Tales From the Nightside

  Liza looked at me for a long moment. She wanted to laugh, but she could see the seriousness in my face, hear it in my voice, telling her that there was nothing laughable about Silicon Heaven.

  “Sex . . . with computers?” she said numbly. “I don’t believe it. How is that even possible?”

  “This is the Nightside,” said Dead Boy. “We do ten impossible things before breakfast, just for a cheap thrill. Abandon all taboos, ye who enter here.”

  “I won’t believe it until I see it,” said Liza, and there was enough in her voice beyond mere stubbornness that I gave the nod to Dead Boy. We were going to have to go all the way with this, and hope there were still some pieces left to pick up afterwards. Dead Boy spoke nicely to his car, and the doors swung open.

  We stepped out onto Rotten Row, and the ambience hit us like a closed fist. The night air was hot and sweaty, almost feverish, and it smelled of spilled blood and sparking static. Blue-white moonlight gave the street a cold, alien look, defiantly hostile and unsafe. I could feel the pressure of unseen watching eyes, cold and calculating, and casually cruel. And over all, a constant feeling that we didn’t belong here, that we had no business being here, that we were getting into things we could never hope to understand or appreciate. But I have made a business, and a very good living, out of going places where I wasn’t wanted, and finding out things no-one wanted me to know. I turned slowly around, letting the whole street get a good look at me. My hard-earned reputation was normally enough to keep the flies off, but you never knew what desperate acts a man might be driven to, in a street like Rotten Row.

  The futuristic car’s doors all closed by themselves, and there was the quiet but definite sound of many locks closing. Liza looked back at the car, frowning uncertainly.

  “Is it safe to just leave it here, on its own?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dead Boy, patting the bonnet fondly. “My sweetie can look after herself.”

  Even as they were speaking, a slim gun barrel emerged abruptly from the side of the car, and fired a brief but devastating bolt of energy at something moving not quite furtively enough in the shadows. There was an explosion, flames, and a very brief scream. Various shadowy people who’d started to emerge into the street, and display a certain covetous interest in the futuristic car, had a sudden attack of good sense and disappeared back into the shadows. Dead Boy sniggered loudly.

  “My car has extensive self-defence systems, a total lack of scruples about using them, and a really quite appalling sense of humour. She kept one would-be thief locked in the boot for three weeks. He’d probably still be there, if I hadn’t noticed the flies.”

  In his own way, he was trying to distract Liza and make her laugh, but she only had eyes for Silicon Heaven. So I took the lead, and strolled over to the door as though I had every right to be there. Liza and Dead Boy immediately fell in beside me, not wanting to be left out of anything. Up close, the door didn’t look like much; just an everyday old-fashioned wooden door with the paint peeling off it in long strips . . . but this was Rotten Row, where ordinary and everyday were just lies to hide behind. I sneered at the tacky brass doorknob, sniffed loudly at the entirely tasteless brass door knocker, and didn’t even try to touch the door itself. I didn’t want the people inside thinking I could be taken out of the game that easily.

  I thrust both hands deep into my coat pockets, and surreptitiously ran my fingertips over certain useful items that might come in handy for a little light breaking and entering. A private investigator needs to know many useful skills. In the end, I decided to err on the side of caution, and gave Dead Boy the nod to start things off, on the grounds that since he was dead, whatever happened next wouldn’t affect him as much as the rest of us. He grinned widely, and drew back a grey fist. And the door swung slowly open, all by itself. I gestured quickly for Dead Boy to hold back. A door opening by itself is rarely a good sign. At the very least, it means you’re being watched . . . and that the people inside don’t think they have anything to fear from you entering. Or it could just be one big bluff. The Nightside runs on the gentle art of putting one over on the rubes.

  “Are we expecting trouble?” said Liza, as I stood still, considering the open door.

  “Always,” Dead Boy said cheerfully. “It’s only the threat of danger and sudden destruction that makes me feel alive.”

  “Then by all means, you go in first and soak up the punishment,” I said generously.

