From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ridley McIntyre)
Subject: SEVEN Parts 1 and 2
Date: 20 Oct 92 15:00:57 GMT


                        SEVEN - by Ridley McIntyre

                        1. Thomas Morrison.

"So that's it, Tommy. That's the end."

 Her face disappears from the screen, angular features flickering to black.
But the trace of her is still there; a two second imprint on the tube. I feel
myself trailing my fingers over the lines of her nose and chin as they fade
in front of me; see my blue reflection in those Sony eyes. She's gone now.

 The rage erupts in my stomach like a bursting ulcer, burning pain forcing
me back from the vidfone screen, and I'm looking for something plastic and
unbreakable to throw at something. The coffee cup she gave me looks the most
likely missile, and I scream out "STUPID BITCH!" in annoyed split syllables
as I hurl it straight through the open rectangle of the living room window.

 Looking down from the window I can just manage to see the white blob turn to
a spec as it melts into the dark shadows eighty floors below me, a falling
angel in a London Dustzone owned and run by the local company, Lambs Conduit,
after which the whole neighbourhood is named. The red midday sun burns my wet
face and I have to go back inside again.

 Through the walls I can hear Jayne's headboard smacking a dull, arrythmic
beat accompanied by the grunts and moans of sexual pleasure. Jesus, I wish
she'd stop sometimes. It reminds me how hard it is to find love in this 'Plex.

 The sun has lifted my brain out of my head and I find I'm just doing things
without realising I'm doing them, with no reason why. I'm going back to the
grey vidfone and pressing the "play" stud on the answering machine. Hers is
the only message stored on disk. Her face flickers onto the screen, that
rough shag of chestnut hair cut into a bob around her ears.

 "Uh, hi, Tommy. I really don't know where to begin."

 Tracing the lines of her face again with rough fingers I can hear the
whisper of my own voice talking to that High Definition image.

 "Just start at the beginning."

                                ***

A week earlier I'm in this place called Chevignon in Lambs Conduit. The
large worker's bar reeks of bad business. Couriers from the Outzone wearing
stolen Lambs Conduit grey/blue worksuits do their best to see as many people
as they can, desperately trying to move pills, microsofts, cheap digital
watches and whatever else they can fit in their jackets.

 I'm drinking Tiger beer with my spar, Falco, when one of the couriers takes
the third seat at our wrought iron table. The light from the fuzzy orange
strip lights above us makes his skinny face look almost healthy.

 "Namaste. How are you doing?" he says, grinning broadly like he's known us for
years. "Amber Roy." A powerful introduction.

 "Not so bad," Falco replies. "How do you feel?" Falco's sarcasm is so thick
I could almost reach out and touch it.

 "No worries," the Salesman says. "Listen. I've got this great deal for you.
You seen these?"

 Like a TV evangelist on one of Disney Guild's religion channels, the Salesman
pulls a sleight-of-hand-trick, making a clear plastic ziplock bag of brown
and yellow lozenge pills appear out of thin air into his moving hand. He throws
it instantly to Falco, who catches the bag with lightning fast Italian reflexes
in his left hand. It's as if the Salesman was just guiding the bag to the right
buyer in one simple, fluid motion.

 "What's it called?" Falco says. I sip from my beer bottle.

 "Chloramphenildorphin-5. The Outzoners call it Primer. Great for getting you
up in the morning and keeping you there. The best thing about it is that that
bag is running at less than half price. I've just cut a big deal with the
Sodha roughriders and I've got some left over that I have to get rid of. So
I put them in bags of ten and I'm letting you have them at the price I got 'em
for. See Phil over there?" He takes a breath to point to some guy at the other
end of the bar, past the empty slampit, who may be another courier, but the
Salesman is trying to make out that he's another buyer. "He just bought five
packs off me. Five, man. I mean, this is going great, by the time I get out
of here, they'll all be gone."

 Falco hands the bag back. He keeps away from chemicals, preferring microsofts
if he can afford them.

 "Hey, but I can tell you just want to see what else I've got before you make
your final decision. I see you both have NST plugs? Excellent. Well, you'll
*love* this."

