Mean Streets

And so we headed into the badlands. Where the neon gets shoddier and the sins grow shabbier, though no less dangerous or disturbing. If the Nightside is where you go when no one else will have you, the badlands is where you go when even the Nightside is sick of the sight of you. The badlands, where all the furtive people end up, pursuing things even the Nightside is ashamed of . . . because some things are just too tacky.

The traffic thinned out more and more as we left the major thoroughfares behind, dying away to just the occasional tattooed unicorn with assorted piercings and a Prince Albert, a stretch hearse with the corpse half out of its coffin and beating helplessly against the reinforced windows, and a headless bounty hunter on horseback. The flotsam and jetsam of the Nightside, all hot in pursuit of their own private destinies and damnations. The streets grew narrower and darker, and not only because maybe half the streetlights were working. The shadows were darker and deeper, and things moved in them. More and more buildings had boarded-up windows and broken-in doors, and where lights did sometimes glow in high-up windows, strange shadows moved behind closed blinds. The neon signs remained as gaudy as ever, like poisonous flowers in a polluted swamp. A few people still walked the rain-slick streets, heads down, looking neither left nor right, drawn on by siren calls only they could hear.

Homeless people lurked in the shadows, broken men in tattered clothes. Mostly they moved in packs, because it was safer that way. There are all kinds of predators, in the badlands. And a few good people, fighting a losing battle and knowing it, but fighting on anyway, because they knew a battle is not a war. I saw Tamsin MacReady, the rogue vicar, out in her rounds, determined to do good in a bad place. She recognised Dead Boy’s car, and waved cheerfully.

The night grew quieter and more thoughtful, the deeper into the badlands we went, a shining silver presence in a dark place. Working streetlights grew few and far between, and the car cruised quietly from one pool of light to another. Dead Boy tried the high beams, but even they couldn’t penetrate far into the gloom, as though there was something in this new darkness that swallowed up light. The roar and clamour of the Nightside proper seemed far away now, left behind as we moved from one country to another. The few people we passed ignored us, intent on their own business. This wasn’t a place to draw attention to yourself; unless, of course, you had something to sell.

A tall and willowy succubus, with dead white skin, crimson lingerie, and bloodred eyes, loped along beside the futuristic car for a while, easily matching its speed. She tapped on our polarised windows with her clawed fingertips, whispering all the awful things she would let us do. Liza shrank back from the succubus, her face sick with horror and revulsion. When the succubus realised we weren’t going to stop, she increased her speed to get ahead of us and then stepped out into the middle of the road, blocking our way. Dead Boy told the car to put its foot down, and the car surged forward.

The succubus ghosted out, becoming immaterial, and the futuristic car passed right through her. A spectre, tinted rose red and lily white, the succubus drifted at her own pace through the car, ignoring Dead Boy, her inhuman gaze fixed on Liza. A succubus always has a taste for fresh meat. She reached out a ghostly hand to Liza, but I grabbed her wrist and stopped her. It was like holding the memory of an arm, cold as ice, soft as smoke. The succubus looked at me, and then gently pulled her arm free, the ghostly trace passing through my mortal flesh in an eerily intimate moment. She trailed the fingertips of one hand along my face, winked one bloodred eye, and then passed on through the car and was gone.

The badlands grew grimly silent, abandoned and forsaken, as we closed in on Rotten Row. We had left civilisation behind, for something else. Here buildings and businesses pressed tight together in long ugly tenements, as though believing there was strength, and protection, in numbers. Windows were shuttered, doors securely locked, and none of these establishments even bothered to look inviting. Either you knew what you were looking for, or you had no business being here. Enter at your own risk, leave your conscience at the door, and absolutely no refunds.

Few people walked the gloomy, desolate streets, and they all walked alone, despite the many dangers, because no one else would walk with them. Or perhaps because the very nature of their needs and temptations had made them solitary. And though most of the figures we passed looked like people, not all of them walked or moved in a human way. One figure in a filthy suit turned suddenly to look at the car as it drifted past, and under the pulled-down hat I briefly glimpsed a face that seemed to be nothing but mouth, full of shark’s teeth stained with fresh blood and gristle.

