Boots

  * * *

  The waketimeman’s mechanical voice repeated the same phrase over and over until Mark got out of bed: “Wake Time ... Wake Time ... Wake Time ...” He stood up for the Morning Mantra.

  Gen 26, we live in the Heavens,

  Honoured is our name

  Our Ship has come from distant Sun

  Bringing Earthlings into Heaven

  Give us this day the will to be

  And let us not question our purpose

  As we were in the beginning

  Humans without end

  A-Men

  It was Day 5, so he put on his blue Day 5 overalls and went quickly to the canteen, secretly hoping to meet Rea on the way, or at least hoping to be able to sit beside her in the canteen. When he got there, it was already half full and he had difficulty finding her. He realised that it might have been the first time since childhood that he had actually sought someone out, that he had not just sat anywhere and exchanged pleasantries with whoever happened to be at the same table.

  When his roaming eye found Rea, Mark’s heart muscles started to behave erratically. He walked over to the long table at which Rea was sitting and waiting for the Servant Droid to bring her a wakemeal.

  When she saw him sitting down she smiled. She smiled and then he returned the same smile, a natural, authentic smile that erupted from within. They both felt nervous for no reason but also excited. They wanted to say something, but something beyond a pleasantry, something more meaningful than a mantra.

  As they stared at each other, communicating with their eyes, an emotocam spotted them making prolonged eye-contact. It alerted the director droid at once.

  Director Droid 5 immediately ran a full body scan on Mark and Rea and noticed an elevated heartbeat, raised serotonin levels and even some indicators of sexual excitement, such as nipple arousal and penile extension. It booted up a complete android camera crew and deployed seven floating camera droids around Mark and Rea, determined to get every possible angle, to be ready for every possible close up, to record every single emotion.

  A compere for a new Reality Show was also hastily dusted off. It called itself Dave Droid, and it had last been used on a long-discontinued quiz show called The Droid is Right from Gen 8.

  Dave approached the couple and introduced himself and the Show.

  “Hi there, viewers! I’m Dave Droid, and I’ll be your host for the Ship’s latest Reality Show: The Mark and Rea Show. Hold on to spacesuits viewers ’cos what we got here is a good old-fashioned Lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvve show! Let’s get to know the lovebirds right away!”

  He bent down, stuck a microphone between Mark and Rea, and went on: “So, how do you feel now? Tell the viewers all about your emotions. Share your happiness!”

  As he spoke, the physical symptoms of their desire were simultaneously displayed as medical readings at the bottom of the live vidcast, evidence to the viewers that Mark and Rea were really feeling something and that this was not a simulation.

  The clear signs of emotional attachment, combined with the titillation of the symptoms of sexual arousal, led to the Mark and Rea Show gaining instant syndication across the entire Ship. The vidcast was beamed live across all ten giant screens in the communal canteens. Everyone looked up from the yellow liquid that was always wakemeal on day 5, and stared into the eyes of the couple. Mark and Rea were the new stars of the Ship, living vessels for that most prized of emotions. The screens flashed the word ‘love’ in red letters under Mark and Rea’s heads.

  The compare repeated his question to the couple, this time more nervously, noting that the signs of love were fading rapidly in both of them.

  “Tell us how you feel. Tell us!”

  There was a long pause, and Mark and Rea stared hopelessly at each other. There could be no escape from the cameras now, no privacy, no secrets.

  Suddenly, their stare broke apart, their gaze fell to the table. All emotions were swept away. Cauterised. Cleansed.

  The compere Dave Droid pleaded with Mark and Rea to answer him. “Tell us how you feel! Share your emotions! We need to know. Tell us!”

  Mark looked straight into the camera and spoke with a cold and clinical voice, a hollow voice full of BluesPurps, the voice of the lost generations.

  “We are Gen 26. We believe in the Past, the Future and the Present. We know where we’ve come from and we know where we’re going. We are Gen 26.”

  The Intelligent Sexual Attraction Device

  (The I-SAD)

  Veronica O’Donghaile never liked her name. She thought her father had chosen it to annoy her, to deliberately saddle her with the initials VD.

