Slaughtermatic Read Free

three climbed through the ceiling. ‘Deep down he’s all heart - stab him and the knife’d germinate.’
    Dante had the job down to fly-leg detail. The first three floors belonged to the bank and the bank’s elevator rose no further. Above that, according to Download’s sensurround reconstruction, were seventeen floors devoted to scams of every stamp, reached by a bullet elevator up the side of the building. Dante’s little group would hitch the bullet to the roof where Rosa Control would be waiting with a grin and a jetfoil to Alaska - the continuation of Dante’s life and reputation would be assured. He and the Kid were pioneers of the permutation heist, forcing staff to sample small cakes or listen to dismal poetry. They stole trashbaskets, flooded vaults with kelp sludge and staged full-costume drama for nocturnal surveillance cameras. Tonight’s piece was meant to launch the more subtle and mature work for which everyone assured them they were ready.
    On the fourth floor they found a warehouse full of hydraulic dictators and other creepy toys. The bullet elevator didn’t show but there was a regular one the brotherhood had taken out with a crowdpleaser. ‘Why’d they run a tank into the elevator?’ gasped Corey.
    ‘ Didn’t figure we newted the other one,’ said Dante. ‘Guess they know we’re headed for the roof.’
    ‘ I hate inflatables!’ Corey shrieked, kicking the face of a vinyl Hitler. ‘They’re historic !’
    Dante was already feeling strange about the caper – about everything. Was it just the screw-up with the building? By guesswork he tried to match his disassociation to the disused words he’d salvaged from a contraband copy of Vampire Reverse . Abandonment? jacinth? Shame? Nostalgia?
    He seated himself against a wall and breathed deeply. For once he was glad Rosa wasn’t around - she referred to meditation as ‘aspirin on stilts’ and approved less of the shelled ebook he’d boosted from the vault: The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel by Eddie Gamete.
    He visualized the waters of a pond until the last of the shark fins had submerged. A little clearer in the head, he closed the meditation and scrolled the stolen volume, recalling the story. Biff Barbanel is a diametric prankster who, chagrined at the microscopic impact created by even the grandest actions of the individual, sets upon a campaign of experimentation to determine the largest results attainable by the smallest personal effort. He wires up a sophisticated sonic rig to record himself blinking and relay the sound through ten stack amplifiers in the front yard, so that the slightest flicker of an eyelid shatters windows up and down the street. He changes a lightbulb by holding it up and letting the world revolve around him. He writes a history of digitotalitarianism by assigning letters of the alphabet to the varied unreachable itches in his middle ear. He officially nominates a ‘slight, fleeting sensation of nausea’ as a senatorial candidate. He declares a ceasefire with his reflection. Having learned to effect the world in a grain of sand and create heaven in a wildflower, he goes into the larger world with a tortuously amplified causal energy and finds he can switch the world image to negative and positive and back again with the flick of a hand. Told in the first person, the entire scenario proves to be the demented fantasy of a gameshow host who has repented and sits all day at the window wearing a propeller hat. ‘A thought is no different from an act,’ he concludes, ‘especially if your thoughts are of no consequence.’
    This was the last thing Gamete had written before his spectacular death. Legend had it the book had been written not with a pen but a bellows.
    Dante knew all this from snaffle and hearsay, but now was the first time he’d held the fruit in his paws. Browsing, he saw straight off the story wasn’t central - the spice seemed to be in the speed-of-consciousness rants Barbanel scrawls on the