Glowing eyes followed the progress of the futuristic car from shadowy alley mouths, rising and falling like bright burning fireflies. They didn’t normally expect to see such a high-class, high-tech car in their neighbourhood. They could get a lot of money, and other things, for a car like ours. And its contents. In the quiet of the street, a baby began to cry; a lost, hopeless, despairing sound. Liza leaned forward.

“We keep going,” I said, and turned to Liza as she opened her mouth to protest. “That isn’t a baby. It’s just something that’s learned to sound like a baby, to lure in the unsuspecting. There’s nothing out there that you’d want to meet.”

Liza looked like she wanted to argue, but something in my voice and in my face must have convinced her. She slumped back in her seat, arms folded tightly across her chest, staring straight ahead. I felt sorry for her, even as I admired her courage and her stubbornness. She was having to take an awful lot on board, most of which would have broken a weaker mind, but she kept going. All for her dearest love, Frank. Husband Frank. What kind of man was he, to inspire such love and devotion . . . and still end up here, in Rotten Row? I would see this through to the end, because I had said I would; but there was no way this was going to end well.

“Are you sure?” Liza said doubtfully, peering through the car window with her face almost pressed to the glass. “I can’t see . . . anything. No shops, no businesses, no people. I don’t even see a street sign.”

“Someone probably stole it,” Dead Boy said wisely. “Around here, anything not actually nailed down and guarded by hell-hounds is automatically considered up for grabs. But my car says this is the place, and my sweetie is never wrong.”

Someone in the tattered remains of what had once been a very expensive suit lurched out of a side alley to throw something at the futuristic car. It bounced back from the car’s windscreen, and exploded. The car didn’t even rock. There was a brief scream from the thrower as the blast threw him backwards, his clothes on fire. He’d barely hit the ground before a dozen dark shapes came swarming out of all the other alleys to roll his still twitching body back and forth as they robbed him of what little he had that was worth the taking. They were already stripping the smouldering clothes from his dead body as they dragged it off into the merciful darkness of the alley shadows. Liza looked at me angrily, more disgusted than disturbed.

I held up the two jaggedly torn pieces, pressed carefully together, and concentrated my gift on them. The image of Frank jumped right out of the wedding photo, to become a flickering ghost in the street outside. He was walking hurriedly down Rotten Row, a memory of a man repeating his last journey, imprinted on Time Past. His palely translucent form stalked past the car, his face expectant and troubled at the same time. As though he was forcing himself on, towards some long-desired, long-denied consummation that both excited and terrified him. His pace quickened until he was almost running, his arms flailing at his sides, until at last he came to one particular door, and stopped there, breathing hard. The badly hand-painted sign above the door said simply Silicon Heaven.

Frank smiled for the first time at the sight of it, and it was not a very nice smile. It was the smile of a man who wanted something men are not supposed to want, not supposed to be able to want. This was more than need, or lust, or desire. This was obsession. He raised a trembling hand to knock, and the door silently opened itself before him.

Frank hurried inside, the door closed behind him, and our glimpse into Time Past came to an end. I busied myself putting the torn pieces of photo away, so I wouldn’t have to see the disappointment and betrayal of trust in Liza’s face. Dead Boy turned around in his seat to look at us, calmly munching on a chocolate digestive. He didn’t care about where we were, or what we were doing here. He was just along for the ride. Apparently when you’re dead you only have so much emotion in you, and he doesn’t like to waste it. He would go along with whatever I decided. But this wasn’t my decision; it was Liza’s.

“After coming all this way to find Frank?” said Liza. “Why would I want to leave, when all the answers are in there waiting for me? I need to know about Frank, and I need to know what happened to my memories.”

Liza looked from me to Dead Boy and back again. She could see something in our faces, something we knew and didn’t want to say. Typically, she became angry rather than concerned. She wasn’t scared and she wasn’t put off; she wanted to know.

“No one’s going anywhere, just yet,” Dead Boy said calmly. “We are all staying right here, until John has worked out a plan of action. This is not your world, Liza Barclay; you don’t know the rules, how things work, in situations like this.”

“But . . . look at it!” said Liza, gesturing at Silicon Heaven, with its boarded-up window and its stained, paint-peeling door. “It’s a mess! This whole street would need an extreme make-over before it could be upgraded enough to be condemned! And this . . . shop, or whatever it is, looks like it’s been deserted and left empty for months. Probably nobody home but the rats.”