  Village gossips whispered that Mr O’Donghaile was afflicted with the diseases of Venus himself. They pointed, in evidence, to his unhealthy obsession with cows’ udders, his marriage to a foreign girl, and his dreadful skin conditions.

  The latter were the direct result of his pathological aversion to washing. “God loves a stinker,” he told his daughter. “Sure, isn’t it written down in the bible that the only part of his body Jesus allowed to be washed was his feet? And even then, only by prostitutes!” Veronica tried to argue with him, but he always left the room in a huff. He would spend the rest of the night in the cow shed, caressing his bullocks and milking his udders, well into the early hours of the morning.

  Mr O’Donghaile was greatly concerned with his daughter’s chastity. To ensure her purity, he placed her in Ireland’s strictest boarding school, run by the Sisters of Scurvy. The nuns took great care to ensure all pupils knew that sex was dirty, and that girls were dirty. “The best part of life,” Sister Severicus used to say, “is when you die. Then you go to Heaven and have all your filthy sins washed away.”

  In her last year at the College of the Immaculately Immaculate Conception, Sister Severicus interrupted Veronica’s flagellation tutorial to tell her that her father had died. “It was a horribly gory, bloody accident,” the nun said. “Your father was trampled to death by his own bullocks, while he was probing them for anal parasites. They broke his yoke!”

  At the funeral, Veronica faked emotions she didn’t feel. She managed to look sorrowful, as her father’s coffin was lowered into the dark, sodden Earth. He was buried beside his favourite heifer, Hegel, in accordance with his wishes.

  At the reading of the will, Veronica found out that her father had left most of his estate to the cattle research charity, the Bovine Council. All that he bequeathed his daughter was Carrioneta, the carnivorous cow. However, as carnivorous cows are somewhat of a rarity, even in the west of Ireland, it fetched a high price at market.

  With enough money to sustain her for six months, Veronica headed off to the bright lights of Dublin.

  Bearing in mind her unusual childhood, it should surprise no-one to learn that she became an unusual adult. Genetic factors also played their part. For one thing, her IQ was the off the scale.

  Her father believed Veronica’s mental abilities were due to his “lactic hothousing”. As an infant, and even as a child, he fed her by strapping her to a cow’s udder. “Pasteurisation destroyed the nation,” he would say. “Take the milk from the udder, and your brain won’t suffer.”

  The real reason behind his daughter’s astounding intellect was that her mother, who had died in childbirth, was an alien.

  Her arrival on our planet was against her will. The Andromedans held a weekly lottery, The Space Draw. All female citizens were entered, like it or not. First prize was a one-way ticket to a distant world, with humanoid inhabitants.

  To spread the Andromedan seed far and wide, their biologists, who were all men, radically altered the genes of the lottery winners, who were all women. If they did not become impregnated by one of the native planet’s inhabitants within their first month, they dissolved into slime.

  Sloppy gene therapy meant that, in Veronica’s mother’s case, she dissolved into slime immediately after giving birth. Mr O’Donghaile didn’t believe in hospitals, so he insisted on a home birth. “Hospitals
are full of sick people,” he warned. “More people die in hospital than anywhere else.”

  The attending physician in the cow shed that night was a vet with a doctorate in bovine philosophy, and a life-long friend of Mr O’Donghaile. When Veronica’s mother bubbled away into a slimy mess, he consulted Hegel, the most intelligent cow present. They put the cause of death down to “her never drinking milk, and to her being foreign.”

  Her daughter, Veronica, grew into an exceptional beauty — if you happened to be from Andromeda. If not, then she was one of those girls that boys thought probably had a nice personality, but didn’t hang around long enough to find out. Like Richard III, she appeared to have been “sent before her time into this breathing world, scarce half made up.”

  Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder; and her eyes were certainly something to behold. They moved independently of each other, like a chameleons’, which many found disconcerting. One of her pupils was square and the other triangular, which allows Andromedans to see in several dimensions. Veronica didn’t inherit this ability, but she did shed black tears on nights with a full moon, when her eyes filled with dark matter sludge.

