38

"I don't get it," Bub sighed, finally yielding to Mod's respectful silence. "I've dealt with some real fuck artists in my time. Psycho-schizo Rembrandts. Hackers. Slashers. Carvers. I've had some walk into an interview thinking they're Mo-fuckin'-hamed. Regular fucking prophets. I've seen fear, incredulity, anger, the whole gamut of human fuckin' emotion in that interview room. What I ain't never seen is someone just..."
"Blank." Mod completed his sentence. Bub looked at her thoughtfully.
"Blank. Yeah. Nothing there. No humanity. The sickest bastards that've ever lived are more often than not more human than anyone. This fuck... he's nothing. Literally nothing. Like a ghost of a dream of fuckin' nothing."

They sat in The Park in silence for a few minutes, further contemplating the greenery.

"You wanna get a 'lucidator?" Bub said suddenly.
"Sure," Mod replied. She didn't, but she felt obliged to ease her superiors anxiety by any means possible.

They strolled along the grass and soon found themselves near one of the many big cat enclosures. Bub strolled towards the bars and Mod followed. The cage contained lemas - squat powerful spotted things, a dozen of them, half yellow with big black splotches, the other half black with big yellow splotches. They were lazing in the sun. A few animal carcasses lay around their enclosure, stripped to the bone. The lemas were relaxed and full.

"Look at these things," Bub said thoughtfully, "killing machines. They don't know what they're doing. They play with their prey, make 'em suffer, but they don't have any understanding of what the prey's feeling. There's no maliciousness to it. Just pure untempered evil. The same that everyone needs to blow off once in a while. What I don't get is how some mute fuckin' Rembtard can bring so much fuckin' chaos to a city so designed to siphon it. Where the fuck did this Abe arsehole spring up from?"
"Jungarw," Mod answered with detached authority.
"Jungarw," Bub repeated thoughtfully. "You ever been mainlanding?"
"Once. A family trip, when I was about eight. We went to Tropanisia."
"Tropanisia," Bub repeated with a smile on his face.
"How about you Bub? You ever go mainlanding?"
"Shit Mod, I'm entering my second century, I've done my fair few stints of mainlanding. Jungarw though, I ain't never been to Jungarw. I don't even know where the fuck that is. I understand it ain't no small place."
"Eight million people," Mod clarified without pause.
"Just the eight fuckin' million huh? What is it, a fishin' village?"
"It's northern," Mod replied, "coastal."
"I've read his rap sheet from up there and it's all so fuckin' M.O.-heavy. What the fuck's a fuck like that doin' flippin' out fuck wild in Esplinade? Shit, I seen clone fucks with more nous to them then that fuck Abraham Alexander."

A significant silence fell upon them as they watch the lemas sleep and purr.

"You don't think..." Mod tentatively suggested.
"I don't think," Bub snarled, suddenly perceiving the state of play. "I know."

11

The morning found Abe refreshed as he emerged into the brilliant sunlight of an Esplinade morning. He walked away from the steps at Main Central Avenue 11, thinking of moving on to another district. The slaughter of the armless pig the night before had wiped away all the good that his Maryelle had done for his brain. The Dissociator and his decision to log into a Floater at the Underland Sleep Centere had done their bit to remove the worst of the memory. It was a new dawn and a new day and Abe felt nothing.

Tel emerged from the same point on 11 minutes later. He'd opted for a Herodyssey at the same centere. He'd thoroughly enjoyed the brutality and degradation that the Money Pit had allowed him to inflict on some broken down old Maryelle. He thought for all of a half-second about returning to the Stateler, but quickly decided to spend his last full day of freedom before another 15 and a half day stint in the Contact Centre out in the open air.

Both Abe and Tel settled upon the same destination as they ambled along Main Central Avenue 11, the only destination any right-thinking person would head towards with time to kill on a sunny day upon the roof in Esplinade: they were going to The Park.

