Tropez walks down an unending corridor of rags and goes out in the open. He looks at his dominion, the summit of his mountain of shit—the biggest, in the West Area. Seventh row, Sector A, just next to the large brown tanks. Rusty nests of cloacal gulls, dismembered systems, allutex chunks jutting out from the ground like threatening zombie arms. Crystallized escape attempts, burnt fingers. An electronic Pompeii. Baden Landfill, South Paris 5.
The W5 plesodroids, blue undertakers of that graveyard of circuits and bones, are passing by, scanning their jurisdiction zone. Tropez must not be seen, it is illegal to live in the Limbus. That’s what they call the landfill, which shelters any sort of citizen, in South Paris 5. Condos of men and roaches, palaces of flexible water and tents of warped morblix panels. The engines of the heli-drones rumble, like every morning, black grasshoppers dropping down new shit into the projection area.
A yellow perimeter, racket of stuff collapsing from a hundred meters up. Bouncing; diagonal shots of metal shards. The blue undertakers slide on their magnetic caterpillars, dutiful as ever, to stock that new shit. Distribute it. From the bellies of those flying garbage collectors, mesosilicone tubes come down, radioactive slush pumped with fury, flowing like green blood inside hanging arteries. The W5 plesodroids immediately connect the ducts to the landfill main tank, linked to its small twins arranged in a sunburst pattern. From above, all that cursed area looks like a bug skyhub, runic symbols carved by mutated animals on imaginary dolmens.
Megalithic tombs of lidless memories. Vertical abutment of cryopacks, holo-printed acronyms reflecting glowing yellow letters and numbers: codification of collection zone.
Tropez runs from one mountain of shit to the next, waiting, out of breath, in the right angles of the Limbus alleys, traced by the long limbs of broken molecular burners. Districts of gigantic fused engines and ripped sleeves of protoskin suits glint like alternate road signs; gathering of roaches on the highest banks, where a Last Supper is chewed.
Sometimes, in the yellow perimeter—the target area of the heli-drones—human fragments are dumped, big and small. Burst chests, crushed heads, internal organs already nibbled and sucked. Stuff that should be stocked in class-A organic tanks. Scorched worms melted with human cells.
But the blue undertakers are assaulted by the elite squads of the cloacal gulls, horizontal trajectories hitting bellies and backs of the energy-suckers; sometimes they even manage to rip some cable and stop one of them, as the plesodroid keeps blowing steam, uselessly. Surreal installations, light alloy bodies trying to force exhausted caterpillars. Tons to be moved, apocalyptic turtles in shiny armors. Mechanical mosaics of steel2 edges are heaped on the energy-suckers’ bodies. Plate and chain mails of Celts with their asses kicked right into the future, panoplies of Trojans who survived the small Apocalypse of their city. Only to land, with wooden triremes, on the coasts of New France, after sinking circumnavigations into hidden portals. Dilitium rocks, chants and alarms of android sirens. The trip around the world the wrong way round, blasphemies of physics.
Tropez must get out of Limbus, go to the city to buy some of the old Cloud 2 pills, his stock is gone. The hunt for synthetic drugs and still-alive uteruses. Tissues and ribs still supporting tits and fresh female forms. Women without their asses marked: the pimps of South Paris 5 may take badly the idea of having their workforce snatched from them—the bulwarks of the gross product of the apocalyptic district.
One of the most anticipated shows of Limbus is the Arena of the Drooling Ones, sluts fighting like dogs to slaughter each other—years back, Cloud 2 was recalled from the market after two weeks, due to its super-rabies-like side effects. In the night, the plesodroid undertakers are turned off, bent ninety degrees toward the rotten ground, their yellow eyes slowly losing their glow.
That’s the right moment, when the last spark of AI surrenders to positronic sleep. Bites begin, drums of alien membranes beat the right rhythm. Circles of landfill men watching, tightening more and more against the struggle of the sluts with the shores of their bodies. Squirts of blood against black faces, camouflaged like the shells of roaches. Everybody chooses his favorite Drooling One, to gamble a few credits on her. Tropez takes the bets. At Baden, in Limbus, he is among the most respected residents.
Bowdy—a lucky son of a bitch who lives inside the only unused tank—pays well, at the end of the show, to take home the whores’ skins. A sort of Aztec jaguar warrior without black spots, who loves to wear those remains, hems and edges patiently welded together. A psycho who found in Limbus his private paradise. Hunting grounds where cunts are let loose every week, inside the narrow horizons of the landfill electrified fences.
Tatters of white skin, a bird of imaginary feathers affixed to a crown.