  Veronica’s skin was not as scaly as her mother’s had been, but it did flake away under the slightest wind. Her hands were covered in weeping warts, which could exhibit twenty-eight shades of green, depending on her mood. Her arms and legs were the same length, since Andromedans get from A to B by cartwheeling, rather than lugubrious bipedal perambulation.

  In short, Veronica’s appearance shocked. She was pointed at by children. Grown men walked in front of on-coming traffic, in their haste to avoid her. Hardened muggers thought twice and let her be. Alcoholics took the pledge of abstinence.

  Shortly after her arrival in Dublin, at the age of eighteen, Veronica entered what Andromedans call the sexup. To put it bluntly, she went into heat.

  Veronica realised that she had very little hope of copulation, but she was possessed by the irrepressible lust of the sexup. She tried picking men up in bars, but was barred from most of them. Andromedans are a literal race, and Veronica had misunderstood the phrase “to pick up”. She physically picked men up and tried to carry them out of the bar with her. They flayed about, like fish out of water, and she ended up dropping them all.

  Word spread quickly around Dublin. Soon, bouncers wouldn’t let her into nightclubs. Singles clubs said she should stay single. Even priests refused to admit her into their confessional boxes.

  Sitting on a bench by the River Liffey, a realisation dawned on her. Either she would have to change her appearance, or else, change peoples’ perception of her appearance.

  She considered cosmetic surgery, but rejected it. Her skin had a curious habit of dissolving plastic. She decided that if she couldn’t make herself more attractive, she would have to find a way to make people think she was attractive.

  Veronica passed sleepless nights studying the psychology of perception and the physiology of arousal. Within a month, she had built a machine that could, in theory, produce sexual arousal in others. It employed an atomic Bluetooth signal to activate the endocrine glands of those within a two-metre radius. It tricked their limbic systems into producing massive amounts of norepinephrine and dopamine.

  But how could she test it? There was little hope of enticing a man back to her apartment, where the machine sat, wedged between a toaster and a microwave. Attempting to dial a take-away man led to a police caution, and a civil law suit from a distraught pizza delivery boy.

  Her machine needed to be portable, she realised. If man would not come to Veronica, then Veronica would go to man. With a little tinkering, she managed to house her device inside the shell of a tablet device.

  The hardest part had been designing an imprinting function. Arousal needed to be limited to the first person the subject saw. Otherwise, the machine would create a monster. A sex-starved maniac, who would attempt to copulate with any and all orifices, in any and all directions.

  She had seen just how dangerous this could be in her experiment on Father Amadáin Analicán. When she last saw him, he was surrounded by police, at a loss to explain how he had formed such an intimate attachment with the exhaust pipe of a Fordo Fiestal.

  A sexual attraction device was not enough. She needed an intelligent sexual attraction device. She had to put the “I” in the “I-SAD”.

  One sunny autumn morning, she was ready to test it. She went south of the River Liffey, where all the pretty people live, and where standards of personal hygiene are better.

  Inside a trendy café, filled with men whose suits were even more expensive than their phones, she sipped a cappuccino. Its white froth stuck to her upper lip.

  Like a tigress, she scanned the room for prey. A handsome foreign man caught her eye. He was reading a newspaper in an alcove, with nobody else around. She crept up on him. Foam began to form at the edges of her mouth. When she was two metres away from him, she took the I-SAD out of her bag and switched it on.

  It powered up with a beep. The screen had only one icon — Sexup. With a smile, Veronica activated the atomic Bluetooth.

  A flashing antenna told her she was in range. Her heart began to race. Pus seeped from every orifice in a kaleidoscope of colours. Her warts glowed bright green. Sexup mucus is thought very becoming on Andromeda, but much less so on Earth. She increased the Sexual Attraction setting to maximum and said “Hello!”

  The man looked up from his newspaper. He smiled warmly. Perhaps even wildly. His eyes lit up. His nostrils flared. It was the face of a man who has just seen the love of his life for the first time.

