

Vigilance + Company Loyalty = Safe

Ra was the most prominent of current GB counter-Kulture organisations. The long haired eco-fighters, determined to bring back a people's government of elected citizens, rather than the Company Law that now ran 97.7% of the world's Citizens, were into big gestures - not petty vandalism and pointless executions.

He swept the single room for DNA trace, using a standard crime scene-peeper. The machine chuckled and murmured to itself for a few minutes, whilst Finn trod carefully through the debris, looking for some other clue to this mess.

What had she meant by her dying words? "You left the damn gate open..."

The word 'gate' often had a historical connection to one of the old Thames Barriers. The second barrier was built in 2043, both old and new eventually failing to prevent the greater city of London being flooded by the rising sea levels. It was an old urban myth that some sick joker left the gates open in the last barrier on April 1st 2052, letting in billions of gallons of ocean. The flooding of London beginning the Great Credit Crash, as all the world's financial markets went down simultaneously.

Gate... Was this some sort of code phrase connected with the terrorist cell, Ra?

He picked up a large piece of Debbie8082's Babbage table. The same model as his own, BlackApple5.2. There were bits and pieces of useless information still salvageable, which he could just about call to the surface. The clock was ticking and the Office would be wondering what the fuck he was about.

She had been a drama addict. There was a library of over six thousand episodes of various soapfantasy shows. She liked sweetstuff.

Then something caught his eye underneath the rest of the shattered interface table. The slip of paper almost obscured by the wreckage made him suddenly chill. He reached out and picked up the downloaded picture. It was the same image of a little black and white dog that he had in his own living cube.

"Not. Possible," he mumbled to himself.

The crime-scene peeper broke his concentration and announced it had finished. Debbie8082 was a lonely girl. Only her DNA was all around the ransacked living cube. Which left Finn with the only one conclusion. She had trashed the place herself.

Getting out of there fast, before the commercial Politz got there, he tied in to the Company she had been registered with. That farmer's outfit, RedAcreFarmingCo-op. They were pretty helpful. Their girl had gone off the board about eleven hours previously, probably sticking a screwdriver or something long and metallic into the back of her head to sever her ironglass connections with all peeper facilities. Not the easiest thing to do, especially when she had no morphine shut. It must have hurt like hell.

He bowed out of the conversation when the farmers' Office began to ask awkward questions and left the usual call sign to connect to his own Company, Xiang&Whitechapel. Let the cybernetic offices baffle each other with a ring-around of Company-to-Company enquiries.

The picture of the little dog bugged him the most. The odds against both of them liking, then printing out a hardcopy of, the same pic were astronomical. Kassandra at his Office was still on HeadMail, as she tried to untangle the red tape spewing out across the void from his attack, so she had no work for him. No corporate job was bad - it gave him too much time to think. So he moved through the shopping halls, being towed by the tide of humanity, until he settled in a HeadSpace cafe-booth, overlooking the vast sea of brightly coloured market stalls in New Camden.

"CocaCoffee?" meeped the Gonzo-waiter, scanning Finn's ID where all his likes and dislikes were stored.

"Aye," he responded, already people-watching through the dusty, scratched bombproof windows. Kassandra was still on HeadMail. He mused with the idea of dialing up some soft porn, but it was a little early in the day for that, and he was more in a killing mood.

It was whilst he was on his third CocaCoffee with extra-cream and sweetstuff, when the second would-be assassin tracked him down. This one was even stranger than the first, as this Recyc was not even a Tallyman. He obviously worked in the city's ancient sewers, as he was still dressed in a bulky plastic suit, marked with the stains of his trade.

Finn saw the man in the dayglo-yellow coverall striding through the throng of midday shoppers half a tower away. He stood out in his working clothes amongst the coats 'n' hats brigade, as people parted in front of him, holding their noses. Hardhat pulled low, the figure just kept on coming like some Gonzo. Somehow, the Tallyman knew the sewer-rat was coming for him.

The guy was also holding a long, rusting carving knife in one hand. Landfill treasure or looted from one of London's sunken museums, the effect on the shoppers was still the same - Total. Panic.

The sewer-rat began shouting something and pointing at Finn with the old knife, but as his plastic helmet was still over his head, beneath the hard-hat, the Tallyman couldn't hear a fucking deuce word he was saying.

This time he gave this nutcase no second chances. Loading his Salamander with a handful of plastic cutlery from the table, he stood his ground until the last minute, as the beefy looking assailant closed the gap between them. With about five meters to go, Finn raised his pistol, aimed and fired.

The plastic knives and forks peppered the fat man in the yellow baggy suit, making him stop dead.

"Ow..." Finn heard him exclaim, quite clearly this time.

"What contract have you picked up? What Company has pressed Delete?" he barked at the sewer worker.

"He was only little... He didn't know the danger..." Ross7707 winged, pulling out the bloodied missiles from his chest.

Finn fired a second barrage at the man.

"Who was little? What the fuck are you talking about, guy?"

The man raised his knife, a look of pure hatred painted on his face.

"Scruffy..." he mouthed, just before Finn sent a third set of cutlery through the transparent facemask. Ross7707 staggered sideways, shoving several round booth tables out of the way, before collapsing into a large palm plant.

As Finn siphoned the twice-dead man's personal biog from his brain, as he had his first attacker, his jack buzzed frantically. Now the Office woke up. Finn popped transmission and put himself on HeadMail. He could imagine Kassandra's sculptured face, bright with indignation. The clock was ticking... he had no time for protocol when his own neck was on the block. And here came the wail of the ruddy Politz again.

The sewer-rat's cube was smaller than either of the Tallyman's. It too had been totally wrecked. But the man had gone one further and smeared human excrement all over the walls and floor. Finn wondered if he was any relation to the sod that regularly redecorated his home corridor. Guess he had been up to his chest in shit most of his short, new life and it had seemed the right thing to do. Again, with the Egyptian eye in Union Jack colours on one wall.

This was making zero sense.

