The first sensations…Pains, fading in like a piece of music. A rhythm section, bass and drums, was a dull ache in the back of my head that echoed down my neck to duet with the throbbing in my limbs. A piercing trumpet shrieked sore notes of free-form jazz. Aggressive slashes of stringed instruments, piercing attacks of stabbing bows and the whine of high-pitched oboes were my inflamed, burning nerves, pinched tissues and tinnitus screaming in my ears.
Some of them played on the surface of my skin, others in the muscle tissue or the joints, and still more, the really deep dull ones, reverberated in the marrowed tunnels of my bones.
Somehow, as I became more conscious, I remembered this as being familiar: I seemed to have been here before. But that’s all I could recall—the feeling of remembering, remembering pain.
I opened my eyes to see people staring at me. Although they were talking, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was clear they knew me. But they were wary and arguing about what to do with me. I looked around: a small space crammed with clutter; a vehicle, the type you could live in on the road.
Now I became aware of another sensation—thirst and hunger. I tried to speak, but for some reason I couldn’t, so I reached up to point at my mouth to indicate my thirst. I was shocked to touch something cold and hard. With my hands I explored where my face should be and found something smooth and plastic. A feeling of immense disappointment and sadness overtook me. I felt betrayed, as if I was the butt of some stupid joke. I realised I’d only thought I’d opened my eyes and that in fact I didn’t have any eyes to open. I was seeing through something else.
But, noticing my actions, two of these people knew what to do. They took a tube hanging down from my neck and stuck it in a bottle of brown liquid. After some experimentation I found I was able to suck, and felt it sliding into my stomach…a snake of nectar bringing reconnection to the world. Yes, I’d done this before, many times. It wasn’t normal for other people but for some reason it was for me. I was special.
But I was very tired. I drifted away, and when I came back to the pain and the disappointment again, I felt another sensation—motion. The van was trundling over a bumpy surface. Someone was holding my hand and that felt good. It was a girl wearing baggy clothing. Neither of us spoke. After a while the van pulled up and she opened the door.
“You know how to walk, don’t you?” she said.
I sat up, twisted around and tried my feet on the floor. That felt OK so I stood up. I put weight on them and stumbled. But, yes, I was able to walk if I held on to something. I stepped out.
Piles of rubbish greeted me, as far as could be seen. Why had they brought me here? Was this my home?
The sky was grey, but it must have been late in the day for the light was fading. Gradually, figures emerged from the shadows to approach the van. Three people had accompanied me and they greeted the figures. The girl turned to me and said: “I think you’ll be safer here among people like you than you would be with us. It’s a shame you couldn’t tell us how you escaped. Perhaps your memory will come back. Remember, your name is Johnny. I’m sorry we don’t know anything more about you. We’ll come back sometimes to see how you are. Bye bye.”
I watched as they climbed back into the van and it drove off to be swallowed by the dusty gloom.
I turned to stare at my new companions. With wild and feral looks in their eyes, those whose eyes I could see, they dripped wires and pieces of broken gadgetry, and their clothes were made of whatever they could find and bind together with wires and tape. They regarded me with suspicion. One of them, who was carrying a long metal pole with coloured rags hanging off each end, came up to me. He was tall and gaunt, with a bandanna round his head and a scar down his face. He peered closely at my screen and tapped it with the end of his staff. I didn’t react. He pushed me backwards, and when I still didn’t react, he pushed me more aggressively and started to yell. I wasn’t sure what to do. I tripped on something and fell over, and he started to kick me. So I grabbed hold of his legs and pulled him down. We started struggling on the floor. He had the neck of a bass guitar sticking out of his jacket and I grabbed hold of it and yanked and he howled like a madman. He dug his fingernails into the transition at the side of my head. The pain was excruciating.
Instinctively, I kicked him in the balls, picked up a rock and aimed it at his head but he blocked the move, pushed me back and knelt with one leg pinning me down and his staff across my neck. He was about to use a rock to smash my screen when somebody grabbed it off him.
This guy was shorter and stockier and had the neck of an electric guitar sticking out of his clothes. There was a scuffle and much shouting. The pair of them rolled over and over down a slope, through a puddle, into a pile of rubbish. The small crowd of other ragbag hybrids began to cheer. After a few minutes of pointless grappling and grunting they separated, and the tall one backed off, growling, before any real damage was done to him. The other got up and walked towards me, dusting himself down.
“Hm. Name’s Slash. What’s yours?”
“Johnny—I think,” I replied. “But I guess I’ve lost my memory. Where the hell am I?”
“Lost your memory?” replied Slash. “You’re in a bloody mess that’s where you are.” And he started to laugh. “You’re at the end of the world, mate.”
Then he turned to face the others who were watching. “All right, you lot, sod off, party’s over.” The crowd dispersed, mumbling to itself. Slash guided me away to a nearby makeshift hut constructed from pallets and plastic sheets. Inside were some tin drums for seats and a crate for a table.
