reMix

Chapter Twelve Wide-eyed & Legless

“Here, put it on.”

The police sergeant gave Fixx back his left arm, which puzzled Fixx since it wasn’t two hours since the squat Gascon had been encased in a slop-down, happily beating him to pulp with a short length of rubber hose. Only this time the sergeant was wearing his best uniform, his blue jacket pulled tight over his jutting belly.

“Put it on, you fuckwit.” The sergeant raised his hand and Fixx ducked. Over the past two weeks those five minutes of explosive mid-morning violence had become something of a ritual.

Five minutes wasn’t prescribed in any training manual, it was how long it took the man to get out of breath. Ten years ago the Gascon had been able to manage fifteen minutes, and ten years before that he’d been able to keep it going for what seemed like forever.

The fat man sighed and pulled in his gut. Even he’d heard of Freud.

The Préfecture Imperiale had more sophisticated pleasures at its disposal, of course, from the effective but tek-crude delights of a Matsui taser to the full cerebral meltdown of a Bayer-Rochelle parasite squid, squids were meant for medical use only, but it was obvious even to an illiterate that any machine capable of reading sensations could be reverse-engineered to provide them as well. And Fixx was many things, from a crystal-head to eight years older than he admitted, but tek-illiterate wasn’t one of them.

Luckily, the sergeant was the old-fashioned type. Neanderthal.

“Put your fucking arm on.” The man’s voice was raw with a breakfast of Gauloises and cheap alcohol. Fixx didn’t blame him. The only way he could have hacked the sergeant’s job would have been to blunt his edges too.

Sighing heavily, Fixx balanced himself on the hard plastic bed and slotted the stump of his left arm into a shining black prosthetic. The stump had been bleeding ever since the sergeant first ripped Fixx’s arm off and putting it back stung badly as prosthetic meshed with bloody flesh.

No, that wasn’t the right description. Fixx shook his head, short bleached dreadlocks flicking from side to side like little snakes. Get the words right. Slotting on his arm didn’t sting, it hurt like fuck. And it would go on hurting until flesh healed and the nerves in his stump grew back through the chip gate at the hard/wet interface.

There was a gizmo built into his left arm that was meant to deaden any pain, but it didn’t work, or if it did and this was it working, then Fixx didn’t want to be around when the gizmo hung, as it undoubtedly would. All his limbs had a nasty habit of going belly-up.

Outside might be up two floors and along a corridor, but Fixx still knew it was pouring out there. Thunder crashed off the corridor walls, loud enough to drown out the screams of those in interrogation. Questioning took place each morning from 11:00 to 11:30, and in that half-hour the whole prefecture was a riot of animal howls. By noon the howls were reduced to whimpers that faded to silence. And so it would remain, until 14:00 when it started up again and the sequence was repeated.

“What about my legs?” Fixx demanded.

“What about them?” Pig-like eyes raking contemptuously down Fixx’s naked body, stopping at the oozing pink stumps that passed for his thighs. They’d been bleeding too, but then the prosthetics Fixx had chosen back when he was rich weren’t meant to be removed. They were the permanent kind, wired into his peripheral nervous system using motor nerves grown straight to Japanese silicon. The best that Chiba could supply.

Not that it was difficult to work out why the pig-eyed bronze had decided to ignore the manufacturer’s instructions. Fixx was a renegade Jihad hacker, so violent even the Imams wouldn’t have anything to do with him. At least, he was according to the slab they’d thrust in his face, shortly after hot-keying his studio door straight out of its frame and just before some black-booted gendarme kicked him into unconsciousness.

Which was kind of weird, because Fixx had always been too busy f’f’fixxing hoojChoons to give squit for politics — moral, sexual or racial. Anyway, he’d hardly been inside long enough to soften up some petty data thief, never mind the hardened Jihad fanatic he apparently was. But then, Fixx knew he was really in there for shitting on someone else’s doorstep. If that’s what you could call hanging out at the Crash&Burn with the jailbait daughter of some brain-dead policewoman...

“Do I get my fucking legs back or not?” Fixx demanded, and was surprised to see the squat man hesitate. The sergeant was scared! Not of him, that was obvious, which meant it had to be his visitor. Fixx began to look interested.