Tropez crawls in the tunnel; a passage dug by pulse diggers, highway for roaches going back and forth. He creeps right below the picket guards’ feet. Beyond the fence, above the rim of the tunnel mouth, the palaces of South Paris 5 rise, scarred by the Uxor rains—at least old-gen ones.
Rue Morganaux, the pushers’ strip, fucking amateurs. Cloud 2, hard-to-come-by stuff, they only sell it at Les Soirées Dentées, about two kilometers inside. A t-girl whorehouse in “Tramp” Millander’s territory.
The door slides open, Tropez is a known face: the videoeye has immediately recognized the prince of the landfill, his distorted physiognomy long since archived in the brothel database.
A big salon; in the middle, the tiny meteorite shard glitters like an oyster, with its black pearls flapping their wings. Mutated roaches, purple shells. That thing arrived in South Paris 5 about a year ago from who-knows-where—before crashing, Uxor shat shards like that all over the world. Millander’s stuff, as everything else that lives, comes and dies in the district of the damned.
Tropez waits for his contact; they offer to let him lick the shard to get high. He refuses. Blue plexolite cubes all around, deflated by the customers’ bodies, men and women who let the wings of the mutated roaches vibrate inside their holes. Internal soft-bladed helicopters. Children of another world, spawn of that black rocky starship which crashed into Earth.
Ojou-sama finally arrives—Tropez is in a hurry: he must be back soon to Limbus with his Cloud 2 and a couple of sluts for the landfill arena. The show cannot be put off, he has only a few hours to set everything up.
“Tropez! I was waiting for you yesterday. Now I don’t have any left of that nasty stuff you like so much…but listen, I just got this.”
Ojou-sama is in her usual mistress armor, her huge tits glittering in triangular aluminum leaves. Two red LEDs fitfully light up nipple simulators. She still wears, on her fingers, thermal penetration prostheses; apparently, she was working. But Tropez is a loyal customer, Paris is well worth a coitus interruptus. Or, more to the point, putting on ice a roach-mandible-based torture. Those fucking bugs, strange space variables, have lately become the favorite toy of many a refined fat cat of upper-class Paris. Les Soirées Dentées has quickly become one of the most sought-after places of all New France. You can’t find many other places with shards, beasts, and wings like those. Millander is making a lot of money thanks to the armored troop of t-girls, priestesses of the oracle of the space stone.
Now she is pinching between her nail prostheses a blister with a few blue pills inside. “Brace yourself: this is Cloud 7.”
Tropez laughs out loud. “Sure, and I’m the King of France.”
“I’m not shitting you. New Moon is about to launch the new version, and I got this from an early discarded test batch. I hear it has side effects worse than Cloud 2…thought it could be interesting for you. I can give it to you at our usual price. But beware: it must be used in little doses.”
Tropez isn’t crazy about this change of plan, but he must make do. “Give me whatever you got, I’m in a hurry.”
He slips the pills of Cloud 7 beneath his rags; he has to move quickly to gather all the ingredients for the landfill show.
“Hey, leaving already? Same old bastard. Come closer, only a moment.”
Ojou-sama’s honeyed voice sounds like a five-meter violin. Tropez turns back, the t-girl’s purple lips approach; a kiss which tastes like Martian salt. The deionic LEDs of Ojou-sama’s nipples tilt—they are equipped a neural link.
“Come back soon, you bastard, but not in a hurry.”
Tropez makes his way through rotten bodies, consumed asses, coral reefs of backs whipped red; he gets back out on the road. En route to College St. Marie, where fresh meat can always be found. Madame de Buisson—the new maîtresse of the college, after her predecessor Madame Desroches had her throat cut by one of her girls, a couple years ago at the Café Lazar—is a supplier of high-quality raw material. She is connected to no-less than Breton, a high-ranking New Moon Corporation motherfucker, who obviously gets all the best material from her. Collaborating with New Moon, in South Paris 5 and elsewhere, means floating on a sort of Hyperuranion-tiled attic, with license to piss down, in generous gushes, onto degraded humanity, crushed into the burial recesses of its last hours.
The great whore—a heavyweight version of Gauguin’s Breton nuns, with big, manly hands, flushed cheeks, protruding teeth, and a white hat on her head from which red curls and rivulets of holy sweat sprout—motions for the eager Tropez to wait. She vanishes into the lurid, creaking corridors of the college. Her corpulent shape, tight in the black multi-fiber fabric of her robe, immediately blends with the throat of darkness; only her white hat stays clearly visible, in midair, away from the neck; it looks like a spaceship able to float indefinitely, thanks to the blue fuel—Heresy—running from the tanks of the brain of that invisible head. She is going to pick one of her girls. Of course, she always offers waste material to him: short-legged orphans, a few teeth missing, sure, but it is always fresh-enough stuff. For the Limbus arena, it will be more than okay.
