Slaughtermatic Read Free Page A

walls and ceiling:
     
    “ There was a time when the extension of illegality to innocent acts could be used to manipulate men. But when guilt is no longer felt over acts of genuine criminality, what hope of instilling guilt in the innocent?”
     
    Barbanel’s wallworks reminded Dante of an exercise he’d idly pursued during rehearsal - as an installation piece the job had been organized more like a notion than an act. They’d memorized the upper floors in case the elevator stalled but Dante was faster than the Kid and spent a lot of spare time creating a memory palace. Every hall and corner of the building was used as a signifier, a means of remembering text and images by having them dotted around the walls of the simulation. Strolling through the simulation he could read an entire story and then, by walking through the real thing, be able to recall it.
    But this wasn’t the building he’d memorized - similarities triggered flashes of text here and there but in a jumbled order. He’d memorized a favourite Gamete story in which an angel stows away in a hypodermic needle and is inadvertently injected. The girl who receives it feels only the faintest tingle as the being is absorbed.
    In this unfamiliar place the story was scrambled so that the girl was injected into the angel, which reacted by becoming a god. Why was the real thing different from the simulation? Had Jones really sold them down the river?
    As he sat considering these issues he heard the leper’s bell of an approaching idea - maybe Download never let them out of the simulation. The thought hit him like a car at a stop sign. If they were still hooked in, the heist had been nothing but a wraparound dream.
    Virtual reality. That would explain why he felt so bored.

 
     
     
    3
    ROSA
     
    Rosa strode down Swerve Street, dragging her nails along the wall. Sparks leapt and underscored a graffito saying Only the expert will realize your exaggerations are true. In her other hand was a Zero Approach gun identical to Dante’s except for a squeeze adjustment - Rosa had lost a finger in a mood ring explosion. She couldn’t believe she was here when Dante was waiting for the pick-up on Deal Street. Download was up to no good. A guy like that needed a wound bigger than his body.
    Developed to re-empower the victim, the Zero Approach gun worked on a principle of etheric consent and only fired when the target was asking for it. Since its introduction, the homicide rate had risen by four hundred per cent. Download’s ignorance was sure to demand a bullet. Without the firm and necessary grasp of present and past, he didn’t believe an entire nation could lie. She thundered over the monroe grill which served as a welcome mat for his digital foundry.
     
    Dante thought of dolls within dolls and wheels within wheels. ‘Hey Kid - Kid. I look okay?’
    ‘ Yuh look like shit, Danny.’
    ‘ Sure, but I ain’t all shiny, right, not movin’ like a robot?’ He flexed his hand, viewing it. It seemed completely normal. ‘This look texture-mapped to you?’
    The Kid ignored him, slumped morosely against a gas tank. He was thinking of a time when things were different as the result of an experiment. Hearing frequent news reports of people’s unsuspecting and carefree condition just prior to violent misfortune, the Kid had attempted to attain this condition by taking out a contract on himself and ingesting an amnesia drug to forget the arrangement. Sure enough, on the day of the hit he felt an alien lightheartedness. But as the hitman’s car sped toward him he remembered everything and felt more cheated than ever that others got the service for free. He leapt aside and the hitman, who hadn’t a care in the world, died violently on impact with a wall.
    Seating herself opposite him, Corey the Teller asked gently after his wellbeing. He raised a face scorched with reality and whispered that life would be great if it weren’t for its termination in a box of earthworms. They