“Someone important?” Despite four years in Paris, the French that Fixx spoke was tourist-crude. LizAlec reckoned the English were incapable of speaking French properly and no matter how many times Fixx explained about being Irish, he was still forced to agree. English, Irish, American — none of them could speak real French, never mind hack a proper fifth arrondissement Parisian accent.

“Your boss?” The sergeant said nothing and Fixx grinned. It was the wrong move — or it would have been at any other time. Bulges of neck muscles and knots of vein told Fixx the sergeant wanted to whip out the exerciser, but something made the man’s hand stop just before it reached his belt.

Blind fear, for real... Fixx was impressed. He could imagine few things that could stop the Gascon when he was at play in his own cells: whatever was going down was heavy. And better than that, whoever was about to visit, they obviously had the sergeant by the balls.

“Give me my legs,” suggested Fixx. “You don’t want to get it wrong...”

The sergeant actually thought about it, his pug face tipped to one side. And he shook his head, flicked a lighter and went straight ahead, pulling carcinogens into his lungs from an untipped Gauloise.

“Nah,” he said dismissively. “It only mentions your arm.” Checking a standard-issue Matsui pager inset in his wrist to make double sure he’d got that right, the sergeant nodded to himself and wandered away to check his appearance in a mirror. The uniform was fine but nothing short of a complete remake could have helped his face. Not that Fixx was going to mention it.

Fixx hadn’t had that many new faces — in fact, Fixx was the same sex and colour as when he started out, which made him something of a rarity, at least it did in the music business. Though he sure as hell needed a new face now. That was, if he ever got out. Fixx sighed and shuffled on the plastic bed. If he could, he’d have hidden the stumps of his legs, but the cell had no blankets and he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen his clothes... Fuck it, Fixx smiled grimly. So he was going to have to stand on his dignity: so be it, because it was all he did have to stand on.

Heels clicked on the floor outside and someone knocked, making the fat Gascon jump. God, Fixx thought to himself as the door swung back, the Neanderthal really was frightened. A tall major with high cheeks, thin lips and sunken eyes entered the room, hook nose wrinkling at the stench of tobacco and the acrid stink that rose from the floor where Fixx had pissed himself earlier after a particularly nasty blow to the kidneys. But, inquisitor’s face or not, it wasn’t the major who was important. It was the thin, bird-like woman behind him who mattered.

Not that Fixx noticed the woman, not at first. He was too busy eyeing up the Ted Brewer violin clutched in the major’s hands. It was an original Gothic, body cut down to a swirl of clear acrylic, Ashworth pickup, Pirastro strings. There were fifteen working models left in the world, and that was his.

Or had been until the prefecture blew out his door.

After seeing what the police had done to his antique 303, the Thereman and his mixing decks, Fixx hadn’t dared hope the Ted Brewer was still unbroken. But it was and poking out of the major’s pocket was a matching acrylic bow, strung with purple horsehair. The hair was snapped but that didn’t matter, the bow itself looked fine.

Lady Clare Fabio walked abruptly into the room, pushing past the major who stammered his apologies for not getting out of her way. Her greying crop was immaculate, her dark Dior lipstick perfectly applied. The only thing that looked out of place were the deep shadows round her eyes, shadows so dark that not even quality make-up could hide them.

No one need have greying hair, enhancers could reverse that as easily as a laser peel could have taken the fine lines from around her blue eyes. Any half-decent hairdresser could have done both.

“My Lady, let me get the man moved. The smell...”

Lady Clare shook her head. “I’ve smelt worse,” she said abruptly, “much worse.” She didn’t bother to mention it had been many, many years before. Her eyes took in the cell, the basic plastic bed, the lack of sheets and sharp edges, the ceiling’s permanent light strip turned up to daylight and inset behind shatter-proof polymer. The place hadn’t improved since her time as a junior prosecutor.

Everything was as it always was, including a man sitting broken-nosed and naked on the bed. Briefly Lady Clare wondered on whose orders the gendarmes had stripped him and then remembered they were hers. The man looked different to his official tri-Ds, but then, he would without his legs. His natural height had been 1.78 metres but after his accident in Moscow he’d sued himself and used the insurance to acquire the most expensive prosthetics that money could buy. Back on stage in his new legs, the man now stood 1.88 metres tall — so far as Lady Clare was concerned, that said it all.

