Mannequin Man and the Plastic Bitch

She was a dream. He had imagined her once, he was sure, and as she lowered herself and began grinding her hips Tom had that sense of deja vu again. He licked at her vulva and stroked her arse and she pushed down… and he thought that in the dream she would be dancing, not fucking. Or maybe it was that elusive dance of love.

He had paid for his troubles to be taken away, soothed and suckled and swallowed by this plastic bitch. Within a few minutes later they’d been bearing down heavier than ever before, because he’d experienced that which he’d never believed in, thought existed only in songs and poems and his own warped mind… love at first sight.

Stupid, naive, and utterly impossible. She probably had a dozen men every day telling her they loved her, and maybe once or twice in her life she’d actually believed. But none of them really did love her, or ever could. Love a whore? Love a plastic bitch?

Stupid.

“Love you,” Tom said, but his words were stolen by her pussy pressing into his mouth. He told her with his tongue instead, a gentle touch as if he were eating the dish of his life. She let slip a small squeal of pleasure.

None of them had ever done that with him before.

He paused, she stopped sucking him, and they lay there for a few seconds looking at each others’ sex and wondering what was happening.

And then they started again… but it was different. There was a tenderness that hadn’t been there before. Tom lost his sense of desperation — he didn’t have to come, not just yet — and she started taking her time. It became a pleasure, instead of simply a transaction.

“Love you,” he said again, careful this time to pull away so that she couldn’t help but hear.

There was no reaction. Tom gazed at her goose-pimpled buttocks, the sweet crack pouting at him from between them, and suddenly he wanted to shrug her off, turn her around and kiss her.

But kissing was never allowed. Too many viruses were targeted orally.

“I love you,” he said again, trying to force her off. In his naivete he thought that showing her she didn’t have to suck him would set him apart in her mind. But when he flipped her over her stare was as hard as before, her mouth firmly set. Her eyes, though… there was a depth there that had been absent when he’d first entered the room.

She sat beside him on the bed, staring.

“What’s happening?” Tom said, because something was. The whore shook her head, but there was doubt in the way she hesitated, doubt or confusion.

She — Honey, she’d told him her name was Honey — reached out and grabbed his dick, squeezing and kneading it like a cow’s teat. He couldn’t lose his hard-on, much as he believed this to be so much more than sex, and when she lowered her head and started sucking he sat back and closed his eyes.

Wondering what was going on.

Thinking of the women, genuine or artificial, he’d thought he could love.

Realising here and now that this was, in reality, the one and only time.

He came, and when the pleasure had passed and he looked down he thought he’d sprayed across her face. But then he saw that the moisture on her cheeks was tears.

She smiled and wiped her mouth. There was no hate in her eyes.

That, at least, was a start.


“What do you like?” Tom asked.

“I’m not allowed to like anything.”

He smiled. “Yes… but what do you like?”

She looked at him so long and hard that he thought she’d malfunctioned. But then she let the ghost of a smile touch her features. “You’re talking as if we’re on a date.”

“We are, aren’t we?”

“How much did Hot Chocolate Bob charge you for this?”

He thought of the slimy, drugged up pimp he’d negotiated with on the street. “Two hundred.” Realising he’d forgotten to do it, he plucked a credit card from his pocket and offered it to Honey.

She nodded her head slightly and glanced over his shoulder at the wall clock. “Then for another seventeen minutes yeah, we’re on a date.”

“So…?”

She took the card, tapped in the amount and scanned it. She should have shown him first so that he knew he wasn’t being swindled, but he trusted her. Stupid of him, blind, but he trusted her.

“Isn’t it a bit late to ask me?” Honey said. “You get your kicks out of knowing what you missed?”

“Sorry?” He frowned, genuinely puzzled.

Honey smiled again as she handed back his card. “I like it from behind so I don’t have to see the customer’s face. I like it up the arse. It gives my snatch a break. I like it fast, that way I don’t have to pretend — ”

“You weren’t pretending just then.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes it feels okay.”

“Don’t believe you. Sometimes? How often?”

Honey didn’t answer. The silence hung heavy and awkward until Tom spoke again.

“Anyway, I didn’t mean sex. I meant everything. What do you like? Whether it’s permitted by your pimp or not, you must have your likes and dislikes. You must have enough life for that, at least?”

Honey looked down at her feet, stretching her toes. She was still naked, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. Then she looked up at Tom through her golden fringe. The image was so shy and lonely that he wanted to take her in his arms, buy her, get her the hell out of here forever.

Trouble was, there were no places to go.

“I like dancing,” she said. “There’s a club three floors down in the basement, and sometimes if I’m having a slow night I’ll dance to the music.”

“On your own?”

“Of course on my own. The music’s torn apart by the time it gets up here, gutted by the floors and rooms between us, but I still get the beat. Sometimes I can even identify the songs.” She looked away from him, out the window. It was still daytime but heavy smog made it twilight. The sodium street lamps fell like moonlight on her face. “I like the slow ones.”

“I can’t dance,” Tom said, full of regret, wanting so much to be able to hold her for his remaining twelve minutes, pirouette around the room, jive into true love.

“I’ll teach you,” Honey said, and then she frowned, stood, walked to the dressing table and lit a cigarette. Confused. Perhaps not knowing what she’d said, nor understanding why.

“What else?” he asked, rescuing her. He looked at her naked back, buttocks and legs, imagining that he knew the geography of her already, was able to go there and touch her exactly how she liked to be touched, and where, and for how long.

“Finger puppets.” She blew smoke and smiled. “I love finger puppets. The more intricate the better. There’s a Chinese guy down the street. Lunchtimes he brings out this wooden box, sits behind it and puts on a puppet show. He doesn’t try to hide or pretend it’s not him doing it, but it doesn’t matter, because his fingers have such sweet movement. He dances and fights them across that box, and for a few minutes it’s another world, more imagined than any netcast or movie. He touches you, that guy.” She paused for a while, turned to look at him. “Or rather, the finger puppets touch you. He just moves them. For a while they have a life of their own.”

Tom was caught up in her eyes. She looked happy, and he was glad that he’d brought it on by asking questions.

She spoilt the moment by glancing at the clock again, but he persisted.

“Anything else?”

“I like being held. That’s all. Just held. After some of the things that have been done to me…” She trailed off, running her fingers along a white scar across her belly. Tom had thought it was a poorly done repair job when he’d seen it earlier, but now it was something worse. Far worse.

“Have you ever been in love?”

“I’m a whore. An artificial, a plastic bitch. I’m incapable.”

“I’ll bet you’re incapable of enjoying anything, either. Like finger puppets and dancing and being held.”

Honey lit another cigarette.

“Can I hold you?” he said.

She sat on the bed next to him, crossing her legs demurely, folding her arms and hiding her breasts. It gave her such a sense of innocence that a lump came to Tom’s throat.

“Only… I can’t dance. And I left my puppets at home.”

Honey looked at the clock. “You can hold me for six minutes.”

“Longer,” Tom said, shuffling over and wrapping Honey in his arms. It was awkward at first — strange, after what they had been doing, that a simple touch could feel so clumsy — but after a minute it got better. The tension in Honey’s muscles drained away, her head dipped onto Tom’s shoulder, she dropped her cigarette and sighed heavily. “Longer,” he said again.

“Three more minutes.”

“Honey…” He hated that she was still clock-watching. He knew that all this wasn’t just a part of the act, another twenty dollars-worth, because he could feel the heat of her skin and the coolness of tears on his chest. Something had happened, removing the sex from this moment and replaced it with something far, far more.

Tom knew that Honey had not been designed for that.

“I want to stay like this forever,” she said, and it was like a punch to Tom’s chest. “Forever. But you saw Hot Chocolate Bob. You… don’t know what he’s like. You just can’t imagine.” She lifted her head to look at him. “If we’re five minutes over he’ll be up here. He’ll kick you out, or worse, and as for me…”

“What? What?” Tom didn’t want to know what the pimp would do, but he thought that knowing would take some of her hurt and bleed it into him.

“Us plastics are quite hardy,” Honey said. “We can take a lot of beating.”

“Part of the design,” Tom said bitterly.

“Part of the design. Warriors and whores. Need to take abuse.”

“Come with me!” he gushed, realising how foolish this sounded. An hour ago he’d paid some pimp for a fuck with a random whore, and now he was asking her to run away with him, be with him. Foolish, but it felt so right.

“Don’t be stupid,” Honey said.

Tom felt defeated, lost. And stupid. “I’m sorry.” He’d come in this artificial whore’s mouth, and he thought that gave him the right to tell her he loved her. Stupid.

But he did.

“Do you mean it?” Honey said, after a long pause.

“What?”

“What you said earlier. Do you mean it? I’ve heard it a million times before, but I’ve never had cause to believe.”

“Come with me and give me a chance to show you.”

She was silent again, staring at him, and Tom felt as though he was being appraised inside and out. Could she see inside? he wondered. Could she penetrate to the deepest parts of him, the secret centres where even he did not hold reign?

“I’d risk everything,” she said. Tom wasn’t sure whether it was a statement of fact or intent.

“Then come — ”

“I can’t, not now. Kiss me.”

Tom leaned forward and kissed Honey, and she tasted of her name. Smoke and cheap food and himself, she tasted of that too, but it was all sweet. He held her head and pulled her to him, kissing her, his eyes closed, the skin of his palms and fingers tingling where he touched her skin.

She pulled away at last. Her eyes were wide and moist, her breathing fast. She glanced at the clock. “Time’s up.”

Tom sighed heavily, wondering what to say. He was running out of time and needed a plan, but his brain didn’t function. He shook his head angrily, furious at himself, unsure of where the fury came from.

And then Honey saved him.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Lunchtime. I’ll say here instead of going down the street for food. There’s a back door, down an alley next to Hell’s Bookstore on Ashley Street. You know it?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Come here then. And take me away.”

“You’re sure, you believe me, you’re sure?” Tom gushed, stumbling over own thoughts.

There were footsteps on the landing outside the door, and the handle rattled.

“Go!” Honey said. And in an instant she was a ragged, hard whore once more, a plastic bitch built for sex and sucking and little more, sitting back with her legs splayed and another cigarette in her hand. Tom despised the transformation, and he suddenly wondered whether she’d been kidding him all along. The doubt was reinforced when he tried to discern hope in her eyes: there was nothing there. Only a vagueness, a vacancy, waiting to be pumped full of the desires and fantasies of her next client.

“‘The fuck?” a voice said from behind him. “Time’s up, shithead.”

Tom turned around, and Hot Chocolate Bob stood in the doorway.

“I was just leaving.”

“Best you do. Got a lawyer outside, real slimy type, top dog, criminal defence, ready to stick it in Honey’s ass. Like that, don’t you Honey?” He grinned as he spoke, and the paleness of his skin was countered by his black, rotten teeth. He was bald, no eyebrows or facial hair, and his eyes were networks of broken veins. Tom wondered which drugs he did. Probably all of them.

“You know I do, Hot Chocolate Bob.” Her voice was low and sultry. It dripped sex.

Tom didn’t want to turn around and see Honey like this. He looked at the pimp instead and felt his rage building, percolating through the layers of apathy he’d drawn around himself over the years and filling him with energy.

“Out. Now.” The pimp wasn’t joking. Tom could see the bulge of a piece on his belt and his eyes glittered like loose diamonds, the sign of a military-level optical chop. If he’d had his eyes done he’d likely had other stuff as well, and Tom had no desire to mix it with him right now.

Later, maybe.

But not now.

“‘Bye sweetie,” Honey called mockingly as he passed the pimp at the door. “Your juice tasted good, Honey wants more, come back soon.”

He needed to turn around and see her one more time. Just in case he was wrong. Just in case she’d lied. But the pimp had pushed past him into the room, and the two of them were muttering together like lovers, and there were wet sounds that Tom didn’t wish to know.

“… like it like that…” Honey said.

Tom hurried away from the room, passed a dozen more just like it, and walked quickly outside to find escape.


The sun was setting by the time he approached his street, and the night people were out. It was as if the dusk dictated style: the roads heading into town filled, and the people almost all wore black. A dark tide of humanity flowed into the city, accompanied by the clinking of chains, the buzzing of zips, the musical tinkling of jewellery, visible or otherwise. Some of the people had been professionally chopped — eight feet tall, three arms, four breasts, one guy with a huge dick swinging unhindered between his feet — but most had chosen merely to adapt themselves. Tattoos and piercings were the least of it. Amputations, scoops of flesh removed, dyed skins, divided penises, all manner of mutilation was at home in these crowds. Nothing was a surprise.

It made Tom wonder just where these people would go next.

He’d seen it all before, but it never ceased to fascinate him. That people should act like this — tear themselves apart, wound for pleasure or pleasure through pain — confused him. But sometimes, just sometimes, he wondered whether being artificial simply meant that he could never understand.

They were heading for the clubs. There were dozens in the city, most legal, a few not. They buzzed every night and bled every day, bled money to the law and literal blood from their cellars and other hidden ‘rooms’. Tom had visited them a few times in his wanderings and he’d seen some things… some awful things. The nearest he came to these clubs now was the occasional visit to a brothel, and always, always, a brothel where the whores were artificials. After what he’d seen once or twice in club cellars he had no wish to know more of what people could and would do to themselves. And to each other.

Now, walking against the flow, his vision darkened by the sunset and the stares of those passing by, Tom felt doubt stabbing at him.

It was cruel, this doubt, because it was selective in what it recalled. He knew that Honey was beautiful, but try as he might he could not see her face. He could imagine her breasts, her thighs, her flat stomach and moist pussy, but her face eluded him. And her voice, that was gone too, swallowed along with the setting sun. Like it like that. He could remember the words but not the voice that had spoken them. He grabbed at his head, trying to save the memories. Hands over his ears to stop any more of her voice from escaping. Over his eyes, to hold her image in.

He walked into someone and felt the sharp sting of metal spikes picking at his clothes. The person shoved by before he had a chance to look properly, for which he was glad.

“Almost home,” he said to himself.

“Home is for pussies,” a voice mocked from the crowd, but Tom had no idea which of them had spoken.