 Falco's face shines when he sees the jet black microsoft in the Salesman's
hand. He looks like his mind's already hooked on the thing, and the two tiny
Neuro-Sensory Transfer sockets placed in his skull just behind his right ear
are calling to him: "Feed me, feed me". The Salesman's grin grows wider as his
confidence jumps up another notch. And I watch the two go through the ritual
of haggling a good price for the cleanest drug in the world.

                                ***

Her face is pained. Like something out of camera shot has pierced her flesh
and is slowly twisting a danse macabre through her nervous system.

 "I felt like I knew you the first time I met you, Tommy. You have this way
of opening your eyes so your whole soul pours out of them and touches me.
That's what you did outside the bakery. I didn't know what was going on then.
I wish I didn't know now."

 "Yeah," comes my voice again. It's sort of disconnected, like it isn't *my*
voice, but a damn good impressionist's. "I wish I never knew, too."

                                ***

Outside the bakery. In a back alley not far from the monorail station at the
cross where the Paddington to Islington New Road meets the Gray's Inn Road. On
my route to the huge fortress building at Euston where I work, I stop to ghoul
at what looks like a traffic accident. There is a company ambulance, rentacops
and a small crowd of local bakery workers all milling around the scene. I get
in closer and it's Falco.

 His arms have been sliced laterally, across the middle of each forearm, and
then down deep in diagonals towards each wrist. With cuts like that he can't
have lasted long. A Lambs Conduit medic flashes some snapshots for the local
rentacops while another one dodges the blood as it streams out into the road.
Flies buzz around his head, competing for the sweetness of his eyes.

 "Name's Lyle," she says to me. Her skin is too clean and soft for a
Dustzoner; but the clothes she wears - black baggy bermuda shorts and a
short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt with popper buttons down the front - and the
attitude she carries is 100% pure Outzone. She's been standing next to me all
time, but my mind has been on that corpse.

 There's a Federal ID tag pinned to the pocket of her shirt with her videostat
hardcopied onto it and the name now has a meaning. Mandy Lyle, Federal
Department of Investigations. Her ID tag shows her serious face, knowing that
the people she has to spy on must never see it. Lyle is a fake, an applejack
in the Dustzone. Trouble. And this fact is kicking me in the face, telling me
to stay away. But I'm ignoring it. Fighting it.

 I look for some sign of recognition, but all I can see is my own twin
reflection in the permanent stare of her Sony Guild cybernetic eyes; blue
cusps which fit neatly into the cheek and brow bones over her eye sockets.
Lyle has a cold face. Poised, angular and clean.

 Those eyes are digging into me. Thermographic vision watching my heart thump,
and my stomach churning at the mixed stench of fresh bread and fresh death. I
emulate her face, hoping that those eyes can't see what I feel. That I want
her like love at first sight and I've only known her for a minute and a half.

  "Did you know him?" she asks me.

 I turn back to face him and I nod, letting my facade drop, my face scrunches
up with memories of Falco. I try to remember him as I knew him, rather than
this blood spattered stiff that's crumpled in the doorway of some Lambs
Conduit bakery.

 "He was a good friend of mine. Falco Batacini."

 High above us all, a monorail Sprinter speeds past, bound for Tottenham Court
Points. Four green-jumpsuited medics lift Falco out of the doorway and into
the back of an ambulance.

 "You don't exactly seem cut up about it."

 "I worked with him at the processing plant. Running loaders and stuff. You
need NST jacks to manipulate the exoskeletons. You have to be careful how much
you lift. People die of sensory feedback all the time. Fact of life. But
you're an applejack, you wouldn't know."

 I can sense her voice tighten after I call her an applejack. Those born in the
Secure Zones take that as a pretty major insult these days. Maybe I meant it
that way.

 "Looks like suicide, doesn't it?" she says, as if I did it. "What would you
say if I told you that's the twelfth body we've found like that in the last
three days? All with that L-shaped cut in their wrists. I might need to talk
to you again. Have you got a vidfone where I can reach you?"

 I look back to her, standing with her back against the wall, my haggard
loader's reflection in the blue shine of her enhanced eyes. "Sure," I reply.
And she taps it into a Sony hand computer the size of her Federal ID tag.

                        2. Falco Batacini.

"Well, this is the last time I'll use this number. The last time. Life doesn't
get any better than last night, Tommy. It just doesn't."