In this cube, there was no picture of the dog. Finn kicked bits of ripped furniture aside in a desperate search for that one connection. Perhaps this was a separate attack. But then why the vandalism and the eye on the wall?

Finally, he found it. A screwed up ball of paper in one littered corner. He knew what the picture was before he straightened it out, but the laughing face of the little dog with its lolling tongue and cockeyed ear looked up at him. Same dog. Same picture.

"He didn't know the danger..."

"Scruffy..." Finn heard himself say.

The dog's name... some damn dog's name was Scruffy. And he had belonged to Finn in his original life. How he knew that, was impossible to guess at. How his two wannabe assassins knew was an even bigger puzzle.

His HeadSpace buzzed like an angry bee in his brain, the Office wanting to know where the fuck he was and what he was doing. No point in making stuff up. They could patch into his ironglass's peeper as easy as spit. Coming off HeadMail, he faced the music.

"You have a second corpsicle on Camden and Fifteenth?" his handler had a panic attack. "What are you doing to me, Finn? The fines! The crudding fines!"

Calming Kassandra down, he told the more-than-slightly peeved handler the half-truth. That both his attackers were Ra sympathisers and he had illegally examined their homes. That this could be the beginning of another Piccadilly Circus riot if they were not fucking careful.

Kassandra shut up and faded away with this inspired piece of fiction, presumably to talk to her boss. But the pushy mare would be bending his brain again soon. Finn had left out the bit about the dog, of course.

All he had to do now was find out what connected the three of them and what an image-library picture of a mongrel pup had to do with anything, before some other head case tried to Delete him. In the metallic tabletop, he caught sight of his own reflection and realised what a mess he looked. He had to get off the streets and think.

Signing himself off the book, he made a beeline to the usual Soho-bar.

The Tallyman had always liked the skin-palaces. Primarily because they were kept warm to stop the sex-workers breaking out in goosebumps every five minutes, and there were other bonus attractions too. Heading for the washroom, he shed his outdoor coat, then spent ten minutes soaking his pale grey shirt in the sink, until most of the blood washed out of it.

No one eyeballed him as he cleaned up his neck wound and covered it with a quick spray of plastic skin from a pencil-aerosol. Once, he'd had to sew part of his left arm back on, out there in the ruins of Old London. A Tallyman soon became expert at DIY surgery, until he could get booked in to a company Refit hospital. All part of the cruddy job.

Julie was waiting for him when he left the blue tiled men's' room and walked back into the hot tangerine lights of the palace. Julie Francisco was a sex-worker whom he'd got to know quite well over the last year. Not so much a friend, more a regular client. She used to be a doctor, but the pay for taking off her clothes for horny office workers doing lunch, and loveless dead guys, was far superior. She also had a clinical mind for all things recycled.

Over two hot rums and zucchinis, he told her everything that had happened that day,

"And all three of you have the same initialisation date?" she said.

"Jun8/2102. I was guessing either a virus has been introduced into the ironglass interface, or we're all part of a bad recycle batch."

"No way. The RoseLang system has over seventy separate sieves and antibody creches. You've got to remember, you Tallymen and all low-paid maintenance workers are second-generation recycled cadavers. RoseLang built up the business by supplying hard-to-kill cannon fodder for the African corporate wars waaay before the process was legalised. Plus, there's no such thing as a bad batch... But something sure as fuck has happened."

The good-looking brunette dressed in two tassels and a thong, slipped on her heavy vary-focal glasses and promptly borrowed Finn's visor. The Babbage table they were sitting at cleared as she placed the hardware on its glass surface. Strings of microsoftware lights began to draw tracer patterns around the HeadSpace interface.

"I guess you illegally downloaded stuff from both attackers brains?" she chattered, tassels swinging enthusiastically as her fingers ran over a lightkeyboard projected inside the glass tabletop.

"Of course. What I could get out in a flash, anyhow."

Finn hunched forward on the padded seat. He felt oddly nervous. He was never nervous.

"When they brought me back..." he began, tentatively. "When they bring any of us back, what are the chances of us retaining some of our original memories?"

"Absolutely none," Julie replied, quite emphatically. "This process has been in the public domain for over fifteen years. RoseLang was producing corpsicles - as you were so delicately known as back in those days - in secret for twenty years before, via the African Corporations. The successful recycling of a human being moved in tandem with silicon-protein breeding - that's growing the ironglass daggers that have been spiked into your brain. We called it 'the crown of thorns' in the trade. You should really grab a copy of my first book, 'Playing God'. WAXprint hold it on memory. I go into detail about which parts of the brain are surgically removed upon death, to fit the crown before initiating a new persona-map..."

"I think I'll pass on that," Finn paled slightly, cutting her off.

Julie tapped the table and moved lumps of hyper-compressed information bubbles as she babbled on. She rarely got the opportunity to prove she had a mind in her current trade. The strains of remixed 2030 garage-classical strings drifted through the red-lit pleasure rooms as the ex-doctor got into her tutorial.

"Listen." Finn tried not to be rude. "I really just need the basics." He tried to stem the verbal tide, but Julie was enjoying herself. "So could my dreams be ghost-memories of my original life?"

She shook her head.

"As I keep saying, dumbo, the portions of your brain that retains long term memories were either surgically sliced or lasered away when you were on the table. I wish I could show you a real crown of thorns being inserted into a cadaver's cranium. It's a thing of beauty. But these days, that sort of stuff is all jobbed-out to Gonzo body shops. The original RoseLang operating theatres have long been shut down... another reason why I ended up here."

She finally stopped her fingers tapping on the tabletop and sat back, a puzzled look on her face. Before her, two groups of memory-files had been stacked in the holographic screen set into the table Babbage.

"Odd, that. These engrams have all got bad encryption dates on them. Both your attackers whole persona-command systems have degraded... It started about 13 hours ago. Could be a sloppy reincarnation after all. The tales I could tell you about some of these body shops..!"

