1.
Where it all began …

-1-

It was just after 1:30 am New Years day 2217 under the crystalline star shine of the inland when Massud Ramad told his wife for the fourth time to listen to what he was telling her. He seemed quite oblivious to the fact that he had been the only one saying anything since they’d left the party twenty minutes earlier and that his voice was raised sufficiently for anyone within the cruiser and perhaps those in the next lane to hear. But since they were alone on the road there’d be no way to test that. He shook his finger in her face to make his point clear, although it only served more to distract her from his words.

He misunderstood the apprehension in her face to mean she did not understand the obvious point that he’d been trying to make about the Martins, the people whose party they had just left when Massud had been rudely insulted by a flippant comment Martin had made. But Mariane Ramad’s apprehension had been about the fact her irate husband seemed to be all but completely ignoring the road.

“And furthermore, who is that guy to talk about me?” he yelled, “I earn my money! I perform a service for this city…” the Ramads were pretty well off and had got that way by walking the straight and narrow. He knew this pissed a lot of people off. This is what he was trying to explain to her. It was just after the fifth “and further more…” that he felt the front end of the cruiser buckle. He was busy screaming when the wall of the service exit smacked into his windshield at 70 kph. The instantaneous noise was deafening.

Then there was silence.

The Ramads belonged to the coddled classes. Their daily concerns were usually limited to who was taking which car and at what establishment they should eat that evening. They were never in want for sustenance or the simple material necessities of life. Nor were they used to helplessness.

Mariane awoke first. She knew immediately that the taste in her mouth was blood. A horrifying sick feeling came over her immediately and it only grew worse when she realized she could not move. After a moment she heard her husbands unmistakable moan near her. In the cold blackness of the night she could not see where he was though.

But she did see something.

A man! He was walking toward them. They had help!

No… wait. It had been a trick of the light. The man was walking away. Where had he come from? Didn’t he see them?

She tried to yell but pain assaulted every point in her face at even the prospect of opening her mouth. God! She was hurt!

Then with sudden terrifying clarity she saw the man that was hurrying away from the scene of their crash clearly silhouetted in the distant glow of the city.

She screamed until she passed out from the pain.

-2-

The woman was in agony. That was plainly obvious. The paramedic ran another booster into her arm and was grateful to see her relax. The injured woman swore then and then called out for her husband.

“He’s right behind us,” the young paramedic said in an assuring tone. She didn’t add that the unit that carried him was no longer in a hurry. The woman would find out in due time.

“Can you hold still for me now?” the paramedic asked. “We are almost at the hospital. You’re gonna be fine! I just want you to…”

“His head was gone!” the woman yelled through an almost ruined mouth.

The paramedic didn’t have any response for this. She knew that the woman was not referring to her husband. The man was intact. And she did not yet know he was dead. Maybe she was delirious?

“Ok. It’s ok. Everything’s fine. Just relax.” She didn’t want to put the woman to sleep. She needed her conscious in the emergency room.

“Don’t patronize me! I am not delirious! He didn’t have a head! I saw it!”

“Ok. Ok.” The paramedic comforted her before putting her to sleep. She’d deal with the emergency room issue when they got there.

-3-

Trenton wasn’t the busiest of the five regions the state police had to deal with tonight. But you couldn’t tell by looking at the precinct. The detox-tank was filled with people who wouldn’t volunteer to a neutralizing shot. So they were stuck for the night. Or at least until their wristband changed color. Magna-tagged against the wall, away from their Orga counterparts, a line of malfunctioning Mecha struggled against their captivity, looping robotic phrases and twisting in awkward postures. It would have been a funny spectacle if they weren’t such a pain in the ass this time of year. As if there wasn’t enough to deal with already without some fiber-heads blowing chips or whatever the hell went wrong with ‘em. All around the room, quiet stern-faced men and women in tight blue uniforms went about their various tasks. Used to the chaos.

“Fuck!”

Davich stood in the doorway of his office. Behind him a quiet holographic game of chess waited. In front of him a mess that would never go away without his effort got worse by the minute.

“Fuck!” he swore again at no one.

“We heard you the first time Boss,” Spacer said as she passed by. The tough woman had a rowdy Orga boy in tow. The kid looked like one of the mainland neo-nazis. Black tights on sickly white skin. And this one had spikes protruding from his shoulders. Wow were those real? Davich followed, enthralled, stepping out of the range of a tagged Mecha who had started swinging its arms wildly ranting some digital jibberish.

“Hey! Is that shit real?” he asked and made a low whistle.

Spacer had cuffed the kid to a post in the center of the room. It was safer here than in the tank. The brat was obviously a bruiser, just waiting for a chance to take his frustrations out on someone who wasn’t a cop. Nobody was stupid enough to try a cop. Especially one like Spacer. “Yeah, it’s real. Damn implants!” she said. The brat had his eyes downcast. Couldn’t have been older than fifteen… sixteen tops. “Little shit and his pals ripped up some shanty’s outside Haddonfield. Almost killed a couple of vags. The other’s got lost in the wood. But they’ll show up.”