 She takes a breath, and as she does so, I reach for the pause key. There's a
bottle of tequila hidden inside my brown sofa. It has a hole in the corner
where the stitching has come apart and I can keep things like that where no
one can find them if my apartment ever gets searched. The rentacops like to do
that sometimes. Dawn raids. If they get a tip off that someone's hiding
something in one apartment they hit the whole block. Keeps the rest of us on
our toes.

 As a loader, I'd get canned for possession of alcohol. It dulls the nerves
and interferes with the NST jacks. Doesn't stop me from keeping some, though.
I only ever drink when I'm depressed, and I know that alcohol only makes it
worse, but that's usually exactly what I want. Right now, I want to be as
depressed as I can get. And then some. I want to feel like Lyle.

 And Falco.

                                ***

The London Outzone has the kind of close, rotting atmosphere that scares the
shit out of us Dustzoners. I'm in there on some kind of mission, I guess. I
need to find out what happened to Falco two days previous. It's like a
deranged curiosity I keep inside me that takes over from time to time. Right
now, it's in complete control.

 Soho. The Year of the Rat. I ask one of the streetkids where the Blue Cross
is and they laugh in my face. One of them looks as though he wants to bleed
me with the hunting knife he's twiddling between his fingers. He has wild eyes,
with those glaring wide pupils that the speed junkies at Lambs Conduit have. I
can imagine the slicing edge of that blade, all nine inches of it, running
along the skin of my gut, letting my insides spill out for the rest to gawp
and laugh at. I must be oozing with fear. But the others must think I'm too
stupid to even bother with, and the threat ends when I finally round the
corner of the next block.

 And there in amongst the frozen death throes of a decaying building sits the
Blue Cross.

 Nothing like I imagined it. In the Outzones of New Atlantic City, the local
teams police the streets and keep the areas safe from harm. They charge a hefty
price for their services, but it's worth it all. With that, you get good bars,
nightclubs, shops that sell stuff made in the Outzones - what they call Shadow
Industry - and a semi-decent cycle-rickshaw taxi service. Here in Thames
Midland, it's only just starting to pick up. The London Outzone is anarchic, a
playground for the roughrider teams, with maybe a dozen or so neutral places
scattered around. The Blue Cross, a steamer's bar built in the ground floor
ruins of one of the unfinished towers of the Outzone, doesn't even have a roof.
This is one of the few places left where body armour isn't essential. Anything
heavier than a fistfight gets blasted outside by the bar security's riot
weaponry. It's one of those places where you feel safe, but scared, like being
in a Metropol rehab cell, I guess.

 I'm here because Falco mentioned it once. Out of the two of us, I'm the one
who never leaves the Dustzone. He was always the adventurous one. I stayed
home and watched TV or drank at Chevignon or sometimes wasted some ration
credit on the NST RAID PORT SAID game at the FLC games arcade. Never leave the
Dustzone. Yet I'm here. Having snuck out of the Dustzone past heavy security
after curfew hours and dodged some roughriders, I'm at the Blue Cross.

 Striding over to the tiny bar area, past the slampit crowded with long haired
raja steamers and a parade of twenty rupee kittens, I pay for a lukewarm
bottle of a local variant of Elephant beer, called Rhino. They make the stuff
in the cellar here, the barboy tells me, and bottle it in Paddington, which
affiliates the place with the Sodha roughrider team.

 "I'm looking for a courier who knows something about microsofts," I say to the
barboy.

 "What?" The sound system by the slampit is deafening at this end of the bar.

 I pass over another twenty marks. With that, he can probably buy himself a
week's worth of kittens. "Microsofts," I remind him.

 The barboy points at one of the many clustered circular wrought iron tables
on the other side of the slampit, populated by rajas in leather roughrider's
outfits and hawaiian shirts with fading prints. "Over there. Ask for Amber
Roy Chowdhury."

 I thank him and push through the jumping rajas in the slampit. Chowdhury's
companions see me coming and vacate the table, moving just far enough to give
us some privacy, while keeping close enough to protect their man. My mind is
scrambling for the lines I rehearsed to myself on the way out here. I know
I can't afford to fluff this one up. Not on their territory.

 "Namaste. Remember me from the Lambs Conduit Dustzone? Two nights ago. Dealed
a microsoft to my spar."