She tapped the offending engrams with her index finger, to try and encourage them to open up. They looked like little coloured bubbles bobbing in two groups. They flexed and moved around within themselves, but refused to open.

"Thought so. They're buggered," she said, finally.

"That will be a medical term then."

Julie grinned at him. That was one of the things she liked about Finn, above all the other dead clients she had. Somehow he'd retained a sense of humour.

"Shut up. These are foreign thought engrams. Ideas... or memories. But they've been corrupted and got lodged within each of your insane attackers' minds. I can't read them on this toy interface here - it mostly deals with porn, day in, day out. Wasn't installed for heavy cerebral diagnostics. But I can tell you both degraded bubble groups are identical. Could be some sort of fetish implant that didn't take... or maybe they've both been subjected to a large electric shock at some point during reanimation."

"Both of them?"

"Highly unlikely, I know. But these alien engrams got in there somehow."

She tidied up the electronic table and passed Finn's visor back to him. So now he knew both his assailants had one thing in common - bad thoughts messing with their heads.

"Where could I open these engrams and read them?"

She pulled a face. "Used to be all done at RoseLang. As I said, the work was all sent out for tender three... no four years ago now. I'd have to identify the body shop that worked on all three of you and talk to them. Though how you're going to explain where you got two other persona-maps from, I don't know."

"I skate a thin line..." Finn smiled mysteriously.

He got up to go, scratching at his crew cut, when Julie caught him gently by one arm.

"Can I interest you in a little executive stress relief, guy, whilst the house computer tracks down whatever copyright glyphs it can find in your three persona-maps?" She grinned at him, coyly.

"Ah, well... What the hay..." Finn took off his coat and smiled back at her.

Two minutes later they were hot and naked in Julie's room, conducting other business.

He was in that boat again, with person or persons unknown... drifting with the receding tide through the artificial canyons of flooded Old London. This was it... This was the place... Cautiously, he looked down into the water to see if they were there. Lions beneath the sea foam.

But this time, only his reflection looked back. He had long hair, like a democrat. His nose was thinner and there was something different about his jaw line. Dressed in a combat jacket with a fat laser slung over his shoulder.

Then someone spoke a name...

There was a thumping in his head as Finn woke up. Not like the usual whisky hangovers he had every morning - this one was accompanied by screams. The Tallyman sat bolt upright on the bed, Salamander already in hand. Even before he struggled to get his pants back on, he stuffed the business end of the gas-fired gun with perfume beads snatched from a shallow bowl next to Julie's bed.

Ever since the two attempts on his life - ha! - his second life - the universe had been turned upside down, and shaken vigorously. He was just a dead man trying to keep his own books balanced in this dour recycled world. 18 months dead, with a custom made personality programmed into his fucking brain; which told him he was a debt collector, a corporate executioner, and a dog lover... Not a bloody moving target!

There was no sign of Julie Francisco, the doctor turned sex-worker he had just spent Happy Hour with, and the screams were getting louder from right outside the door. Seconds later, the sliding panel was smashed in by someone tall and armed with a length of scaffolding, who stood in the settling dust of the corridor.

"I know who you were..." said a grating voice through the haze.

With an almighty swing, the man nearly took the top off Finn's head.

The Tallyman's finger strained on the trigger of his Salamander. It was an easy shot. The perfumed balls should have enough alcohol in them to create a stream of blazing, adhesive pellets. But this was Julie's house, her place of work. She wouldn't be too pleased if it went up in smoke.

"Just put that fucking pole down and let's talk about this," he said, trying the diplomatic route. Finn was rubbish at the diplomatic route. Just to irk him a little bit more, HeadSpace went off with that annoying buzz. The Office again.

His manic attacker, who was a young man clothed in the dark blue boiler suit of a hi-rize window cleaner, also thought he was rubbish at the diplomatic route. With a sudden twist of the pole, he tried to shove the eight foot improvised weapon through Finn's stomach.

"Finn - back on the Book, immediately," twittered his handler Kassandra in one ear.

"Busy now... I'll call back!" Finn replied, as the scaffolding grazed past his chest and embedded itself in the bedroom wall behind him.

Pouring the perfumed balls back out of the gun's muzzle into the palm of his hand, he slipped them into his trouser pocket. Scooping up a sharp chunk of plasterglaze from the wrecked wall, he rammed that home instead.

"You swore on the Lions that this would always matter," his assailant babbled. Finn wondered, almost absent-mindedly what the young man had died of and what cock-eyed insurance contract he'd taken out that had placed him in the hands of the reanimators.

"This country... this green, verdant land should not be stripped away and sold overseas, bit by bit!"

Now the nutter was spouting democrat propaganda. Those political throwbacks that still kicked against the worldwide Corporate system. Government run as and by a Business. Strewth, history had shown communism never worked, and democracy went down the pan shortly after that. The world was a better place under the direct control of Global Conglomerates.

Then, maybe that was just his reprogramming talking.

Finn gave up trying to pacify his attacker. With a belch of fire, the gun launched its jagged chunk of plaster and impaled the man in his left shoulder. The window cleaner looked at the offending item and then returned his full psychopathic attention to trying to smear the Tallyman over all four walls.

"Finn5612. The last two kills you have been involved with have severe repercussions. You must report in person to the fucking Office now!" Kassandra was getting a little annoyed.

"I'm on my way..." lied the Tallyman.

"What's that noise in the background? Did you just discharge your weapon again?" the disembodied voice of his handler squawked in his ear.

Finn hastily cut her off.

"Don't you dare blow him up in my room!" he heard Julie shout from somewhere in the corridor. This raised his game slightly. The screams he had heard mustn't have been hers.

"Well how am I supposed to get this lunatic off my case?" he shouted back through the wrecked doorway.

"You let him out..." the man suddenly butted in, tears now welling in his eyes. "Mum said that he had to stay in the garden, but you let him out!"

