Escapology Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Ren Warom

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  The Story of a Shocking Boy

  Ask Me Why I Do This Again

  Dock of the Bay

  Fed to a Joon Bug

  Nice Work If You Can Get It

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  Amiga and the Shit Mountain

  Trouble on the High Seas

  Mim Bearing Gifts

  The Problem with EVaC

  Volk

  Johnny Sez Has a Bad Day

  The Neon Angel

  Dead Ends and Corners

  Land Ship Showdown

  Rocks and Hard Bastards

  Mim Makes a Deal

  Everything’s Eventual

  Inner Spaces and Awkward Places

  Part Two

  Journey to the Centre of the Hive

  Time to Call in Joon Bug

  Mim and Johnny Sez Go Hunting

  Resurrection Comes

  Why Bugs Have a Bad Rap

  Cavalry on Blades

  Going Underground…

  Monumentally Fucked

  Slipping IRL and Breathing Problems

  When a Plan Comes Together

  Good Company and a Good Day to Die

  The Towering Infernal

  Change Is Underrated

  So What Happens in the End

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  ALSO BY REN WAROM AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Virology (June 2017)

  Escapology

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785650918

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785650925

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: June 2016

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Ren Warom asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2016 Ren Warom

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For Jacqui—who drank with the Blue Monkey God and laughed and loved life.

  PART ONE

  The Story of a Shocking Boy

  Curled up against the window like a squashed bug, Shock squints down at the tops of rain-swollen clouds, the plunging cliff-side drops of the ’scrapers, and half imagines he might be dying.

  The mono speeds up, merging clouds and ’scrapers to silvery grey smears. It looks like the world is melting, an ugly dream swilling like full-body nausea just under his uncertain flesh. He’s never been in Slip as long as that before and never will again. It’s made him unsure of everything, thinned reality out to an untrustworthy husk.

  He can’t find his focus, his physicality. Keeps wondering why the fuck he has legs and can’t swim. What this meat sack is with its tight skin and ever-present grind of hunger in the goddamn fuel tank. Can barely think, his brain swilling like half-liquefied tofu in a bone box.

  Can’t work out, in fact, what he’s doing in this sardine-crush mono on the way to Plaza of all places. He has a bed calling him, probably musty by now but still warmer than this, dryer at the very least. A baggie with two bumps left hidden under the pillow he’s pretty much been jonesing for.

  So what the fuck is this?

  The mono slows, approaching lower Plaza. He thinks he’ll stay on for the round trip, back to where he started, but then he gets up, driven by impulses he’s not yet making sense of. Too scared to take the shoot in case it pulverizes what’s left of his brain, he careens down flights of stairs, fingers gripping the rails spasmodically, convinced the ground will disappear, or he will, or both.

  Drops off the last into the usual Plaza crowd and allows himself to be carried, bound by a straitjacket of bodies streaming toward the high end. Tries again to riddle out why he’s come here of all places, but only two thoughts wriggle through the tofu mass toward comprehension.

  First, the commitment to hunting down and bitch-slapping the little POS in Risi who fed him this giant cosmic shafting. Ten neurone-frying days jacked into Slip writing virads for fuck’s sake. Outrageous. Frankly uncalled for. What was that punk’s name? Reg? Ralph? Rudy? Arsehole.

  Second, coming off the back of this road-kill feeling and the lack of those pillow-hidden bumps, is the cell-deep need to find a little chemical relief for his ills. He’s going to hate himself for this in a week’s time, but only because he’ll need more and he won’t have enough flim to eat, let alone calm his head.

  Tracking into a line of liver-whore salarymen half-cut on synth-saki, he manoeuvres by degrees over to a grubby little coffee stall with dimly lit back seating known as Ducky’s. Ducky Took runs the joint; a sleazy, skinny little Euro, claims to be Irish but talks like wharf-jocks, all dropped aitches and hard consonants, ready to punch your tongue out. If he’s anything near Irish, Shock’s a fucking Scandawhoov.