“This is my shed,” he said. “They won’t bother you in here.”
We sat down and talked. Slash began to explain that everybody here was a creature on the edge, scavenging an existence in the back of beyond—a landfill tip in the wilderness east of London where nobody else could live. “Everybody here is pretty much like you,” he said. “They all want to forget their past cos it’s too much pain. You’re lucky—you really have lost your memory. We all got new names here—Wirey, Plasma, Knobs, Twiddle, Speaker, Trash an’ that. We better call you something—how ’bout…I dunno—Pixelface?”
Pixelface. I shrugged. It was as good as anything. “Who was that other guy, the one who attacked me?” I asked.
“That’s Metal Gristle,” said Slash. “A real psycho.”
“He is totally gone,” I agreed. My head still smarted where he’d scraped at my sores.
“There’s about thirty of us. Every now and then someone new turns up or someone dies. Me, I been here a few months. I remember what it was like at first—I didn’t have a clue. So stick with me for a few days and I’ll show you what’s what,” he offered.
Over the next few days Slash showed me the ropes. We lived off the rubbish; whenever the lorries came to dump it, we hid. As soon as they left, we rushed out to see what they’d brought, picking through the festering produce thrown out by the markets and restaurants of London. I suppose our diet was balanced—a bit of everything—English, Chinese, Italian, often perfectly good fruit and vegetables. The real problem was fresh water. It had to be carried in plastic drums from a public toilet two miles away. We could have been living on the edge of a sprawling African shanty town.
I managed by not thinking. Nobody talked about their past. I didn’t care. I had no past to talk about.
Somebody had invented a name for us bunch of scavenging losers: the Flotsam. Each of us alone in their own lost world. There was a certain camaraderie. We’d enjoy sharing a good haul—a sack of ripe mandarins, boxes of overripe mushrooms—or collecting wood to make fire. But that went out the window as soon as something desirable turned up and there wasn’t enough to go around. A fight would break out. I stayed well out of these—it meant nothing to me. Usually, Metal Gristle would be the winner because he wasn’t afraid to smash somebody’s legs or skull if he felt like it. Perhaps some of the lorry drivers caught glimpses of us, but if so they didn’t seem to give a damn. We were invisible.
Sometimes at night we sat around making music. The ones that were musical instruments like Slash and Metal Gristle played them and the rest of us made a racket banging on tin drums, blocks of wood, whatever.
Sometimes people found alcohol: unfinished bottles of wine or spirits. They’d slip some in my bottle. We’d get high and dance round the campfire in the pouring rain howling like the mad animals we almost were. At times like this, I could forget my name and the pain again. Afterwards, the others would grow weepy and whine about their childhood, their mothers and fathers and all that stuff they no longer had, and I was glad I didn’t have any of that.
Some of them used drugs—anything they could find, which wasn’t much: spirits, solvents or glue. I just watched them stumbling around, jabbering at things that weren’t there, and felt some kind of envy. Sometimes, when they got high, some of them would attack their hybrid parts, trying to rip out the wiring, the plastic, the metal, any part that wasn’t human, because they hated it so much. If only they could be human again, they could get back to the world they came from. But they might as well have been trying to pull their own legs off. In the morning, when they came to and realised what they’d done, their screams were so loud they were probably heard in the East End of London.
On such a night as this Metal Gristle decided to have a go at me again. This time Slash wasn’t around to help. He was sick, groaning in his hut. The rain was coming down without mercy and had been for three days. The plastic over our shanty town shacks was not much defence against this kind of onslaught and putrid, toxic rivers ran through our yard, under the walls and beneath the pallets we slept on. What light there was came from my face and that of a girl called Games, plus a few other gizmos like that. Gristle had gone outside and when he came back he decided I was sitting on his chair.
“Get off,” he ordered.
But it wasn’t his seat and I wasn’t going to move. So he pushed me off. He’d been goading me like this ever since I arrived and I was fed up with it. This time I hit back. He roared with delight. He liked it when people fought back. The rest of the pack was scared of him and never did it. But he and I were the same height and I wasn’t scared—I had nothing to lose. I lashed out and connected with his jaw. He swung a fist at me and hit the side of my screen, which jarred all the way down my neck and spine. I kicked out at his shin. He howled, then brought both hands down on the back of my skull. The rest of the pack was cheering and had made a space for us in the centre. We locked into each other and I pushed him against a table. We collapsed on to the floor and rolled over and over, dislodging bottles and cans and getting soaked. Whenever he rolled over the neck of his guitar it was agony for him and I played this to my advantage. His teeth sank into my arm where the keyboard was. “Why are you doing this?” I kept saying. “If you stop, so will I. I don’t want to fight you, but if you insist I can kill you.”