The pole caught Finn square in the chest, knocking the breath out of him. Straddled across the bed, wheezing for air, he watched in detached horror as the man loomed over him and raised his weapon above his head, poised to slam it down and spear the Tallyman through the heart.

At the last possible moment, Finn hauled himself to one side, the weapon ripping down his left shoulder blade. Not for the first time did he thank the Company for installing a morphine shunt embedded under his left armpit. For a moment the two antagonists stared at each other, face to face. There was only one thing he could do... Finn bit down hard on the young man's nose and wouldn't let go.

Fist flailing and roaring like a bull in pain, the attacker punched him again and again in the belly. In a blur of movement, Finn could see Julie stood behind them both, with some hand-held gizmo as she frantically crunched in the numbers.

"Keep him off you for just a few more..." she began. Then the man suddenly collapsed heavily across Finn's bruised body. "...seconds..." Julie finished, lowering her remote device.

Finn lay there on his back looking up at that familiar ceiling, catching his breath, and wiping the taste of his attackers blood from his mouth. It didn't take an expert to tell him his dancing partner was dead and it was nothing to do with his actions.

Heaving the corpse off him with his last ounce of energy, he sat up and rubbed the sweat from his face with his crumpled shirt. He glanced over to the ashen-faced Julie, in her pink silk dressing gown and fluffy rabbit slippers.

"How did you do that?" he asked, nodding at the deceased man.

"Every one of you has a biological kill-switch, Finn. Just needed to find the right algorithms."

He stared open-mouthed at the ex-doctor.

"I never knew that... What would have happened if you had found the code for my kill-switch first?"

"I'd be having this conversation with him," she replied, tight lipped.

This whole thing was getting out of hand, Finn mused as he sat on the cross-town Linear Accelerator to Xiang&Whitechapel's prestigious offices. He had cleaned himself up as best he could, with his coat hiding most of the damage and his round fedora pulled low to hide his face from the peepers, but his mind was still in trauma.

He and Julie had pulled just enough out of the kid's skull to confirm that he too was initialised on the same day as Finn and his previous two assailants. Julie had not been able to translate enough glyphs to identify which body shop had done the deed, but she promised to HeadSpace it to him as soon as the figures popped out of her Babbage machine.

He offered to pay for the mess that his xombie attacker had made, but she had shooed him out, reminding him that his Office was getting a shade suspicious that all was not well.

"That's why they had us medics install kill-switches, love. For the public's greater good. If your Office thinks you've gone a little fruit-loops too, they can switch you off quicker than a 10 dollar light bulb!"

Sat on the Accelerator, he wondered why the idea that his employers had created a fail-safe system in their recycled men was such a shock to him. That they could permanently terminate his contract on a whim? It wasn't as if he was a second-class citizen any more. He simply had no class. Dead man walking... still paying off his own debts that he had incurred in an unknown life.

"I know who you were," the voice of his last assailant echoed around his head, as the Accelerator shot between the round towers of Hurricane City on its single magnetic rail.

It wasn't as if he had never wondered before what his original name had been, whether he had been married or if there had been any children left behind when he had died. It was just now, these recycled maniacs seemed to know more about his forgotten past than he did.

Which made it all the more tempting to try and find out who he had once been...

"Don't be such a fool," Julie had reprimanded him as she had helped him to dress. "That is the unforgivable. The ultimate sin. You try and fish out who you were before they brought your body back, and you'll be on the slab with another personality being jammed into your head before nightfall!"

Some of the perfumed balls had squished over them both and the odour filled up his senses, drowning out the smell of his own sweat. He couldn't help noticing how deuced good she looked, all dishevelled and up close like this. She had committed a crime for him. She had used classified knowledge to turn off one of his would-be murderers. Now they had to cover up far more than illegally tapping into other people's persona-maps.

Before he left to answer the Office call, they kissed. It hurt him to leave her alone to dispose of the body. Finn didn't remember feeling this way before in his long eighteen months of shelf life. Just for a second, the 'L' word popped into his head. Then he dismissed it just as quickly. That didn't happen to a corpsicle.

Things churned over in his mind. He kind of guessed that if he had had time to break into his last assailant's living space, he would find the place trashed and that damn eye graffiti sprayed on the wall again. What was this all to do with the anarchist, Ra?

In his initial briefings by the Company on the various democratic terrorist organisations, the current intel couldn't prove whether Ra was a group identity or a single man. These 22nd century hippies chipped away at the Company laws; smuggling bad debtors out of the country, helping people escape the recycling clauses in their life-term contracts. He had read somewhere that ten years ago, 5% of the world's population had entered into repossession of their lifeless corpse, to balance the book on their life. The latest figures now suggested this figure was more like 27% - and rising.

Death was the fastest growing business in the modern world.

It seemed such a little price to pay for being financially looked after in life. No funeral expenses for the deceased's family and sometimes a further cash settlement to the next of kin. What was the harm?

Ask any recycled man that question. Ask them what they thought about during their new, brief life, with all their greatest assets, their memories and personality stripped from them. Living a half-life with a fictional persona, always wondering what actions were your own and what had been programmed into you as you lay on the slab. Like Finn, a second-lifer only began to realised what a violation had been done to them when it was too late.

The central offices of Xiang&Whitechapel were a prestigious affair. Nestled in the heart of the James Brown tower block, they had been built and fitted out in the more frivolous age of the late 21st century. Someone once described it as Art Deco meets Marvel Comics. Finn had hunted for several days for books on those two eclectic art styles.

Hat still pulled low, he walked between the sightless twin statues of some forgotten Greek deities, into the vast oval arena of the office floor, with its domed roof decorated with stain-glass art work. Holographic sights and surround sounds were being projected up from the business floor via a variety of Babbage machines - like a luminescent waltz of light, movement and sound. On the balcony surrounding the business floor, armed Politz thugs were patrolling, their guns mounted on gimbals and pointed inward. The office joke was, whether this was to keep anarchistic elements out, or keep the workers in. No one was ever really sure.