  “Hello. Please ... Please ... Please sit down,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’d love to,” Veronica replied.

  No man had ever voluntarily engaged her in conversation before. She knew that her machine must be working.

  “Do you ... Are you ... Will you ...?’ the man said.

  Veronica could see his jugular vein jumping, as if it wanted to escape his neck. Even the veins in his temple throbbed. Sweat beads appeared all over his reddening face. His breathing was shallow but rapid.

  Fearing he would have a heart attack, she lowered the level of sexual attraction on the I-SAD.

  The conversation never really got started. Andromedans don’t have small talk, and the handsome foreigner was too aroused to form coherent sentences.

  Veronica decided to speed things up.

  “Would you like to come back to my place, to see my mucus collection?”

  “Wow! I’d love to. I’ve never seen a mucus collection before!” he said, almost shouting.

  He got up to leave, grinning inanely. Veronica smiled back, more excited than she could ever remember being. They both rushed from the cafe.

  In her haste, Veronica accidentally left I-SAD on the table. Carried away by emotion and desire as she was, it was not until her new beau’s body language started to change that she realised something was wrong.

  Once he was out of range, the arousal took only a couple of minutes to disappear. Veronica’s heart sank as she saw his eyes lose their lustful desire. They became the eyes of fear and disgust she was used to. His smile turned to a scowl. His grin, a growl.

  “I’m sorry. I have to go. I have to ... I have to return a library book, with much urgency,” he said, in a clipped foreign accent.

  “Maybe you could see my mucus collection some other time?” she said, without any real hope.

  “No. Now, I remember. I have an allergy to the mucus. Goodbye.”

  Veronica’s panicked when she realised that she had left the I-SAD in the café. She hurried back, but the I-SAD had vanished. Stolen, she was certain.

  She could, of course, manufacture another. But what would become of the stolen one? If the thief discovered its powers, it could be misused. Only now did she consider the ethics of her device. She shuddered when she considered what might happen if the machine was mass-produced.

  She had to get the I-SAD back. She headed deep in
to the Dublin’s Northside, to the inner city slums where stolen goods are bought and sold. She asked every lowlife she could find if they had a cheap tablet PC for sale.

  After a few hours, she heard the wail of an old woman, followed by the shriek of a young man. As they grew nearer, she could make out what they were saying.

  “Cum mere, me darlin’ boy. You’re after breakin’ me heart in twain, so ye have.”

  “Will ye get away to f*ck, ye steaming ole crone!”

  Veronica followed the voices. The woman was in her sixties. Her grey hair was strewn madly over her face. Her eyes, wild with excitement. Her clothes, half undone.

  She had cornered a boy against some railings. In spite of the cold, sweat stains were visible on his shiny tracksuit

  “Jaysus, Mrs Brennan. Have ye cracked or what?” he said.

  “Sure, I knows yis is a wee bit younger than me. But luv is blind!” she said.

  “I’ll bleedin’ blind you, if you don’t cop on!”

  His voice was quivering. There was far more fear in it than anger.

  The woman pinned him against some railings, with a strength incredible for her age. He struggled to get free, but her grip was too strong.

  “Ah now, don’t be cruel. Give us a kiss, me oul Segosha,” the old woman said.

  She pursued her lips and moved in to kiss him. The boy defended himself by placing a tablet device in front of his face. With a fierce sweep of her hand, she flung it aside.

  Seizing the opportunity, Veronica picked up her I-SAD and scurried away. She ran all the way back to the river, not stopping until she reached the middle of the Ha’penny Bridge.

  The lead grey sky released a misty autumnal rain. Darkness fell. Gloom rose from the black river.

  Veronica took the I-SAD out of her bag. When no-one was looking, she slipped it through the railings. She knew she had to destroy it. She knew its power was too corrupting. She knew the risk of abuse was too great. All this she knew, and yet she paused. Her hand held on to the I-Sad.

  She looked to the heavens, to Andromeda.

  She dropped the I-Sad into the river. It plopped into nothingness. Her hopes and dreams sank with it.

  Sex, she realised, would always be something other people did.