“Here she is, her name’s Marianne. I have nothing else, for now. Breton has just formalized five custodies—that’s a real gentleman.”
Sure, a real gentleman, Tropez thinks. He would certainly never want to be in those five little sluts’ shoes.
Marianne is not that bad: narrow shoulders, abundant hips, the smile of a ghost pulled wide by Madame de Buisson slaps. A bruise on her right eye, scent of dried fruit. Tropez has no time to find another whore, the show at Baden must begin shortly. They are waiting for him. He will have to come up with something. What a shitty day.
Tropez and Marianne slither ahead in the tunnel, just a few meters before entering Limbus. Marianne has been worked over well by Madame de Buisson: she doesn’t flinch despite having to move like a snake, leaving behind slices of her skin in that damp, shitty intestine. She keeps coming, as though the mouth of Eldorado were waiting for her at the exit. Golden teeth, a red silk tongue, bas-relieved tissues, the slide of the throat and the leap into Eden, among wonderful swans floating in gastric juice.
Bowdy is the first to greet the couple, he has just finished honing his carver. New skins coming; he is excited as usual. He looks at Marianne’s white skin, interesting shades; after all, a good dermic subject.
“Where the fuck is the other one? Goddamn, Tropez! We have everything set already. The energy-suckers will be comatose soon, we don’t have much time.”
Tropez is annoyed—always up to him, going shopping in South Paris 5.
“Calm down, Bowdy. I got it.”
Tropez opens the faulty Cloud 7 pills, stuff to be treated with the utmost caution, Ojou-sama insisted.
The Arena of the Drooling Ones is ready, but the fight will be different this time. The landfill citizens are all men; the other inhabitants of Limbus, always to be relied upon, are our roach friends. So be it, Tropez thinks. Maybe, it will be even funnier than usual.
The circle takes shape, the bets begin. Bowdy is nervously handling his carver, he is eager to work on Marianne’s body.
On one side the girl, Cloud 7 already flowing inside of her; on the other, a large group of roaches sprinkled with that same blue substance. The last gem from New Moon Corporation’s labs: just a grain on your skin and you turn into a fucking cannibal. If you don’t immediately find someone to bite, flesh to maul and swallow, you end up chomping one of your own arms, enjoying it like a leg of lamb, then continue by sinking your teeth into yourself. Eating yourself, that’s right, until bleeding makes its course and the game is over. A pandemic not to be fucked with is just around the corner.
Marianne drools, she throws herself toward the onlookers who withdraw, sheltered by morblix panels, modern Crusader shields. Then the group of roaches charges toward the girl, leaping upon her like a chewing squadron.
Goddamn, Tropez thinks, those damn beasts became furies!
Blood, bites of human teeth and bug mandibles; the struggle seems to be a close match, at first, then the large number of roaches begins taking the upper hand. Marianne falls on the ground, the insects covering her quickly, her skin by now a mosaic of shells sewn together by the thin threads of their feelers. They are tearing her apart faster than expected.
Bowdy flings himself in the middle—the cursed roaches are damaging that beautiful skin, he won’t be able to wear it if they keep ripping away pieces that large. They are ruining everything, goddamn them!
He begins kicking the bugs, tearing them away from Marianne’s body, by now moving like a doll with dying batteries. He is immediately attacked by the swarm as well. Those fucking wings, boosted by a new, infernal fuel, let the squadron move with great speed; they have become uncatchable. Perfect killers.
“Sons of bitches! Tropez, do something!”
The bursts of mouthparts are going too deep; before his carotid artery is sliced, Bowdy’s last cry is choked by the blood pouring out of his mouth. Dark, thick. Ink of soul which won’t write anything anymore.
Tropez grabs a flamethrower, he opens the thermovalve and spits a tongue of flame toward that heap of blood, of dismembered people, of crazed insects. The circle of the audience scatters, while everything fries and crackles. Some wait for their winning bets to be paid, others get away to sit on the dihedra of their mountains of shit and look at the bonfire.
Cloacal gulls and blue undertakers will deal with the clean-up.
Tropez heads toward Bowdy’s tank; now that place has a new owner. The Limbus mansion is all for him. He pushes the heavy hatch, looks around. The cylinder is clad in hanging human skins; some, he has already seen worn by Bowdy. An old worn-out cube on the right, a holo-system. He turns it on, browses the gallery, selects. An azure light spreads in the environment, rising toward the top of the tank, Bowdy’s ceiling.
After a few wigwags—it’s old stuff—the holo materializes: a boat, his brother Bowdy at the helm, smiling; and then he, Tropez, close-up, hugged by Léna, his wife. Tropez is still looking for her, in that cursed landfill, after ten years.
He hasn’t managed to find a single piece of her yet.
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