A gaol can give you a role [SLA fiction]


Incessant rain.

The slurry of nearly a thousand years of Progress.

Here, two levels from the sky, they had both.

Something so clean and pure, tainted irrevocably by the mire.

But the purity was an illusion, the child of countless years of sin and destruction, the rape of the planet and the weak and insipid attempt to correct it. Somewhere, out near the atmosphere generators, the water was born - a by product of the refusal to give up this giant planet to the wastes that sought to claim it. Life as a side-effect of refusing to submit to death. It was almost poetic. Like most things in SLA industries, it had worked too well. It did precisely what was needed of it. Like most things in SLA industries, it brought with it a whole host of new problems.

What was the old saying? Throwing good money after bad.

Good money after good money thrown into the pit bad money had created. But if it wasn’t thrown in, then the pit would be empty and demand something else. No one seemed inclined to come up with a new solution, and there was always more money. Money was made constantly in the World of Progress. Lives, whole planets went in one end, and money came out.

These thoughts were far too clear for Shiver Captain Thawn. He sat in his office and stared at the wall. Neutral grey. The damp was coming in again. It was collecting in a bucket in the corner of the room as it dripped through the ceiling. The wind, foetid with the stench of thousands of people living closely together, still managed to find its way through the upper levels on nights like this and rattle the set of his window through the armoured grate that protected him from the idle vengeance of an angry population. It didn’t stop the rain lashing against it though, pattering angrily as if it resented his presence there, or at least his immunity to its chilling, irritating fall. Thousands upon thousands of drops, wasted against the window, carried on to the Shiver station and dashed to bits. Thawn rubbed his stubble coated chin and wondered what to do about his lucidity. A small stash of Alice was taped to the back of his desk, behind the bottom drawer. He used to keep it openly in his top drawer until that fucking bastard James had tried rifling through his stuff while he’d been out attending to the nursing of some freshly qualified Slops.

Thawn remembered it well.

Too well.

The man had been angling for promotion. Corporate arse licker. He’d made Sergeant in three months. Finding his commanding officer knee deep in drugs and contraband would have been the final feather in his cap.

Stupid bastard had offered Thawn the chance to retire instead.

Thawn had shot him three times through the face with a FEN 603.

The man had twitched and spewed blood from his ruined mouth, convulsing on the floor for a full three minutes before he’d finally lain still.

(Teeth had been on the ground. He’d stepped on one. It had crunched.)

Thawn had carried his body out with the help of his remaining sergeant, thrown him in to the gutter behind the station where the rats had fallen on him even before the two Shivers had let go of the body.

No one had said anything. James had been an arsehole. Bad for morale, and probably stooped in sin. Nothing illegal, that wasn’t his style. Just sin; treating people as things, objects, the kind of stuff no one ever got arrested for, that people tolerated. He was better off dead. None of the other staff under him would inform command what he’d done. After all, he’d turned blind eyes to most of their actions. He knew what it was like on the street. Constant risk of death for doing nothing more than your job, gang leaders taking you on to keep their position. The company said you had to arrest them, punish them appropriately. Thawn knew that when fighting against these scum, if you lost, you died. So, if his underlings happened to accidentally crack a skull far too hard, or if prisoners had accidents, or if for some reason a whole pack of human rats from his sector washed up out in the cannibal sector with the rest of the sewage, Thawn knew nothing about it. James had written about it in an extensive report he’d been planning to file when he was made captain. Thawn had found it when he’d ripped open the man’s locker to retrieve his belongings. “Thick as thieves… a system of hand-shakes and back scratching… rampant rules infringements”. If there had been any doubt that James’ death might have spread, then after Thawn had left the document on the canteen table all that doubt was gone. Most of the station were listed by name and all the infractions James had ever observed noted down in precise detail.

Naturally, Thawn had kept a copy of these personally on a data disk behind his locker.

No point being foolish.

Outside the rain howled.