After a couple of minutes of this I was really suffering, and I guessed he was too. He was bleeding from his cheek and my head was screaming from where he kept bashing my screen. He’d drawn blood on my arm and I was wondering whether my keyboard would ever work again. But he was in a worse state. He could barely stand up. The crowd was chanting, urging us to finish the job—they wanted one of us done for. I managed to grab hold of Metal Gristle’s metal bar and twist it out of his grip. I knocked him down and had brought the bar up ready to smash it on to his head. The crowd yelled for blood.
I could see there was no more fight in him. An imperceptible shake of his head. A dulling of the light in his eyes. I threw the bar aside and walked away to the far corner. Some of the others crowded around me to congratulate me, but I wasn’t interested. Games gave me water, which I drank gratefully.
After a while I went back over to Gristle. He was nursing his wounds.
“You OK?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Why’d you do it? I kept saying I didn’t want to fight.”
“I got to.”
“Why you got to, Gristle?”
“Dunno,” he managed. “Cos it hurts.” It was obviously an effort for him to admit this.
“What hurts, Gristle?” I said as gently as I could manage.
“Back. At back.” And he pointed at the base of his spine.
“Here?” I asked. He nodded. “Mind if I take a look?”
He shook his head. Nobody else was watching. They were all playing a game around the table which they’d reassembled. He lifted up the various layers of what passed for clothing and I was able to see by the light of my monitor that his skin was in a terrible state. I saw that the bass guitar was sticking out of his side, but that wasn’t where the problem was. A couple of strings from the neck were disappearing into his spine. It was clear that whenever he moved around they tore against the skin and dug into it. The wound was infected.
“Stay there,” I said.
I went looking for something to cut the wire with. I came back with a tin can lid and proceeded to saw into the wire until I could break first one and then the other. It didn’t take long. That took the pressure off. I then cleaned the wound. Gristle could feel the benefit of the release straight away and stretched in a direction he hadn’t reached for many months.
He turned around with an expression of gratitude on his face I’d never seen before. “Thanks, mate,” he said and held out his hand. I shook it. “I feel better already.”
From that moment on we were friends. His temper had gone because the pain had gone. I don’t know why he could never admit it to anyone before. Maybe he didn’t know himself. Anyway, after that, the rest of the Flotsam thought of me as their leader. They started bringing their own problems to me to solve. Hardware, software, health. Like I was some kind of miracle worker.
There were hardly any tools. One Torx screwdriver that only fitted half the gadgets, and one Phillips, all that was left of a full set of attachments for a guy called Driller, whose arm ended in a power tool. I fixed a broken casing, rewired an amp, applied crude dressings to wounds, soldered connections using a coat-hanger and a fire, and treated infections with lemons and yogurt that had been dumped the day before. I had no idea how I knew what to do. Sometimes it worked. But there was loads I couldn’t do, so I tried to get us to work things out together. Like organise ourselves.
The next day the rain stopped and the sun pushed weakly through. I started some of them on building duty, repairing the shacks. I set up a rota so there were no longer arguments about whose turn it was to fetch water, prepare food or wash up. People could see it was fair and there was a certain amount of relief. The mood changed. I got people digging trenches so that the putrid water never came through the campsite again. We found containers and cleaned them and used them for collecting rainwater. And life became very slightly less hellish.
From time to time the people who had brought me here would come back. They would ask me how I was and bring news. They told me about how they’d met me once before when I’d visited them. Apparently, I’d brought friends with me: a beautiful young girl and a man around thirty with a video camera. They said I ought to try and remember who I was. They said I must be very clever because I’d escaped from the CGR and nobody had ever done that before. When the Flotsam heard this, I was even more of a hero. Respect.
“Hey. Maybe you can help us escape from here to a better place one day, Pixelface,” Slash chipped in hopefully.
I was told I was a computer and that was probably why I was rational and good at organising. And that my memory banks had been wiped as I escaped.
They suggested I try to put my memory together. I wasn’t sure if this was a good idea. I feared my keyboard wouldn’t work after Metal Gristle had bitten into it. But surprisingly it did—it had begun to heal itself just as if it were part of my body.
Gingerly, I began to explore inside. Only a handful of files on my internal hard disk had escaped from whatever happened at the CGR. Many were just fragments left over after the rest had been destroyed, like charred scraps of paper burnt in a fire. When I couldn’t open certain files, I deciphered others until I found passwords that let me open them. Slowly, my knowledge grew.
It wasn’t like remembering. It was like reading about somebody else. I supposed I must have been this person who referred to himself as Johnny Online, but it was a stupid name and he was an unhappy, twisted person. I preferred being Pixelface, a boy with no past.
I was unaware that my efforts were severely hampered by the absence of Internet at the landfill site. I only knew what I found within myself: a wired, overstrung, plastic spastic, a faceless, graceless, mechanised fossil. Such crusty body armour must mean I had a heart of silicon, a metal mind inflexible as pitted steel. No wonder I’d ended up here on the edge of the known world, in the place where everything unwanted was thrown away. With all these other useless, pointless things—rotten, putrid rubbish.