“Protective camouflage,” I said, when she finally ran out of breath. “Remember the baby that wasn’t a baby? Silicon Heaven set up business here, because only a location like this would tolerate a trade like theirs; but even so, it doesn’t want to draw unwelcome attention to itself. There are a lot of people who object to the very existence of a place like Silicon Heaven, for all kinds of ethical, religious, and scientific reasons. We like to say anything goes in the Nightside, but even we draw the line at some things. If only on aesthetic grounds. Silicon Heaven has serious enemies, and would probably be under attack right now by a mob with flaming torches, if they weren’t afraid to come here.”

“Talking of fates worse than death,” I said, and Liza immediately turned back to look at me, “you have to brace yourself, if we’re going in there. Just by coming to an establishment like this, Frank is telling us things about himself, and they’re things you’re not going to want to hear. But you have to know, if we’re going in there after him.”

“Silicon Heaven,” I said carefully, “exists to cater to people with extreme desires. For men, and women, for whom the ordinary pleasures of the flesh aren’t enough. And I’m not talking about the usual fetishes or obsessions. You can find all of that in the Nightside, and more. In Silicon Heaven, science and the unnatural go hand in hand like lovers, producing new forms of sexuality, new objects of desire. They’re here to provide extreme and unforgivable outlets for love and lust and everything in between. This is the place where people go to have sex with computers.”

“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.

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 gray 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.

“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 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 foot 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.

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.

“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.”

He leaned in close to study the wall tracings, and prodded them with a long pale finger. Blue-gray 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 chewed thoughtfully, evaluating the flavour. The blue-gray lines slipped back down his arm and leapt back onto the wall, becoming still and inert again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 anymore, 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 the 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.

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.

“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.”

“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. nless she was remembering something else, even worse, still to come . . .

A door appeared in the far wall, where I would have sworn there was no trace of a door just a moment before. A section of the metal just slid suddenly sideways, disappearing into the rest of the wall, leaving a brightly lit opening. I started towards it, and once again Dead Boy and Liza fell in beside me. You’d almost have thought I knew what I was doing. We threaded our way through the motionless robots, and I held myself ready in case they came alive again; but they just stood there, in their stiff awkward poses, utterly inhuman even in defeat. Dead Boy pulled faces at them. Liza wouldn’t even look at the robots, all her attention focused on the open door, and the answers it promised her.

We passed through the narrow opening into a long steel corridor, comfortably wide and tall, the steel so brightly polished it was like walking through an endless hall of mirrors. It occurred to me that none of our reflections looked particularly impressive, or dangerous. Dead Boy had lost his great floppy hat in his struggle with the robots, and his marvellous purple greatcoat was torn and tattered. Some of the stitches on his bare chest had broken open, revealing pink-gray meat under the torn gray skin. I keep telling him to use staples. Liza looked scared but determined, her face so pale and taut there was hardly any colour in it. She was close to getting her answers now; but I think, even then, she knew this wasn’t going to end well. And I . . . I looked like someone who should have known better than to come to a place like Rotten Row, and expect any good to come of it.

The corridor finally took a sharp turn to the left, and ushered us into a large antechamber. More steel walls, still no furnishings or comforts, but finally a human face. A tall, slender man in the traditional white lab coat was waiting for us. He had a bland forgettable face, and a wide welcoming smile that meant nothing at all. Slick, I thought immediately. That’s the word for this man. Nothing would ever touch him, and nothing would ever stick to him. He’d make sure of that. He strode briskly towards us, one hand stretched out to shake, still smiling, as though he could do it all day. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. They were cold, certain, the look of a man utterly convinced he knew important things that you didn’t.

“Hi!” he said brightly. “I’m Barry Kopek. I speak for Silicon Heaven. I’d say it’s good to see you, but I wouldn’t want to start our relationship with such an obvious lie. So let’s get right down to business, shall we, and then we can all get back to our own lives again. Won’t that be nice?”

He tried offering us his hand again, and then pulled it back with a resigned shrug, as though he was used to it. And if he was the official greeter for Silicon Heaven, he probably was. Even a ghoul in a graveyard would look down on a computer pimp like him.