He turned into his street, breathing a sigh of relief when the flow of black-clad people reduced to a trickle. He passed a final couple of leathered-up teenagers outside his house. The boy had a pierced tongue, the girl was bare breasted and frowning with the weight of chains connecting her nipples to her eyelids. They both smiled at Tom and nodded a polite greeting, the girl’s breasts jiggling with the gesture. He knew their parents. He wondered if their parents knew them.

“Honey,” he said as he palmed his doorlock. The flat was small and compact, big enough to live in but not too large to become unmanageable. “Honey, won’t you tell me the truth?” Doubt again, buzzing at him like ghostly bees, flitting past his ears and eyes and mouth as he tried to remember her voice, her face, her taste. It felt as if she was a dream, fading away as the day wore on.

Would she be there for him? If he smuggled himself into that rank building tomorrow at lunchtime, would she be waiting with her bags packed, ready to run off with him and risk the wrath of that bastard Hot Chocolate Bob?

Tom doubted it. True, his existence felt different today. It was fresher, brighter, Honey had brought something in that had been missing or sought for so long. Not only love, but a sense of importance in himself. A sense of living, not just existing. The sun had seemed warmer and closer upon leaving the brothel, even through the smog. The streets were cleaner, the smiles more real, the adverts flashing across billboards less cynical and more concerned.

Yes, things felt so different.

But good things never happened to Tom. That’s not the way his life was built, it wasn’t how his hat had been put on. Bad things clung to him like shit to shoes.

Would she be there? He doubted it. But the very last thing he would do was not go, just to find out.


He listened to the sounds of the night, trying to perceive just how they were different tonight from the night before. There were sirens and shouts, drunken youths singing in the streets, buzzed artificials screaming as the bad charges slowly but surely cauterised their insides. At one point Tom heard gunshots from somewhere deep in the city.

By three in the morning he admitted defeat and left his bed. He logged onto the net and sat back, closing his eyes as he tried to find somewhere to go, a place that would be safe for Honey and him. It was a fantasy, of course, and he knew it. Dream tropical islands awash with happy-ever-after were not for her kind.

Not for him, either.

Later, as the sun smudged the smog in the east and turned it pink, Tom connected to the net point, closed his eyes and accessed his recharge site. He input the correct code, sat back and felt tiredness recede as his power cells gulped their fill.


Tom always watched the sunrise. However tired or run-down he was, he’d see the sun climb out of the industrialised eastern suburbs of the city and heave itself skyward on pollutant legs. It never failed to cheer him, however depressed he felt, and this morning it worked more than ever.

Because he was in love. Love. That elusive, haunting myth. The place he’d never thought he would be.

Love.

The Baker had finally done it, even if it had taken fifteen years to have effect. If only he were alive to see it now. Tom smiled and closed his eyes for a moment, remembering his old friend. And then he thought of Honey and opened his eyes again.

The morning washed last night’s doubts away. Tom made himself some toast and sausages, drank a pint of orange juice, visited the toilet four times before the sun had cleared the chimneys and sprung free into the sky above the city. The smog was always dissipated in the morning. It was as if industry paid worship to the sun for the first hour of the day, and then when the main shifts began, worship turned to profit. The sun never seemed to mind. It came and went, came and went. It was the reservoirs and food chains and fields that were protesting, and strenuously. Tom was fortunate enough to be able to afford lab-grown food, but there were many who were not.

Honey, for one. What diseases could she have? What malfunctions waiting to happen, tumours biding their time, rots working away at her joints and flesh?

“I love her,” Tom said, shaking his head to dispel the negative thoughts. And he said it again, because he liked the sound and feel of the word in his mouth.

The Baker had given him the virus of love fifteen years before. A clumsily written and input programme, Tom had actually felt it take root inside his head, spreading electron-tentacles, feelings its way into his artificial cortex and brain-stem… and then vanishing as it sought to establish itself fully. He’d never thought it would have taken so long. The Baker — Tom had never even known his real name, great friends though they were — would have been a happy man today.

He spent the next hour sitting at his window and looking out over the city. He hadn’t found anywhere to flee to, but he was sure that they’d find a good place, a safe place. He had no idea of what to do if Hot Chocolate Bob confronted them in their escape, but he was confident that they could slip away unseen. The thought that Honey would have changed her mind — or, worse, had been playing with him all along — came once, and once only. He killed it. He chased it down into the pits of his mind, drowning it in other, more established forms of hopelessness and fear.

Totally unprepared, lightened by a love he had never been designed to feel, Tom set out just before noon to rescue the plastic bitch that had stolen his heart.


The change in the streets was as breathtaking as ever. Last night they had been flooded with people in black, a tide of leather and metal and mutilation with one single, enveloping thought: pleasure. It was as if that flow of people was a solitary organism, pushing through between buildings and parks and walls, penetrating the city to plant its thoughts and intentions, leaving the pale residue of hopelessness behind as dawn drove it away.

By morning, the streets belonged to the workers. People thronged the pavements and cars coughed their way along roads, filled with people heading for work. Thousands flocked east towards the factories — those who could not afford monorail or tube tickets — with many more filtering into office buildings or sweatshops built in deep, cavernous basements. Steam hissed from manholes and there was the intermittent thud of accumulated gases burning off in the sewers. Something flew by just over Tom’s head, and he saw the trailing heat-stick of a policeman. The platform dipped and bobbed before accelerating away and disappearing down a side street, aiming to ruin someone’s day.

Tom tried to keep himself to himself, which wasn’t difficult. He was an artificial, and with so many people opting for body chopping he was camouflaged by normality. And he was dressed in the uniform of a factory worker, even though he did not work: the Baker had seen to it that he had enough money to want for nothing. So he blended in, becoming one of a crowd. A crowd that shed curiosity like water from oil.

It was not a long walk to the area of the city where Honey worked. Shops and offices gave way to boarded-up buildings and plain-fronted stores, many of them selling counterfeit produce and dealing drugs, or worse. Tom knew of several places down here where an artificial could buy a black market charge, and he began to see a few of them around. The worst of the buzzed people could barely walk, let alone see and talk. They screamed; there was always screaming. Illegal charges were like fake foodstuffs: they’d feel and taste the same, but eventually they tortured the body and polluted the mind, leading to a slow death.

The gangs were here as well. Some were all human, like the Draggers, renowned for tying perceived enemies to their cars with sharpened chains and driving at speed through the city. In turn there were the artificials’ gangs, who rarely named themselves because identity was something they shunned. Rebellion was their cause, their drug, and most of them chose to get buzzed even if they could afford legitimate charges. The Draggers fought for money and turf and women and drugs. The artificials rebelled against creation. Such differences ensured that they rarely fought each other.

The gangs that did fight each other were the mixed ones. But daylight was their enemy, the night’s exertions drained their energies, and for now Tom felt safe.

Three human Draggers hung around by a gambling emporium. They looked tired and drawn, pale from whatever they had taken the previous night, and they didn’t even look as Tom passed by. He caught a whiff of drugs bleeding from their pores. Blessed with the gift of love and loving, how could these people demean themselves so?

But love and loving… that was something he had now! He looked up out of the concrete canyon and grinned at the hazy sun.

A burst of laughter brought him back.

The buildings fell back to reveal a small, shaded park, so boxed in by facades that only a weak, pale green grass grew. Hidden from the sun most of the time, the park was home to escaped pets and carrion birds. Tom had been here before but only once, and only at night. The sights he had seen had chased him away, the gutted dogs and bloated crows too fat to fly, too big and mean to tackle. Here was evolution aggravated and progress tainted.

Now, during the day, it was home to people having fun. They danced and jigged and laughed, and Tom tried to shrink into himself and move away quietly until he saw what the people were watching.

Here was the finger-puppet man.

He sat cross-legged on the ground beside the stump of a long-dead tree. Before him was a wooden box, about the size and shape of a coffin. Along the length of the coffin, back and forth, up and down, danced the most fluid and lifelike puppets Tom had ever seen. They captivated him from that instant, drawing him into the crowd, pulling him through to the front, between hard shoulders and muttered curses from those he shoved aside. His view was better here, and all the more amazing for that.

The Chinaman sitting behind the box was impassive, expressionless. The only sign that he was even awake was the subtle twitching of his cheeks as his eyes shifted left and right to follow his finger performers. It looked for all the world as if the puppets were controlling the man, not the other way around.

Tom looked closely at their carved wooden faces, and he was sure he saw smiles directed at him.

A clock struck one o’clock somewhere unseen, and he realised suddenly that he had somewhere else to be.

He walked around the shaded park twice before he saw the sign for Ashley Street. It was a lane rather than a street, and an alley more than a lane, home to a few squat fast-food shops, a couple of porn palaces and a chop shop that stank of blood and desperation. A couple of its regular clients hung around outside, bad advertising if ever Tom had seen it: the woman had no nose or eyelids, but bled profusely out of open veins above her eye sockets; the man displayed his mutilated genitalia, balls the size of footballs and a dick like a joint of uncooked pork.

“Need something doing?” the man asked.

“Leave him, he’s a fake,” the woman said, dismissing Tom with a bloody glare.

“Doesn’t look like one.”

Tom walked by, feeling their pained eyes on his back. They were wondering what he had, he knew. Secretly craving a look beneath his skin and flesh. Well.. they’d be surprised. In a way he too was chopped. The Baker had seen to that.

He passed Hell’s Bookshop and found the alley Honey had mentioned. Its walls were so close together that Tom’s arms brushed them as he made his way along, stepping over a vagrant who may have been dead. Before him — the shadow at the end of the alley, a great wall of black concrete pointing at the pink sun — stood the whorehouse.

Tom was amazed to find the back door open. It wasn’t as if such a salubrious establishment needed a rear entrance for shady patrons.

As he opened the door and a flush of smells came out at him — the tang of sex, old greasy cooking, smoke, drugs, the sparkle of ozone from an illegal charger somewhere — he realised that he had not yet seen Hot Chocolate Bob.

Not out on the street, working his patch.

Not down in the dead park watching the incredible puppeteer.

Which meant, very likely, that he was inside.

Tom closed the door behind him, but he made sure he knew where the handle was.

He thought he could remember where to find Honey’s room. It was on the third floor, facing out onto the street. He hurried along the dark corridor, stepping on things that cracked or snapped and, in one case, squealed. He tried not to look down because he didn’t want to see, didn’t want anything to mar this moment, this occasion when he would do the most valiant thing of his life: rescue his love from the purgatory she had been created for, and which she endured still. Why she endured it he did not know. It was something he may ask her… one day.

He reached the stairs and quickly moved up towards the third floor. At each landing he sensed doors opening around him; just a crack, wide enough for the inhabitants to see out. A couple of times he heard a relieved sigh when they saw him walk past.

There were many sounds permeating the air, turning the dank stairwell into an echo-chamber for the whole building. A blasting television here, a whining drill there, the screams of a child from far along one refuse-strewn corridor, the grunting of sex, a soft mumble somewhere else, as if someone was trying to talk themselves out of this hellhole. And smells as well, even worse than those that had hit him upon opening the door. Shit, piss, cabbage, saliva, rotten food, death, spunk, cordite, smoke, drugs… very little good, hardly any sweet. Neither belonged here.

Honey was both, and her time in this place was now numbered in minutes.

Tom had found her door. He ran up the last flight of steps and stood before it, surprised at how nervous he felt, how terrified that she’d only mock him when he opened the door. She’d be sitting there with her legs open and her hand held out, ready to scan his card and take her ten measly percent.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. No. She’s better than that. She meant it. No.”

Someone pushed him from behind. He spun around to look into the wizened face of an old man, tall and angular where he had been chopped in an attempt to avert aging. “Yes,” the old man said. “Yes. Don’t torture yourself son, do it. She’s sweeeetttttttt!” His voice rose into a bird-like cackle. Tom leaned back against the door as the old man stumbled away along the corridor, laughing to himself and shrilling “Sweeetttt, sweeettttt!”

The door opened behind him and Tom stumbled into the room.

“Tom! You came!” And there was so much relief and joy in Honey’s voice that Tom knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the love was not his and his alone.

Here was hope. Here was trust. Here was the rest of his life.

Honey had caught him in her arms and he twisted around to kiss her.

“No time for that!” Honey said, kicking the door shut. “I thought you’d be here half an hour ago. Hot Chocolate Bob will be back anytime, he knew I wasn’t going out, he’ll be here to have me. We have to go. We have to go now!”

“Come on then!” Tom said. Honey had a rucksack over her shoulder, and today she wore no make-up. He didn’t know how he could ever have forgotten her face. He saw her for what she really was and loved her more. Years of abuse with her face pressed into pillows and against walls had given her skin a pale sheen, but he had enough money to sort that out. He’d give her new skin. He’d give her anything.

“You’re going to have to do something for me, Tom,” Honey said. “It’s the only way we’ll get out.” She swung the backpack his way and quickly stripped.

Tom went cold.

“You want me to — ”

“If anyone sees me out of this room with you — anyone — they’ll tell Bob. He’ll be on us in seconds, and… I’ve seen him kill before, Tom. He wouldn’t hesitate today.”

“But it’s so dangerous.”

“I know. Tom… let me down. Turn me off, let me down and get me out of here.”

Tom knew that this was a drastic step. Reinvigorating Honey would take hours, and he’d heard that half of the plastic artificials this was done to never came back. They weren’t designed for this. It was like killing a human in the hope that they could be resuscitated.

She put her fingers into a fold beneath her left breast. Tom saw the muscles on her wrist tense. “I’ll do it myself if you don’t. But I want you to do it.”

Honey removed her hand. Tom reached out and slipped his fingers inside the fleshy slit, felt her Christ valve — so named for its artificial powers of death and resurrection — and twisted it sharply to the right.

Honey gasped and slumped into Tom’s arms. “I won’t watch,” he said. He closed his eyes and felt her wrinkling lips pass across his mouth, heard a hissing exhalation of love as her weight lessened. Folds of flesh hung over his arms, a warm rush ran down his legs as she voided herself, steam rose around him and stung his nostrils as he breathed in sharply…

And it was over so quickly.

He tried not to see Honey’s flattened, lifeless face as he rolled her up and stuffed her and her clothes into the rucksack.


At every step, every landing, every corner in the staircase, he expected the pimp to be waiting for him. He would have no defence, no way to fight off such a person. Run or die, that was all. No bluffing, no pleading, no fighting… just running.