Davich shook his head. “Oh yeah. Tough guy, eh kid? Beating up people that ain’t even eaten in weeks. Ewww… scaarrry!” he mocked. “How in the fuck do you sleep with those things on anyway?!” he asked eyeing the spikes. “That shit is like… permanent, right? Ya know, one of these days you might want to get a job,” he said with the hard edged sincerity of a cop who really believed in his rhetoric. But he could tell by the feral sneer the kid gave him that he called this one wrong. Yeah. Another one for the stasis someday. His waved his hand dismissively.

“Spacer. I’m glad your back,” Davich whispered conspiratorially pulling his lieutenant aside, “I need some of these detox clowns boosted and outta here. I got no room for this shit.”

Spacer winked. She knew the routine. Get ‘em into the Interrogation room and film ‘em saying ‘ok’ to anything. Just ask ‘em any question that they would say yes to, and then pump some detox in ‘em. If anybody bitches later they got the agreement on tape. All nice and legal… sort of.

“Yes, Boss. I’ll get someone on it. Anderson should know the routine.”

“Yeah. Oh! And get me someone to grab somma these gawddamn Mecha. I don’t give a shit if they got licenses or no. If you can’t locate the owner immediately, I want them outta my…”

“Captian Davich!” a voice called from across the noisy room. Davich turned to see a young city cop scanning the busy room, craning his thin neck. Local kid. This can’t be good.

He turned to Spacer and sighed. “Think I can slip outta here before this snot finds..”

“Oh there you are. Sir,” the snot said from behind him. “We have a situation at the General. I was told to ask specifically for you.”

“Fuck!”

-4-

General wasn’t his favorite place. But then he really didn’t have any favorite places. Well, maybe home was ok once in a while. Or the snack bar at noon. Some might think it pathetic that a man would prefer hanging out with a bunch of troopers over lunch to being at home with ‘family’, but then none of them were Rachman Davich. He didn’t drink, so the clubs were out. Even after all the shit he’d survived, he preferred to be sober. And he didn’t fuck around. It had been a long time since he and his wife had loved one and other, but they had both been cursed by a traditional sense of duty. So affairs were out. And divorce was out. As were kids. But a few Christmas’ passed he’d made that one up to her. She was happy enough he guessed.

But Davich loved to hang with the youngsters. The new troopers. The ones still learning the ropes. They were his kids. He loved to hear them talk. The boasting and challenging. The unlikely and downright impossible stories. The screw ups and the successes. He loved it all. It was like old times. Like when he had been a fit young recruit, not the balding overweight desk jockey his rank had turned him into. But once a day he could shoot the shit and be one of them for a while. Well, at least until lunch was over. Then he was the Boss again.

“Fuck!” he said as they walked into the blaring lights and noise of the Trenton General Hospital. Everywhere was fresh misery. Blood. Puke. More drunken assholes. The one thing you didn’t see was Mecha. Small favor.

“Hey, Spacer,” he said thrusting his chin at some cut up transies across the room. “Those the vags your boys cut?”

Spacer glanced in that direction. “Probably,” She replied nonchalantly. Davich humphed and followed the pencil necked kid that had come to get him.

The woman had her own room. She was pretty messed up too. Her face was wrapped around in bandages and coils of tubes ran from the bandage casing. God. Was she alive in there?

“Rachman?” The bandaged mess said, and Davich immediately recognized the voice. Spacer had never seen the hard-edged man’s face go pale before.

“Mariane?!” why hadn’t someone told him? “Mariane! Oh Fuck! What the hell happened to you?!” Davich yelled.

“Massud is dead!” the bandaged woman muttered urgently though her ceramic mask. Davich received these words like a punch to the gut. One of the few good guys this damn city had ever known! Gone!

“Oh Fuck!” he said oblivious to the annoyed glances from passing nurses. He bent over and placed his hands on his knees. Massud was gone. Shit. Now the Council would be run by that self-serving prick Grainer.

“I had them get you, Rachman.” Mariane said slowly. She tried to lean close to him but the pain stopped her. He leaned close to her instead. “I saw something out there.” She said, “I saw something, Rachman, and they won’t believe me.” Then she proceeded to describe the thing.

Spacer was amazed to see her Boss go pale twice in one night.

-5-

An unceasing mechanical groan penetrates the darkness. Fire erupts from some piping blackened by age and decrepitude and a sulfurous reek poisons the air.

Nothing here can smell it though.

Amid the clutter of this dark and stinking place, something is moving. Something that shouldn’t be moving; that should have long ago ceased to have any motor activity at all, is busy. It’s casing is flesh. Occasionally a chunk of it, wet and rotting, falls off. But there is no pain.

For it is not alive.