 He nods. I can see sweat break out between the lines on his forehead. Could be
the heat, I tell myself. Or it could be him.

 "I want one, too. Same price."

 The look in his eyes as we cut the deal leaves a hard ball in the pit of my
stomach. Walking back to Lambs Conduit I wonder which of us looked more scared.

                                ***

I press PAUSE again. Lyle continues in her broken voice.

 "Of course, you don't really understand, do you? I went back to see Nukie
again. Routine procedure. He told me everything. Now I'd better tell you..."

 PAUSE. I take a swig from the bottle. I've had too much already, but I can't
stop now.

 "Yeah, yeah. Spit it out, Lyle, you stupid bitch. Run through the whole
routine again. You came here and I showed you the microsoft. You said that
Falco never had his, but some of the others were well-known microsoft users.
So you took me to see Nukie, thinking he could solve everything, but all
he did was make you curious. How could you, you stupid bitch."

                                ***

We are standing in the burned-out shell of the lift when she notices the
sprayderm patch over my hand. It covers a stapled gash that runs along the
life line of my left palm.

 "Where'd you get the cut?" The concern in her voice is overlaid with suspicion.

 "I got stressed out and smashed a cup against the wall of my apartment. It was
stupid. The guy a few doors down from me's a doctor friend of mine. He patched
it up for me. Only charged me half price."

 She takes hold of the hand and runs her clean, soft index finger over the
sprayderm. "Not bad."

 "Yeah, but it means I can't afford to eat for two weeks."

 The lift stops on 57 and we wrench open the concertina doors. The corridor
reeks of rotting vomit and the floor, sticky with old piss, tugs at the soles
of my trainers. Lyle tries to reassure me by telling me this typical of a
block in the Outzone. It just makes me feel so lucky to be born a Dustzoner.

 "At least it still has some electricity," she reminds me.

 "Probably tapping it from the monorail lines," I reply to myself.

 She agrees with an audible sigh.

 "Bet your place ain't like this."

 She shakes her head and laughs softly. "No. Tottenham Court Points isn't
the greatest Secure Zone in the world, but it's better than this. I couldn't
live here. Not on my own, like Nukie. I can't even handle the SZ alone,
sometimes. I still live with Sean. My brother."

 "Tell me more about this Nukie, then. Where's he from?" My curious side takes
over the conversation again.

 "He's one of you," she replies. "His father worked for South Shields. And his
father's father, and ever was. He'd be there now if Sony Guild hadn't closed
the Dustzone down. He freelances for deckers, building cyber decks for them
and stuff like that. He's bound to have something that can read your microsoft.
Then we can find out if there's a connection, see what it was that made
someone want to kill your friend and make it look like suicide."

 We get to the old fashioned door, and it's already open, with a crack of
orange sunlight seeping through the gap. The Geordie's voice beckons us in.

 Nukie's a tower all by himself, with long scraggly hair and broken teeth set
in a thick-lipped maw. Sitting himself down in a big red velour armchair that's
been heavily slashed acroos the back by what could have been a scalpel blade,
surrounded by his Aladdin's Cave of electronic circuitry and plasterboard that
forms a bizarre silicon/plastic/wire collage around his living room, he assumes
his designated role of Rat King. In a way, he kind of reminds of Falco, and I
feel like I can get along with him easier that way.

 Lyle gets straight to the point, handing over the microsoft. "Can you tell
us what this does? I need a full schematic rundown. Any hidden data it may
contain, subliminals, anything that'd make anyone want to kill for it."

 "Ooh. This is something to do those suicides, isn't it?" He plugs the smooth
black cylinder into the side of a small box black box fitted with some sort of
pedal switch and jacks a thin blue lead he finds lying on the floor between
the box and a Fednet PC so brutally customized that it's barely recognizable.
The image on its blue screen is a Guild Profile with my Videostat on it.

 Nukie instantly senses my apprehension. "Relax, matey. I ran a go-to on you
as soon as my camera could get a good shot of you in the lift. No voodoo here.
So, do I call you Tom, Tommy, or Thomas?"

 "Tommy," I reply.

 The Geordie offers us seats of upturned cardboard boxes set amongst the
detrius. He directs most of the conversation at Lyle, but occassionally he
gives me a wink to see if I'm still awake.