As did the fact he could have used limb grafts or, if he was squeamish about accepting cadaver tissue, he could have had limbs clone-grown in less than five months. As it was, it took him that long to get used to his new heavy metal prosthetics. Lady Clare knew, she’d had it checked.

There was little she didn’t know about this man’s history. And most of it she would have been glad to forget, especially the bits after LizAlec came into the equation. It had been going on for over a year and she hadn’t known. Minister for Internal Security, the ultimate head of S3 and she didn’t even have a clue until just before Christmas... When Lady Clare got the first hint of what was going on, she’d tagged Fixx in her head as a social retard but nothing more, not dangerous to her or LizAlec. Except that wasn’t how LizAlec’s diary read. It seemed this was the creep LizAlec had chosen as her first lover... The kind of shit who could take a fourteen-year-old innocent to his bed without even asking her name.

Not that Lady Clare needed to have that last fact checked; LizAlec had thrown it in her face, on the drive out to the shuttle port at Charles de Gaulle.

Pulling off her black ultrasuede gloves, Lady Clare stalked over to Fixx’s narrow bed and stood in front of him, legs apart. Three vicious slaps slammed into his face. Back, forward, back. The last blow toppled him sideways into a heap on the bed. Even the sergeant looked shocked.

“Feeling better?” Fixx asked, pushing himself upright. There was blood running from a split in his bottom lip.

Lady Clare shook her head and reached for his right arm, the only limb that wasn’t a prosthetic. She wanted to snap it at the elbow and grind the jagged edges against each other but she didn’t. Instead Lady Clare made herself step back a pace and let her arms rest at her sides. The man had no idea how difficult that was for her to do.

“Finished?” Fixx asked and shot Lady Clare his most irritating smile. It wasn’t the brightest thing he’d ever done. Turning her back on Fixx, Lady Clare reached for a Korean-made ceramic-and-copper taser velcroed to the sergeant’s belt. It was Fixx’s bad luck that the manufacturers in Seoul had designed it without including steel.

She saw sudden worry fire up in his silver eyes and it was her turn to smile. Where to start depended on what it was you wanted from the victim. Abject terror was easy: from the relative subtlety of the underside of the tongue to the obviousness of exposed testicles, it took a matter of seconds only. There were other places... just inside the anus was always effective for humiliation. Eyeballs were good for instant panic. But that wasn’t what she wanted.

“Gloves,” she told the major, who made to pass the woman her own discarded pair until he saw her frown. Hastily he reached for the sergeant’s heavy pair of mitts and thrust his thin fingers into them, stretching the rubber.

“This isn’t necessary,” said Fixx, eyes fixed to her hand. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it...”

The unique selling point about the new Korean tasers was that they were pressure-sensitive. The more Lady Clare pressed down on the button, the brighter the spark... “Do what?” Lady Clare demanded. The taser felt light in her hand, pleasingly clinical in its white ceramic finish. She thumbed the button and watched jagged lightning dance from one electrode to the other.

“Do what?”

“Whatever you want,” Fixx said quickly. “You’re S3. First you hurt people, then you sympathize, then they do what you want. A kid I know told me...”

“Hold him.” Lady Clare demanded and the major grabbed Fixx by the shoulders.

“Face down...” Lady Clare ordered and waited while the major pushed the suddenly struggling Fixx flat on the bed.

Lower spine?

Neck?

Lady Clare ran the taser lightly down his spine, from neck to buttocks, increasing thumb pressure as she went. By the time she reached his lower spine, a gurgling Fixx was bucking under the hiss of sparks, muscles locked rigid with pain across his back. Flecks of froth dotted his lips.

This was the man... Lady Clare looked down, seeing the naked buttocks, the broad shoulders, the bloody stumps of his legs, though those wouldn’t have been there. This was the man who...