The stairwell didn’t seem so dark on the way down, nor so pungent. Maybe it was because the sun had edged around and found a break in the smog, bathing the stairs in heat and light through a rooflight. Or perhaps it was simply because here he was, escaping this pit for the last time with the woman he loved over his shoulder.

The Baker had told him a few thing he should look out for, but he had never explained exactly what love was, what it would do, how it could change the way Tom thought. He guessed that the old bastard could never have explained anyway, genius though he was, and so he had simply neglected to try.

Tom wished the old man could see him now.

At the bottom of the stairwell he headed along the narrow corridor towards the rear of the building. The door was still ajar — he could just see the slice of light in the gloom — and he had made it. He was there, he was out, and a flush of relief relaxed his muscles as he opened the door and stood facing Hot Chocolate Bob.

The pimp glared at him in comical surprise. He must have seen the guilt in Tom’s face, the backpack over his shoulder and the fear in his eyes. “What the fuck?” said the pimp, slipping a silver gun from his belt at the same time and lifting it up towards Tom’s face.

Tom used his head. Flipped forward as hard as he could, his artificial muscles writhing and knotting as he pumped them with adrenaline, Tom’s forehead connected squarely with the pimp’s nose. The sounds was sickening. The pain and shock must have been dreadful, because the man didn’t even scream as he sank to his knees and slipped down the slimy wall.

“Leave us alone,” Tom said. “We’re in love.” He vaulted Hot Chocolate Bob’s splayed legs, kicked the gun down the alley ahead of him and sprinted for Ashley Street. It only took a few seconds, but they were filled with so many thoughts that it felt like hours.

Most of them centred around whether the pimp carried more than one gun.

As he burst out in the street and angled left, Tom felt a foolish sense of elation. He may be away now, yes, but he’d made an enemy, a deadly enemy. From this moment on the city was no longer safe, could never be called home again… but the sun shone down on his adventure, laughter still came from the dead park at the end of the street, Honey’s weight hugged his shoulder as if she had an arm draped there and he could smell her on him, smell her.

He wondered whether this place would become famous, just as Pudding Lane had in London. That’s where the Baker had taken his name from. He’d said that he would be responsible for initiating a new Great Fire, but this one would be a conflagration of love.

Tom ran through the park, noticing that the Chinaman was still entertaining. There were fewer people watching him now but he seemed not to notice, so intent was he upon his little play. The finger puppets bobbed and weaved and stared. Tom wished he had time to stop, but danger loomed large and dark behind him, an almost palpable force that drove him on into the city.

He stopped running after a mile because he was drawing attention. Glancing around constantly, he was certain that he was not being followed. Enraged and bloodied, pride dented, Hot Chocolate Bob would certainly not be silent in his pursuit.

The midday lull was almost over and now the streets were buzzing again. Cars vied for space and ground against each other, coughing out exhaust fumes at pedestrians. Street performers were counting their lunchtime takings, many of them looking sad and despondent as they pocketed a few measly coins. Nobody looked at Tom. Nobody could know what he had in his rucksack.

He felt like a murderer. Honey may well be dead in there, a coiled, folded mess, a smashed egg with no hope of reconstruction. Each time he caught someone’s eye he looked away guiltily, blushing with the obviousness of what he had done. Surely they could see it on his face? Surely they could discern the shape of her bulging the rucksack, smell her scent as Tom took her towards salvation or death?

But the streets stank of rot and smog and fast food. And anyone who did look at Tom seemed to look away just as quickly as he.

It had always been a city full of secrets.

The sense of threat behind him drove him on. He would have to go back to his flat for a while — Honey’s state now made things much more complicated — but he didn’t want to stay there for long. Hot Chocolate Bob could know anyone, and it would be easy to snatch Tom’s image from the street cameras outside the whorehouse, download a privileged search programme from the net — police maybe, or military, depending on who he knew — and trace Tom.

He’d have ten minutes to collect some things, and that was it. He’d be leaving. Fleeing the city if he could, perhaps making it into the mountains where, rumour had it, there were still regions of wilderness to get lost in for those with the courage or need.

He’d been here all his life, and yet he had no regrets at all about leaving. There were no ties here anymore.

Passing by a shop Tom glanced in the window and saw himself reflected back. He didn’t recognise the face for a moment and he spun around to see who was behind him. But then he walked on, knowing that he was already changing. Love, fear and desperation had left their mark on his face.

He reached his flat a few minutes later. He remained at the end of the street for a while, trying to spot whether there was anyone waiting for him. All seemed normal. His backpack weighed him down. And the longer he delayed, the less chance there would be of Honey coming back as fit and functional as she had been just an hour before. So Tom strode down the street, palmed the doorlock and went inside.

The place was just as he had left it. It no longer felt like home, because he had slaughtered safety and comfort in the couple of hours he’d been away. But its familiarity was comforting. Tom realised that he was absolutely exhausted. He could do with a charge right now. He looked longingly at the connection port and he even accessed the net briefly, before shaking his head and breaking the link. What right had he to sit and recharge while Honey lay crumpled and twisted in the rucksack like that? Besides which, Hot Chocolate Bob and his cronies may be here at any minute.

No, he had to leave now. If it weren’t for his foolish lack of planning he wouldn’t have been forced to return here at all, but he needed credit, clothes and something to help him get out of the city. An official pass would have been good, but failing that, there was always money.

He placed the rucksack gently on his bed — how he’d love to be holding Honey there right now, explaining his love and feeling her explanations in return — but it would be crazy to try to revive her here. Memory would have to sustain him for now. In the meantime, he needed a safe place and the time to bring her back.

A safe place…

Perhaps he’d known all along where he would go. He hadn’t been there since the old man had died almost fifteen years before, but he sincerely hoped that the Baker’s labs were still functional and equipped. Waiting for the right person to come and use them again.

Safety. If anywhere in this hope-forsaken city was safe, it would be the place where the Baker had lived, thought, composed, created and died.

The place where, for Tom, love had been born.


It was crazy what time could do to memory, even that of an artificial. It was as if the years could twist streets, the passing of seconds alter perceptions, smells and memories, take the truth and turn it into distorted ideas of what was and had been.

Either that, or he’d consciously tried to forget.

He’d found the estate easily enough. Twenty acres of industrial and business units, half of them flooded by the swollen river and stinking effluent, was not difficult to locate, even in the city. But once there, distance and direction became skewed echoes of what he remembered. He took the third turning right, the second left and found the unit… but it made net casters, and there were several chopped Draggers hanging around outside, eyes red with menace and blood.

Tom backtracked and started again, trying to make out where he had gone wrong. Wading through a foot of shitty water was not the highlight of his day, but knowing that the Baker’s hidden lab was beyond made it almost possible to ignore the stink and the things bumping against his legs. The sun sank in the west. It bled through the polluted atmosphere and cast pink reflections and violet shadows across the buildings, making them almost beautiful. Tom laughed out loud when he found the unit, then frowned when he realised that it was the wrong one again.

Every passing minute his fear grew. The sense that he was being watched — created by his own internal terrors, surely, not by any external presence — grew and grew, twisting him around every few seconds to search for the watcher. He saw a tramp and a few gang members, individual buzzed artificials wandering around awaiting death, a pack of dogs looking for the dead.

Eventually, desperate and exhausted and fearful that the dark would steal his last hope of finding the place that night, Tom sank down against a wall and felt tears brewing. The rucksack weighed heavily on his shoulders and in his heart.

And then the Baker found him.

Something inside his head clicked on. He’d never felt it before, had never even been aware of this part of his consciousness, but its sudden appearance opened up whole new vistas of knowledge for him. There was a brief surge of power that made his vision dim and his balance waver, but then he knew so much more than before that he almost cried out in fear, shock and relief. He stood, shucked the rucksack higher on his shoulders and walked around two corners to the Baker’s old unit.

It was deserted. The windows were smashed, the door graffiti-strewn and smeared a shiny silver where someone had tried to crowbar it open, the walls crumbled and lined black with flood tide-marks. And Tom smiled, because he knew that no one would have ever been able to find the Baker’s place.

No one but him.

Here was safety and refuge. Here, in the twist of a handle and the muttering of a special word, was a place where his love had been born and where, ironically, he could save it. Tom unslung the rucksack and slipped two fingers under the flap, feeling the silk of Honey’s hair and the oily coolness of her deflated skin.

“I’ll save you now,” he said.

Tom reached out, twisted the door handle and muttered, “Pudding Lane.”

The ground parted and carried him six feet under.


The inner door opened and Tom walked through. The laboratory was just as he remembered. It looked more like the room of a dark-ages alchemist, with arcane machinery arrayed around the walls, sheafs of yellowed paper piled high and haphazard on the huge oaken desk at the far end, dusty skylights letting in a faded, filtered light from somewhere outside. The whole end wall was taken up with a huge pinboard and there were drawings, sketches, formulae, potions, text-book extracts and personal memo’s pinned there by the hundred, a collage of idea and potential that stunned Tom now as much as it had fifteen years before.

The place even smelled the same — spilled chemicals, old experiments, stale thought. It was as if the Baker were still here, ruminating in the comfortable back room instead of being dead. Tom shook his head. An artificial’s thoughts were supposed to be his own, but memory was powerful. Here was the Baker bashing a clay pot with a hammer, determined to get at whatever was inside before it was spoiled. He looked up and swore at Tom… and then he was relaxing in an easy-chair, recounting tales of his earlier years as Honorary Professor of Sentience at the university… and then here, pouring a sticky, clear gunge over the back of a dead frog and screaming in delight as its legs spasmed. Memories everywhere. It had been the most amazing time of Tom’s life.

“You’re as good as human,” the Baker had told him, “and better than most.”

Among the mess of apparatus were pieces of equipment that Tom recognised from many of the Baker’s experiments. He didn’t necessarily understand them — not back then, and still not now — but they provided him with a strange sense of peace. To know that the Baker had been busy in this world was a comforting thought. And to know for sure that his influence was still felt — through Tom, and probably elsewhere as well — went so far as to give hope.

There was a noise at the edge of the room, a rattle of cogs and the lazy squeal of something long-dormant coming to life. Tom stepped back and prepared to utter the exit phrase. He wouldn’t put it past the old scientist to have left some sort of guard in this place, a booby trap to bring the roof down should anyone enter after his death. After all, as he’d once told Tom, there were things in here best forgotten. But then Tom felt himself being spied upon, scanned, a horribly invasive sensation that raised his hackles and drew his balls up into his body. A sheen of light passed over him from head to foot and it seemed to reach inside as well, lighting his internal make-up and delving into his head. He felt a brief flush of abandonment as the scan ended — for a moment he’d sensed the Baker’s attention upon him — but then the discordant rattle and hum of machinery took on an orchestrated rhythm. Some lights flickered on, a coffin-shaped upright cabinet to his left began to shiver slightly as something inside turned over, and several of the Baker’s gophers darted out from beneath the workbench along the wall.

Tom smiled in sheer delight as the little robotic transports hurried about the floor. The scientist had made these things one day when the effort of walking back and forth across the laboratory, searching through cupboards and sifting files had become too tiresome. His casual genius was apparent in their perfection. He could speak his requirements and the next gopher in line would search the lab until it found exactly what the Baker was after. They were remarkable, but their uses were too simple, too convenient for the Baker to be over-excited by them. His efforts had always been directed more left of centre.

No instructions were spoken now, yet still these little wheeled creations busied themselves with some secretive business. And as Tom watched for a couple of minutes the pattern became obvious — everything they searched for and found was taken to the cabinet. They’d disappear beneath the desk beside the cabinet and come out again empty-clawed. There were clicks and clunks and soft sighs from in there. The sounds of construction, and creation.

But Tom felt safe. The Baker, though long dead, would never do anything to bring him harm. Tom had been the nearest thing he’d ever had to a child.

“Baker,” Tom said. “It worked. It worked just like you said it would!” He slipped the rucksack from his shoulder and placed it on a work bench, realising as he undid the clasps just how pathetic it all looked. The Baker had sent him into the world to find love, and here he was returning to the old man’s labs for the first time with a deflated whore over his shoulder and a mad pimp on his tail. “I know it looks a bit strange,” Tom said, carefully opening the drawstring and taking Honey out. She was so light, so reduced. “But you should see her, Baker. Really, wait until you see her when she’s whole again. She’s beautiful. And her mind… she really has a mind, it’s true! Her own mind, her own thoughts, her own sense of herself. She likes finger puppets and dancing and being held.” He frowned. “She’ll have to teach me to dance.”

The cabinet rattled and hissed at the edge of the room, gophers flitting on their unknown missions. One of them jumped onto the bench next to Tom and grabbed a lightning-quick snip of his hair. Tom jerked back and watched it return to the shivering machine, his lock held high in its claws.

He looked down at Honey, a wrinkled mask of herself. He would resurrect her now, and for a while they’d be safe. For a while. But he wanted them to live, to go out together, think together, be together forever. He’d already resigned himself to having to leave the city.

Never once did he let failure enter his mind.

Honey would live again. Nothing else was possible.

He left her on the bench as he went to find what he needed.

Ironically for a scientist, the Baker had been something of a Luddite. His science was his own, so personal and unique to him that in Tom’s eyes it had seemed almost magical. He’d not even had a net point in the laboratory, and even fifteen years ago that must have inconvenienced him so much. Tom only hoped that the scientist’s illicit charging unit still functioned after so long. Of all the illegal units he had seen and heard of this was the only one that didn’t eventually kill its user. The others — sold on street corners and in darkened corners of clubs — worked for a time, but they fused and cauterised their users’ insides, driving them insane, psychotic or both. The irony was that it was a buzz the artificials could not give up… hence the buzzed wandering the streets, artificial equivalents of the human drug addicts. They even looked the same. But the black bags beneath a buzzed’s eyes were caused by burnt blood.

He’d need a lead to connect himself to Honey for the proxy resurrection, and one to plug her into the charging unit. The Baker had kept all his connectors in an old cupboard at the rear of the room, and they were still there now. Tom pulled out a great knot of leads, cables and wires, a tangled web home to many real spiders. He wondered whether they’d become more entangled with time, because at first glance he had no idea how he’d ever be able to part them. But they seemed twisted by design, and in a matter of minutes he’d extracted the two cables he required. He replaced the rest and closed the cupboard door. Strange how neatness was so comforting.