 "I hear you found number thirteen this afternoon. Unlucky number where I come
from. Ruth White on Disneynews reckons there's a psychopath on the loose. She's
nicknamed him the L-Razor."

 Dustzoners labour under the misapprehension that Outzoners used TV's as
fireplaces, and I'm about to say something to that effect when Lyle cuts in
on me.

 "Ruth White's just a computer-generated digitized image, what the fuck would
she know about it?"

 Before then I was one of the gullible millions who believe that Ruth White and
the other Disneynews anchormen are actually real people. Now I know better.
Television is just living proof that half-truths are more dangerous than lies.

 Nukie clears the blue screen and keys in a few more commands before pressing
the pedal switch on the black box. The screen lights up with strings of what
looks like endless random alphanumerics in a chaotically aesthetic pattern.

 "What the hell is that thing?" Lyle asks him.

 Nukie strokes the metalwork of the black box proudly. "It's a military squid.
A Superconducting Quantum Interference Detector. Used for reading fire-control
programs in combat machines. It's good for other stuff, too. I usually use it
to check people's viruses for bugs before they run them against anything. The
housing's my own, and I've made a few small improvements. I'd sell it back to
the MGAF, but I like life. Fella two floors down's gonna finally wake up one
of these mornings and find that his octaver effects pedal's missing. Serves
him right for letting me look after his guitar in the first place."

 He turns and reads the random data on the screen. After scrolling through
over twenty screens of symbols his pensive face turns to us.

 "I think I'll have to get back to you on this one, Lyle, it's pretty much
got me stumped."

 "What's wrong with it?" Lyle asks him.

 "Nothing *wrong* with it, per se. It's just different. It's written in MAX,
like any normal microsoft, but this seems to be some sort of dialect of the
programming language. Like American English for computers. I don't know. It's
slick, I can tell you that. It's called Seven. Puts pretty filters through
your senses, but beyond that, you'll have to wait. It's imported, no one here
could manufacture something this slick."

 Lyle and I sit forward on the edges of our boxes. "So what do you want to do?"
she asks him.

 "Well, I'll put some feelers out, see if anyone knows the dialect. Until
then, I can run it through a codebreaker program and try and compile some kind
of lexicon for it. I've never done it before, but it's an idea I've been
working on for a while. If it works I might be able to translate it myself."

 We leave Nukie's flat in silence. Both of us know that we've gone to see him
and we've scraped the iceberg. But, try as I might, I just can't make myself
believe that Falco was killed over the number 7.

(c) Copyright Ridley McIntyre 1992
--
        	 **Ridley McIntyre - Ronin Ironpig**			
*On a Flowery	     gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk          Space Trip!*
		 -----------------------------------
(*8          "He's in a wibbly-wobbly world of his own."         8*)


From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ridley McIntyre)
Subject: SEVEN Parts 3 and 4
Date: 20 Oct 92 15:02:41 GMT


                        SEVEN - by Ridley McIntyre

                        3. Mandy Lyle.

"I saw what happened to all those people, Tommy. It was like a hallucination,
completely taking over the senses. Some of them survived, you know that? Some
actually carried on beyond that. The ones with the strongest wills. But that's
a *high*, Tommy. You can't get higher than that. Never."

 My heart's being swallowed by a pit of guilt in my stomach, I can feel it
tearing at the flesh of the fast-beating muscle, strangling it into submission.
I stumble down into my sofa, throat gasping for air, guilt like a fat demon
sitting on my chest. I'm going to die. I know I'm going to die. Just like Falco,
and Sean, and Amber Roy Chowdhury.

 "Just what the hell happened at that arcade, Tommy? I just can't believe you
could do something like that."

 The message just keeps playing. In my drunken stupor, I roll from the sofa
and try to switch the vidfone answering machine back onto PAUSE, like it will
save my life or something. It won't. It can't.

 I know now, that even if I live through this heart-pounding episode, I won't
be able to live long with the events of the last five days sitting there like
some mutant foetus of ours on my conscience, waiting for the time to enact it's
own Oedipal desires. It's all my fault. Everything.