Hurricane City was constantly on an uneasy alert, as was the whole Northern European Block, due to democratic insurrections. These were mainly graffiti and lurid slogans, such as "Votes for the People!' sprayed on national monuments. But there had been shootings and there had been explosions. Who exactly had done these deeds was questionable, but it had been decided in the boardrooms, long ago, that every good Corporate State needed an enemy to keep its Citizens sharp.

Kassandra Pi, ravishing in her auburn wool pencil skirt, magenta silk blouse with padded shoulders, with her copper hair piled up in the present WW2/gauche fashion fad, was not in a good mood.

"You are in so much deep doo-doo, Finn5612!" she berated Finn from her bucket seat before he had even set foot on the office floor proper. "Two dead bodies to log and process... Companies to be contacted and remuneration bonds to be discussed... Several citizen injuries and one Gonzo-bot destruction to place on your book. This is going to tie me down with RedLegislation for a deuced week!"

Flamboyantly, his handler kissed him on both cheeks, whipping the round brimmed hat off his head before she did so.

"You're such a naughty guy! If we didn't have dozens of peeper digi-files to back you up, we'd be looking at a serious spanking here!" she grinned, wiping a smudge of dirt from one cheek, like a mother would her favourite son. Kassandra was barely 22 years old and a born handler. She loved playing the femme fatal, and Finn's little exploits had earned her multiple-bonuses in the last eighteen months. Greed was her god.

But the Tallyman was breathing an inner sigh of relief. There was no mention of a third body. Julie must have managed to spirit it away, with the help of her slightly dodgy business connections.

"What those two bozos were on, we could only guess at. CEO Bok of Xiang&Whitechapel has counselled the European Northern Block Multi-Corporate Committee for increased drugs tests on recycled employees. There's enough substance abuse amongst the living, without frying the minds of the dead too!"

Finn resisted the reply that she should know.

Robotically, he placed his thumb on one of the input pads on Kassandra's table to log in. He noticed she had his files-to-book already pulled up in a holographic stack. The input pad pinged away for a few seconds before it gave him the green light. How Julie had been able to mask what had happened to him in the last few hours was beyond him. She really did know the workings of a crown of thorns inside out.

Then the rocket went up.

Ten-point alarms began to clang around the office floor, as Kassandra's desk began to pulse with a sickly green light. The clack and hum of maser rifles training on him, made him freeze to the spot.

"Oh, you naughty, naughty boy..." his handler muttered, her fingers tripping over the lightkeyboard. "You've picked up a bug!"

Finn knew the routine. Hands flat out on the table before him, an armourlite Politz officer relieved him of his Salamander and a second mute Company thug ran a detection rod across his body. It beeped when the rod was passed over his left forearm. Still leaning on the table with his right hand, the Tallyman allowed Kassandra to slip his left coat sleeve off and roll up his shirt. Embedded in his arm was the tiniest of bumps.

Around any modern city, cleansed of most natural insect life, buzzed miniature peepers on tiny wings. Little industrial spies. Once they landed on an unsuspecting person, they would burrow into thick clothing or even under the skin, to transmit Corporate secrets back to rival Companies. Slipping on a microthin pair of rubber gloves, Kassandra took great delight cutting into his skin with a disposable scalpel to remove the cybernetic bug.

What no one noticed, just as Finn and Julie had planned, was he had never removed his thumb from the input pad. With his files wide open, out of their usual impenetrable digital vaults, he was streaming everything he could see via HeadSpace back to the pleasure rooms.

That little bit of theatre done with, with weapon returned, Finn strode casually back out of the offices, leaving Kassandra to dissect the bug he'd picked up and see who was tagging her Tallymen.

"There were a full eight bodies initialised in your pack," Julie's voice came over HeadSpace, once he was out of Xiang&Whitechapel peeper range. "There was you, the three you have killed and three more who have committed suicide in the last fifteen hours."

"No coincidence there. Something went wrong when they brought us back. Something at the body shop where the reanimation was done..." he muttered, pretending to look over the balcony at the Elephant Gardens from an elevated walkway, laid out in stacks and home to various rescued species of African wildlife.

"The other survivor of batch ST9/RL/Jun8/2102 is called John9595. Funny that... he's a Tallyman too for Xiang&Whitechapel. No information on who you were before you died. That's perfectly normal. A Company purchases clean and newly personalised corpsicles from the independent body shops. They have no interest in who the xombie's were before they died. Information like that should be held at the body shop in question."

He held his breath. She was grandstanding again.

"Which is?" he finally got out.

"The rather darkly titled, Sweeny Todd Esquire. Somebody's got a sick sense of humour."

"Let's see if they're still laughing after I've paid them a fucking visit," Finn replied, already following the map Julie had placed inside his mind.

The lower levels of Hurricane City lost some of the shine, which the Companies liked to keep in their business and social districts. Old heating ducts and exhumed sewer pipes had been revealed as the city had burrowed deeper below the rising sea level to create new foundations. Reaching Apple Way, Finn knew he was getting close to his destination. The moving pavements ran out and he had to walk.

The body shop of Sweeny Todd Esquire sat in an old converted mill, which had been reinforced over thirty years ago when the pillar-shells of Hurricane were first raised. Its red brickwork, encased in a peeling reinforced gel looked almost unreal. How anything that old had stood up to two centuries of climatic corrosion was a mystery.

Inside, the place was a similar time capsule to things best forgotten. Squeezing through the rotting wooden door, on terminally rusted hinges, one energy-saving light bulb lit an empty hall-way and staircase. Cracks patterned the walls, the bare staircase was littered with mouse droppings and there was a dead pigeon rotting slowly in one corner. All nice camouflage. Tentatively, Finn began to climb up the creaking stairs.

Three floors up, the walls were suddenly white, having been skimmed with a vegetable resin. White metallic doors lined the corridor, sliding into invisible frames, each with a newly installed thumb pad next to them. Peeper boxes clustered around each entrance, little red lights winking to show they were awake.

