Xenoform

  Xenoform

  By Mike Berry

  Copyright © 2011 Mike Berry

  *

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  In the interests of honesty, I have to say that this book is for me.

  Find me a creative person who doesn't

  ultimately do it for selfish reasons.

  However, I dedicate it to Annie, for making it possible.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Leo Travant shook a reeferette from a battered Sativia packet, lit it and inhaled expansively. He smiled, stuffing his hands into his pockets, happily regarding the teeming crowd as it breathed and swelled its way towards Friday night.

  He fluttered his brilliantly-plumed parrot wings, feeling the greasy evening air ruffle their feathers delicately – the caress of the living city. He savoured this sensation momentarily as the gravpods silently planed up and down the neon roadways. He absent-mindedly relit one edge of the reeferette where the wind had smoked it and crossed into the pulsing, almost solid mass of High Street foot traffic, heading west against the tide.

  He would see the Jukeman one more time. Of course, the Jukeman wasn’t his real name. Leo didn’t know his real name, and knew better than to ask. To the Jukeman he was an interloper from another world – the world of smart suits and conference calls. Or was he an interloper in the world of smart suits and conference calls? Either way, he would have one more hit and then off the stuff. It would all be fine and life was good.

  The people here were dressed in the simple, clean lines of the moderately wealthy, their bodymods of reasonably high quality, doubtless most of them legitimately obtained and installed, unlike Leo’s own. The lovely, flightless wings would have cost a year’s worth of his good city salary on the legit market. They had been custom-designed and made by one of the black market’s finest bodymod surgeons, introduced to him, coincidentally, by the Jukeman.

  The people moved hurriedly and without fuss – cogs in a machine, grinding and meshing along the crowded pavements. Places to go, people to see, lives to be lived, busy, busy. HUD-glasses showing street-map overlays, net-brooches jacked into direct neural interfaces, stunning chameleon skin patterns, high chrome faces, sexmods and fightmods and workmods – a heaving, breathing bio-mechanical mass.

  The domes of the spaceport loomed in the north – huge, silvered hemispheres like congealed blobs of mercury. The elongating plume of an ascending lightpusher – a sustained-acceleration craft still climbing out of the Earth’s gravity well on fusion drives – hung like a dwarf star above the monolithic skyline. Soon it would switch to ion thrusters for its long and steady acceleration into deep space.

  Leo moved away from the glittering edifice of the Smithson Investment Advisory Services building where he worked, crossing at a junction without waiting for the lights, passing the holo theatre. From a projector in a film advertising billboard emerged foot-thick metallic snakes, holograms made solid by force-field manipulators. They writhed through the air like trails of silvered smoke. Occasionally, one would snap the hat from a passer-by, spitting it back into the crowd or soar towards someone menacingly then swerve away at the last moment, fangs bared and crackling with electricity.

  A stunning woman with lengthened legs and honey-coloured skin bumped Leo’s arm and he burned her on the bare elbow with his joint. She hissed, scowling, and jerked her arm away but continued into the throng without slowing.

  ‘Sorry!’ he called after her redundantly as he paused to watch her recede from view.

  Damn sheep. There should be a cull, he thought, but immediately scolded himself for allowing his mood to falter. Leo re-pasted his smile into place and returned to the business of walking.

  Spyflies buzzed past on tiny whirring rotors, their helter skelter flight patterns so much like those of real flies. Some were operated by the police, but others belonged to market research companies, private detective agencies, mapping and surveying organisations, even private owners. The tiny, complex devices were the latest piece of highly desirable, highly expensive must-have tech amongst the business classes.

  Leo came to the end of High Street, where it exploded into a six-armed junction. Two roads anticlockwise from his position he saw Beat Street, heard its heartbeat of pulsing seismo-bass, saw the play of laser light along it.

  Not looking out for cars, he dashed across the road to a traffic island. A gravpod with an iridescent paint job braked sharply to avoid running him down. A smooth-faced man with sunglasses leaned out and shouted something at him before accelerating off again.

  This is some strong shit. I nearly got creamed there. Must keep it together!