                                ***

The door buzzes angrily for the seventh time as I get there and punch the LOCK
stud. Wrenching the thing open, the first thing I see is the blue-chrome
image of a sleepy Thomas Morrison in Lyle's Sony Guild eyes. Her cheeks are all
puffed up and she makes one last spit into the corridor before I invite her in.

 She's crying. I remember watching an old movie on the TV once about someone
who had cybernetic eyes and couldn't cry through them. Instead, the tear-ducts
are re-routed into saliva glands, and you have to spit.

 "Can I use your bathroom?" she asks me.

 I point her in the right direction and she follows my finger. Pulling the
glue from my eyelids, I head into my cluttered room to pull some grey canvas
jeans on. I walk back into the living room and she's there, looking utterly
lost.

 "Lyle, it's three in the morning."

 "I brought you a present." She offers me a plastic coffee cup.

 I just look at her straight. I'm trying to use some kind of empathy, to feel
her own problem, so she won't have to tell me. But I'm a man, and men aren't
so good at that kind of thing.

 Her voice is broken, croaking like a misused engine. "Sean's dead, Tommy."

 "Your brother?" I can feel a tiny part of her emptiness in her stomach as
she nods. There's a few seconds of pure silence, and I'm screwing my eyes up,
too, holding the tears back.

 "I got back from work and found him in his room. He had his modelling scalpel
in his hands. There was blood everywhere. I puked for a while, I couldn't stop
puking, then I was able to check the wound. There was no forced entry, and no
one had been at the door, I checked with security. But that L was there, Tommy.
It was there, on both arms, just like the others. So I checked the jacks on
his neck. I found this."

 She hands me the smooth black cylinder, hot from the palm of her hand. It's
the same as the microsoft I gave to Nukie two days before. I look up at the
suddenly frail figure of Mandy Lyle as she gestures at the thing in deep
frustration.

 "It killed him, Tommy. Seven killed my little brother."

 I can't think of anything to say to her as she spits into the carpet. But
somehow, I know that after the police, medics, and probably another FDI agent
ransacking her apartment, she could do with a friend. So I move close to her
and she grabs me around the waist and my muscles ache in resistance as she
squeezes me, forcing me to feel her pain.

 I just stand there and take all the pain she wants to give.

                                ***

Her face flushes red with embarrassment. Eyes are the windows to the soul, and
Lyle's eyes are nothing but mirrors. So I have to try and read the other signs
that unconsciously emanate from her face. The way she spits, the colour of her
face (or as close as my vidfone screen can emulate), the shape of her cheeks
and lips.

 "You held me in your arms and somehow things were right again. We could've
made love, there on the sofa, but instead we just talked until we couldn't stay
awake, and you left me in the morning with a note to tell me you had to go to
work. I hated you that morning. I felt like a twenty rupee kitten in the
Outzone. But I was just emotionally wasted after that night. I had died with
Sean and you gave me new life. Well, there's more to life than sex and death,
Tommy. Much more."

 Between each rasping breath I'm trying to form her name with my numb lips.
It's grotesque. I can almost look at my self from outside my body and laugh
at how stupid and feeble I look. I feel like someone with an elephant sat on
his chest trying to talk after just being anaesthetized at the dentist's.
Like a flashback of the evening after Sean died.

                                ***

After work I'm in the Blue Cross again, but Chowdhury isn't.

 Trying to get the attention of the barboy, a very tall thirteen-year-old raja
with a few whiskers of black hair along his upper lip, I instead manage to
attract who I can only assume is one of the rajas around Chowdhury's table
the other night. The kind of person who makes you think of where you've kept
your cash, and if it's safe. This trip, I've got it rolled into a neat bundle
and hidden in the pocket on the tongue of my trainers with the velcro strapped
across it. I'm determined not take any chances.

 "Looking for Amber Roy, again, chuck?" His voice is like sharp ice in my
ear. I turn to face him and he's a massive fat guy, something unusual in the
Outzone, where food is nearly legal tender.

 My heart pounding in my ears, I emulate a casual nod as much as I can. "Yeah.
Seen him around?"

 "What do you want him for, chuck?"

 I try my best to soothe his violent tone. Chuck isn't really an insult. It's
just what the rajas call non-asians. Same as us chucks call the asians in
Thames Midland rajas. Just a name. But he makes a simple word like chuck sound
like "shithead".

