the story wasn’t central - the spice seemed to be in the speed-of-consciousness rants Barbanel scrawls on the walls and ceiling:
“There was a time when the extension of illegality to innocent acts could be used to manipulate men. But when guilt is no longer felt over acts of genuine criminality, what hope of instilling guilt in the innocent?”
Barbanel’s wallworks reminded Dante of an exercise he’d idly pursued during rehearsal - as an installation piece the job had been organized more like a notion than an act. They’d memorized the upper floors in case the elevator stalled but Dante was faster than the Kid and spent a lot of spare time creating a memory palace. Every hall and corner of the building was used as a signifier, a means of remembering text and images by having them dotted around the walls of the simulation. Strolling through the simulation he could read an entire story and then, by walking through the real thing, be able to recall it.
But this wasn’t the building he’d memorized - similarities triggered flashes of text here and there but in a jumbled order. He’d memorized a favourite Gamete story in which an angel stows away in a hypodermic needle and is inadvertently injected. The girl who receives it feels only the faintest tingle as the being is absorbed.
In this unfamiliar place the story was scrambled so that the girl was injected into the angel, which reacted by becoming a god. Why was the real thing different from the simulation? Had Jones really sold them down the river?
As he sat considering these issues he heard the leper’s bell of an approaching idea - maybe Download never let them out of the simulation. The thought hit him like a car at a stop sign. If they were still hooked in, the heist had been nothing but a wraparound dream.
Virtual reality. That would explain why he felt so bored.
3 ROSA
Rosa strode down Swerve Street, dragging her nails along the wall. Sparks leapt and underscored a graffito saying Only the expert will realize your exaggerations are true. In her other hand was a Zero Approach gun identical to Dante’s except for a squeeze adjustment - Rosa had lost a finger in a mood ring explosion. She couldn’t believe she was here when Dante was waiting for the pick-up on Deal Street. Download was up to no good. A guy like that needed a wound bigger than his body.
Developed to re-empower the victim, the Zero Approach gun worked on a principle of etheric consent and only fired when the target was asking for it. Since its introduction, the homicide rate had risen by four hundred per cent. Download’s ignorance was sure to demand a bullet. Without the firm and necessary grasp of present and past, he didn’t believe an entire nation could lie. She thundered over the monroe grill which served as a welcome mat for his digital foundry.
Dante thought of dolls within dolls and wheels within wheels. ‘Hey Kid - Kid. I look okay?’
‘Yuh look like shit, Danny.’
‘Sure, but I ain’t all shiny, right, not movin’ like a robot?’ He flexed his hand, viewing it. It seemed completely normal. ‘This look texture-mapped to you?’
The Kid ignored him, slumped morosely against a gas tank. He was thinking of a time when things were different as the result of an experiment. Hearing frequent news reports of people’s unsuspecting and carefree condition just prior to violent misfortune, the Kid had attempted to attain this condition by taking out a contract on himself and ingesting an amnesia drug to forget the arrangement. Sure enough, on the day of the hit he felt an alien lightheartedness. But as the hitman’s car sped toward him he remembered everything and felt more cheated than ever that others got the service for free. He leapt aside and the hitman, who hadn’t a care in the world, died violently on impact with a wall.
Seating herself opposite him, Corey the Teller asked gently after his wellbeing. He raised a face scorched with reality and whispered that life would be great if it weren’t for its termination in a box of earthworms. They got to talking about carrion, absence as therapy and the fact that not a single vitamin had ever been visually identified. The Kid described his ability to mentally unwind people like spiral-peeled apples and see them as skanking, swing-armed skeletons. ‘One thing you’ll say for skeletons,’ Corey said brightly. ‘They’ll always give you a smile.’ There are two ways of bringing someone around to your way of thinking - softly, or hardly.
‘Danny says crime’s one of many methods justice may select,’ the Kid quoted. ‘But I don’t think I believe in justice d’you, miss?’
‘Far as I can in somethin’ I never saw - so break it to me, you guys givin’ up or what?’
‘You think we’re in Jones’s fuzz machine, Danny?’ asked the Kid, uneasy at Dante’s suspicion that they weren’t real crooks. ‘Still in them old-fashioned roller wheels?’
Dante gazed up from his book. ‘Chances are this heist ain’t been accomplished, Kid, just portrayed, like electoral hype.’
The Kid was nonplussed at his accomplice’s apparent apathy - this wasn’t the Dante he knew. The Dante he knew would spring into action so fast he’d leave his aura behind. Was this hanging around part of the plan? ‘What about intent, Danny?’
‘Sure I guess we got that,’ Dante conceded, though he was on shaky ground. There was a name for those with intent to crime who subsequently enacted it in a simulation - crap.
In fact VR was held in such contempt that many states ran hive jails in which prisoners were permanently hooked into a sim crime environment to play out their rage until decrepitude or drooling madness. Physically the prison was a coffin-stack bunker where inmates were drip-fed nutrients and urban fantasy.
It was a source of mirth throughout the SSA that the virtual environment, called the Mall, was modeled on Beerlight. This had led Beerlight itself to reject plans for a VR clench, opting instead for a re-offenders’ trashpile and a standard clench for first-timers. The petty clench was based on the old panopticon model, despite complaints from tower guards that every single prisoner would stare at them.
‘Maybe we been arrested already, Danny. Wired up in one of them funny places.’
‘We’ll find out at midnight,’ said Dante absently. He knew the Mall ran the same twenty-four hours on a loop and that there was a burst of static at the reset. Anyone killed was resurrected. Anything damaged was restored. Like a kids’ game.
‘What about her?’ whispered the Kid, pointing at Corey.
Dante said nothing. If this was Jones’s simulation, she was no less a puppet than the toys in the warehouse - effectively, she was Jones.
None of it really accounted for the weirdness - since he worked the vault he’d been weaker, spread thin, in two minds about the whole match. He thought of Rumpelstiltskin, the real version where he tears himself down the middle, and found he preferred the PC mix in which the little bastard just runs away. What would Gamete have said?
‘Gotta realize, Benny,’ Blince rumbled, slapping a new magazine into the gun, ‘value’s based on rarity, demand and ease o’ replacement.’ He resumed firing into the panicked crowd. People dropped as predictably as ninepins. ‘This gun’s my pride and joy.’
He was referring to a Colt Demograph with a nine-inch barrel, which he’d fetched from the squad car as the bank employees began to emerge. It could be set for age, colour and wage bracket. Blince had wanted to work in Vegas until he discovered he’d only be allowed to shoot blacks. He liked to throw it wide open. ‘Why ain’t they keepin’ still, Benny?’
‘Guess it’s what they call civil unrest, Chief.’
‘This ain’t civil unrest, Benny, it’s civil goddamn insomnia. Pull back. Take out the whole goddamn street.’
Everyone reversed up Deal and a Gates gun was trundled forward, steaming like a diesel truck. Denizens froze in its spotlight. Then they were crushed tightly together as though magnetized, and blown to tiny bits. As the cops moved forward, the street was being pelted as if by popcorn. Blince lit a