  Leo looked suspiciously at the roach between his fingers as if the item itself had tried to get him killed and dropped it to the floor. It bounced, trailing embers, into the gutter and he ground it underfoot as he stepped out, more cautiously this time, into the road.

  He gained the other side without incident this time and weaved his way up Beat Street, pausing now and again to look at the flashing holos for upcoming club nights. Various tunes competed for air space here – back and forth, each taking bites out of the other, basses rumbling like machines of war, lasers flashing in time.

  Here the well-heeled mix
ed with the down-at-heel, partied in the same clubs, consumed the same drugs, drank the same poisons together and danced in time, or out of it, beneath the same strobing lights. Beat Street was famous throughout the land, its largely respectable pleasures available to all comers.

  Leo passed beneath the gossamer trellises of Viaduct One. Trains and gravpods streamed by overhead like the shuttles of a loom. Evening was giving way to night.

  As he passed from the Centre District and neared the Lanes the architecture of the city seemed to age and crumble about him. The buildings, though smaller here, were more oppressive. They crowded and shouldered their way towards the narrowing road as if huddling together in fear of the falling night. Ceramicarbide and glasspex false fronts gave way to dripping brickwork and boarded-up windows. Strange smelling smoke wafted from doorways and alcoves. The music of Beat Street was just a murmur now.

  The pavements were less crowded here, though Leo knew that as soon as he entered the Lanes proper the crowd would thicken again. The buildings were mostly dilapidated housing tenements, each subdivided into as many tiny flats as physics would allow. The people moved slowly in comparison to those in the more affluent parts of town, heads lower, clothes cheaper.

  It was getting dark. The shadows seemed to bunch into all corners, thick and gloopy like some industrial residue that had fallen from the air to blanket the city.

  Leo ruffled his wings, shivering slightly against the cold of autumn and paused to light another joint. A tall black man with plastic eyes and a bald head studded with antennae peeled away from a shaded patch below an awning and swayed towards Leo.

  ‘You like a smoke?’ this character drawled in an incredibly deep and sonorous slur. ‘I got – is good…’ He tried to lay a hand on Leo’s shoulder but the hand seemed possessed of its own ideas and floated away to wave vaguely in the air. Micro-lasers glinted on the man’s knuckles.

  ‘I’m good, friend, thanks,’ Leo answered, managing to keep his voice more-or-less steady. He stowed his lighter hurriedly, smiled, and brushed past the aerial-headed black man without looking back.

  The juke withdrawal was making Leo’s heart race. Surely it was just the juke. He would sort out this one last hit and then be done with it for good. The Jukeman had the pills to cure all ills. Oh yeah. Strangely, the symptoms had seemed worse since he had had the wings fitted. He had quit the juke before and it had not been nearly this bad. Never mind – he would be free of it soon. For good this time. One last hurrah may even help with the workload – the current contract he was working on at Smithson’s was proving to be a bitch. When it was cracked, though, there may even be a promotion on the cards. What better time to get clean than then? He would start in a new position with a new lease of life. Clean, wealthy and young, the world would be his oyster. But first – one more dose. Just one.

  Into the Lanes proper. This was the dark heart of the city – the ever-burgeoning black market district, defiantly sprawled across the landscape like a dog turd on a lawn. The spyflies dared not enter here, and if they did then they were lured to their dooms by scrambler-baits. Seldom were the police seen in these parts either. Underworld businesses were either strong enough and wealthy enough to pay them off or so weak that they were eaten by their contemporaries. The authorities generally let nature take care of itself.

  Leo passed under a wrought iron archway festooned with fairy lights. A woman with masses of dark curly hair and the lower body of a green snake was curled around the arch itself, the tip of her tail holding to a nearby streetlight, which washed her in a sinister yellow. She hissed at Leo as he passed below her and he was unsurprised to see that she had the forked tongue of a serpent. Underworld bodymods were often more extreme than their licensed counterparts.

  Enterprising souls had erected trestle tables on the slimy flagstones here and from these gaudy stalls they sold all manner of items. Drugs and drug paraphernalia, electronic items, mostly either stolen or fake, bizarre foodstuffs, bio-modded pets, weapons legal and not. At one stall outside a smoky brothel a woman whose face appeared to be made of electrical components was tattooing an eight-pointed star onto the forehead of an immensely muscled man.