 "Just seeing if he's got any more deals for me. I liked the last one he did."

 He shuffles in his cheap black plimsoles for a few seconds. His fat face
seems to light slowly, like someone twisting a dimmer switch behind his eyes.

 "No worries, chuck. I'll take you to see him. He's in Paddington. Come on."

 "Yeah, what do you want?" the barboy asks, his hand scraping a filthy rag
that could once have been a green T-Shirt around the inside of a steel tankard.

 I look at the barboy, and I look at the big raja, and instead of trusting
my instincts and asking the barboy anyway, I follow the raja out into the
street.

 We must be about two blocks down the street when he hits me. It's something
flat and hard, like the business-end of a cricket bat right across the back
of my skull.

 The last thing I remember is the sensation of being turned over and over. I
can tell he's looking for my money, checking the pockets of my blue plastic
rain jacket and my grey canvas jeans. Then he feels around in my socks and I
can feel him sliding his hand in my trainers, checking under the arch of my
feet for the stash.

 Then I can't seem to fight it anymore. The feeling that my brain's going to
expand out of my head and that my eyes are going to pop out onto the cracked
concrete wash over, and I'm out.

                        4. Amber Roy Chowdhury.

Swimming in my own long death, I try to think of a way out. Lyle's broken
voice is still stabbing at my mind.

 "There's no way out for people like us," she's saying. "We're all on some
downward spiral. I know. I was born blind. I've never seen through real eyes.
Then I saw my myself for the first time as if I was out of my body and looking
down on myself and I could see what kind of shit I was in. How stupid
everything looked. How stupid and pointless my whole existence had been. It
was the greatest feeling in the world, Tommy. I'd never felt that good before."

 ... out of my body and looking down on myself... That's what I'm doing. I'm
having one of those near-death out-of-body experiences. I'm willing myself to
live, to do something to save my own life, but I've got no power out here. I'm
all spirit.

 "The light, Tommy. It shines there like the ultimate high."

 But there's no fucking light here. Not even a dark spot to signify where the
Devil can get you. And damn it, after I found Amber Roy Chowdhury, the Devil
deserved me.

                                ***

The rain spitting on my face brings me round, and I'm alone on a heat-cracked
pavement in Soho, the London Outzone. My head is pounding, there's a pain in
my ribs like I've been run over by a robot racehorse, and it takes ages
for the dizziness to wear off. I stumble along pipes of streets distorted
by tunnel-vision. Falling over the rubble of crumbling buildings. Dodging the
threats of local teamsters and streetkids. I don't even know where I'm going,
let alone where I am. It's my mad hour. And it finishes in an arc of red neon
as my weak and tired legs finally give out under me outside some club, amidst
a gaggle of distressed voices.

 I wake up in the back of a moving Metropol truck.

 "Awake at last," one of the fat officers in the back with me says, his face
peering at mine. I can smell chocolate on his breath. "You did well, trying
to crawl into a Tottenham Court club is a neat trick. You nearly made it, too.
If someone hadn't accidentally found your Lambs Conduit dog tags, we'd have
probably killed you. We don't take well to Outzone scum turning up on our
doorstep."

 My dry mouth parts to speak. "I was attacked. I got lost and was attacked.
Then I woke up and tried to find my way home."

 "That's okay," the fat cop says. "We're taking you to the monorail station.
You can get home from there, can't you?"

 I nod. It seems like the headache's gone now. I still have that pain in my
ribs.

 They let me off at the monorail station, and I thank them. I can't really
thank them enough. It must be a busy night for them. I've heard rumours of
Metropol cops shooting on sight anyone who looks remotely like they could come
from the Outzone. But these are stories told by the rentacops of Lambs Conduit,
and they've built up quite a rivalry with the official Federal police.

 I check to see if my cash is still in the pouch in my trainers while waiting
for the monorail and it is. Counting what's left, I have about thirty-five
Marks. It's just enough to feed me for the next week, if I'm at the stores at
the right times to get what I want. Otherwise, I'll have to make do with the
processed crap they feed us in the canteens at lunchtimes. Seeing the monorail
train arriving, I quickly stash it back into the pouch and tighten up the
velcro flap to hide it.