“Come with me,” he said, “and many things will be made clear. All your questions will be answered; or at least, all the ones you’re capable of understanding. No offence, no offence. But things are rather . . . advanced, around here. Tomorrow has come early for the Nightside, and soon there’ll be a wake-up call for everyone. Slogans are such an important part for any new business, don’t you agree? Sorry about the robots, but we have so many enemies among the ignorant, and our work here is far too important to allow outside agitators to interfere with it.”

He looked like he wanted to wince at my crudity, but was far too professional. The smile never wavered for a moment. “We are not a part of the sex industry, Mister Taylor. Perish the thought. Everyone who finds their way here becomes part of the great work. We are always happy to greet new people, given the extreme turnover in . . . participants. But they all understand! They do, really they do! This is the greatest work of our time, and we are all honoured to be a part of it. Come with me, and you’ll see. Only . . . do keep Mrs. Barclay under control, please. She did enough damage the last time she was here.”

Dead Boy and I both looked at Liza, but she had nothing to say. Her gaze was fixed on the official greeter, staring at him like she could burn holes through him. She wanted answers, and he was just slowing her down.

He led us through more metal corridors, turning this way and that with complete confidence, even though there were never any signs or directions on the blank steel walls. He kept up an amiable chatter, talking smoothly and happily about nothing in particular. The light from nowhere became increasingly stark, almost unbearably bright. There was a sound in the distance, like the slow beating of a giant heart, so slow you could count the moments between each great beat, but they all had something of time and eternity in them. And there was a smell, faint at first, but gradually growing stronger . . . of static and machine oil, ozone and lubricants, burning meat and rank, fresh sweat.

“Oh, yes,” he said, carefully looking at me rather than at Liza. “Mrs. Barclay was here yesterday, and we let her in, because of course we have nothing to hide. We’re all very proud of the work we do here.”

“If you’re so proud, and this work so very great, why did you send those cyborged taxis to attack us?” I said, in what I thought was really a quite reasonable tone of voice. Kopek’s smile wavered for the first time. He knew me. And my reputation.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “That. I said that was a mistake. You must understand, they were some of our first crude attempts, at melding man with machine. Those men paid a lot of money for it to be done to them, so they could operate more efficiently and more profitably in Nightside traffic. We were very short of funds at the beginning . . . When they found out you were coming here, Mister Taylor, well, frankly, they panicked. You see, they relied on us to keep them functioning.”

He nodded glumly. Still smiling, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “I’m not surprised. Your reputation precedes you, Mister Taylor, like an attack dog on a really long leash. It’s a shame, though. They only wanted to better themselves.”

“Well, of course he’s here,” said Kopek. “It’s not like we’re holding him prisoner, against his will. He came to us, pursuing his dreams, and we were only too happy to accommodate him. He is here where he wanted to be, doing what he’s always wanted to do, happy at last.”

The corridor finally ended in a flat featureless wall, in which another door appeared. Kopek led us through, and we all stopped dead to look around, impressed and overwhelmed despite ourselves by the sheer size of the glass-and-crystal auditorium spread out before us. It takes a lot to impress a native of the Nightside, but the sheer scope and scale of the place we’d been brought to took even my breath away. Bigger than any enclosed space had a right to be, with walls like frozen waterfalls of gleaming crystal, set so far apart the details were just distant blurs, under tinted glass ceilings so high above us clouds drifted between us and them. Like some vast cathedral dedicated to Science, the auditorium was so enormous it had generated its own weather systems. Kopek’s smile was openly triumphant now, as he gestured grandly with outstretched arms.

He led the way forward, between massive machines that had shape and form, but no clear meaning or significance. So complex, so advanced, as to be incomprehensible to merely human eyes. There were components that moved, and revolved, and became other things even as I watched; strange lights that burned in unfamiliar colours; and noises that were almost, or beyond, voices. Things the size of buildings walked in circles, and intricate mechanisms came together in complex interactions, like a living thing assembling itself. Gleaming metal spheres the size of sheep-dogs rolled back and forth across the crystal floor, sprouting tools and equipment as needed to service the needs of larger machines. Dead Boy kicked at one of the spheres, in an experimental way, but it dodged him easily.