Oh fuck it. She tossed the taser onto the bed beside Fixx and nodded to the major. On cue, the man stood back, his piano-players having left bruised circles across Fixx’s shoulders

“You can go,” Lady Clare told the major and waited for him to tell her it was against regulations. But all the man did was toss rubber gloves onto the bed, nod for the fat sergeant to leave first and click the door quietly behind him. If he had any sense he’d go straight up the concrete stairs and out onto the rain-slicked cobbles of the Île de la Cité, and then keep going, right to the outskirts where he could buy a new identity and lose himself in the teeming mass that passed for humanity. Then all he had to do was stand and Sieg heil the Black Hundreds as they came marching in.

But he wouldn’t. Loyalty might be bred into the bone, but the procurété didn’t choose its bulls for intelligence or intuition. The major would go and read something obscure by Barthes at his club, while the sergeant would camp out upstairs in the NCOs’ Mess and drink bad Megrib coffee laced with cheap Normandy marc while nicking though frames of holoporn. Always assuming the system wasn’t down again.

Lady Clare might not know their names, but she knew how her men thought, even the insignificant ones. When she’d finished, the sergeant would stagger back down and expect to scrape Fixx off the tiled floor with a shovel, because shit shovelling was what the police did these days.

But instead of reaching for the taser to start it all over again, Lady Clare pulled a military hypodermic from her pocket and blasted 50ml of endorphin through the skin of Fixx’s neck. Switching the cartridge, she followed the endorphin with 100ml of seratonin and then 200mg of coproximol.

Pain slid away and Fixx suddenly felt both calm and slightly elated, which even he realized was pretty weird, given the discarded taser on the bed and the streaks of vomit drying on his chin. All the same, he didn’t let logic get in the way of his relief.

Indecent acts... It was odd, thought Lady Clare while looking at Fixx, it was odd the way sometimes the weapon you really needed was the one closest at hand. There were two cases against Fixx that involved indecent acts and only one of them concerned LizAlec. The other one, the earlier one, the really obscene one, involved illegal activity with a computer on the Moon.

“My daughter,” Lady Clare said but got no further.

Fixx nodded. The bitch was who he thought she was. Just a bit further up the greasy pole than LizAlec had led him to believe. “LizAlec,” he said, “what about her?”

“Kidnapped,” said Lady Clare, obscurely proud that not a single tremor betrayed the blackness inside her. She might feel old as sin but she wasn’t going to demean herself in front of Fixx, at least not more than she already had.

“Where?”

“The Arrivals Hall at Planetside...”

“You sent her?” Taser or not, Fixx didn’t bother to keep the contempt out of his voice. “How could you be that fucking stupid?” Shaking his head, Fixx caught sight of the abandoned Ted Brewer violin, and he nodded towards it with his chin. “And now that’s meant to make me want to go after her?”

She could tell him she’d sent LizAlec back to St Lucius for her own safety, because she’d know the Reich would move on Paris as soon as the virus struck, but Lady Clare didn’t bother, she didn’t believe it herself. Instead Lady Clare wondered if Fixx knew he was seconds away from writing his own suicide note and decided he just didn’t care. Either the man was tired of life or she’d pumped in too much coproximol.

“That’s what you want, right? You want my help?”

Lady Clare nodded.

Fixx thought about it. In one way she’d come to the right person, and not just because he had a bit of a thing going with LizAlec. Fixx knew all about Planetside. It was where he’d got thrown out of five years before, after he got emotionally too close to a full-Turing AI. Hell, he still owned an apartment there. In Chrysler. Seven vast rooms of art deco steel grown from a cross between Corbusier Lite and Mannerheim. He just couldn’t afford to live in them, even if he’d been allowed.

“Have the kidnappers made contact?” Fixx asked her at last.

“No.” Lady Clare lied without thinking about it. Fixx knew nothing of foreign policy and, for all she knew, probably cared even less. Her world wasn’t his, thank God. Besides, the situation was difficult enough without letting two separate parts of her life collide.

“But you’re worried?”

Lady Clare thought about nodding, then rejected the idea — too many tears were backed up in her eyes for them not to spill down her cheeks if she did.

“For what it’s worth, it wasn’t me.” Fixx said, but she knew that already

Lady Clare had a question to ask him. No, she had dozens, each darker than the one before. Starting with, Why my daughter? What had he got out of corrupting some defenceless kid? She wasn’t beautiful or even that rich, just intelligent and too strong-willed for her own good. Why? Why? Why? But instead, Lady Clare decided to ask just one question, the question that mattered. The only problem was that Lady Clare didn’t know which one it was, never mind how to ask it.