The body shop had a conservative brass plaque next to its door. He stuck his thumb in the usual place and the ironglass shard overrode any security code, making the door hiss open. Like an animal must have felt being taken to the vet, back when people were allowed to keep pets, Finn felt ill at ease. The pristine white walls with their low-energy blue light lines resonated with the sense of death.

At least they did to him, because this was where he had been reborn.

No one seemed to be around. The narrow entrance soon opened up into a large floor space, sectioned off with opaque curtains into separate cubicles. The soft hiss of pneumatic pumps and an odd clickerty-clack came from all sides. His heart beating a little faster, Finn risked pulling the nearest curtain aside.

There were eight slabs grouped around a central medicGonzo behind the grey curtain. Only three tables were occupied in this particular resurrection suite - all heads pointing inward. Their naked bodies were covered with flimsy green sheets, their vital organs hooked up to tubes and wires as the Gonzo monitored and breathed for each of them. Whilst the sound of clicking needles came from a host of spider-like Waldos that were working frantically on the cadavers' exposed brains.

Cutting, slicing and cauterising... Finn could feel the bile rising in his throat.

In the next area, seven more bodies were being prepped for a new life. In the one beyond that, five. The automatic surgeons shaving away slivers of human brain and dropping the pieces into recycling bins, making way for the artificial crown of thorns. Preparing the dead to receive their new personas.

It was all sickeningly fascinating, as the Tallyman watched limbs being replaced, muscles toned and plastic surgery alter faces. Wouldn't be good for business if a widow had a screaming fit in her local WAXTescoMicrosoft as she bumped into her dead husband.

It all left Finn cold, as he imagined himself and the seven other bodies in batch ST9/RL/Jun8/2102 being cleansed of everything that made them who they once were. Waiting to be initialised. Born again into the all-embracing, Corporate world, where the average Citizen didn't give a fig about their recycled cousins.

Shelter+Warmth+Food+Occasional Sex = A Happy Citizen.

"Really... for a Tallyman, you do blunder into things like an amateur," said a cold, articulate voice from behind Finn. "Now, remove your Salamander with the thumb and forefinger of your left hand and drop it in that medical waste bin next to you," the voice commanded.

In the reflective stainless steel surfaces around him, Finn could see the distorted image of a short man dressed in green. The man, a doctor by his clothes, was pointing a blunt gun at the Tallyman's back. He calculated the distance between them, and then let out a sigh. Doing as he was ordered, he dropped his ornate weapon into the metal container, where it landed with a dull squish amongst the body waste.

Without waiting to be told otherwise, Finn turned to face his captor.

The middle-aged doctor with an almost hairless head but an impressive moustache, smiled wryly. He had a gap between his two front teeth. Finn smiled back, as best he could. You didn't see many moustaches these days. Plus, you didn't see many illegal African Corps masers pointing at you either.

"Nice piece," he tried to get the conversation going, nodding at the gun.

"You haven't a clue who I am, have you?"

"Well actually, I have. You're Doctor Karsten Johannson, from the information I stole from the Office. I've always had my doubts about Kassandra's honesty. I presume some illegal peeper embedded in her desk told her I'd hacked into my personal file?"

The Doctor pulled a face. "Now you've spoiled my little reveal. How do you think a handler like her affords fine dresses and supports several nasty habits? A few back-handers from the body shops here... a touch of blackmail there... you'd be surprised what that little minx gets up to!"

"No I wouldn't," Finn scowled. "So, what's the game, doctor? Why have snippets of my original memories been scattered through a complete batch of recycled cadavers?"

"A fascinating accident, I'm afraid. I can't claim the cerdit for that one. But what I think you really want is to find out who you once were. What all those dreams and visions mean." He patted a fat, innocuous looking drum, embedded in the brick wall next to him. "It's all stored here in the shop core-frame."

Johannson sat down in a swivel chair, the fat barrelled weapon beginning to grow heavier. Finn could already detect a tremor in the man's right hand.

" By the way - I've already cheated and looked. Your parents bought Scruffy as a pup when you were four years old. They thought it would teach you some responsibility. Rather stupidly, they left you both playing in that tiny front garden somewhere on the new south coast, and you left the gate open, silly boy... Scruffy got converted into road-kill when a five-coach wagon train flattened him. Never should have allowed those lorry-trains to take the C roads."

Finn suddenly felt an odd lurch inside his gut. His eyes began to prickle at the image of that little dog swam back into his memory and he had to chew his bottom lip for a moment, to try and regain some composure.

"Do you get off rummaging through dead men's memories, Johannson?" he asked. The gun jerked back up, aiming for his face.

"Only the special ones. And you, my boy, were very special... Mark." Johannson smiled at him, regaining the upper hand.

"Mark..." Finn repeated, rolling the name around with his tongue. It was proving difficult to stick to the game plan. "So what happened? How did the operation screw up?"

The doctor waved the maser around in a distracted sort of way.

"Do you know the oldest a Recyc lives to? Eight pathetically short years. You all go mad, often before then... that's what the constant psych screening is really for. That yawning gulf behind you and your lost past eats away at you like a cancer, until we have to put you down like the animals you are and re-initialise you all over again."

"Something to look forward to, I suppose," Finn shrugged.

This ticked his captor off a touch.

"You think you're all so deuce clever! Pain management, reinforced skeletal structure, increased stamina... personality created by lottery rotation from a Babbage. But you, Mark... You thought you were the bee's knees when you were first alive!"

The doctor laughed and sat back in his chair. Finn gritted his teeth. The trajectory had been better when he had been sat forward.

"Little Mark Brass... still pining for his mummy's embrace. The things I could tell you about you..."

The Tallyman just smiled. It was time to play his joker.

"I was still alive, wasn't I, when you hooked me into your machines? A learned friend of mine told me that there was no way any remnants of memory could be retained after initialisation - let alone passed down the line - from dead mind to dead mind. So I had to be alive, laid out on one of those tables with spider-knives cutting into my brain... as you killed me."