  The Smartphone Addicts and Precinct 9

  “Give me back my memory!” the fat woman snarled, looking more pig than human.

  “I ain't got it,” the dealer snapped back.

  He wasn't much of a dealer. It was third rate junk, the memslush he pedalled. Every credit he made went into feeding his own addiction. Memory addicts are like that. Their addiction swells to feed their wallet.

  When they can't scrape together enough credits for a terabyte, they try to resell stuff that's already been cut three of four times. Remembered till it does more harm than good. The memories get all twisted and confused, kinda schizoid. They turn poisonous, like caviar that's gone through the guts of a beggar. But you can’t tell a salivating junkie that what he’s downloading is just a turd within a turd within a turd.

  The woman pushed the weasel pusher against a wall. Her eyes burned with all the rage and hatred of an unfed child.

  “Gimme back my memories! I know you've got them! I know you're holding out on me!”

  “I ain't got them. I swear! You're not part of me stash. I never took nothing from you. Never!” the dealer whined, trying to break free of her grip.

  If it had been up to me, I'd have just left them there and rode away. It was a bum collar. The city’s full of squalling memjunks. We don’t have cells to hold them for more than a couple of days, so why bother with the paperwork?

  But my partner wasn't the walking-away type. She just couldn't turn a blind eye, Emergency Officer Jen. As soon as I looked at her, I knew we'd have to break it up. Just my luck to get partnered with a fresh-faced militia.

  We walked towards them. Ex-teacher Jen's hand was on the pepper spray but mine was on my gun.

  “NYPD. Put your hands up and turn your backs to the wall!” Jen shouted.

  You could tell she got a thrill every time she said that, even though she sounded about as threatening as a cheerleader.

  They saw us and froze, with that deer-in-headlights look you find in the hard core addict. You suck out the memory and all that's left is instinct. It was fight or flight time for the memjunks.

  A snarl grew across the woman's lips and her hands turned to claws. The boy crouched and his ferrety eyes looked for a getaway.

  “We got a runner and a biter,” I said to Jen.

  “You take the runner, I'll take the girl,” she said. “And remember, O'Toole, use minimum force.”

  I didn't like this freckled rookie telling me what to do, but I held my tongue. I tried not to think about how easy it would be to put a couple of bullets through the addicts' brains. The world was on the edge. Two more dead junkies wouldn’t get noticed.

  The boy ran down an alley and I ran after him. It was pointless calling for backup. There wasn't time and we were stretched too thin.

  He turned down another alleyway but this one didn't have any street lights. There were more and more of these dark spots, spreading out over the city. We couldn't even map them anymore.

  I paused for a moment to work up my courage. Then I took out my flashlight and headed into the darkness. A tunnel of light showed upended bins, but my nose could have told me that. The stink didn't turn the rats off none. Their beady little red eyes reflected in the flashlight and gave me the creeps.

  I was about to give up the ghost when I heard a trashcan lid fall onto the ground. I turned my light to the clang and there he was, hiding in the refuse.

  “You know what I want, kid. Hand it over.”

  “I ain't got one. Honest!”

  “Listen up, boy. Either you give it to me now, or else I put a slug in your brain and take it from your dead body. If it wasn't for the paperwork, your brains would be wrapped around the insides of that trashcan already. Now, for the last time, hand over the smartphone!”

  He reached into his pocket and handed it to me. It was a Samapp 950 — typical clone hardware. I put on my protective glasses and switched it on.

  A sickly green light lit up part of the alley, throwing my shadow onto the wall behind me, making me look like a 10-foot tall green giant.

  “You're holding kid: 4 life memories, 16 events — 160 zipped terabytes. You're looking at a 5-year stretch in the pen for this. Unless ...”

  “They're for personal use, man. I ain't no dealer. It's a possession rap, that's all. You'll never made dealing stick.”

  “What — you got a smart ass lawyer on speed dial, kid? You know that, under Martial Law, even possession of a smartphone means you don't get no Public Attorney. You're going down, boy, and the pen's a mean place these days. Mean place. Unless ...”