Tom carefully lifted Honey and carried her into the back room, the comfortable place where he and the Baker had used to sit for hours on end talking, discussing, philosophising. The Baker had never been subtle. He’d told Tom that philosophising with what was essentially a robot had been one of the greatest pleasures of his life. Tom smiled now as he thought of some of those conversations, pleased that he’d have a few hours to recollect them in full. He felt in need of some of the Baker’s wisdom.

He took one armchair and placed Honey in the other. The charging unit was built into Honey’s chair. The Baker had done that so that Tom could sit and recharge whilst still conversing. Hungry as he had been to experiment and create, it was the gleaning of knowledge that had been the old man’s greatest love. And he’d told Tom that their relationship was unique in all of history — the more they talked and argued and discussed, the more they knew. It was as if their words reacted in some weird psycho-chemical way, causing truth itself to leak into this room and find a home in their minds.

Tom plugged Honey into the charger and set it to start bleeding power in an hour’s time. Then he connected himself to Honey with the proxy cable, sat back and closed his eyes.

He accessed the net. It took several seconds to find the correct resurrection sites, and he grouped them divisionally so that they could be manipulated in order of importance. He only hoped that Honey had suffered no hidden alterations at the hands of Hot Chocolate Bob. If she had… something other than Honey may result from this.

And if that happened, Tom would destroy her and then himself.

He looked around the room, still swimming in wonderful, safe memories. There were worse places to die.

Honey twitched once as the flow of information began. Then she began to undulate slowly, steaming, a bubbling sound coming from within her pale folds. An eyeball oozed from one socket, rolled across her face and then was hauled back in by a tightening of the optic nerve.

Tom did not want to see. So he half-stood, shifted his armchair and sat back down, staring into the laboratory as he acted as a conduit for Honey’s resurrection.

He reckoned on six hours.

By that time, perhaps the gophers would have finished the pre-programmed task they were executing.

The cabinet rattled and beeped, Honey stank and bubbled, and Tom decided to close his eyes and let memories of the Baker give comfort.


Tom never truly slept. He could turn down and shut off many of his normal functions — and for him that was akin to sleep — but his dreams were sunken thoughts, consciousness on a reduced level, and here randomness crept in.

Dreams were memories as well, and sometimes memories of dreams. That’s why Tom spent six hours thinking of Honey.

Because he was certain he had dreamed of her before.

There were no defined memories in his mind, nothing definitely her, but the whole sense of her was there. It was something he had lived with for a long, long time, a presence in his mind living in shadows, existing in places not yet seen or known or understood. Every thought he had about her now — the way she moved her head, spoke, smiled or frowned — was familiar to Tom. Even the way she’d acted when he had first seen her yesterday, the sex, the smell of her as they’d rutted on the bed… all known.

Hidden, but known.

He wondered briefly if the Baker had been aware of her, but that was crazy. Tom would have known. And the Baker would never have been so cruel as to give him love, only for him to experience it with a sister.

No… plain crazy.

He surfaced from these sunken thoughts from time to time and found everything to be the same. The light had dimmed somewhat and Tom realised that it was night outside, but the gophers were still busying themselves, and Honey still sighed and bubbled behind him.

Maybe the familiarity was a product of the virus the Baker had programmed and injected into Tom mere days before dying. “I’m giving you love,” he’d said, “and one day I pray you may find it.”

For those long years it had always been inside him. And when he had set eyes on Honey, she was everything that love was meant to be.


“Tom?”

Tom drifted back to the surface of his mind. Someone was calling him. Perhaps it was the Baker, because the sounds had stopped from the laboratory, and something was ready.

“Tom… don’t say you’ve gone, not after all this.”

He stood from the chair and spun around, and there was Honey. She was curled into the chair, knees drawn up and feet tucked under her behind, as if hunkered down for an evening with a book and a bottle of wine. But she still looked… wrong. Her skin was tinged blue, her eyes dry and harsh-looking, her hair lank and greasy. She could not move, and her flesh lay in folds around her midriff, pooled on the armchair about her thighs. Her eyelids looked thick and heavy. Her breasts sagged down to her waist, nipples pointing earthward.

“You’re alive!” Tom said. She smiled weakly and he moved to her side, reaching out to touch her forehead. It was slick and too cool.

“I feel unfinished,” Honey said.

Tom made sure the lead still joined them to the buzz unit, closing his eyes to ensure that the net connection was still there. Then he sat on the arm of the chair and put one arm around her shoulders, drawing her to him like a doll, kissing the top of her head even though it dismayed him to do so. “But you’re awake now,” he said, “and I’ll stay here with you until you’re ready.”

“Where are we?” she asked weakly, and he told her.

“Stay quiet and get some rest,” Tom said, “you’ve got a way to go yet.”

“Fuck quiet!” Her voice was low, but full of life. “We’ve got a lot of getting-to-know-each-other to do, you and I. Tell me about you. Tell me… tell me what it’s going to be like for us, and where we’re going to go. Tell me how happy we’ll be when we get there.”

So Tom sat there, holding Honey’s shadow as her resurrection was completed, and he told her the things she wanted to hear. Curiously enough, they were all the things he wanted too.


They left at midnight. Honey held onto Tom’s arm as she walked across the laboratory, looking down at her feet, concentrating hard on each and every step. The lights were stuttering now, as if losing their will when they realised that their guests were leaving, and Tom was terrified that they’d fail before he and Honey reached the door. He’d find his way out, he knew that… but right now he wouldn’t welcome the dark.

The gophers had been inactive for hours. The cabinet was quiet too, but it was a loaded silence, like a pause between breaths or the stillness after a scream. Tom kept glancing at the cabinet as they approached, and again as they passed by, wondering what was in there and whether, by the Baker’s weird machinations, it was meant for him. The scanning he’d felt upon entering may have kick-started some long dormant programme in the laboratory’s terminal, a gift for message for him. A final testimony to the Baker’s genius.

They walked on, and Tom felt the cabinet standing behind him watching them go. It was the centre of the room, the heaviest point, a black hole drawing everything to it, including his thoughts. Good sense was sucked in too.

At the exit door, Tom paused and Honey rested against the wall. “I’ve got one thing to do before we go,” he said.

“You’re destroying the place, aren’t you,” she said.

He frowned at her. “No.”

“Oh…” She did not elaborate, and Tom did not push her. Not now. Later he may ask her what she thought the Baker really meant to him. But for now, he had scant minutes to snoop around. Perhaps, deep down, he didn’t want to leave this place of safety and nostalgia so soon.

The cabinet had the dimensions of an upright coffin, but it was made of metal and warm to the touch. Tom ran his fingers around its edges, wondering if there was some way to open it easily, and then he thought of the gophers. They’d been darting in and out beneath the benching next to the cabinet, so he knelt and peered into the shadows.

There was a hole through which a gopher could slip inside, but that was it. Nothing more. No way for him to get in, nor to see what was there.

Unless.

He scouted the lab quickly, feeling Honey’s gaze tracking him. “Not long,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I like watching you work.”

“I’m not working.”

“What’s your job if it isn’t to save me?”

Tom wondered again just how much Honey had changed during her shutdown, and then he spotted what he was after: a small mirror fixed to the wall above the wash basin in the corner. He tried to prise it from the concrete, failed, punched it instead. It shattered into the sink and he selected the largest shard. He grabbed a second piece as an afterthought — he’d need light — and then went back to the cabinet.

All done with mirrors, the Baker had often muttered as he performed some astonishing new scientific feat. Now Tom used mirrors as well. And for the briefest, darkest, almost human moment, the black magic he had never believed in faced him down.

He could see the pale hue of new skin even before he slipped the mirror into the hole. The leg was sheened with fine hairs, and they seemed to thicken and darken as he watched.

“What is it?” Honey asked.

Tom did not answer. He could not. Because he’d angled the second mirror to catch some light and bounce it up into the cabinet, giving brief illumination to what stood within, illuminating nothing… because Tom could not understand.

Why or how or when… he did not understand.

The naked man dipped its head and looked down at him.

He was looking at himself.

Paler, thinner, not quiet all there… but himself. There was no real expression on the face. That made it worse. The light was feeble, but Tom could see some details he’d rather not. Like the fact that the simulacrum had no real eyes, only milky white jelly balls in its sockets. Or the way its hair seemed to be forcing itself through the scalp, twisting and waving like a million baby snakes, hushing against the inside of the cabinet as if the splash of light had agitated it.

Tom dropped the mirror shards and scrambled back on his hands and heels, leaving bloody hand prints on the floor.

“What is it?” Honey asked again, concern tingeing her voice.

“It’s me,” Tom whispered very quietly. “It’s me…”

“What?” Honey hadn’t heard, and now she was walking unsteadily across the laboratory and reaching down, swapping roles as she helped Tom stand and lean against the oak desk. “Tom… if it’s that bad we can leave and shut it in.”

Tom looked Honey in the eyes — they were full of life again now and their golden hue had returned, as mysterious and bewitching as before — and he realised that he didn’t want to tell her. And he didn’t need to.

That one crazy glimpse had seemed to lessen his own existence. For a second he’d felt… insignificant.

He was an artificial, after all.

“Do you love me?” he said.

Honey frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, you know, I’m a plastic bitch and I hear the word ‘love’ a lot… but then you did rescue me. And you have resurrected me. So yes, I suppose I do.”

Tom was crestfallen.

Then Honey laughed and kissed him, and she held his face in her hands so that he couldn’t look away. “Of course I do! Now, can we leave please? There’s a place I need to go.”

“Where?”

“The Slaughterhouse. Best club in town.”

He was dumbfounded. Didn’t she realise just how deep the shit was they were wallowing in? “Honey, we need to leave! Hot Chocolate Bob… we have to leave the city, get out, maybe up into the mountains — ”

“There’s a friend I have to say goodbye to. And it’s near the city walls.”

Tom looked around at the cabinet as it started to hiss. It was venting an opaque gas from a port in its head. He realised how this had been the first place he’d thought of bringing Honey for safety… and he wondered how much of that decision had been a subconscious wish to say a silent, final farewell to the Baker’s memory. Was Honey’s request so different?

“We have to be quick!” he said.

Honey kissed him once more, and then stepped back so that he could open the door.

The thing in the cabinet had shocked and disgusted him. Some of the Baker’s equipment must have corrupted and gone bad, kick-starting the creation of some meaningless experiment as soon as he’d entered the rooms. The instant he and Honey found themselves out in the open Tom uttered the locking phrase, praying that he, nor anyone else, would ever have to go in there again.

And he bid the long-dead Baker a fond, final goodbye.

They hurried away from the business estate. Tom thought of the simulacrum of him trapped down there forever, without benefit of memory or knowledge to keep it sane. He remembered the Baker saying that some things in those rooms were best forgotten. Now more than ever that was true. So he put a block on the image and memory, and he and Honey moved on.

The streets sang with the sounds of night. Sirens echoed between the tower-blocks like carrion cries in desert canyons. The flood of chopped humans turned the city into an extravagant nightmare, a place of evolution bastardised by enforced mutation. A thousand possible futures walked the pavements, waving their wings, whistling through gilled throats, scurrying spider-like or walking tall.

“He’ll look for us,” Honey said. “Hot Chocolate Bob won’t give in. He’d have spread the word.” She ducked into a boarded-up shop doorway as a feisty gang of teenagers ran by, trailing a sense of threat behind them.

“Going to a club is crazy!” Tom said. “Who is it you need to see?”

Honey turned to him and held his face. “You sound jealous,” she said, smiling.

“I would be if others like us could love,” he said.

“What?”

And then Tom realised for the first time that, as much as Honey’s feelings for him were a surprise to her, the reason behind them would be more so. He should tell her. But he was afraid.

How to tell her that her love was caused by a virus?

“Nothing,” he said. “And I’m not jealous. I’ve never felt like this before and I know it can’t be false. You and I… we’ll endure. If we’re given the chance. And that’s what frightens me, the idea that we won’t even be able to try. If you’ve been to this club before, it’s one of the places your pimp — ”

“He isn’t my pimp anymore,” Honey said, quietly but firmly.

Tom shook his head. “Yes, but you know what I mean.”

“The man I’m going to see… he’s my only client that Hot Chocolate Bob never knew about.”

Tom was confused. A lover? A sex partner for a hooker? Or was the Baker wrong? Had love existed for artificials all along, and only he, Tom, had never experienced it? The thought was chilling and belittling. He felt the world moving out from him, and Honey seemed to recede, forever beyond his reach, their separation confirmed by an awful, unbelievable truth.

“And you have to say goodbye?”

Honey nodded slowly. “He’s a human. His name’s Doug Skin. There were lots, hundreds, but he was kind, Tom. Not the first time, then he was just like them all — he fucked me, beat me, came in me and left. But the second time he’d changed, he was different. We never had sex again. Ever. And he said it was because he’d fallen in love with me.”

“Do you love him?” Tom asked. Such complexities in four short words. The answer would make or break his existence.

“No,” Honey said.

Did you, once?”

She frowned. “No. I respected him, and I was grateful to him, and I treasured him. I still do. But no, I never loved him, even though he wanted it so much. It was never like that.”

“Can we trust him?”

Honey merely nodded once, and Tom thought it was because she was angry at the question.

More people passed them by, a couple of grotesque manacled women stopping to hiss and laugh and piss at their feet. One man — chopped so that he was over eight feet tall — strode over and whipped the women around the necks and faces with his extended phallus, as long as he was tall and festooned with knotty lumps.

“Hope they’re not going to this club of yours,” Tom said as the three freaks sauntered away, laughing and crying together.

Honey raised her eyebrows. “Well, they’re going the right way.”

Tom sighed and followed, grabbing Honey’s hand and enjoying the contact. They were both dressed in black, and really they didn’t seem that out of place on the streets. But if Hot Chocolate Bob did have important contacts, and money to buy up-to-scratch surveillance equipment, then they would be found. No question. Chances were, if he worked in association with regional drug barons or the illicit chop surgeons, he would be tracking them now with a hijacked police satellite. Recognition software would have picked them up within minutes of leaving the Baker’s unit.