She didn’t need to.

“I loved her,” Fixx said baldly and dared her to deny it, to disagree. For a second, sitting there on the stumps of his legs, the steam-driven Samurai, the man who was once Sony’s most famous reMixer, looked almost sad. “Not at first,” he said “I didn’t really know her at first. She was just someone who hung about Schrödinger’s Kaff. You know, one of the street kids...”

Clare didn’t know. She didn’t know at all.

“Lady Elizabeth a street kid?”

Lady Clare was so busy being shocked she nearly missed the disbelief that flicked across Fixx’s battered face.

LizAlec? Lady Elizabeth...?

James Begley, mostly known as Fixx Valmont, stared at Lady Clare Fabio, who stared straight back. He really hadn’t known who LizAlec was, Lady Clare realized. Which meant LizAlec hadn’t told him. And that said more about LizAlec than it could ever say about Fixx.

Lady Clare sighed. “You used to meet her at Schrödinger’s Kaff?” Stupid question, hadn’t he just said he did...

Fixx nodded, thinking of their two-up battles against the Dragon and the incongruous glass tent he’d coded her for Fistful, patching it onto scrub in the Sierra Madre. Her home, LizAlec had called it, the one she didn’t have. Broken home, single-parent syndrome, a mother who was always out at work, he could remember almost everything she told him: if that wasn’t love, what was?

“St Lucius,” he said at last. “She’s not there on a scholarship, right?”

Lady Clare thought about the obscenely high fees and tried not to feel hurt. “No,” she said, “she’s not.”

Fixx was going to tell Lady Clare how LizAlec had followed him from Schrödinger’s Kaff to the Crash&Burn one night, hung at a nearby table until he’d had to take notice, but now didn’t seem the right moment.

“Right,” said Fixx. “So where do I come into this?”

“I want LizAlec back. And you get to take this with you, if you still want it.” She held up his Ted Brewer violin.

Of course he did: it was his, for a start. Of course, if the electricity supply died for good then the violin was useless, but Fixx didn’t reckon that would happen, not gone forever.

“Any idea where she is?” Fixx kept his voice so neutral he might have been discussing the weather, except no one was neutral where that was concerned, not with storms ripping apart buildings from Salzburg to the Atlantic coast.

“Darkside, maybe,” said Lady Clare. “Or one of the burbs. If it was LunaWorld or Planetside, I’d have noticed.”

Fixx didn’t actually ask his question but the woman answered it anyway. “Reciprocal security treaty. Besides, she was tagged,” said Lady Clare, her voice defensive.

“But the trace was removed,” Fixx finished for her, running what data he had through his mind and adding in what his old minder Albrecht would have done. “Probably got a cortex bomb too by now, if they bothered to keep her alive.”

Lady Clare looked at him and then shook her head. “LizAlec is alive.”

“Yeah?” Fixx had no doubt she meant it, he just wasn’t so sure she was right. Either that, or there was a lot she wasn’t telling him. “How do you know?”

“I just do,” said Lady Clare. “Put it down to a mother’s intuition.”

If she could call herself a mother, which was doubtful. But then Fixx still called himself a musician and five years had gone walkabout since he’d fixxed anything worth releasing, and even that had just been a tarted-up remix of KrystalKrash, featuring clips by Coppola and classic samples from Roni Size and Wagner.

Even so, the man was on the other edge of genius. An IQ of over 160 matched to the EQ of an amoral infant, Lady Clare knew that, or she did now. According to Fixx, what drove humanity wasn’t the usual troika of lust, greed and fear, it was vacuum. Whether people knew it or not, everything they did was about hiding from the void.

It wasn’t hipness that made artists gut the past for designer role models: fashion was really just another need to feed. All anyone had left to ransack for inspiration was history, and there was still plenty of that to go round.

Fixx didn’t deny that it was cheap, cut-price nihilism or that outside half a dozen minor academics he was probably one of the few people alive who could tell you who Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus had been. Certainly the only person who might care.

All the same, Lady Clare wasn’t sure what to make of a man who’d had one leg blown off in an organitskaya car bomb explosion and then promptly had the other one surgically removed to ensure symmetry...