  “Right!” said Dead Boy, brightening immediately. He kicked the door wide open and stalked forward into the impenetrable darkness beyond. His voice drifted back to us: “Come on! Give me your best shot, you bastards! I can take it!”

  Liza looked at me. “Is he always like this?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “This is why most people won’t work with him. Personally, I’ve always found him very useful for hiding behind when the bullets start flying. Shall we go?”

  Liza looked at the open doorway, and the darkness beyond, her face completely free of any expression. “I don’t want to do this, John. I just know something really bad will happen in there; but I need to know the truth. I need to remember what I’ve forgotten, whether I want to or not.”

  She stepped determinedly forward, her small hands clenched into fists at her sides, and I moved quickly to follow her through the doorway. My shoulder brushed against hers, and I could feel the tension in her rock-hard muscles. I thought it was something simple: fear or anticipation. I should have known better.

  The darkness disappeared the moment the door closed behind us, and a bright, almost painful glare illuminated the room we’d walked into. Solid steel walls surrounded us, a good forty feet a side, and even the floor and the ceiling were made from the same brightly gleaming metal. Our own distorted images stared back at us from the shining walls. Dead Boy stood in the middle of the room, glaring pugnaciously around him, ready to hit anything that moved or even looked at him funny, but we were the only ones there. There was no obvious way out, and when I looked back, even the door we’d come through had disappeared.

  “I don’t understand,” said Liza. “This room is a hell of a lot bigger than the shop front suggested.”

  “In the Nightside, the interior of a building is often much bigger than its exterior,” I said. “It’s the only way we can fit everything in.”

  There was no obvious source for the sharp, stark light that filled the steel room. The air was dry and lifeless, and the only sounds were the ones we made ourselves. I moved over to the nearest wall, and studied it carefully without touching it. Up close, the metal was covered with faint tracings, endless lines in endless intricate patterns, like . . . painted-on circuitry. The patterns moved slowly, changing subtly under the pressure of my gaze, twisting and turning as they transformed themselves into whole new permutations. As though the wall was thinking, or dreaming. I gestured for Dead Boy and Liza to join me, and pointed out the patterns. Dead Boy just shrugged. Liza looked at me.

  “Does this mean something to you?”

  “Not . . . as such,” I said. “Could be some future form of hieroglyphics. Could be some form of adaptive circuitry. But it’s definitely not from around here. This is future tech, machine code from a future time line . . . There are rumours that Silicon Heaven is really just one big machine, holding everything within.”

  “And we’ve just walked right into it,” said Dead Boy. “Great. Anyone got a can opener?”

  He leaned in close to study the wall tracings, and prodded them with a long pale finger. Blue-grey lines leapt from the wall onto his finger and swarmed all over it. Dead Boy automatically pulled his finger back, and the circuitry lines stretched away from the wall, clinging to his dead flesh with stubborn strength. They crawled all over his hand and shot up his arm, growing and multiplying all the time, twisting and curling and leaping into the air. Dead Boy grabbed a big handful of the stuff, wrenched it away, and then popped it into his mouth. Dead Boy has always been one for the direct approach. He chew
ed thoughtfully, evaluating the flavour. The blue-grey lines slipped back down his arm and leapt back onto the wall, becoming still and inert again.

  “Interesting,” said Dead Boy, chewing and swallowing. “Could use a little salt, though.”

  I offered him some, but he laughed, and declined.

  Liza made a sudden pained noise, and her knees started to buckle. I grabbed her by one arm to steady her, but I don’t think she even knew I was there. Her face was pale and sweaty, and her mouth was trembling. Her eyes weren’t tracking; her gaze was fixed on something only she could see. She looked like she’d just seen her own death, up close and bloody. I held her up, gripping both her arms firmly, and said her name loudly, right into her face. Her eyes snapped back into focus, and she got her feet back under her again. I let go of her arms, but she just stood where she was, looking at me miserably.

  “Something bad is going to happen,” she said, in a small, hopeless voice. “Something really bad . . .”