  “Yo, Duckster,” he croaks out as he swings in, clinging to the cracked plastic of the counter like grim death. “Got any bumps? I’m screwed from ten days in the swim.”

  Ducky struts out from in back, pipe-cleaner legs shucked in skin-tight denim, old school, and sweat-soaked wife-beater hugging his bird-bone chest. He’s got swagger all right, but no meat to back it up. He sniffs, wiping snot off on the back of one thin, hairy forearm; it glistens in the lights, snail-trailed next to several the same.

  Ducky whistles. “You in the swim? How the mighty ’ave fallen, aye? Fought you was a gonner, I did. Like them other Haunts.”

  “What other Haunts?”

  “Ones gone AWOL.”

  Shock tries to parse what the hell Ducky might be saying. Fails miserably.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, got some Haunts gone bye-bye. Signal dead an’ all that.”

  “Ducky, Haunts don’t have a fucking signal, that’s why we’re Haunts.”

  Shrugging, Ducky picks his nose. Grumbles, “Jus’ what I ’eard, innit. No need to split ’airs.”

  “Whatever. Have you got bumps or fucking not?”

  “Might ’ave. Yuh got flim?”

  “Just got off ten days, Ducks. I have flim.”

  Ducky nods. “Then I’ve got me some scrams and a few baggies of skippers. Wot’s yuh poison?”

  Shock screws up his face. He doesn’t like the S-series. Whoever synthed that shit got their quantities cracked. S high starts ugly, like drowning in syrup, and thins out to something too close to normal. But the nearest dealer to Ducky’s is about a mile further down the Plaza and Shock won’t make it, can already feel withdrawal seeping into the matter of his cells like rot. He leaves it any longer he’s gonna be scooped out hollow and fold to the floor like an empty suit, carrion for the crows of Plaza to pick clean. In other words, choice is a city hub in high orbit, way beyond his reach.

  “Gimmie a dozen scrams.”

  Ducky goes out back, returns dangling a baggy in filthy fingers. Handing over a stack of f
lim, Shock tries not to think about those fingers bagging up his S; it’ll make him hurl whatever poor-excuse-for-food synth he was tube-fed for the last ten days, and keeping things down is a priority of his.

  It takes forever to open the baggy, the meat jacket still refusing signals from the tofu brain, but he finally peels the plastic lips apart and shakes out two. Presses them hard into the skin of his neck until they pop, leaving as always a gross taste in the back of the throat.

  Totally worth it.

  Veins of cold steal in on the back of that foul taste, carrying relief to tired matter, beginning the inexorable slide from dead cells to cellular fireworks. Saluting Ducky he pushes off from the counter and stumbles out onto Plaza, tucking the baggie next to his flim.

  As the buzz hits, Plaza lights become stars bleeding to mildew stains on a rotten canvas. The street stretches, sags, melting into heavy folds. Muting sound. Diffusing movement to a glutinous crawl. Shops ooze around him, droning out noise that only a moment ago was the frantic beat of dub-tech, the chitinous whir of machinery, the jabber of voices ramped to eleven.

  And he’s swimming again, legs treading water, arms fanned like fins. He grins, some sort of sloppy bastard brother to a smile, and rolls off down to wherever it was he was headed. Should check his IMs, but can’t figure out where his brain is any more at all. Bliss.

  The crowd trickles past as he floats through, unable to strike the lunatic smile from his face. It’s stuck on with S—sticky psych glue. He waits it out, jaw aching, like it’s a shuttle on the mono, until the glutinous drag fades from his bones, his brain, and leaves him clearer, a little awake, verging on aware.

  The trickle transfers from crowd to cheeks, a physical/perception shift inexplicable without experience of S, and allows his smile to drool away. He lifts hands heavy as orbiting moons and scrubs at his face, anticipating the ticklish needles that follow the numb and trying to rub them away before they set in. It’s useless, but he does it every time.