 The sleek silver bullet takes me back to Lambs Conduit, but I don't want to
go home just yet. I somehow need to feel the electricity of some local life.
Just one of those whims I occasionally have, like when you want to go for a
walk or get some fresh air. I need to be around people. My kind of people. I
need to smell the sweat of a workforce, and the nearest place I can think of
is the FLC games arcade.

 I walk in past a pair of rentacops on their way out and feel a little safer.
Only five or ten minutes into watching a raja jacked into the NST RAID PORT
SAID game, his arms and legs still, while his mind controls the wild nuances
of a fighter simulator flying against some ancient Middle-East threat, and I
need to take a piss. So I head to the gents at the back of the arcade.

 And there's Chowdhury. A sleek black cylindrical microsoft sticking out from
behind his ear, and his hands shaking as he makes the first pain filled lateral
slice across his left forearm with a kitchen knife.

 I race over and grab the blade from his hand. His face, uncomprehending, looks
up in a fearful gaze. Black eyes staring into me as if I've spoiled his final
pleasure.

 Rage is swelling through me. I can't believe that he's so stupid to die from
his own product, and I don't want to let him have the satisfaction. So I grab
the collar of his jacket and throw him into one of the cubicles with all the
force I can muster, so much so that I can hear his skull cracking against the
pipe leading from the cistern to the bowl, and it nearly knocks him out, and I
do it for him.

 After making the slices I can finally see it. I'm covered in blood and Amber
Roy Chowdhury's sat on a toilet bowl dying. And on his arms I've etched two
7's on his arms. Each one a lateral cut across the forearm and a diagonal cut
from there down the wrist to the hand.

 Dropping the knife into his lap, I run home. But Lyle's gone.

                                ***

Her face, cupped in the lines of that bobbed hair, looks so angelic now. She
gives me the last half of the speech. "Nukie just said it was a dialect from
Rio. That the only subliminal in there was the number seven. It's like
something you know in a dream, but it doesn't actually manifest itself. It's
extraordinary. I jacked it in and I understand the whole thing now. There
was no L-Razor. Just a feeling of utter uselessness. So you have only one more
useful thing you can do with your life after you've jacked seven. And that's
to end it."

 But I don't feel like ending it. So Lyle had an out-of-body experience that
revealed the final truth to her. My experience is doing the same. Only the
truth is that I'm a loader for Lambs Conduit that's guilty of murder, even if
the bastard did deserve it, I didn't need to do it. And so I really deserve
to die, too. But not tonight.

 I'm walking calmly back to my gasping body and I know I have to somehow climb
back in to take it over. So I lie down on the sofa where Lyle and me could have
made love, and I enter myself. Once there I force my fingers into my throat,
and my gut spasms, wretching onto the carpet.

 "So that's it, Tommy," she says for the second time this night. "That's the
end."

 And her face disappears as I suffer my third blackout of the night.

                                ***

I'm waking up to the sound of the door buzzing. The smell of vomit hits my
nostrils, forcing me to dry wretch until I can make it to the door.

 It's another suited guy from the FDI. Guilt may have left me to live last
night, but the FDI won't. The penalty for Chowdhury's murder would be death,
even for an Outzoner, we were in the Dustzone when it happened. And they know
it was me. Someone must have seen me do it. Someone must have.

 I'm looking for something with a sharp edge. I'm in the kitchen, looking for
a knife. Where did I put them? The door still buzzes. There, in one of the
cupboards, and I'm out of my head again, watching myself, thinking, this'll
fuck their theory...

 This time I can see that light Lyle talked about. It's there. It's waiting
for me. But it's grey, like a fading light. Like a dimming light all around me.

 Sat on the tiles on the floor of the kitchen, the knife edge slides across
the skin. At first the wound is clean, white, shining in the reflection of
the knife. Then the blood comes, flowing steady like the emergency water pump
out in the square. And I make the second cut. A single, bloody seven down my
arm. Fading like the pump as the flow slowly runs dry.

 And stops.

(c) Copyright Ridley McIntyre 1992
--
        	 **Ridley McIntyre - Ronin Ironpig**			
*On a Flowery	     gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk          Space Trip!*
		 -----------------------------------
(*8          "He's in a wibbly-wobbly world of his own."         8*)