Tom looked behind them, up, across the street, feeling eyes burning into him from every angle. He’d never felt so exposed, even though they were lost in a crowd. And each time he turned to Honey she was looking at him, smiling, eating him up with her resurrected eyes and holding his hand tighter every time.

“What?” he asked, half-smiling.

“I don’t know. I’m just enjoying what’s going on, loving that fact that I love. Maybe I caught life from one of the humans who had me.”

Tom thought about that, about all the living stuff she’d had pumped into, onto and over her. In reality it wasn’t life she’d caught, but something even less quantifiable and understood.

Yet again, he wondered whether he’d ever tell her the truth.

And that’s when they were seen. Freedom, so fleeting and precious, was lost to them in the space between breaths.


Tom felt the instant change in atmosphere. One second they were part of a crowd, two black-clad night walkers with plenty of secrets to hide, and that was their camouflage. Next second, all attention was on them.

When he turned around and scanned the street behind them, he saw why.

“We’ve been found!”

Three people emerged from the steaming mouth of a subway station and ran straight at them. They were chopped. They had elongated legs to help them move faster, at least two extra arms for multiple weapon implementation, and their bodies were mostly hidden by a sleek, shiny protective coating. They looked like man-sized beetles.

“Mercenaries,” Honey said. “One chance. Run with me!”

The crowds parted as Tom and Honey sprinted along the pavement. For a second Tom wanted to mingle with them, pressing away from the streetlights and melting into the dark. But he knew that would be pointless. The mercenaries had them now, they were locked on as surely as if they were all chained together, and the only chance of escape was to outrun or outmanoeuvre them.

And that was hopeless.

The street had quietened suddenly, all conversation and laughter and singing smothered by terror. The only sounds now were their own pounding footsteps and the regular, incredibly fast slap-slap-slap-slap of the mercenaries’ hydraulically driven feet meeting concrete. The hunters closed in quickly, echoes bringing them even nearer. Tom knew that they would be caught within seconds.

He glanced at the people pressed against walls or huddled in alleys, but no one would meet his eye.

“Where?” he gasped, and Honey reached behind her and grabbed his hand, squeezing. Hours ago she had been shut down and deflated, and now here she was running for her life from three mercenaries, people so drastically chopped that they were more mutant than human, more machine than mutant. Her new charge must be draining quickly.

It wouldn’t matter. Within a few seconds they would have either escaped — and Tom had a hunch now as to where Honey was leading them — or they’d be dead.

At least their deaths would be quick. The mercenaries were trained killers, and from what Tom knew of them they had no time for torture or melodramatic acts of vicarious vengeance. If they were hired to kill they killed, in the most effective and economic manner available.

They’d probably crush his skull under their feet to save on ammunition.

As if conjured by his panicked thoughts, a machine gun opened up behind them. He’d never been near to gunfire, and the sudden cacophony shocked him, the white-hot kiss of bullet trails across his skin sending him into a state approaching panic. Bullets thumped into the ground ahead of them, spinning shattered concrete slabs along the street. More impacted the facades of shops and buildings, and Tom was sure he saw indistinct shadows flailing and spinning, heard the surprised cries of innocent victims. The gun paused for a moment, and as Tom wondered why something smashed into his ankle, taking his feet from under him and sending him across the concrete on his face.

“Grenade!” Honey hissed. She grabbed Tom, dragging him clumsily across the pavement and into the doorway of an old hotel.

It stank of piss and stale booze, and the pain from Tom’s foot brought everything out clearly, even in the weak streetlight: the crumpled newspapers damp beneath him; Honey trying to hug the two of them into one; the smell, the stench, a miasma of everything that could show fear.

There was a surreal moment of utter quiet in the street before the grenade exploded.

They were protected from most of the blast by the reveal of the inset door. The ground shook, windows shattered and rained glass across the street, bricks burst into stinging powder, people screamed, the air was sucked from Tom’s lungs by the blast, his outstretched legs were shoved into the brick wall, bringing more white-hot agony. He heard Honey moaning beside him, and he reached for her and cried out joyously as she squeezed his hand twice, a message that could only mean I’m fine. He squeezed back as he stared to get to his feet.

“We may have a second or two,” he said. His voice sounded distant, eardrums ringing. The echoes of the blast still reverberated along the street, and now he could hear more cries, moans and screams of pain or shock.

And fading in as the explosion passed away, the slap-slap-slap of the mercenaries’ continuing pursuit.

“Come on!” he hissed. “Wherever you were going, go!”

Honey stood, rubbed dust from her eyes and lead them back out onto the pavement.

The feeling of stepping into full view of the mercenaries was terrible. But it was their only chance. If they remained in the doorway the chopped warriors would be on them in seconds, and then it would simply be a matter of a bullet to the back of the head or a quick spray from a flame unit. At least in the open there was a chance. The dust and smoke from the blast gave a false sense of concealment, but Tom knew that the fighters’ senses were paring in on them even now, radar and sonar, heat detectors and biometric scanners picking them out of the chaos.

Tom’s ankle gave way and he fell to one knee, but Honey pulled him up and he staggered on. The pain was incredible — he’d never felt anything like it before — and he tried unsuccessfully to block it out.

Each second that passed, he expected the slew of bullets that would cut him in half.

“Here!” Honey said, darting left into a small alley. There was more gunfire behind them, a sustained burst accompanied by fresh screams. Ricochets echoed between the tall buildings, startling flocks of fat pigeons aloft. Bullets annihilated the walls either side of the entrance, exploding bricks, disintegrating corners, sending shrapnel cutting along the alley. Tom’s jacket and shirt were ripped, his skin scoured by hot shards of stone.

“Run!” Honey shouted. “Ten meters!”

Tom heard the footfalls of the mercenaries slow, and a grind of metal on concrete as one of them stopped and pivoted at the alley entrance.

Next would come the grenade, or a hail of explosive-tipped bullets, or perhaps a shower in fire.

The alley ended with a blank wall holding a pocked, solid-looking door. Tom began to fear that Honey really had no idea where she was going — her headlong flight driven by panic, pure and simple — but then she stopped and punched a lever on the wall.

She turned to look at him, her eyes wide, breathing harsh and heavy. It sounded like something in her throat was broken; every time she breathed, it clicked. And as Tom noticed the scorched bullet trail reaching from just beneath her left ear to her mouth, so she glanced over his shoulder and her eyes widened.

A doorway opened in the wall next to them. It was camouflaged by moss, the green-grey growth on the scarred metal merging it in with the old brickwork.

Several black metal eggs bounced against their feet.

Honey fell sideways, pulling Tom with her, and they landed on the piss-stinking floor of an elevator.

The doors started to slide shut. Tom watched the grenades spinning in lazy circles as they came to rest on the alley floor… with one of them rolling slowly towards the closing doors. It rolled, the doors hissed together, Tom could not breathe… and he heard the tiny tap as the grenade struck the doors a second after they had finally closed.

Honey kicked up at the control panel and sent them humming downwards. She looked at Tom, seeing right into him and telling him so much, and he knew that this moment was life or death. In two seconds they would be alive to run some more, or dead, smashed bodies in a blasted lift, left to rot down here, food for rats, wild cats and perhaps a desperate, dying buzzed.

The grenades exploded.

The shockwave buckled the lift walls and punched Tom like a train. He cried out but could not hear, because his ears were already bleeding. Blood oozed from his nose, his eyes, his mouth. The lift must have been below ground level — otherwise the blast would have crushed it like a cardboard box — but the remains of the wall above showered down onto the roof, shoving it down faster than the lift could take. Something whined and screeched and then snapped. The lift jerked sideways, tilted ten degrees, grumbled for a few seconds and then stuck fast.

“No!” Honey shouted. She stood and leaned on the control panel, punching buttons, looking at the doors as if willing them to open. “Tom, we have to open these. Those bastards won’t stop until they can see our corpses.”

“Where are we?” Tom knelt by the doors and shoved his fingers in the warped crack, pulling both ways. He was ridiculously aware of Honey’s leg pressed against his upper arm as she did the same higher up, its muscles tensing and spasming as she heaved.

He spat dusty blood and felt it dribbling from his ears.

“A hooker’s got to know the city,” she said and grunted as she pulled, gasped, and Tom closed his eyes to see her naked and writhing on his face the day before.

I’m more human than I think, he thought.

There was a continuous rattle and thud as detritus from the ruined alley rained down the lift shaft. And then came three louder impacts, regularly spaced, and time froze again.

The doors screeched open. Tom and Honey rolled out and crawled sideways so that they were away from the lift doors. Tom had a second to look around — they were in a long, dimly lit tunnel, service pipes ribbing the ceiling, condensation dripping onto the rusted metal walkway, fists of fungi pressing out between old bricks in the walls — and then the three grenades exploded. The lift disintegrated and splashed its metallic guts out into the corridor, wounding Tom’s senses even more and stroking his outstretched legs with a brief tongue of fire.

He gasped in relief as the fire retreated… and then screamed as fresh flame leapt from the ragged hole in the wall, white-hot and stinking of intent. It flowered like a cloud of snowflakes gusting through an open door, twisting and wavering almost as if it were conscious. Service pipes burst apart, spraying water and gases which were heated and mixed by the chemical fires, turning breathable air into a deadly mist of poisonous steam.

Tom stood clumsily, favouring his good leg, and grabbed Honey under the arm.

“Where to?” he shouted, coughing and retching as the bad air clawed his throat.

Honey nodded along the tunnel and started running, Tom following on behind. His ankle had swollen and pushed the head of his boot out; his back was cool with shed blood; other bumps and cuts added their own song to his symphony of pain. And in front of him still, leading the way, Honey’s clothing was soaked from her left shoulder down by the blood leaking from her gashed neck. The bullet had scored a line there without actually entering… but Tom was still terribly afraid at the damage it may have done.

The last thing they could do was stop.

From behind them came the sound of flames gushing through the lift wreckage, and a blast as another grenade was dropped. It wouldn’t take the mercenaries long to realise that there were no dead artificials at the bottom of the shaft.

“Where are we going?” Tom shouted.

“It’s a maintenance tunnel to the underground,” Honey called back. Her hand went up to her gashed neck and pressed as she spoke. “The other way leads back into the station those things came from. This way goes to the river, branches out, connects into other underground networks. You can get from one side of the city to the other, if you put your mind to it.”

“We may be able to buy passage downriver.”

The Slaughterhouse is this way,” Honey continued, acting as if she hadn’t even heard Tom’s idea.

The noises behind them had stopped, and they paused in their flight. Tom found the silence more distressing than the sounds of destruction. It meant that the mercenaries were thinking. “I think we should get out of this tunnel.”

“I agree,” Honey said, “but I’m still not quite sure where we are.”

“You’re bleeding,” Tom said. He moved to her and tilted her head slightly so that he could look at her neck.

“So are you.”

He kissed her above the wound, tasting sweat and blood. He couldn’t believe that she still wanted to visit the club, but for now their priority was to escape. Where they went afterwards… that was something to think about later.

“I think that way,” Tom said, indicating a door in the wall a few steps away. “If we do our best to get lost down here, we’ll lose them as well.”

“Well, that’s original crisis thinking at least.” Honey grinned at him, a bloodied plastic doll.

They opened the door and entered the corridor beyond. It was much narrower than the one they left, badly lit as well, and here and there on the floor were piles of ragged clothing which may once have contained people. Tom was glad for the bad light; it meant he couldn’t see bone or desiccated flesh. Rats scurried around their feet, flies buzzed them, and fattened things crawled on the slimy walls.

“They say the buzzed sometimes come down here to die,” Honey said. “Getting out of the sunlight sooths the pain. Or something.”

Knowing whom the remains belonged to didn’t help Tom one bit. The further they walked along the dank, damp tunnel, the more corpses they came across. At one point they had to step on brittle bones and shift piles of clothing aside with their feet to get by. Rusted chains jangled as they finally parted, spilling cheap imitation jewellery to the floor.

“Do you think we lost them?” Tom asked.

Honey stopped, turned and cocked her head slightly to one side. “Stop breathing,” she said. They exhaled, and Tom could hear only the blood pulsing through his ears, whispering secret words to him, messages from his body saying, run, this is all wrong, you’re not built for this, this love, this fear and danger. But looking at Honey he chose instantly to ignore them, because she was worth everything.

“I love you,” he said.

“I think they’re burning their way along the tunnels,” she said. Then she glanced at him and smiled. “Love you to. What a strange thing to say.”

“I mean it!”

“Not you, me. I never thought I’d ever say it to anyone. Never in my vocabulary.”

“Well — ”

“We’re not built for it.” Honey gave him a quick kiss, wincing as the movement stretched the wound on her neck. “But I guess we’ll adapt.”

They moved on and took the next exit from the tunnel. It was a hole smashed through a thick brick wall into the neighbouring main sewer, its edges rough and festooned with an alarming swathe of spider web. Tom heard the web tearing as his arm brushed by, and he wondered whether it would serve as another fresh sign of flight for the mercenaries.

“We need to change tunnels again soon,” he said. “As soon as we can, three or four times. They must have biometric scanners, they’ll pick up our sweat from the air, our breath, our shed skin. We won’t lose them by running fast. But hopefully we can confuse them enough to give them the slip.”

There was a coughing explosion from somewhere far behind them and the tunnel lit briefly, softly

They jumped down into the sewer. It was disgusting. It stank, it was thick like congealed soup. Tom could even taste the filth in the air.

Another explosion rumbled through the sewers, knocking a drift of dust down from the curved brick ceiling. It was difficult to tell which direction the blast had come from.

“There!” Tom said, spotting a rotten wooden door leading off from a stone ledge.

Honey scrambled up and tried the door but it seemed to be locked from the other side. Tom joined her and together they smashed at it, groaning as the impacts reminded them of their various wounds. The wood gave after several attempts, and they spilled into another tunnel, this one lit intermittently from above through frosted glass paving blocks.

As they hurried along, Tom tried to think of where they could be. There was a pavement like this down by the river, spread along the main promenade road in front of the classier hotels. There was also a roller skating area back in the centre of the city, a gathering place for junkies and buzzed when the lights went down. But there were probably a dozen more streets and roads and courtyards with glass paving… and Tom finally admitted to himself that he was lost.

Honey was leading them now.