Thawn was snapped from his reverie – his dark green suit, stained and old and for wear when he wasn’t on patrol, seemed somehow brighter today - and wondered if the howl had been the wind and the rain, or some beast risen up from the sewers, or a citizen going feral.

Or something else.

The thing that haunted him.

He wished he knew what it was.

It was tangible, physical and utterly unknowable.

Left over from his chemical dreams, always on the edge of his mind, waiting to intrude. It was horrible and monstrous, something that wanted him, stalked him, yet despite how abhorrent it was, it was not repulsive. It drew him in, and not just with the morbid curiosity of the insatiably curious. The scent of the Alice invaded his nostrils, wholly imaginary but as real as the paranoid feelings that plagued him. Sweet and wholly synthetic, Alice tasted to him of lemons and sour wine, smelled of it. Felt of it. He could feel it now, for it came to him whenever the drug called to him, whenever the feeling of the looming, desiring threat made itself known. Memories again flashed by, now utterly inextricable from the lure of the Alice. The visit uptown with his school when he was a boy, when the good will of the company had favour their trip and he’d tasted actual, real, lemonade. The graduation from Shiver training and the wine he’d splashed out to celebrate with his girlfriend of the time. That night he’d stood on guard duty on Regeneration Day when the rain had thinned almost to the point of stopping and the clouds had briefly parted to allow him to see the faded light of the stars. He’d taken his bright green helmet off to see them first hand.

A gunshot outside brought his memory away from the intangible and back to horrible lucidity.

Upon the school trip, as they were all leaving and buzzing with renewed childish vigour about the beneficence of SLA Industries and how they all wanted to grow up to be operatives like on the TV, as they herded themselves on to the armoured bus that would take them back to the Gauss train, they had watched a wraith Slop hack a beautiful woman in a business suit, fleeing for her life, into three pieces with a vibro-sabre in two simple, easy cuts. The wraith then pinned an extermination warrant to the largest chunk of the steaming, spreading corpse, summoned the Shivers and left. After the initial fight, no one batted an eyelid, but the young Thawn had stared straight into her eyes as she lay there, lifeless, tongue lolling pathetically. It was the first person he’d even seen killed, except on the TV, and even then it was only the flamboyant killers of the contract circuit. This was just so real. He was silent all the way home, the taste of lemonade still on his lips.

That night of the graduation, wine with a girl whose name he can’t now recall. She’d hated the wine and had instead drunk a can of slosh. When they were finally alone after the celebration, they’d gone back to his room with nothing but amorous intents. Moments before they were about fuck, she’d stopped him, retrieved something from her bag and told him that it would make the whole thing much better. She didn’t tell him what it was, so he’d refused to try any. He watched her inject it into the flesh next to her eye because the marks might show up elsewhere and she’d be fired on the spot from where ever it was she had worked. They started to make love – or was it just screwing? It felt so long ago he can’t remember how deeply attached they were – but she’d started giggling uncontrollably, and then to imagine that he was some kind of beast raping her. She’d given him a black eye and then curled up in the corner, waving a broken wine bottle neck at him and refusing to move. It was five hours before she came down and was violently ill. Thawn recalled seeing her again two weeks later, rat-gnawed and floating face up in an overflow channel.

When the rains had stopped that Regeneration Day, and he’d taken his helmet off to gaze at the stars, he recalled how his nostrils had been assailed by one of the worst stenches he’d ever known, and how the carrien had leapt from the alley where it had been lurking, vicious claws hacking straight for his face. Pure luck saved him, instincts honed by years on the streets. He’d managed to overpower it and had beaten its head in, smashing and pummelling away long after the creature’s skull was fractured, years of frustration and anxiety released on to this enemy, both personal, moral, physical and distant.



(It’s hide had seemed orange, not dirty brown or red. Washed clean of the filth by the water of the level. How long had this beast lain up here? Were they all this colour underneath?)