  Capitalism at work, thought Leo. And in a purer form than that practised by the honourable Smithson Investment Advisory Services. This is the beating heart of the beast, right here. He felt like an invading germ.

  He came to a corner where a makeshift stage had been made from pallets and old doors nailed together. A four-piece band was playing screaming funk metal from it. A motley crowd of revellers swelled the street here, bouncing to the music, drinks cans aloft, beer spilling over sweaty bodies as they banged their grizzled heads with whiplash-inducing ferocity. The lead singer was a red-headed girl who looked about sixteen years old. She punctuated a half-bar break in the music by spraying a mouthful of vodka over her listeners, convulsively rejoining with the bass as the beat returned, a thrashing visual representation of the sound itself.

  One of the band was playing a hypnophone, jacked directly into his DNI. He swayed with his shaven, tattooed head back and his eyes rolling at the sky, body trembling as the wheedling, entrancing noise of the instrument merged with the guitar, drums and vocal. Occasionally he would reach down and minutely adjust some arcane setting on the panel of the hypnophone implanted in his bare chest. The echoes rattled back and forth between the walls of the looming shop fronts.

  With no route around, Leo pushed his way through, being bounced and shoved quite violently if unintentionally. Only two blocks to the Jukeman’s pad from here. The Jukeman lived in a cellar apartment below a second hand tat-emporium. The colourful fumes of some of his more bizarre concoctions seeped up into the shop between the ill-fitting floorboards, and Leo could only guess what the old ladies who shopped there thought of that.

  He attempted to sidestep an athletic-looking woman with grey skin scribed in fluorescent blue. She danced enthusiastically right into him, seemingly looking at her own feet and laid a hand on his wrist to steady herself. He noticed that she had the most remarkably long and sharp-looking nails – claws almost. She reeled back and briefly he looked into her eyes. They were the washed out blue of glacial ice. He felt himself unintentionally shrink from that freezing gaze. The music seemed to dissolve into the sub-audible – Leo could barely hear it over his own pulse.

  ‘Nice wings, man,’ she said, releasing his arm, and was gone into the maelstrom of bodies like a ghost.

  Disorientated and a little unnerved, Leo continued towards the Jukeman’s place. At the end of the street he crossed over to the lighter side. Feeling singled out by his smart brown-on-black layered suit and brightly contrasting wings, he elected that it would actually be safer in the light than the shadows. Most people here were harmless to the passer-by. Better to be visible. Better to stay out of the shadows. Just a precaution, Leo told himself. Nearly there now. And this is the last time.

  Leaving the band behind him, Leo passed beneath a series of steel cables groaning between the rooftops, laden with slowly creaking cable cars like plump fruit on a vine. A couple coming the other way seemed to glance at him and then huddle closer, laughing between themselves. Leo felt a twinge of paranoia. He passed an old man whose artificial heart pumped in an unnecessarily baroque glass case inside his chest. Leo noticed with a shudder that the man was drooling down his chin, ceramic teeth grinding loosely together. A gyrocopter thudded overhead, searchlights slicing the night like knives.

  He pulled his suit lapels tighter around his cheeks, hunching his wings closer to his body. He tried to draw on his Sativia but was appalled to notice that his fingers shook so violently that he couldn’t get it to his mouth. He threw it away. It had gone out anyway.

  Man, I don’t feel good. Must be the juke jitters. Be okay soon. Take a left here. Oh what…

  He was back in the square with the stage. How had this happened? The music, seemingly louder than ever, physically buffeted him to and fro as he stood in slack-faced confusion staring at the place he had just come from. He swayed gently. The world seemed to be pulsing in time with the bass – not just the lights, but reality itself, as if the data stream from his senses were just a series of electrons in microchips, disassociated not just from Leo himself but from everything else too. Reality was subjective, his point of view objective. Or was it the other way around? The dancing crowd had literally become a beast of one body and many legs, which thrashed and smashed madly beneath it, pounding at the slippery street. He lifted a hand to wipe his sweating face and the sound it made was like granite slabs dragged over concrete. Sparks glittered in the air of its wake.