Kopek led the way, and we all followed close behind. This wasn’t a place you wanted to get lost in. It felt . . . like walking through the belly of Leviathan, or like flies crawling across the stained-glass window of some unnatural cathedral . . . So of course I strolled along with my hands in my coat pockets, like I’d seen it all before and hadn’t been impressed then. Never let them think they’ve got the advantage, or they’ll walk all over you. Dead Boy seemed genuinely uninterested in any of it, but then he died and brought himself back to life, and that’s a hard act to follow. Liza didn’t seem to see any of it. She had a hole in her mind, a gap in her memories, and all she cared about was finding out what had happened the last time she was here. Did she care at all about husband Frank, anymore? Or was she remembering just enough to sense that her quest wasn’t for him, and never had been, but only to find the truth about him and her, and this place . . .

There was a definite sense of purpose to everything happening around us, even if I couldn’t quite grasp it, but I was pretty sure there was nothing human in that purpose. Nothing here gave a damn about anything so small as Humanity.

And finally, we came face-to-face with what we’d come so far to see. A single beam of light stabbed down, shimmering and scintillating, like a spotlight from Heaven, as though God himself was taking an interest. The illumination picked out one particular machine, surrounded by ranks and ranks of robots. They were dancing around the machine, in wide interlocking circles, their every movement impossibly smooth and graceful and utterly inhuman. They moved to music only they could hear, perhaps to music only they could hope to understand, but there was nothing of human emotion or sensibility in their dance. It could have been a dance of reverence, or triumph, or elation, or something only a robot could know or feel. The robots danced, and the sound of their metal feet slamming on the crystal floor was almost unbearably ugly.

Kopek led us carefully through the ranks of robots, and at once they began to sing, in high chiming voices like a choir of metal birds, in perfect harmonies and cadences that bordered on melody without ever actually achieving it. Like machines pretending to be human, doing things that people do without ever understanding why people do them. We passed through the last of the robots and finally . . . there was Frank, beloved husband of Liza, having sex with a computer.

The computer was the size of a house, covered with all kinds of monitor screens and readouts but no obvious controls, with great pieces constantly turning and sliding across each other. It was made of metal and crystal and other things I didn’t even recognise. At the foot of it was an extended hollow section, like a large upright coffin, and suspended within this hollow was Frank Barclay, hanging in a slowly pulsing web of tubes and wires and cables, naked, ecstatic, transported. Liza made a low, painful sound, as though she’d been hit.

Frank’s groin was hidden behind a cluster of machine parts, always moving, sliding over and around him like a swarm of metallic bees, clambering over themselves in their eagerness to get to him. Like metal maggots, in a self-inflicted wound. Thick translucent tubes had been plugged into his abdomen, and strange liquids surged in and out of him. Up and down his naked body, parts of him had been dissected away, to show bones and organs being slowly replaced by new mechanical equivalents. There was no bleeding, no trauma. One thigh bone had been revealed from top to bottom, one end bone and the other metal, and already it was impossible to tell where the one began and the other ended. Metal rods plunged in and out of Frank’s flesh, sliding back and forth, never stopping. Lights blinked on and off inside him, briefly rendering parts of his skin transparent; and in that skin I could see as many wires as blood vessels.

The computer was heaving and groaning, in rhythm to the things going in and out of Frank’s naked body, and the machine’s steel exterior was flushed and beaded with sweat. It made . . . orgasmic sounds. Frank’s face was drawn, shrunken, the skin stretched taut across the bone, but his eyes were bright and happy, and his smile held a terrible pleasure. Cables penetrated his skin, and metal parts penetrated his body, and he loved it. One cable had buried itself in his left eye socket, replacing the eyeball, digging its way in a fraction of an inch at a time. Frank didn’t care. He shuddered and convulsed as things slid in and out of him, changing him forever, and he loved every last bit of it.