  “Unless what?” he asked me.

  “Turn in a couple of the big fish and I'll see what I can do.”

  He thought about that for a while, weighing up his options. I knew he'd come round to ratting. There's no honour among smartphone criminals.

  “It goes higher than you know, man. It's all screwed up. It's —”

  There was a look of fear in the boy's eyes all of a sudden. I heard a squeal. There were ferals nearby. Damn close too.

  I turned around and there they were. Two of them, with another crawling out of a manhole.

  My flashlight had stunned them but only for a second. I'd heard the rumours, but this was the first time I'd seen them in the flesh. There was nothing human left in them. They were naked, covered in scabs and pus and completely wild. They were men minus mind. Soulless creatures.

  The dealer saw his chance. He pushed me to the ground and started to run away. But then he stopped and came back to grab his smartphone.

  In a second they were on him, drawn by the sickly green light of the screen. They tore at him with their nails and teeth, like wolves, like demons. I've seen a lot of things in my twenty years on the force, b
ut I've never seen anything like that.

  I let off four rounds, one for each of the ferals and one for the dealer. And then I stood on the phone, smashing it under my boot.

  When I got back to my partner, she was covered in blood. Partly her own, but mainly blood from the girl. There had been a struggle, I could see, but I couldn't get much from my rookie partner. She was mumbling, shaken.

  “I couldn't stop her. The mace didn't stop her. She just kept lashing out. Then she caught hold of my hair. She wouldn't let go. She was scraping my face, like a mad woman.”

  When we got back to the precinct, she was still pretty shook up. I told her to wash up and grab a bite to eat. There would be forms to fill in, lies to tell, secrets to keep. But not tonight.

  The precinct was in chaos. It got worse every night.

  I saw Captain Klinsky at the other side of the office, across a sea of panicked faces and cops that hadn't slept properly in weeks.

  The cap was shouting down an old black phone. The veins in his thick neck were bulging under his red face.

  “Look, I need more cops, real cops. I'm down to one cop for every three volunteers. Soon I'll be sending rookies out with rookies. And for the love of God, will you ferry these junkies outta here and stick them in the camps. The cells are overflowing. I can't squeeze any more in. I've got them tied to the radiators in the basement. I want them outta here! You hear me? You ... hello? Hello?”

  He slammed the phone down and ordered his secretary to get the Emergency Council back on the line.

  “Rough night?” I said to him, lighting a cigarette and offering him one.

  “Sure,” he said. “At least there's one good thing about the Emergency — nobody's worried about smoking anymore!”

  “Still no sign of reinforcements?” I asked him.

  “I think we're more likely to see the Second Coming!” the cap said.

  I was hoping to get a real cop by my side, so we could stick Jen in the back seat. She was a nice kid, but when all hell is breaking loose, nice kids don’t last long.

  “What about the army? Where the hell are the troops? What's the point of Marshall Law if the cavalry aren't charging in?” I asked him.

  “My guess is the army's holed up somewhere with all the politicos and the corporates. Whatever's left of the army. I mean, they were major screen freaks too, y'know. Who knows how many turned into memjunks! We’re on our own. What's it like on the streets tonight?” he asked me, “now that they’ve powered down the internet.”

  “Everyone’s selling or trying to score. They don't need the internet no more, Cap. They're trading on the street, using old-school USB cables and memory boxes.”

  Jen came over to us and asked the Cap to go home early. He could see she was frazzled, but he gave her the old line about getting back onto the horse after you fall off, and told her to get back on the beat.

  Then he gave us an assignment — a special assignment. He'd got wind of a shooting gallery in the old Wall Street building and wanted us to investigate.

  Manhattan was a hive of screenfreaks and had been ever since the Emergency started. It was still the city's major smartphone dealing centre. I couldn't think of anywhere I less wanted to be, especially with a rookie in tow who was beginning to crack.

  I told the Cap I needed more men, but he said he couldn't spare them. He promised to try to send me more later, after I radioed with the hive's exact location.