For some inexplicable reason, this change of emphasis disturbed him. Perhaps it was a machismo thing, the idea that he had saved her and should continue to do so. But that was just so human…

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked. “I think we should try to go up top now, get out of the city-“

“We’re going in circles,” Honey said. “We’ll lose them soon, then head for The Slaughterhouse. They’ll have trouble finding us in there.”

“How do you know?”

She glanced back and smiled at him, lit by dirty light filtered down from the city. “You’ve obviously never been there.”

The tunnel dipped and they descended several flights of stairs, listening out all the time for the echoes of pursuit. After a couple of minutes they emerged onto an old, deserted tube platform. It was barely lit by sun pipes sprouting from the arched ceiling like the ends of severed arteries, the light weakened by every reflective elbow it had to travel. During the day it may have been light enough to read, but now, at night, the only illumination that found its way down was the borrowed glare of civilisation: street lamps; neon signs; the city’s night-time glow reflected from the underside of low, pollutant-heavy clouds. It was a grubby light, well suited to what it revealed.

The platform and station must have been deserted for years. Tom had heard about these places, way stations on the old underground network, deserted rather than adapted when the trains were changed to monorail. And like any forgotten place it attracted the more feeble side of humanity, those wanting to find themselves lost. The junkies, the wretched homeless, the criminals… there was talk of whole gangs living down here, communing via old tunnels, rising to the surface to attack and rob and do whatever it was they imagined their purpose called for.

“Into the tunnel,” Honey said.

“There’s no light. Who knows what’s in there!”

Honey hugged him and Tom could smell her, sense his brain’s ecstatic reaction to her unique aroma in the rush of blood in his veins. They stood like lovers waiting for a train that would never arrive.

“You’re so brave,” she said. “Who’d have thought you’d have rescued me like that? Who’d can believe I was worth rescuing, by anyone?”

“Nobody’s ever loved you before, obviously.” Honey shrugged slightly, but said nothing.

Tom thought of Doug Skin, her human customer who had supposedly fallen for her, and for a moment he was overcome by something bitter, new and shocking: jealousy. He hated the idea that they were going through this to say goodbye to someone else. They could have left the city and that would have been that.

“Why is your pimp trying to kill you for running? Girls must run all the time.”

“On occasion they do. And Hot Chocolate Bob hunts them down, or more likely has someone do it for him, and they die. Then he buys more plastic bitches on the black market as instant replacements. Gives him a good turnover of girls, fresh meat. Keeps the customers happy.”

“Jesus,” Tom muttered, hugging her tighter as if that would protect her more. “Why can’t he just let you go.”

“Face,” she said. Or perhaps she said fate.

A thump passed through the station. It may have been a sound coming in from the distance, wending its way through tunnels and vents like a gust of air. Or perhaps they only felt it through the ground. A rat maybe, hidden by shadows, jumping from a wall onto the platform… or a violent grenade explosion five tunnels and a mile away.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said. “Into the tunnel like you said. If we hold hands we can never get lost.”

“Romance,” Honey said, arching her eyebrows. Yet again, she confused Tom even more. As they jumped down between the rails and out of the weak light, he wondered whether that was love all over.


They walked for two hours. Through the train tunnel, across another platform, into a long, rising corridor, through a set of iron doors that had been blasted open at some point in the distant past. The atmosphere was dank, damp, dangerous, and they held hands as often as they could. Most of the places they passed through had some form of illumination — weak emergency lighting, or more often borrowed light bleeding down somehow from the surface. Some were pitch black. These they traversed as quickly as they could, relying on senses heightened by fear. And deep inside, Tom tried to trust fate as well. He desperately believed that they would have never come this far if an unseen, pointless death down here was all that awaited them.

They heard and felt intermittent signs of pursuit, from a rattling explosion, to a subtly decreased pressure on their eardrums as a heavy door was opened in some distant tunnel.

Eventually, finally, Tom climbed a rusted iron ladder, shoved a manhole open with his shoulders and helped Honey up into the open air.

He stood panting in the deserted street, his right foot and ankle a heavy weight of pain, the cool night air kissing his bleeding wounds as if to soothe. Honey stood next to him and looked around, nodding and sighing quietly. She knew where they were. A hooker has to know the city, she’d said as they took the lift into the underworld. Tom wondered if she’d been a whore forever, but they’d have plenty of time to get to know each other properly. Plenty. The idea that they knew virtually nothing about each other, and yet they were fleeing together for their lives, seemed far too romantic to take seriously.

Looking around, diverting his attention outwards, seemed to ease the pain. They were at the very edge of the city. Tom could even see the enclosure wall, eighty feet high and well lit, it’s top spotted with bored guards.

Honey pointed across the street at a low, curved doorway set in the face of a blank concrete facade. The building was huge and square, more dismissive of aesthetics as any in the city. There were hardly any windows, and those that were there appeared to have been boarded up. Its bulk seemed to swallow the light. Even though a misty rain was falling, there were no reflections from its damp walls.

Above the doorway hung a glowing axe, dripping neon blood onto the heads of anyone who chose to enter.

“That,” said Honey, “is The Slaughterhouse.”


Tom had only been inside a few clubs in his time. Mostly they were visits marred by too much noise, too many drugs, too much drink, too much body chopping… just too much. Artificial he may be — cloned, grown, extruded, constructed and programmed — but Tom was not a man of extremes. The Baker had told him that those who resorted to extremities of existence had lost sight of the beauty at its heart. At the time Tom had found it difficult to understand, but after the old scientist died and the years went by he began to see the truth in the words. Most of those who wandered the streets at night, seeking enjoyment or satisfaction in the arms of mindless experimentation, had lost the simple ability to live. They needed more, and more, and more, without giving themselves the chance to get used to what they already had.

Tom’s club visits had been out of interest in other people, not to find anything for himself.

He’d been to The Club at the End of Time, Fuck-Shit and Hell, among a few other. In one he was mugged, in another he was hit on, in the rest he was ignored. He’d hated every one of them.

The Slaughterhouse… it was as much a club as Krakatoa had been a slight pop. The Slaughterhouse was a world. The second Honey opened the main front door and they passed beneath the axe, that world launched its attack on Tom’s senses.

They were in a corridor not unlike some of the tunnels they’d just been fleeing along. There were a few barred windows in the walls, payment booths, but more like viewing holes in prison doors. There was nobody behind them and Honey did not give them a second glance. The floor was uneven, and in the low light Tom could see what he thought were shattered bones forming its covering, the curve of a skull here, the ragged end of a snapped femur there. His balance was thrown and he held out his arms, staggering at every step. He tried not to look down. He was sure… certain… that the bones must be false. Must be.

Waves of smoke frolicked in the air, disturbed by mysterious draughts. A skein of rich fumes settled around Tom’s head. He breathed in, unable to resist the spicy hint of forbidden pleasures, feeling the sense of them settling into his nostrils and setting his blood aflame.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“What, the smell? It’s a mix of everything the club stands for. They extract it, concentrate and vent it over newcomers. Gets them ready. Gets them hot. You’re smelling drugs, fear, sweat, rage, sex and burning bone.”

Burning bone. Tom looked down at the floor and an eye socket stared back.

There was a sudden explosion ahead of them, pounding through the air, hitting his already bloodied ears and stealing his balance. He sagged against the wall. It was slimy to the touch, and the slime smelled of sex. Unconsciously, still reeling from the blast, Tom touched his fingers to his tongue and closed his eyes. He could have been eating pussy. He snapped his eyes open again, wondering what was happening to him, why he was drifting away when those things were here, they’d found them, they would blast The Slaughterhouse until Honey and he were dead.

Buzz ‘n’ Chaos!” Honey shouted. She turned to Tom, a crazy grin on her face. “You’ve never heard or seen live music until you’ve seen these guys.”

It sounded more like inclement weather than good music to Tom, but he followed Honey through a pair of heavy doors and into the club itself.

Outside, in the corridor, they could have been almost anywhere.

But anywhere was never like this.

The place was a riot of humanity, a deep sea of people, a swarm of experimenters indulging their most devilish whims, the air redolent of highs and sex and a vibrant freedom. The music of Buzz ‘n Chaos stalked the air like a rogue dragon, setting glasses shaking on tabletops and teeth rattling in skulls. There was shouting, screaming, sighing and crying, arguing, talking, wailing and laughing. And there was movement everywhere. The designers of The Slaughterhouse had never allowed economics or gravity to hobble their decadent dream.

The room was the size of the building containing it, but it looked impossibly larger. There were no windows. There were no internal storeys, only platforms, staircases, open lifts, glass slides, chains suspending swinging floors. On every visible surface people sat or danced or stood talking, sipping drinks and smoking and wiping exotic drug patches across their tongues or eyes, eating, climbing sleeping and fucking. Lots of fucking.

It reminded Tom of a giant ant nest, but here all the ants were seeking only one thing — enjoyment. And enjoyment, Tom realised within seconds of entering, came in all shapes and sizes.

“Holy shit!” he shouted above the cacophony. “Honey, what the hell are we doing here? These people are wasters, freaks, chopped because they can’t — ”

But Honey did not let him finish. “This is my thing, Tom, where I like to be when I’m not being fucked and beaten and spat on. I know I’m artificial so I can’t be chopped, but these freaks as you call them make me feel… normal. I’m a whore but that’s no worse than most of these. And much better than some. Love me, love what I do.”

He didn’t know what to say. A woman walked past with grotesque gashes across her body, a dozen inches long, their edges pouting around thick strips of cardboard to prevent the wounds from healing. She grimaced, and it may have been a smile. “Oh God, Honey.” Even he was surprised at how much desperation and disgust came out in his voice.

“You told me you loved me,” Honey said, moving in close so that she could talk into his ear, “and yet you don’t know a thing about me. You don’t know what I like to eat or do, whether I have religion, what books I read.”

“You like to dance,” Tom said. “You like to be held. You like puppets.”

“Puppets,” she said. She barked a hard laugh, stood back with her hands on hips and Tom realised that she was exasperated. She looked up as if searching for someone in this multi-level altar to pleasure.

“It’s what you told me,” Tom said, trailing off. The band seemed to be between songs, but the volume in the place had not relented.

“We’re all puppets, Tom,” she said. “Especially us, the likes of you and me. Artificials. I don’t like puppets, I like those who cut their strings and rebel. Watching that Chinaman’s show outside the brothel… it makes me really look at myself. It makes me think about who pulls my stings, and how beholden I am to them. These people here — the chopped people and the lost artificials — they shed their strings long ago.”

“We need to get out of the city,” Tom said, uncomfortable and confused with where this was leading. They had to escape now, together, and then time would be theirs’. “We can get to know each other when we’re away.”

Honey looked at him, her lips pressed tight and a frown hardening her face. She was about to say something. But the band started up again, and a veil of blue smoke wafted down from above, setting Tom’s nostrils alight, his blood pulsing through his veins at twice its normal rate. Honey smiled and held out her hands, pulling him close and hugging him tightly. But there was something else there, a hesitance he hadn’t felt before. Almost as if her thoughts hung between them, a weight requiring crushing before they could touch.

“Honey…”

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s find Skin, then we can move on. Get out of there. Finish all this.”

“Leave the city, you mean.”

“Leave the city,” she said. At least he thought those were her words. But she’d already started turning away, and her eyes had left his.

As they started walking, Tom felt much lighter than before. His perception had widened, his senses apparently refreshed and enlivened by whatever chemicals he’d breathed in with the smoke. He could make out the bands’ individual instruments, the harmonies bouncing off each other, the rasp of the guitarist’s rough skin against the strings, the clicks and sighs of the vocalist’s breathing method between lyrics… even the volume seemed manageable now, rather than painful. He wondered what the drug had been and decided, against all logic, that he liked it.

Honey led him up onto an uneven platform welded together from what looked like panels of a ship’s hull. There were even traces of a name along one side of the suspended floor, and star-shaped rust patches as big as fists which may have been where creatures had once clung. There was a group of people at one end of the platform, some of them dancing, others — mostly men — paying more attention to the woman hanging from chains above them. Meat hooks curved through the flesh of her shoulder blades, buttocks and calves, and the chains that rose into the gloomy heights were rusted, the colour of dried blood.

She was grinning as she swung back and forth, her rhythm matching the fast beat of the music in some terribly soporific way. She was naked. Blood ran copiously onto the heads and shoulders of those below. One of the men reached up and squeezed her pendulous breasts, twisting her nipples and pulling hard, changing her direction of swing. Another shoved him aside and flipped into a handstand, his engorged prick flopping as he walked clumsily towards the woman on his hands, offering himself up to be sucked. His gang screamed and shouted and jeered. The woman nudged out with one hand, hitting him on the knee and sending him tumbling.

Her blood drew graceful arcs on the dark grey platform. Her swinging, twisting and rotating was all in time with the music, like some grisly metronome. She caught Tom’s eye and smiled. He looked away, disgusted and embarrassed, as one of the men started to jump and bash his face between her thighs.

Honey passed by the group without a second glance, and Tom was pleased when they started climbing a ladder to the next platform.

“Chopped folks up here,” Honey shouted down before she disappeared onto the floor above. Tom climbed faster, wondering what to expect. He’d seen people walking to and from these clubs, noticed the freakish adjustments many of the humans made to their bodies. He didn’t think he could still be completely shocked. He thought he’d seen it all.

The couple had given themselves over, completely and utterly, to sex.

The man’s prick had been hugely extended, thickened and distorted so that he could screw the woman at a distance, at any angle, and still dip his head to lick her arse or the other openings weeping and swelling across her body.

There were several other men scattered across the smaller platform, all naked and obviously recently sated. A couple of them glanced nervously at the rutting couple, and Tom guessed that they’d been at the woman until this grotesquely chopped man had appeared, someone with the same commitment to sex as this she had. Normal men she could entertain by the half-dozen, but none of them wanted to pit their sexual prowess against this freak.

Tom and Honey walked by as the man withdrew and entered another hole, this one in the woman’s side. She groaned and writhed, her extra sets of arms and hands doing their best to keep her other holes occupied, fingers obviously augmented such was their speed of manipulation.

“You like these places?” Tom asked, amazed. Honey ignored him, but one of the naked men glanced up and smiled sheepishly.