“Yes, and no,” said Kopek. “He’s becoming something else. Something wonderful. We are making him over, transforming him, into a living component capable of being host to machine consciousness. A living and an unliving body, for an Artificial Intelligence from a future time line. It came to the Nightside through a Timeslip, fleeing powerful enemies. It wants to experience sin, and in particular the hot and sweaty sensations of the flesh. It wants to know what we humans know, and take for granted; all the many joys of sex. Together, Frank and the computer are teaching each other whole new forms of pleasure. He is teaching the machine all the colours of emotion and sensuality, and the very subtle joys of degradation. In return, the machine is teaching him whole new areas of perception and conception. Man becomes machine, becomes more than machine, becomes immortal living computer. A metal messiah for a new Age . . .”

Kopek’s face was full of vision now, a zealot in his cause. “Why should men be limited to being just men, and machines just machines? Human and inhuman shall combine together, to become something far superior to either. But like all new life, it begins with sex.”

Liza collapsed, her knees slamming painfully onto the crystal floor. Her face was twisted, ugly, filled with a horrid knowledge, as all her repressed memories came flooding back at once. She pounded on the floor with her fist, again and again and again.

“No! No, no, no! I remember . . . I remember it all! I came here, following Frank. Following my husband, into the Nightside, and through its awful streets, all the way here . . . Because I thought he was cheating on me. I thought he had a lover here. He hadn’t touched me in months. I thought he was having an affair, but I never suspected this . . . Never thought he wanted . . . this.”

“She talked her way in, yesterday,” said Kopek. “Determined to see her husband. But when we brought her here, and showed her, she went berserk. Attacked the computer. Did some little damage, before the robots drove her off. We wouldn’t let her hurt Frank, or herself, and after a while she left.”

Frank stirred for the first time, his one remaining eye slowly turning to look down at her. His face showed no emotion, no compassion for the woman he’d loved and married, not so long ago. When he spoke, his voice already contained a faint machine buzz.

“This is what I want. What I’ve always wanted. What I need . . . And what you could never give me. I’ve dreamed of this for years . . . of flesh and metal coming together, moving together. Thought it was just a fetish, never told anyone . . . Knew they could never understand. Until someone told me about the Nightside, the one place in the world where anything is possible; and I knew I had to come here. This is the place where dreams come true.”

Suddenly she was back on her feet again, heading for Frank with her hands stretched out like claws, moving so fast even the robots couldn’t react fast enough to stop her. She jumped up and into the coffin, punched her fist into a hole in Frank’s side, and thrust her hand deep inside him. His whole body convulsed, the machines going crazy, and then Liza laughed triumphantly as she jerked her hand back out again. She dropped back down onto the crystal floor, brandishing her prize in all our faces. Blood dripped thickly from the dark red muscle in her hand. I grabbed her arms from behind as she shouted hysterically at her husband.

And already the machines were moving over him, mopping up the blood and sealing off his wound, working to replace the heart with something more efficient. While the computer heaved and groaned and sweated, Frank sighed and smiled.

It was too much for Liza. She sank to her knees again, sobbing violently. Her hand opened, and the crushed heart muscle fell to the crystal floor, smearing it with blood. She laughed as she cried, the horrid sound of a woman losing her mind, retreating deep inside herself because reality had become too awful to bear. I gave her something to breathe in, from my coat pocket, and in a moment she was asleep. I eased her down until she was lying full length on the floor. Her face was empty as a doll’s.

“Not for her,” I said. “She loved him, and he loved this. To be betrayed and abandoned by a husband for another woman or even a man is one thing, but for a machine? A thing? A computer that meant more to him than all her love, that could do things for him that she never could? Because for him, simple human flesh wasn’t enough. He threw aside their love and their marriage and all their life together, to have sex with a computer.”

“You always were a sentimental sort,” I said. “I know a few things. I’m pretty sure I can find a way to put her back the way she was, when she came to us, and this time make sure the memories stay repressed. No memory at all, of the Nightside or Silicon Heaven. I’ll take her back into London proper, wake her up, and leave her there. She’ll never find her way back in on her own. And in time, she’ll get over the mysterious loss of her husband, and move on. It’s the kindest thing to do.”

“Why not?” I said. “There’s never been any shortage of gods and monsters in the Nightside; what’s one more would-be messiah? I doubt this one will do any better than the others. In the end, he’s just a tech fetishist, and it’s just a mucky machine with ideas above its station. Everything to do with sex, and nothing at all to do with love.”