37

Officers Bub and Mod were growing sick of Abe's non-answers. They stared across the table at the sparsity of his emotionless eyes.
"What do you want?" Bub said in desperation, prompting a searching look from his female colleague.
Abe said nothing. He kept staring straight past the officers at the cold white nothingness of the walls of the interview room. He'd been in custody for long enough to comprehend. He still said nothing. He'd been offered legal consul. He'd said nothing.

For her part, Mod contributed nothing to the interrogation. Her femininity had prompted trust from the most disturbed offenders. Bub would probe and Mod would reinforce esteem. Those were their roles, and long had they worked out just fine. But with Abe - nothing. Just the cold dead stare of a retard.

Mod found herself struggling to comprehend how this incompetent could've plagued Esplinade with such a rampage.

6

................some placeless impossible amalgamation..... a tissue of quotations, firing off against the walls of the inside of his own... some mid-20th..... no.... he surveyed the scene, trying to place it, trying to grasp.... desperate to pass to judgment, to attain any kind of.... ..... certainty.. ... ... ... ... . .

It came into focus. The dark starless sky above. The streetlights. The stump-like six-floor 'skyscrapers', little dwellings along the side walk, bright lights strung across all buildings, billboards affixed at every flat orifice. The road running between streets was clogged with six lanes of slow-rolling traffic, three lanes flowing in each direction. The cars were a fairly even match of sharp-angle yellow NY taxi cabs and stately black Ford Model Ts. The streets were thick with glamour - blonde haired ladies with feathers and features as pretty as a Maryelle, but all different, different coloured dresses, different dresses, different facial features.... and men.... white men in top hats, suits, monocles, cigars, waistcoats...... .... some in army uniform, flat khaki uniform, World War style..... .... and black women in plastic clothing fitted tight to the curves of their bodies..... black men with gold and diamonds swinging from their necks, hooded sweatshirts, jeans flowing loose and baggy from well beneath the waist..... and more - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indian, Iranian...... he tried to place himself: where was this? ....... he wandered the streets and looked, and decided that he must currently be walking through a city located somewhere between the mid 19th and early 21st centuries of the Piscean period.. .

... he without thought entered through a plush gold-lined velvet opening, along a corridor that stretched far from the street, growing narrower towards its end.... the end was breached.... he pushed on..... he moved deeper....... he exited the red and entered into darkness...................

.. he looked up at grainy projection of a cinema screen..... in greyscale, a white man with neat slicked black hair and a thin black moustache talked, and then a pretty white girl with big eyes and curls looked at him from a different angle, the image flickering back and forth between the two of them, words and reaction, words and reaction....... he could hear no sound.......

. he turned around and looked behind him at the expanding darkness.. he felt sudden fear... he didn't know.... could be..... anything in that darkness......... he turned back to the screen..... what screen.... he turned around and around..... he fumbled through the darkness.......... his foot. the first to slip through..... chink of lightness in the floor........ then through bright light he was falling, down from sky, the rooftops of Esplinade floating on the surface of the ocean tens of thousands of feet below...... he hurtled towards oblivion with detached relief..

10

Abe felt queasy as he walked along Main Central Avenue 8, away from the Money Pit and the horror of the Designated Activities Areas, focusing on the sanctity of an Underland Sleep Centere. The Dissosciater he'd taken at Mildred's had left him unable to focus with any kind of certainty. All the forlon faces in Mildred's danced about behind his eyes, disconnected from any form or context... he tried to keep his movement in one straight direction..... the sheer bloody regret of their expressions, the sorrow, quickly melted into calm nothingness as they disconnected their burden and left......

He descended the dirty pseudo-steel wrought staircase to the Top Deck, the strung out first level of the mass of floors beneath the roof. He needed solace. As soon as walked a few feet away from the bottom of the staircase he could feel the darkness, despite the solid white hum of the pseduo-lights. People were more spread out down here on the thin streets lined with vendors hawking food and daytime relief to the office workers, all now closed. There were two lit-up wide night vendors at every second intersection. He knew he'd find a sleep centere if he just kept moving. He let the Dissocsiator guide his body there......................