  A dozen robots rose silently up out of the metal floor, almost seeming to form themselves out of the gleaming steel. More robots stepped out of the four walls, and dropped down from the ceiling. It seemed Silicon Heaven had a security force after all. The robots surrounded us on every side, silent and implacable, blocky mechanical constructs with only the most basic humanoid form. Liza shrank back against me. Dead Boy and I moved quickly to put her between us.

  For a long moment the robots stood utterly still, as though taking the measure of us, or perhaps checking our appearance against their records. They were roughly human in shape, but there was nothing of human aesthetics about them. They were purely functional, created to serve a purpose and nothing more. Bits and pieces put together with no covering, their every working open to the eye. There were crystals and ceramics and other things moving around inside them, while strange lights came and went. Sharp-edged components stuck out all over them, along with all kinds of weapons, everything from sharp blades and circular saws to energy weapons and blunt grasping hands. They had no faces, no eyes, but all of them were orientated on the three of us. They knew where we were.

  Many things about them made no sense at all, to human eyes and human perspectives. Because human science had no part in their making.

  They all moved forward at the same moment, suddenly and without warning, metal feet hammering on the metal floor. They did not move in a human way, their arms and legs bending and stretching in unnatural ways, their centres of gravity seeming to slip back and forth as needed. They reached for us with their blocky hands, all kinds of sharp things sticking out of their fingers. Buzz saws rose out of bulking chests, spinning at impossible speeds. Energy weapons sparked and glowed, humming loudly as they powered up. The robots came for us. They would kill us if they could, without rage or passion or even satisfaction, blunt instruments of Silicon Heaven’s will.

  I’ve always prided myself on my ability to talk my way out of most unpleasant situations, but they weren’t going to listen.

  Dead Boy stepped forward, grabbed the nearest robot with brisk directness, picked it up and threw it at the next nearest robot. They both had to have weighed hundreds of pounds, but that was nothing to the strength in Dead Boy’s unliving muscles. The sheer impact slammed both robots to the steel floor, denting it perceptibly, the sound almost unbearably loud. But though both robots fell in a heap, they untangled themselves almost immediately and rose to their feet again, undamaged.

  Dead Boy punched a robot in what should have been its head, and the whole assembly broke off and flew away. The robot kept coming anyway. Another robot grabbed Dead Boy’s shoulder from behind with its crude steel hand, the fingers closing like a mantrap. The purple greatcoat stretched and tore, but Dead Boy felt no pain. He tried to pull free, and snarled when he found he couldn’t. He had to wrench himself free with brute strength, ruining his coat, and while he was distracted by that, another robot punched him in the back of the head.

  I’m sure I heard bone crack and break. It was a blow that would have killed any ordinary man, but Dead Boy had left ordinary behind long ago. The blow still sent him staggering forward, off balance, and straight into the arms of another robot. The uneven arms slammed closed around him immediately, forcing the breath out of his lungs with brutal strength. But Dead Boy only breathes when he needs to talk. He broke the hold easily, and yanked one of the robot’s arms right out of its socket. He used the arm as a club, happily hammering the robot about the head and shoulders, smashing pieces off and damaging others. But even as bits of the robot flew through the air, it kept coming, and Dead Boy had to back away before it. And while he was concentrating on one robot, the others closed in around him.

  They swarmed all over him, clinging to his arms, beating at his head and shoulders, trying to drag him down. He struggled valiantly, throwing away one robot after another with dreadful force, but they always came back. He was inhumanly strong, but there were just so many of them. He disappeared inside a crowd of robots, steel fists rising and falling like jackhammers, over and over again, driving Dead Boy to his knees. And then they cut at him, with their steel blades and whirring buzz saws and vicious hands.

  While the majority of robots were dealing with Dead Boy, the remainder closed in on me, and Liza. She’d frozen, her face utterly empty, her body twitching and shaking. I gently but firmly pushed her behind me, out of the way. Our backs were to the nearest wall, but not too close.