The band cranked into another number. Its opening chords swelled out to the edges of the club, echoing back several seconds later, the echoes themselves forming an integral part of the music. This one must have been a favourite, because a roar went up that hurt Tom’s ears and set the platform they were on swaying. The inhuman couple never stopped fucking.

“Skin’s up there!” Honey shouted, putting one arm around Tom’s shoulders and pointing up into the club’s shadowy heights. There were at least a dozen levels to climb, and the far walls were obscured by a haze of smoke. Chains draped down, ladders snaked up, bridges strung across spaces, people swung on ropes… and Tom knew that they would be here for a long time. There was no quick way up that high, other than a long, exhausting climb. He really didn’t believe that he could shin up a chain the way he felt now; his ankle was numb with pain, and he was beginning to think he’d lost more blood than was safe. The wounds had been sealed by his body’s defence — he could feel the new skin setting already — but the bones in his ankle may have been crushed. Their knitting would take days, and rest was the best thing for it.

Honey was still bleeding from her neck. Tom wondered whether she’d allowed it to continue because of her visit to The Slaughterhouse, a weird pain perversion she revelled in herself when she came here. She winced whenever she turned her head.

They climbed. The band assaulted the club with its music, strafing the platforms with power-chords that would have knocked a flock of birds from the sky. Sheets of smoke rose and fell, drug-laden exhalations that set Tom’s blood bubbling, steamed bubbles of viscous fluid from his pores, hauled up random memories to dart at him like forgotten ghosts. Some memories were good and these he smiled at, but some weren’t so good. The drug, whatever it was, did not allow him to pick and choose. Between a warm memory of the Baker philosophising, and the cold empty loneliness after he’d died, Tom had time to wonder at the sort of people who willingly submitted themselves to this. He thought he saw the platform where this drug haze originated. The people there were crying, laughing, smiling, weeping, shouting and raging at the visions the drugs were uncovering. Perhaps sometimes they found unwanted truths. Tom was afraid.

They passed many chopped people, some of them changed even more drastically than the rutting couple they’d just seen. One woman resembled an octopus, a head and body with at least eight legs splayed star-like around her. Five men and women licked or fucked or suckled between her thighs.

Sex was the thing. To be chopped was to increase sexual performance and expand proclivities.

They took the easier routes up into the club, travelling between several platforms on a moving, rising walkway. Each level presented new surprises, greater mutilations, none of which seemed to surprise or bother Honey. Climbing eventually onto the highest platform, Tom could see the band. Four men and a woman singing, their instruments and an amplification system looking as if it came from thirty years before. They were surrounded by a jumping, stamping, waving throng, some of them gyrating so close to the edge that Tom was amazed they weren’t sent tumbling… and then one of them did fall.

She spread out her veined, leathered wings, glided through a haze of drug smoke and landed clumsily on a platform near to the club’s floor.

“She flew,” Tom said mildly. She had flown! He’d never know, never believed that such a chop was possible. And officially, he was certain, it wasn’t. It was the sort of thing the Baker had only ever dreamed of.

Tom began to wonder exactly what this place was, and why Honey had brought him here.

“He’s there!” Honey shouted, grabbing Tom’s arm and pointing at the band. “That’s Doug, that’s Doug Skin!”

“The drummer?”

Honey was smiling, a wide open smile that contained sheer delight. “No, silly. The guy standing in front taking the band’s holo!”

Tom saw a tall, heavily built man right by the stage, not jumping with the rest of the crowd. He simply stood there and pointed a camera at the band as they pelted their way into another track.

Honey closed her eyes and Doug Skin turned to look at them.

She spoke to him with her mind, Tom thought. He’d heard it was possible… the Baker had mooted it once or twice… but not in an artificial, surely? And not a plastic bitch built specifically and exclusively for sex?

He felt the centre of attention. The song was about him, the drugged-up clubbers were laughing at him, giggling as they fucked, writing tattoo poetry about his stupidity on each other’s backs. Their eyes bore in, his skin was transparent, and he wished the Baker were here.

Doug Skin smiled at Honey and pushed his way through the crowd. He embraced her and kissed her neck. Once more Tom felt the uncomfortable rush of jealousy, but then he saw that she held back slightly, tensing as the big man displayed his obvious affection.

“That him?” he asked, nodding at Tom.

Honey’s eyes shone, but Tom didn’t know why. It could have been the lasers reflecting from walls, or ceilings lights filtered through the smoky atmosphere. Probably… perhaps… it was the twinkle of her love for him.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s him.”

Skin eyed Tom up and down. “I expected him to be bigger.”

What the fuck is going on here? Tom thought, and maybe he spoke it aloud.

He had no hope of finding out. Because right then hell broke loose, and there were screams and explosions and gunfire, and the sounds of people dying again.

Two minutes later, Tom would see himself dead.


Upon entering The Slaughterhouse, Tom had an inkling of what Honey meant about the mercenaries never finding them in there. They would, of course, given enough time and opportunity, but it would not be an easy search. The place defied the senses.

What neither of them had banked on was Hot Chocolate Bob’s utter determination to find and kill them.

It was slaughter. As if in mockery of the club’s moniker the mercenaries came in shooting, dishing out death at random. They must have known that their entrance would be noticed immediately, so rather than try to find Tom and Honey amongst surprised and angry clubbers, they introduced chaos and terror instead. It was obviously an atmosphere they were used to working in.

They strafed the whole interior of the club with gunfire. People span and danced and fell, screaming and shouting, tumbling from their platforms and hitting those below, or falling all the way to the litter-strewn floor. The band played on for a few seconds, adding a surreal theme tune to the massacre. Grenades popped from the mercenaries’ armour like black eggs being laid, arching up and exploding in mid-air, shrapnel slashing visible swathes through the smoke. One explosion ripped out a ladder and set of chains, tipping a platform and spilling those cowering on it to the floor far below. They hit like rag dolls, limbs askew.

The band cut out as the power stuttered, flickering the lights and adding a stroboscopic effect to the twitching clubbers, the blood spraying the air, the corpses slipping down from platform to platform, bullets and shrapnel ricocheting through swathes of drug smoke, the three mercenaries advancing into the club like huge spiders, swinging their way from platform to platform, spreading out, leaving dead or dying people in their wake.

Skin had pulled Honey down as soon as the gunfire began, and Tom hunkered down next to them, staring over the rim of the huge platform. They were maybe a hundred feet from the floor, the mercenaries a few levels below them. At the rate the chopped warriors were advancing, they’d be on them in seconds.

One of the mercenaries suddenly slipped to one side, flame flowering from his midriff, arms flailing for a handhold. He tumbled from the platform but found a chain before he fell too far. The flames were already extinguished, but a rain of blood and insides was dripping from his dangling legs.

He brought up three guns and opened fire on a platform across from him. Tracer rounds directed his aim to a metal shield that had sprung up there, and Tom could make out a few people sheltering behind it, frantically fumbling with a some huge barrelled weapon.

The other two mercenaries paused to watch.

The fighter stopped firing for a second. The recoil had set him swinging, and the whine of chains was audible across the club. Reload springs lunged from his belt and fed magazines into the machineguns.

Two men stood from behind the barrier, aimed and fired.

The mercenary disintegrated, flames slewing outward as his ammunition ignited.

A second later the victorious attackers were torn to pieces by a five-second hail of fire from the two surviving intruders. Bullets, flame and grenades scattered their remains over what was left of their platform.

“We should have just left the city!” Tom shouted at Honey. “This is all for us!” But his anger was misplaced and useless now.

“Don’t talk!” Skin hissed. “They’ll be scanning for your voice patterns. Your one hope is to trust me and maybe I can get you both out of here. But we have to move, you have to follow me, now!” He turned and belly-crawled across the floor, shoving people aside with his big hands.

The gunfire and explosions stopped, but the mercenaries had initiated the panic they desired. Screaming and crying and moaning continued, almost as loud as the sounds of killing. Interspersed amongst them, the clanking impacts of metal-booted feet on ladders, chains and platforms, always coming nearer.

Maybe they’d already been spotted.

Honey was following Skin. Tom watched her go, and then followed her. He had no choice. To stay still was to die, to go after Skin was to submit himself to the man’s mercy. He was helpless, useless… and he realised that he’d been almost totally ineffectual since leaving the Baker’s old laboratory.

Honey had always been the one in charge. The strong one. Their only real hope.

People moved aside to let them pass. The band was cowering on the stage, trying to edge back but tangling themselves in power lines and the expansive drum kit. Skin crawled across the stage, Honey followed, and Tom was about to follow her when he heard a high-pitched shriek from somewhere else in the club.

It was not a human sound. It was a fighting sound, an angry shrill from vocal chords designed to communicate nothing but pain and terror.

He half-stood and hurried to the edge of the stage, from where he could see at least a third of the club’s space. From the corner of his eye he spotted a dark shadow swinging and scampering along one huge wall, aiming at a place half-way to the ground. Another shape swung from rope to chain to ladder, heading the same way. They screeched in unison now, and Tom tried to make out their target.

And stared into his own eyes.

He was standing down there on a platform, surrounded by chopped people whose bodies were already punctured and torn, leaking blood around his feet. He was standing down there and looking up. From this distance Tom could not quite make out the expression in his eyes… but he recognised his own quiet smile.

“Holy shit…” Honey said, appearing at his shoulder.

The two mercenaries landed on the platform either side of the second Tom. Without pause they stretched out their arms, locked their weapons onto him and opened fire.

Tom watched himself come apart. The bullets tore him to shreds, blood and bone splashing into the air, skull splitting and gushing brain out across the platform. The gunfire only lasted for two seconds, but the thing that slumped down at the mercenaries’ feet could never have been visually identified… had Tom not seen its face.

One of the mercenaries snatched a quick sample of blood. Then they used their flame units, and the sad remains bubbled black.

Tom crawled back from the edge of the stage, head down, feeling more cold and alone than he could have believed. Even when Honey came back to him, touched his face and slung one arm across his back, Tom felt abandoned. He’d just seen…

He didn’t know what he’d seen.

“I guess they’re just looking for you now,” he said to Honey. His voice sounded shallow and vague.

“What happened?” Honey said.

“I think I died.” Tom smiled at her. Already, the mysterious threads were coming together. “Let’s go. If we escape, we can talk about it then.”

“You could hide,” she said. “You could leave me, let them come after me and catch me if they can — ”

Tom did not even honour this with a response.

Skin led them to the rear of the stage and across a narrow metal walkway, connecting the stage platform with the blank outside wall. There was a flimsy handrail, the only thing between them and the floor a hundred feet below, but it had been distorted at several points by bullet or shrapnel impacts. None of them trusted it.

Tom felt naked and exposed, expected the intrusive kiss of a bullet at any moment. The way Honey moved ahead of him — shoulders hunched, arms pulled in, legs slightly bent — he thought she did too.

The Slaughterhouse had gone amazingly quiet since the mercenaries killed Tom’s doppelganger. Tom could still hear the clambering, clanking footsteps of the hunters as they searched for Honey, but the clubbers had all fallen silent, either dead or shocked dumb. Perhaps they feared that now the killers had found and killed their target, any slight sound would merely set them on the rampage again.

Tom, Honey and Skin reached the wall. Skin led them through a door, cleverly concealed in the shadows of a concrete overhang. It emerged onto the head of a staircase. Tom stood on the landing and looked down, down, until the flights disappeared in a grey haze. It seemed far deeper than the club.

“It’s the only way I can think of to get you out,” Skin said. “It goes straight down to the basements. The theatres. From there you can get out onto the streets or down into the sewers and tunnels… just about anywhere.”

“They’re only looking for me now,” Honey said. “Tom, who was that?”

“The Baker.”

“I thought he was dead?”

Tom nodded, waved his hands to clear his confusion. “He is, he is! But… remember at the lab, that cabinet? Me. My clone. The Baker not only gave me love, but ensured it was protected as well. He knew that if I ever had cause to return to the lab it would be because I was in trouble. How he could have known… how he could have imagined…

“You really meant the world to him, didn’t you?” Honey asked. It was a strange thing to say. Tom didn’t know how to respond.

“Don’t mind me,” Skin said, “but can we talk as we walk? It’s very quiet in there…”

They stood silently for a few seconds, listening for sounds of pursuit, listening for anything. Maybe the two mercenaries were motionless now… standing somewhere in the club… listening… listening for the sounds of escape…

“Quietly,” Skin whispered, slipping down the first flight of stairs. They’d descended eight flights before Tom spoke again.

“They think I’m dead.”

“They’ll probe the corpse,” Skin said from in front. “Genetic tests.”

“The did. The Baker would have thought of that. It’s a clone of me, it’s… me.”

“He really was a crazy old bastard, wasn’t he?” Skin laughed, before turning and starting down another flight.

“What? What makes you say that?”

Skin stopped and looked back up past Honey at Tom. He didn’t look any more welcoming than he had when they’d first arrived a few minutes before, but now there was a hint of humour in his eyes. Cruel humour.

“He’s a bit of a legend, in some parts,” Skin said. “Places like this. To people like us. And you, too. The artificial looking for love. Almost a fairy tale!”

“Skin!” Honey said quietly.

“Honey? What’s he on about?”

She looked at Tom and shook her head, looking so sad.

“Honey?”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Honey said, not looking at either man. “Tom, the basements may interest you. It’s where some of the chopping takes place.”

Skin started on down again, followed by Honey, Tom bringing up the rear. Tom thought of making love with Honey, hugging her, being with her… and it all felt one way. He looked at her bloodied back and blood-caked head as they hurried down the stairs, trying to see inside. He wasn’t sure he’d like what he saw. She hadn’t changed, she’d expanded. She’d been right. He didn’t know her at all, and any sense that he did was misplaced, a falsehood brought on by love and his need to love.

After a few more flights, when it looked as if they’d evaded the mercenaries, Tom asked: “You don’t love me, do you?”

Skin snorted, but Honey turned and looked at him with wide eyes.

“How could I not love the man who risked everything to get me away from that bastard?”

“But you don’t. Not really. Not truly.”

Honey averted her eyes, looking down at her feet. It was answer enough for Tom, but she had to go and spell it out, had to destroy whatever illusion he could rescue from what had happened here. “Tom… I can’t. I’m artificial. Artificials don’t love. You know that.”


