human fallout from pain ignored and war extended for profit. The first wave. So far only sixty years’ worth—yet, tilling like bulldozed trash, it spread across the map like red inkblots destined to touch and merge.
Skychum had taken the 8.20 Amtrak north from Grand Central—it had a policy of not stopping for bodies. Grim, he viewed the raining horizon—dust motes in a shaft of light—and presently, quietly, he spoke.
“Many happy returns.”
THE SIRI GUN
“What were you doing in Washington, Atom?”
“Visiting my rights.”
“Wiseguy, eh?”
“Where were you on June 16?” asked the second cop.
“Hiding a pod in the basement.”
“Wiseguy,” muttered the first, nodding.
Nice day—sunny outside and I hadn’t bled much. I was sat in a yelling cell as a bullet lost its flavor in my leg. The two stooges had me jacked to a polygraph. I’d breezed the Wittgenstein controls and we were fronting off to beat the band.
“I get a phonecall? Need to send a singing telegram to my rabbi.”
“You keep northin’ us Chief Blince’ll tear you a new asshole.”
“I need a new asshole—how soon can he get here?”
“You got a gun called a Glory Hand, Atom?”
I rolled a nicotine patch and lit it up. “Okay fellas, you got me. I’ll tell it like it happened. Now let’s see.”
And I spun the following, beginning with my habitation of an office on Saints Street and nothing doing. People think my business is all swapping the clever with rich clients bathchair-bound in a hothouse of flycatchers and septic orchids. Missing daughters and like that. In fact, I was just sat in contemplation when the phone rang. Siri Moonmute sounding wired.
Siri explained that she was now wanted for everything. She had never been into the perfect crime as she didn’t go for Gautier’s principle of virtue in correctness of form. I knew a girl could be perfect because of her flaws. The whole thing was subjective.
Siri was into purity—this it was possible to quantify. A pure crime is like a diamond in which no facet or depth is clouded by legality. It’s criminally saturated, every move from start to finish creating a breach in legislation. This was a headcrime Siri had pondered increasingly of late and with laws entering the statute books at a rate of thousands per year, it was getting easier all the time. So she’d done it, packing as many offenses as possible into each second. Her name smeared the copnet like a rash.
Siri started in on how the difficulties of evading detection were no longer an inducement and she’d been hurting for a new challenge, at which I remarked if she wasn’t careful she’d be sat cod-eyed in a bodyvan. Siri spoke in awe of the particle-science phenomenon of the singularity; a point at which all known laws broke down. If a substance was supposed to expand, in a singularity it contracted. If light was meant to bend, in a singularity it was stiff as a board. Where laws were created to explain behavior these squirls occurred every few months; but where laws were created to prevent behavior—like among people—they happened many times per second. The latter laws were patently inaccurate, and a pure crime was a statement of unmixed truth.
“Siri,” I stated, “don’t you understand that the cops will stick it in and break it off at a speed which will surprise everyone? Such pristine behavior as you display is the sole preserve of a mutant in a belfry.”
Siri remarked that I had failed to gauge the full extent to which she was gung-ho. She was chock full of that quality and would express it at the drop of a hat. “There was a point there, Atom, I’d set things up so that I was committing several hundred offenses in one instant, and I could feel the very atmosphere change—it was as though my misdemeanors had reached such a superdensity that they began to implode.”
“Like a black hole, collapsing in on itself?”
“Exactly.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like god. Could you come over?”
By the time I got there the area was under containment by the cops. Behind them a hole in space spiralled like the water spinning down a drain, a tornado of light sucking scraps of paper and nuggets of masonry out of view.
The trooper boy Marty Nada was stood at the cordon tape yelling through a bullhorn so I went to ask him the deal. He didn’t bother to lower the bullhorn. “Oh hi, Atom. Ah it’s a singularity of some kind, its gravity so powerful not even lies can escape. We’ve lost five officers going near that thing.”
“How’d it happen, they know?”
“Still guessing. Pun gun misfire? Etherics? Eschaton rifle’d do it, right person.”
“Uh, okay thanks Marty.”
“Sure Atom.”
Well, another day another dollar. But it has a bearing upon what happened the following afternoon when I got an out-of-town yell from the Caere Twins. These bottle-bald cuties were crime stylists who monitored the scene for crimes that went outside the known taxonomy of offense. A wholly new crime was rare and precious as white gold. They were camped out in Washington with the theory that a target moved least at the axis. I split the border to face with them in an apartment so small they had to sleep in the mirror. The place really served as a digital gun foundry. Forcing the gun scene from industry to desktop, the Crime Bill had freed it up for limitless configuration. The Twins were among the many who innovated firearms on the fly.
“Siri sent an ‘eyes only’ letter,” they chirped in unison. “With real eyes.”
The Twins gave me some tech laced with sarcasm so heavily encrypted it never really thawed into effect. It was like being flogged with a double helix. I finally extracted the fact that Siri had sent them an email just before her crescendo, but the feed had been jacked to their forge at the time and the message funnelled into a blank skeleton gun which had lain ready for impression.
“What was the message?”
“A command trail,” they said. “Two million keystrokes.”
“All this theory’s like eating hair,” I whined, impatient. Then the truth sunflared over my brainlobes—the only way to achieve the offense density Siri craved was to hack it, initiating a thousand thefts, frauds and intrusions in a split second. The program she created to do it now informed the design of the gun cooling in the Twins’ forge. They opened the panel and retrieved a firearm resembling a tin ammonite with a chicaned barrel and pupstock Steyr grip. Spiral cylinders were real fashionable then. All part of life’s kitsch tapestry.
“Etheric sampler in the butt,” said the Twins. “This gat’s her legacy and culmination, shadowboy, her tub of warm ashes. She’d want to be home.”
“You mean I should take it back and scatter the ammo? No, not me. The cops are right about a gun eventually getting used whether or not there’s a reason.”
“True of theirs, shadowboy. Be careful.”
My car had been replaced with an inflatable replica which burst when I put the key in the door. So I was on a clunker train to Beerlight. Carriage to myself until this big guy in gut braces bellies in. Looks at the empty seats, then lumbers right over to me, dropping down opposite. Regards me with a head like a throw cushion as the light and dark pass over us both.
“Staring is its own reward.”
“It certainly is.” In the pocket of my full-length void coat, the ammo-guzzler zinged against my palm.
“Shave the fuzz from the face of a moth, and what do you get?”
“Fatty Arbuckle?”
“Think