  I was thinking furiously, trying to find a way out of this. Most of my useful items were magical in nature, rather than scientific. And while I knew quite a few nasty little tricks to use against the living and the dead and those unfortunate few stuck in between . . . I didn’t have a damned thing of any use against robots. Certainly throwing pepper into their faces wasn’t going to work. I don’t carry a gun. I don’t usually need them.

  I backed up as far as I dared, herding Liza behind me, and fired up my gift. My inner eye snapped open, and immediately my Sight found just the right places for me to stand, and where and when to dodge, so that the robots couldn’t touch me. Their blocky hands reached for me again and again, but I was never there, already somewhere else, one step ahead of them. Except the more they closed in, the less room there was for me to move in. I managed to be in the right place to trip a few and send them crashing into one another, but all I was doing was buying time.

  I knew what was happening to Dead Boy, but there wasn’t a damned thing I could do.

  One robot aimed an energy weapon at me. I waited till the very last moment, and then sidestepped, and the energy beam seared past me to take out the robot on my other side. It exploded messily, bits and pieces flying across the room. They ricocheted off the other robots harmlessly, but one piece of shrapnel passed close enough to clip off a lock of my hair. Liza didn’t react at all.

  The robots had discovered they couldn’t hurt Dead Boy, so they decided to pull him apart. They grabbed him by the arms and legs, stretched him helpless in midair between them, and did their best to tear him limb from limb. He struggled and cursed them vilely, but in the end, they were powerful machines and he was just a dead man.

  Liza darted suddenly forward from behind me, grabbed up the robot arm that Dead Boy had torn off, and used it like a club against the nearest robot. She swung the arm with both hands, using all her strength, her eyes wide and staring, lips drawn back in an animal snarl. She wasn’t strong enough to damage the robot, but I admired her spirit. We weren’t in her world any more, but she was still doing her best to fight back. But she still couldn’t hope to win, and neither could Dead Boy, so as usual it was down to me.

  I concentrated, forcing my inner eye all the way open, till I could See the world so clearly it hurt. I scanned the robots with my augmented vision, struggling to understand through the pain, and it didn’t take me long to find the robots’ basic weakness. They had no actual intelligence of their own; they were all receiving their orders from the same source, through the same mechanism. I moved swiftly among th
e robots, dancing in their blind spots, yanking the mechanisms out, one after another. And one by one the robots froze in place, cut off from their central command, helpless without orders. They stood around the metal room like so many modern art sculptures . . . and I sat down suddenly and struggled to get my breathing back under control, while my third eye, my inner eye, slowly and thankfully eased shut.

  I have a gift for finding things, but it’s never easy.

  Dead Boy pulled and wriggled his way free from the robots holding him, looked in outrage at what they’d done to his purple greatcoat, and kicked some of the robots about for a bit, just to ease his feelings. Liza looked about her wildly, still clutching her robot arm like a club. I got up from the floor and said her name a few times, and she finally looked at me, personality and sanity easing slowly back into her face. She looked at what she was holding, and dropped it to the floor with a moue of distaste. I went over to her, but she didn’t want to be comforted.

  A voice spoke to us, out of midair. A calm, cultured voice, with a certain amount of resignation in it.

  “All right, enough is enough. We didn’t think the security bots would be enough to stop the famous John Taylor and the infamous Dead Boy . . . or should that be the other way round . . . but we owed it to our patrons to try. You might have been having an off day. It happens. And the bots were nearing the end of their warranty . . . Anyway, you’d better come on through, and we’ll talk about this. I said Liza Barclay would come back to haunt us if we just let her go, but of course no-one ever listens to me.”

  “I’ve been here . . . before?” said Liza.

  “You don’t remember?” I said quietly.

  “No,” said Liza. “I’ve never seen this place before.” But she didn’t sound as certain as she once had. I remembered her earlier premonition, just before the robots appeared, when she’d known something bad was about to happen. Perhaps she’d known because something like it had happened the last time she was here. Unless she was remembering something else, even worse, still to come . . .