I’m artificial!” he said. “I love. The Baker made sure of it, he gave me a virus, and I’ve given it to you and-”

“You really are priceless,” Skin said. He was standing on a landing looking back up the stairwell, a grin splitting his face. Tom couldn’t tell whether he’d been chopped or not. If he had, it was internal.

“Why did you come to him?” Tom asked, nodding at Skin.

“I told you, to say goodbye.”

“I don’t believe you.” Tom was flushed now, jealous, embarrassed at the rejection, angry at Honey’s use of him.

“It’s true!” Honey said again. “ To say goodbye and… ask for his release. Skin and I are connected. Psychically. He likes to watch me sometimes when I’m working, it’s his vice and he paid me well and that’s it, I swear!”

“Swear all you want. You used me to escape, you lead me on, you told me everything I wanted to know. Fuck off. Fuck off with your human lover and — ”

“Tom,” she said quietly, softly. His heart sank. The Baker’s virus had worked on him for sure, because he felt such an emptiness when he saw the lack of love in her, such a sense of abandonment. “Tom, I’m so sorry. I had to get away from Hot Chocolate Bob. You came along and offered me that, how could I not take it? But I feel like…. I could love. You. Maybe it’ll take longer to have an effect on me. Maybe it’s more than a virus. It’ll grow, not like something fake or artificial.”

“We could have been killed!”

“You already have,” she said. “Thanks to the Baker, everyone thinks you’re dead. So you’re free.”

Tom thought about this. And he thought about how the Baker’s virus had had years to affect him. “The Baker told me it would be perfect,” he said.

“Mad old fuck,” Skin said, shaking his head. Honey spun on him.

“He may have been mad, but at least he sought the right thing. He found it in Tom. Let me go, Doug.”

She turned back to Tom, and she was crying artificial tears from artificial eyes.

“So what do we do now?” Tom said. “Are you leaving?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going with you.”

“Tom, you’re free, Hot Chocolate Bob thinks you’re dead, you can-“

“I’m going with you. I still believe in the Baker. That is, if…”

Honey smiled and to Tom she was beautiful, even after everything. Even her tears.

“How about planting a seed first?” she said. “I need a charge and… well, it’s the least we can do.”

“What do you mean?”

Honey turned back to Skin, who stood leaning against the wall like a petulant child. Tom could see now how he’d been chopped: dazzling blue eyes; perfect designer stubble; a squared jaw which did not suit his face. Vanity personified.

“Doug, does this place still have the buzz units?”

“‘Course it does,” he said. “Did you see the state of some of those artificials out there? Buzzed to fuck and couldn’t care less.”

“We need them.”

“Honey, I can access the net anywhere, we don’t need-“

Honey smiled up at Tom even though she was still leaking tears. She could stop, he knew that, she could control their shedding. But as she’d said before, she so wanted to be human.

Love’s the answer,” she said, “whatever the question may be. I heard that once. A stupid idea, especially for the likes of me, but it made me jealous.” She stared up the stairwell, seeing nothing there and apparently liking that. “I’ve been a whore for as long as I can remember, Tom. The start of my memory is my creation. Imagine if love stopped the need for plastic bitches like me.”

“The world would be a nicer place.”

She nodded. “And that shithead pimp would be out of business.”

“What the hell are you two robots talking about?” Skin asked. Effectively dismissed by Honey, his anger was rising now, a red-faced attitude burning its way through his altered good-looks. Robots was as derogatory as he could have been.

“We need a buzz unit to bleed Tom’s virus onto the net. And Doug, I need you to let me go. You’ve had your fun. Your time’s up. Let me go.”

Skin looked at Honey, at Tom, back to Honey. There was so much potential in his eyes — for violence, hate and betrayal — but in the end he simply sighed, pulled a small egg-shaped thing from his ear and crunched it under the heel of his boot.

Honey winced slightly, then smiled. “Thank you, Doug.”

“Fucking robots,” Skin muttered as he walked back up the stairs.

Tom watched him go.

“Come on,” Honey said, grabbing his hand. She pushed open a door and they entered a long, dimly lit corridor. “I’ve seen them used a couple of times… I’m sure I can find them.”

Tom was lost. He felt abandoned and loved, led and in charge, alive and dead… artificial and human. He wished the Baker could explain, but he guessed that even the old man would have made little sense of all this. Honey was leading and he was following, and this wasn’t how he had imagined it at all.

“What if the mercenaries find their way down here?” Tom asked. “If they catch Skin they’ll make him talk in seconds.”

“Don’t know,” Honey said. “I suppose that’ll be it.” And that’s all she offered. She was, Tom realised, as out of control as he.

Honey’s mention of needing a charge had started to make him feel weak, as if his muscles and byways and synapses had responded to her words, his bones thinning, his lungs withering. He could hook straight to the net and give them both a clean charge, but Honey’s idea to spread whatever he had — virus, madness, disease — onto the net… well, it was what the Baker had always wanted. Spreading a fire of love. The old man could never have imagined that the smouldering stage would have taken fifteen years.

The corridor twisted and turned, opened up into wider areas, narrowed again, sloped up ramps and down steps dripping with condensation and slime. The basement was the guts of The Slaughterhouse, Tom thought, a maze of rooms which all had closed doors. He was glad for that. This was where the chopping took place, Honey had said. From the extremes he had seen in the club, Tom did not want to know.

“Can you find your way out again?” he asked. Honey paused and glanced back at him. She looked stunned.

“You mean you haven’t been remembering our route?”

“Oh Jesus…”

“Come on,” she said, “I think we’re almost there.”

They must have been way down now, staggering through the depths of the club’s basement. And this far down the club must have felt safe… because some of its doors were still open.

Most of the rooms were empty, full of dank air and dark potential.

Some had rudimentary furnishings, beds in the centre or equipment burnt into a congealed mass in the corners.

A few were occupied.

Tom wondered how they survived, these victims of chops gone wrong. He saw heads and feet and pricks and stomachs, insides outside, pieces enlarged or shrunk or missing altogether. He saw other things too: appendages he could not identify; globes of flesh with eyes and vaginas; spider-limbs stretched around a webbed parcel; eyes on stalks, ribcage exposed. One person had limp pricks sprouting from his nether regions like a porcupine’s spines, dozens of them dribbling in profusion. A woman, startlingly beautiful where she lay uncovered in her bed, seemed to be fused to the bed itself, flesh and bone arms merging somewhere with the metal frame, legs overhanging and disappearing into the ivory tiled floor.

Honey seemed not to notice, or was unconcerned if she did.

They emerged into a well-lit room, larger than any they had seen before, and she paused.

“This is where it happens,” she said, her voice neutral.

“I don’t know why they do it,” Tom said, staring at the three operating tables arrayed with all manner of arcane equipment. It reminded him of the Baker’s lab. He tried to shake that impression but it stuck fast, and the more he looked the more he found similarities. He hated that that. He didn’t consider himself chopped.

“Most of them choose what they become,” Honey said. “Mistakes are very rare.”

“Those things back there…?”

Honey nodded. “Even mistakes have a right to life. And maybe even some of those chose.”

Tom shook his head, exhausted and amazed.

“So where’s the buzz unit?”

“Through here, in a little room in the corner. If that’s where they still keep them. If they’re still working. If we’ve really escaped the mercenaries and have an hour to do it. If, if, if….”

They crossed the operating theatre and opened the door in the far corner. The buzz units were in there, vast conglomerations of wire and capacitors and chip-hoods, other pieces of equipment tagged on seemingly at random. They were the machine equivalent of the people hidden away in basement rooms, except that these had purpose.

There was a bed with grubby grey sheets, on which the subject would lie.

“You first,” Honey said. “You’re the important one. Tom.” She paused and looked into his eyes. “This might change everything. Everything.”

“The Baker always told me that change is good. It’s how we evolve.”

“Do artificials evolve?”

Tom merely shrugged. He thought of the chopped people he’d seen back there, and those who lived on the streets. He thought of himself, what he was, as an abstract idea rather than a familiar. And he supposed that evolution was a track that nothing could really escape.

He lay on the bed and let Honey hook him up. He resisted the temptation to open a route to the net himself, instead allowing the buzz unit to do so, a violent, painful connection that caused him to wince and tense his limbs. He felt the charge begin to leak in, and it was like drinking piss instead of fresh water. He was invaded rather than energised. But as with all buzz units, it was an exchange rather than a one-way feed. Some of him was leaking out as well, dregs of his essence drifting against the tide like a backflow against his pumping heart… and this is what they intended.

As the first rush of outside images smashed into Tom’s senses, he closed his eyes and let fate carry him along.


Within seconds he knew why they became addicted.

A clean charge went one way. A buzzed charge was a vampiric symbiosis, demanding something of the user’s essence in return. And once given — or taken — that shred of memory, experience or thought remained in the net, floating like a miniscule fish egg in a vast ocean. Waiting for someone else to enter and sweep it up.

Tom’s veins and synapses tingled with the stolen charge, and at the same time his senses came under assault. He smelled rose and rust, tasted pussy and spice, felt a feather touch his eyelid and a weight crush his foot, saw a man on a barren hillside and a girl crucified on barbed wire, heard the soft pop of lips opening by his ear and the roar of a crowd. He gasped and thrashed on the bed, but something was holding him down. He opened his eyes to see Honey sitting astride his hips. She was smiling at him, and there were old lead connectors pasted to her temples and thrust into the slit beneath her breast.

This was a dual effort, a doubling-up. Tom had heard how dangerous this was, and a few times he’d seen artificials who had tried it. They were lost. Not hurt or damaged, but vacant. Missing. Gone somewhere else.

He closed his eyes and tried to buck her off, but the flow of input to his brain crippled him.

“Shhhhh,” a voice said, and he saw Hot Chocolate Bob shafting someone from behind, taking out his prick and coming on her back, his victim’s skin sizzling as the sweet blue acid spurted from his chopped cock and balls. The pimp laughed but he was somewhere else now, somewhere darker and more intimate. He offered Tom a drink and smiled kindly, dropping a gold ring into the glass just before Tom saw Honey’s hand take it.

Tom struggled to open his eyes and there was Honey. She was smiling still, even though her eyes were closed, and he found a free second to wonder which of his memories she was experiencing.

He was pulled back in as his muscles rippled with renewed energy. And there was the Chinaman performing his puppet dance, each finger alive, every twitch of his hand communicating a desperate passion, a morbid misery. Silence then, and blackness, before the dark was filled with the muffled crashing of music from a long way off, seeping between floorboards and through walls, setting him moving to the rough beat.

“Shhhhhh,” the voice said again, and Tom opened his eyes. The room was moving around him, the table tilting, the ceiling fluid and pocked with hundreds more memories yet to be seen. The only stillness in the room was Honey. She had loosened her clothing and tried to make herself naked. Dried blood speckled her breasts and stomach from her neck wound, and as her hand delved inside Tom’s trousers and found his prick he went under again.

The room had velvet lined walls and stank of stale sex. There was a naked fat man between his legs — Honey’s legs, because it was her past history he was seeing and living in snippets — and his hand worked at her slit. He kept glancing up as if his rough assault was pleasuring her, and Tom heard Honey sigh and groan, felt her shifting her hips to maintain the illusion—

— and he opened his eyes and she was feeding him inside her, sinking down onto him and gasping out loud as the penetration matched some hidden memory leaked from his mind. She rose and fell, and Tom could see his wet length revealed and swallowed again like scraps of memory, never the whole picture. He snapped back again, eyes forced closed, and there was another room in that stinking whorehouse, two men at him this time, abusing Honey’s body as if payment meant ownership, if only for a time. One of them fucked her, the other burnt her stomach with hot ash from a cigarette, and she writhed in fake ecstasy.

Tom shook his head to kill the memory and she was dancing on her own… and, finding respite, he felt himself penetrating her and being penetrated at the same time, two minds in one.

He hoped she was feeling the same.

Honey rode him, pressing down on his chest to steady herself, and Tom kept his eyes open for as long as he could. Her smile was constant, whatever fragments of his past she was living, and that had to be good. He pushed back, trying to stay deep inside in case he lost her. But she was in control. And inside their minds, finding each other in an impossible sea of a million strangers’ memories, she let him feel how she felt, guiding him in and thrusting himself up.

And in that sex, blooming and bursting like an endless orgasm, something strange and unknown in Honey’s mind… something very much like love.

Tom sat up and shouted, finding the strength in himself — strength of mind, of body, of purpose and soul — to snap off the connectors, plucking them from Honey’s body as well, throwing them at the sizzling machine beside them.

They were leaking sweat from their pores and tears from their eyes.

“Holy fuck!” Tom said.

“Did you feel it?” she gasped. “Did you feel it go? Did you feel it leave? It’s out there now, waiting for millions people to come along and snap it up.”

“It’ll get lost, it-“

“Love can’t get lost,” Honey said. “Not even if it takes forever.” She kissed him hard and heaved herself up and down violently. She was hot around him, and he didn’t once think about the thousands of other men who had been there, the scum and the sad, the pathetic and the cruel. They made love on the dirty mattress, and when they had come they stayed that way, stroking and giggling and kissing as if it was the first time for them both.


She was a dream. Tom had dreamed of her once, but after their joint buzzing he could not know whether it was decades or minutes ago. Maybe it was when the Baker was giving him the virus, or perhaps it was just now. That did not upset him. In fact, he quite liked it. She was a timeless dream, and she was fleeing the city with him.

“Where can we go?” she said.

“The hills? Maybe north? Anywhere away from Hot Chocolate Bob.”

“He won’t live forever. Bastards like that have enemies.”

They walked on quietly until they felt the cool kiss of fresh air on their skins, tasted it in their mouths. They struggled through a gap in the wall, barely wide enough to crawl through, emerging minutes later from a maintenance pipe on the riverbank. The river flowed into the city. It was so huge, wide and sluggish that its gravity seemed to pull them with the flow, urging them back, back home.

“I’ve never lived anywhere else,” Honey said, looking at the lights behind them.

“I’ve never been anywhere else,” Tom said.

“It’ll be fun. We can discover things.” She looked at him and smiled a mischievous smile. “And Tom, do I know some things about you!”

“Shall we go?” he said, heading off along the course of the river.

“Not forever,” she said. “We’ll come back one day. Not forever, Tom.”

He nodded. They’d come back because he owed that to the Baker.

They’d return to see what they had done.

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