  His IM blips at him, loud as a thunderclap in the skull. Too loud, like his brain’s achieved self-awareness and rebelled by throwing the vol-switch on his drive to max. Halfway through seriously considering this as a possible version of reality he finally clicks to the fact that it’s been doing the same damn thing for about two minutes, gradually getting louder. Something he programmed in to make sure he got calls about work even when he’s so borked on bumps his head might as well be a meat popsicle.

  “Oh screw you, past me,” he mutters, accessing his neural drive.

  Where the fuck are you, Shocking boy? Mimic, tart as a pickle. Her voice provokes instant intestinal distress.

  “Shit.”

  He’d forgotten all about Mim. She hit him up the second he broke surface for air, so to speak, with a job offer he could have done with ten days ago, before being forced to resort to trusting Ronnie. Rick? Or was it Rita? He will remember.

  He’d love to tell Mim no, interacting with her in any way being so much like oil choosing to co-mingle with water it’s ridiculous, but she’s his only remaining decent meal ticket; a fact that makes him want to smash his face into the sidewalk or something.

  He cannot believe this is his life. It can’t be.

  Six months ago, he was sure it would go differently. He Failed his Psych Eval, smiling the whole time. Walked out of that room without a backward glance, practically waving both middle fingers. Didn’t want the life of a Pass, no thank you, he had a whole different career progression in mind; a way back to Sendai District, his holy fucking grail.

  He jumped straight into high-level, mui, mui illegal jobs with payoffs that make the wad in his jacket look a goddamn joke. Had every reason to believe himself a shoe-in for the top echelons of Fail society, the kind of flim that makes Sendai a given. Only it’s all gone horribly pear-shaped. Or rather Mim-shaped.

  They used to be a thing. Or at least he thought they were, until she put him into a situation that helped him understand how mistaken he’d been. Thanks to her, his career took a swan dive, and he currently holds the dubious honour of being a walking corpse in the eyes of three of the Gung’s significant players. Only one of those hanging death sentences is directly her fault, but as a beginning of the end goes it was a doozy, setting the scene for all the rest, and he feels entitled to a certain visceral dislike. So why does he still work with her? Simple mathematics. Before Mim, Shock was alone.

  She’s all he’s got.

  Having zero friends is fine when you’re coasting on glory, not so fine when all that goes away and you need help. These past months, chasing basic survival, he’s slid right down the Fail food chain to the slime at the bottom of the pond. Been dicked on flim, moved from shitty apartment, to shittier, to cage in an attempt to stay off the streets, and escaped brain-locked servitude by the skin of his teeth at one particularly dodgy job—bad luck following bad.

  Basically put, he’s experienced the steep learning curve he initially avoided, the curve most other Fails walk after those red letters flash up, condemning them to self-subsistence in a world that does its level best to make such magic as difficult as possible. You have to be special, a J-Hack, or affiliated to a crime lord, and if you’re not one of those then you’re meat. That’s what Shock is now. Meat. And he’s a Haunt. Top 0.5 % too. In other words, very fucking special.

  He stumbles headlong into a tight-knit group of salarymen, who jeer and shout him away, reeling down rain-smeared concrete. Yeah. Look at how special he is, still so screwed from the virad job he can hardly put one foot in front of the other.

  His drive blips again.

  Do I numb my arse for a no-show or what?

  Shock groans, the truly repugnant gut-warping anxiety of hearing Mim’s voice is worse than waking in a Slip-sling, naked and bristling with grubby tubes too wide for the orifices they’re crammed in to. He wants to do anything except turn up, but there’s that thing about choice and city hubs in orbit. Pulling his jacket tight, Shock turns unsteadily toward the top end of Plaza, the world spinning around his queasy skull like cartoon bluebirds.