He spoke the words as cold as that. Finn had worked it out between the Office and the body shop, but couldn't quite believe it was true. Until the expression of rage on Johannson's face confirmed his darkest suspicions. The Company had had him murdered.

The doctor leaned forward again, both hands around the shaking maser.

"The docket said you were dead. When I first hooked you up, I thought you were dead! If I wasn't so deuce lazy I'd write a paper on how a living patient's memories can be scattered through any number of linked resurrected brains. As you gasped your last, all those private little memories must have flooded through the Gonzo-system to your fellow Recycs. Must have driven them raving-crazy!"

"It's the thought that kills," Finn snorted.

"Still trying to be a clever bugger eh, Mark? Not on your own this time, though. Kassandra's traced the little line from you to your pet strumpet. Sending round the Tallymen for her as we speak. But you're still the clever college boy with all the smart answers. You and your politically extinct pals sat in your retro-coffee bars discussing the next revolution. I mean - democracy? Don't make me laugh! When Joe Public had the right to vote, back in the day when he was using up the Earth's resources like there was no tomorrow, what did he do with it? Sat on his fat backside in front of the Mural, too bone-idle to go out and put a cross on a scrap of paper!

"People need the Company. The Company feeds and clothes them and keeps them in work. Educates their sluggish brats and even takes their mortal remains away when they choke to death on their spun Soya burgers."

He raised the gun a little higher, an insane gleam in his eye, his finger tightening on the trigger.

"Is it such a high price for the Company to demand its pound of flesh in return?"

There was a loud retort, as Finn's Salamander went off in the waste bin.

Shrapnel and bone fragments ripped out through the side of the container, tearing through the doctor's right leg, severing it just below the knee.

Johannson's mouth opened in a silent scream, as Finn took two steps forward and caught him as he fell, disarming him with ease. With a deft judo flick, he dropped the little man flat on his back on one of the empty slabs.

"Julie... Get out of there now! They know!" he shouted into HeadSpace. There was no reply from the other end - only static.

As the doctor began to scream with the delayed pain, Finn silently pinned him down with metal restraints. Picking a water resistant pen from a little rack next to the still bank of spiders, he drew a neat dotted line across the man's forehead.

"You wouldn't!" Johannson squealed. "You couldn't..."

"I'm a Tallyman, doctor. You made me capable of murder without any thoughts of remorse. Remember... the books must always be balanced."

"No... Nooo!"

Finn leaned forward, his face inches from his former antagonist.

"Who was I?" he croaked in a horse voice.

"I already told you! Mark Brass... your name was Mark Brass!"

If Kassandra had sent the heavies out after Julie, it made sense that she had sent a bunch over to Sweeny Todd's too. He didn't have enough time to try and hack into the shop's archives. Deftly, he punched the button to start the lobotomy process on Johannson.

"Who... was... I?" he repeated the question, as tiny buzz saws began to cut along the dotted line.

At that moment, Finn saw how quickly a man could go mad. His voice paralysed with the pain, Johannson spasmodically drew something on the table with one finger, using his own blood as ink. Then the hand went limp. The first incision into his cerebellum had begun.

Finn looked quietly at the sign the dying man had drawn and he finally realised the truth. It was a ragged image of a single eye. Big Brother, back after such a long time.

The sign of Ra.

Running at full tilt, time now short if not completely out, the Tallyman crashed down the rotting stairs and out of that charnel house - to nearly mow down a woman with a mass of curly auburn hair. The woman he thought he'd killed by knocking her into the sea the previous night.

She held out a hand, as he raised his Salamander.

"Wait! Is Johannson dead?"

"Near enough," Finn replied, tersely.

"Good. John wants to see you. Sort all this out."

"John?"

"John9595. The recycled man who ended up with the lion's share of your old memories..."

The lion's share. Now wasn't that something. There was a joke hiding in there, somewhere, waiting to roar. But Finn quietly holstered his gun and followed the girl with the curly hair through the foundations of Hurricane City. Wanting this all done.

Wanting an end to it.

The boats were floating in loose formation, drifting through the drowned streets of Old London. The lead Viking skiff hoisting a proud sail with the red white and blue of Ra' eye. In their coffee-shop days, the radical students discussing Cultural Revolution had ripped-off Egyptian iconography just because it looked Kool.

Nelson's Column still stood proudly, if a little weather beaten, in the centre of the lake that was once Trafalgar Square, coated in lichen and high tide marks. More boats of all shapes and sizes were waiting for them there. Finn felt suddenly unprepared in the face of so many of the enemy and had to fight his programming and not call in backup.

He'd forgotten - he didn't work for the Company any more.

As he had fled from the body shop, he had sent a single word command back to Kassandra's desk; to start its Babbage spewing her secrets out to the rest of the Office. She'd have her hands full covering her own backside for a while. But the Company, in all its terrible glory would eventually turn its all-consuming attention back to him.

John was waiting for him on the wooden platform they had built around the column, now only half its former height, the rest of it hidden beneath the choppy waves. He was an unassuming person. Dark haired. A little overweight for a Tallyman. Finn had probably walked right past him a dozen times when reporting back to the Office.

The head of Ra... The top dog of the democratic terrorists, leading the double life of a Company's Man.

"Congratulations," said Finn, "You've obviously lived my former life better than I did, or I would have never been caught."

"I doubt that," John9595 smiled back. "They jammed my head full of a fake identity, then all of your cruddy memories piled on the top. Mark Brass' memories came crashing in like a fucking tidal wave and screwed me over. You were a real student Meep in your day!"

"What happened? What started this mess?" Finn asked, fingers spasming to draw his gun. His programming ever-lurking just beneath his skin.

This man was an enemy of the Company, after all.

"Gemma?" John asked the girl with the curly hair.

"We were in a demo around the Wembley Arena. Peaceful stuff at first, until the Company decided to let off a few bombs and blame us. They sent in the Tallymen... to balance the books. You were shot, Mark. They gunned you down like a dog - sorry. Sore point, that. Mum and Dad never forgave you for Scruffy..."