  Half-an-hour later we were there. Smack in the middle of the Wall Street ghetto. Most of the lights had been knocked out, but there were a couple of police checkpoints at either end of the street. Their floodlights lit things up well enough.

  I spoke to the sergeant in charge, a nervous looking guy of about 50 who stank of whiskey.

  I was angling to borrow some of his guys, but when I saw them, I knew they’d be more trouble than they were worth. They were all rookies, chewing gum and wearing khaki and a false bravado. Last month they were cooks, cleaners and bookworms, and all the other deadbeats who couldn't afford the latest phones and the latest downloads. Now they were emergency cops, but barely able to shoot in a straight line and with a life expectancy that could be measured in weeks. Not that the recruitment officers mentioned that fact, of course.

  The sergeant walked with me to the steps of the Stock Exchange.

  “How long you been stationed here?” I asked him.

  “Third night,” he told me. “Longer than most survive here. Living on borrowed time.”

  After shaking his hand, which was shaking all by itself, I left him there — a shell of a man guarding a shell of a building, commanding a bunch of losers and senior citizens.

  Me and Jen walked up the steps and this time both of us were holding tight to our guns.

  We put on some night-vision specs the Captain had given us. If this place was half as infested as he thought, then we wouldn't want to advertise our presence there with a flashlight.

  In less than a minute, we found one of them, hunkering in a corner. He was hunched over his smartphone, pawing at it. He was dressed in a shabby suit that had probably cost thousands of dollars. We walked towards him but he didn't notice. When they're using, addicts are easily trapped. The world outside their screen almost ceases to exist.

  “What's app, bro?” I asked him, pointing my gun at his face.

  “Officer, I'm just—”

  “Just calling your sick dying grandmother. We know. We've heard it all before, see.”

  “How many memories you holding?” Jen asked him, trying to sound tough.

  “Just a few. Just for personal use. Just recreational usage, Officer. I'm not an addict.”

  “Yeah, mister. The whole city's full of users and not a single one's an addict. How many hours a day you upto? You still sleeping the whole night through? How many personalities you on?”

  I put my pistol to his temple and grabbed the phone out of his hand. He broke into a cold sweat the second he was without it.

  “Please Officer. Please give it back! Please!”

  It's the whining that gets to me. It's the whining that makes my trigger finger itch. I put on my protective glasses and checked his profiles. He was a financial analyst, a hooker, a teenage girl, a teenage boy, a systems engineer and a shipping clerk.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Francis ... Lola, Patricia, Frank, Michael, John,” he told me.

  “How long you been using?”

  “A year, I guess. It gets hard to keep track of time. It gets hard to keep track of anything. I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m living in the screen, in the memories of others, in the memories of their life before the smartphone. But I can quit. I will quit. I'll never use a smartphone again, Officer. Never.”

  “Never?” I asked him, knowing what was coming next.

  “Never!” he said. “I just need one more hit first. I just need—”

  BANG!

  I don't know what snapped inside Officer Jen. She went in too deep, too fast, I suppose. She shot him once in the head, but like the Captain suspected, there was a nest of them there, financial wizkids holed up beside their dead monitors.

  We only just managed to shoot our way back to the stairs. Jen could have made it too, but she stayed too long. She just stayed at the top of the stairs, shooting them one by one as they ran out the main door. Soon she ran out of bullets. The last I saw of her she was being dragged back inside.

  They swarmed out of the Stock Exchange and overran the Police Checkpoint. In my squad car, I just about made it back to the precinct.

  And that's where I am now, writing up this report.

  There doesn't seem much point covering up the truth now, so I've told it just like it happened.

  They're outside now: the screenheads, the memory junkies, the ferals — thousands of them, maybe more. Maybe the whole of New York City is out there.

  We can't hold them off much longer. Ammo's getting low. We can't raise the Emergency Council.

 
I don't know why they came here. The power grid went down a couple of hours ago, but we've got generator power. Maybe that's what they're after. They need to recharge their phones. You know what addicts are like — they'll do anything for a fix.

  Extracts from Novels

  The Headless Chicken

  (Adapted from the novel Letters from the Ministry)