  * * *

  There are many places to party on Foon Gung’s claustrophobic sprawl but Plaza’s the only one bright enough to be seen from the hubs, the cities smugly orbiting the boundary to endless space. Plaza’s high-end is a migraine-provoking frenzy; a gaudy parade of VIP clubs, Slip joints, art houses and karaoke bars. Despite the money practically oozing from the cracks in the sidewalk these multifarious amusements look cheap stacked side by side and swaddled in neon and fairy lights spangled as a K-rock star’s thong.

  This scene is as far from Shock’s idea of a good time as it’s possible to get, but he’s not surprised Mim’s blipped to meet him here. She’s a freaking magpie, and always out for maximum flim expenditure. Doubtless she’s not numbing her arse much, probably got a gaggle of lanky Biz-Cad creeps orbiting her horizons, dazzled by the glare of her headlights.

  Reluctantly jacking her IM, Shock hooks her signal, tracing it to one of the cheesiest karaoke joints on Plaza: Keen Machine.

  “Fucking jim goddamn dandy,” he sneers, shielding his eyes from the high-intensity blast of illumination that comprizes the entrance.

  Concentrating hard to remain steady on his feet, he rolls in past the muscle, a gaggle of uber-pumped gorks in suits, their necks so thick they look like truncated thighs, and heads for the bar. There’s a skinny little short-arse with neon fangs serving the whole thirty meters of polished copper by herself, clacking to and fro on knife-blade heels and snarling at everyone as she juggles glasses and snatches flim.

  All out of sympathy, his head still basically tofu beneath the straggly S bump-sheen and Mim-xiety, he orders an apple juice, no ice, with two shots of pure green caffeine for himself and a voddie lime slim for Mim and skulks off to hunt her down in the shadowy recesses.

  Predictably, he finds her holding court amongst a gaggle of wide-eyed Frat boys from the Biz-Cad, a different shade of learning than the academies, for hI-Qs and the wealthy
. These are the latter, all spending daddy’s money and trying to look smart in clothes so new they still smell of the print factory; a clean, sharp scent not unlike bleach.

  Mim’s in her usual uniform, a bodysuit fitted close as second skin in holographic material, blending her into the corner like a mirage; the only signs of her existence an inky mass of iridescent black hair and those crazy mirrored eyes. Mim’s a chameleon—you can’t see her, only her surroundings and yourself, reflected back at you into infinity.

  That’s Mim’s problem. She lives her role. 24/7 365 in Imp-mode. Consequently she’s only ever been any use as a reflection. Expecting to find a person somewhere in those vague distorted echoes is a sure-fire route to ending up disappointed. At least he did. Disappointed and sick to the core, his heart aching, just like it is now. He only has to look at her to feel wrecked. She’s a wall he keeps crashing into.

  He still remembers the first time he saw her. In Tech. She’d transferred in from Cad after a Tech-skills test, was perched like a crow in the window of his lecture hall on the seventeenth floor, smoking a long, purple cigarette. Psy. Illegal as hell. She wore a flimsy, red-plastic playsuit and shades, had her feet rammed into matching bladers, stack-heel shoes with a mag-strip for speeding along mono lines, and he fell for her catastrophically.

  Her distant grin and cold mirror eyes gave him shivers he mistook for attraction, and that off-hand way she has drove him out of his mind, full-on crazy as a primo high. He took to following her like a shadow, hanging in her wake, nebulous as a cloud of smoke and half as noticeable. Sometimes he thinks she only noticed him by accident, out of the corner of her eye, like seeing a ghost. Appropriate. It makes him laugh nowadays. But only now and then.

  It took him a year to persuade her to fuck him, another for her to scheme a way to get rid of him. By that time they’d moved in together and everyone spoke their name in one long breathless mouthful, like they were conjoined twins in a freak show. What a fucking waste of two years, and he doesn’t plead the stupidity of youth about any of it. He’s forgotten how to be that kind to himself.