The enemy of the Company is my enemy. Balance the books. Balance... the... books...

"It's Gemma Brass, by the way. I'm your sister." The tears of mixed emotions ran down her face. "Sorry about the axe and the foot and all of that. Anyway, the Company needed information from you about Ra's activities. Johannson decided to put you on the slab whilst you breathed, to get it out of you, but the system crashed. As you died, your memories were looped through the other seven corpses. Little engram time bombs waiting for the right moment to explode. Which was your 100th kill. Your automatic recall for servicing triggered them all off.

"Only John had enough of you to make sense of it all. He'd found us not long after your... and... well, he plays a good you, let's put it that way. Ra lived on."

"I was Ra?"

She nodded in reply to Finn's blank-faced question.

"Corny, I know. But the graphics worked. You came up with all the slogans too. 'Rule Britannia, Britannia beneath the waves'. I always liked that one."

"But now it's time to take the memories back, Finn5612... Mark," his stand-in said quietly.

For once, just at the right moment, the winds that usually blew night and day through the submerged city fell still in some sort of reverence.

Finn knew what he had to do. There was a pounding in his head, but his programming knew what to do.

Ever the Tallyman, Finn drew his Salamander smoothly and pointed its business end at John9595.

"I'm arresting you for civil terrorism, under the Inter-Company Law of 2190."

All around the flooded square, a miss-match of guns were cocked and loaded.

"Don't be such a fucking fool!" John begged. "This was your cause. These were your ideas! I'm just the poor bugger who had them jammed inside his head! I've done all of this for the downtrodden citizens of the British Isles!"

"Democracy was always a flawed ideal," said Finn, and blew the platform between them to matchwood with an explosive bullet.

The water was freezing and salty as they both plunged beneath its surface. The smoke and debris masking what was going on from the rest of the urban terrorists. Both men's heavy woollen clothing dragged them down in a swirl of collapsing scaffolding and bubbles, their hands on each other's throats.

What was going through John's mind, the Recyc who'd lived with another man's memories for a year and a half, was impossible to tell. But Finn's own training had taken over. There would be no passing the baton on - he could never be Ra again. In a world of red, with his HeadSpace crashing like a machinegun to the brain, Finn had no choice other than killing this pretender.

Good = Evil.

Balance the Books...

As they fought, both drowning beneath the freezing waves, Finn's visor popped neatly out of its skull-jack and the two of them turned and tumbled, sinking deeper into the debris of Old London. At least no one would be able to send his kill-code now... If John didn't do the job first.

He really hoped Julie had got clear before the heavy mob turned up.

A ragged image of a little black and white dog skipping down a garden path flickered in front of the young Mark... Balance the books, screamed the other half of his recycled brain.

You have been given a second life by the Company. Use it wisely... Use it for us.

In a dream, Finn reached beneath the water and felt in his trouser pocket. His hand closing around the perfume balls he'd taken from Julie's room. The scent of her was flooding his mind, as the lack of oxygen to the brain began to cloud his vision causing black blobs before his eyes.

As the two versions of the same man sank passed the noble head of one of Trafalgar Square's stone lions, its vacant eyes watched their dance unfold in silence. The sunken lions which those young, politically active students had drifted above all those years ago. Sworn an oath to a forgotten ideal. How many of them were still alive?

Finn realised dimly he would probably never know.

Loading the barrel of his Salamander with the perfumed balls, Finn jammed the gun into John's mouth. There was just one last, frantic struggle as the man realised he was dead, and the Tallyman pulled the trigger. Even underwater, the gas gun ignited the perfume, lighting up the inside of John's skull and illuminating the underwater lions for just a few seconds, whilst the impostor burned...

The living cube seemed all the more cramped when Finn returned to it later that evening. It'd taken hours through a series of sewer tunnels and back alleys to reach his home again. A man wearing sodden clothes, stinking of seawater was rather too conspicuous on the main streets of Hurricane City. Plus there had been the peepers to sideline and avoid.

He sat down heavily on the inflatable chair, leaving his soaking wet coat in a heap by the door. The prize sat on the Babbage table, leaving small puddles of blood where its razor sharp points touched the glass surface. Next to that, he placed a fresh carton of whiskey.

The world inside Finn5612's head teetered on the edge of total mental collapse. He was a Company Man. How much Company subliminal brainwashing was tied into the fictional persona of Finn, he had no idea. But you don't make an army of commercial xombies without building in a ton of safeguards.

Yet John9595's artificial persona had succumbed to the lies of Mark Brass - that was the crux of the problem. Programming or not, Finn agreed with the psychopathic Doctor Johannson. Democracy didn't work. But neither did Corporate Dictatorships. Only in Africa were they more honest by calling their CEO's 'presidents'.

He poured three fingers of whiskey into a tumbler and stared at his prize. There had been no time to mess about linking his mind with the impostors. A more hands-on answer was needed.

Julie had been right. The crown of thorns that was sat on his table, cut from the dead brain of John, was a thing of beauty.

Sometime soon, when all the fuss over the body shop and Kassandra's duplicity died down, some bright spark would wonder if he really was that dumb to go back to his living space. Then sometime shortly after that, the ceiling would cave in and Politz multiple maser fire would reduce him to a pile of dog food. If he still had a dog that was. If anyone still had a dog...

He placed the crumpled picture of the scruffy little canine that may or may not have looked like his childhood pet, next to the crown of thorns. All he had to figure out was, was it worth it? Was surrendering himself to a series of crackpot political ideas in order to find his childhood memories really worth it?

Was that what really mattered, in the final reckoning? Family... friends... old memories like a rich glass of whiskey, trickling down inside a man's mind. All he had to do was jack his own crown into this one, and the forgotten past of Mark Brass would be his - political warts and all.

What to do... What to do...

He sighed, deeply. Whilst he decided which road to take, he would have a little drink.

(c) 2009, Rob Sharp