A pack of the street kids, the local gang, had seen his fight, ready to kill the creature and try and profit like the Slops on TV if it should finish him, or to mug him and probably kill him should he succeed in besting it. After they watched him pulverise the ruins of the monster and stand up straight, putting on his helmet once more, they decided to leave him alone. From that day on he’d been accorded more respect – or rather less disrespect – from the local thugs. They had not seen him walk back to the station, throw up in the latrine and then sob uncontrollably for an hour.

Thawn clutched at his skull. But he could not put his hands in his head, oh no. Could not fish out the bad thoughts. The paranoia pulled at him again, telling him to retreat into the world of Alice once more. Someone was waiting for him there. His finger tips graced the edge of the table, making his desire to sit and escape even stronger. Someone was waiting for him? Why had he thought that. Someone… someone. Perhaps this someone was the one that was after him, this presence that horrified and attracted in equal measure. What arrogance, he scolded himself, to presume that this massive, malign presence would bother with him. What was he? A shiver captain of a downtown sector. He knew that he was worth two hundred unis dead to the street kids, and that in his demise a plucky young gang member may possibly attain membership to one of the more prestigious street gangs that ran in this sector. So far, he was alive simply by dint of being a tolerant and somewhat honourable officer to his Shivers – they knew they had it better than most other local Shiver stations - and by being a little too difficult for the gangers to actually bother killing him. Why would this looming presence be interested him? Part of his mind tried to rationalise that it was his own fucking paranoia and if his worthless, drug-addled subconscious doesn’t think he himself was worth the effort of persecuting then he was in worse condition than he thought. Another part told him that it was something greater than just him, something else. It was something he’d touched on in his drug induced state, something he’d tapped into.

He hated that.

It happened a lot, that feeling.

He knew drug addicts.

He knew they spoke of higher levels of consciousness, tried to justify their addiction through cosmic mumbo jumbo, as if they were tapping into the ebb, or the white or something else preposterous.

But it was there.

Something callous and bitter and vengeful and angry.

Something that wanted him.

He sat in his chair and stared at the falling water, remembering vividly one time, where upon waking from his flight of fantasy he had imagined the dripping water in the bucket to be blood. It had been so clear, whereas normally the dreams and imaginings were as muddled and fleeting as a dream so clear on waking but that disappeared like the condensation from a hot respirator into the rainy air. He had studied it, entranced at how clear the residual sensation had been. Not until a full ten minutes had passed did he realise it was blood. A quick check of the shiver station roof revealed that someone had fallen from the levels above, striking the roof of the reinforced concrete building and had been seeping through. He’d been so unshakeably deep in his stupor he hadn’t even heard it.

The memory fell away as he pushed his chair back from the desk to allow access to bottom drawer more easily.

The ground felt like gravel and sand under his boots but for the merest of moments.

Thawn drew a sharp breath as a needle tip of recollection pierced his mind and was gone. He imagined a haven in hell. A figure of desire and torment, unattainable and unavoidable. A desert of sands. He’d heard of course of the deserts that lay between the cities on Mort. Those who’d been there called them hellish, but to Thawn they’d always sounded so brilliant. Hardly any rain, so peaceful and quiet. That was just his fancy, though. To the multitude who stand in the rain, heaven is where the sun shines. Perhaps that was why his mind drew him to the bizarre combination of sensations that awaited within the Alice.

Regardless, Thawn sat back in his chair after retrieving one of the pills. He closed his eyes, waiting for the effect to start. He had a minute or two. He thought of that pretty young frother girl, the one who supplied him with the drug in the first place. His heart skipped a beat as his thoughts ran there, feelings hidden from himself. He imagined her tattoos, so bright and blue, DNA hallmarks responding to the altered strain of Lumo so that they glowed so beautifully.

Bright blue dancing spirals.

Bright blue, so vibrant

Blue, passionate blue.

Blue...