Twilight...by aeon
Ricky laid down a sheet of razor thin ice which we all slid on, melting off
little sharp-edged pieces with laser-edged precision, pieces which fell from
the rafters and down on the stage, causing the dancers below to dodge and
jump around in some sort of intricate shuffle, part tribal ceremony and part
mating ritual.
We finished the first song and slid into the second in the space between
blinks -- the ice became wind, and now we were all windsurfers, riding his
breeze and adding color to the picture, like pressing a switch on a blender
-- everything is all white and then you hit the button and it spins and the
colors in the middle start to merge with the ones on the outside. Fucking
puree.
The tempo changed -- Mick added thunder and lightning while the rest of us
made it rain -- and the throng twisted and writhed, calling upon the gods
for the water from the heavens and then fleeing when we gave it to them all
at once, all 40 days and nights of it.
Lightning split the stage and the fire started -- first a few sparks from
Ricky, then a torchlight, then the lightning again and the fire raged. They
all ran about, trying to escape our wrath. They loved us and hated us and
worshipped us all at once. We chased them around the room for a while,
letting them burn for a few minutes, and then the fire faded...
...leaving the rumble of the earth shaking, threatening to destroy the
building, the stage, the world. Kiko-man was Poseidon if we were the gods,
and he knew how to make them bow before us. And they fell to their knees in
submission, bowed down as the earth split and swallowed them up, and the
gods rose up, we rose up, amidst smoke and fire and thunder and rain. We
rose. And then, one by one, we fell.
Ricky stopped first, leaving the stage with his guitar. We kept going. Mick
left, then Joey, then me -- we left Kiko-man with the heartbeat, the life of
the earth, the universe, the lifeblood of the gods themselves. He slowed.
Thrum. . .thr. . .
He stopped.
1 hour, 59 minutes, 59 seconds.
The gods died.
The lights followed.
The house music came up and the talking and dancing and killing and screwing
and sweating started again. The confused babble of a billion godless youths.
I went to the bar to get a drink.
The crowd changed from black and violet to chrome and red and everything
else. The music got louder and the crowd swayed in time like a giant
centipede, all arms and legs and a very small brain. But you could see that
their hearts weren't in it. Not like with the Gods.
I saw that Lou was busy, so I yelled for the other bartender. The
idiot-savant looked up at me with empty eyes from his spot on the floor, a
puddle of booze and vomit not entirely his own.
"Succubus," I said. Tequila, with the worm, Cherry-flavored liquour, Pep
Schnapps, garnished with cinnamon and a ripe cherry (very expensive) -- one
of the house specialties. He jumped up and grabbed the bottles off of the
shelves without a word, without a drop spilled. He held out his right arm
and I slid my ID through his wrist. 150 credits disappeared from my
imaginary account. He crawled into a corner and died again.
Something grabbed my arm. I turned to look, drink in hand, and caught 2.7
ounces of steel jacketing in the left eye, no warning. Even as I fell, my
assassin was confronted with the assault shotgun behind the bar, the one
with the special flechette rounds, but I was already going down, dying.
It took a few long seconds before I heard the shotgun. I watched through a
bloody fog as the guy turned pale and collapsed, all of his internal organs
eviscerated by 100 tiny explosive blossoms.
No mess, no scars.
Beautiful.
I died in a pool of cinnamon and cherry.
***
I looked up. It hurt. I screamed.
"Don't worry man -- Insurance's got ya covered. Kay?"
"Yeah, I guess." I winced in pain, trying to look at Kiko-man. S's hurt. At
any rate, I wasn't really worried about insurance, despite the fact that I
didn't have enough. I was worried about hurting. Getting shot was becoming a
habit.
"Oh, don't bother asking for painkillers," he said before I could ask. "Doc
said that you'd get a reaction with the nanos in your eye."
That explained the vision -- millions of microscopic robots swarming in my
retina like so many sperm, repairing torn tissue and then dying, falling
from my system, washed away with a tear. It was almost poetic.
I asked for a mirror, and Kiko-man walked into the lav. There was a
wrenching sound and he brought me the wall mirror a few seconds later,
plaster dusting the sheets. I looked through filth at filth. The iris color
was OK, almost a perfect match, and the grafts on the side of my face were
doing nicely, but my hair. . .
"Flash burns."
I'd just shave the rest.
"Is the eye vat or donor?" I needed to know, even though it hurt.
"Dunno -- I suppose it's donor, cuz vats usually don't take with nanos."
"I wanna know whose eye this is."
"I'll see what I can do." He rose to leave.
"It's Saturday?" I asked. He nodded...that was good -- I'd only been out for
a day or so. Not bad considering what my face had been through. It was a
miracle I'd escaped brain damage. Then again, maybe I just THOUGHT I'd
escaped brain damage... It really didn't seem to make much difference, in my
mind, which was already made up. "I'll be there tonight. At the Pit."
"Yeah -- Sayo." Never one for long goodbyes...
"Au rev," I said to a closed door. I slept.
***
After four more hours of nightmares, I got up and dressed, walking out of
the room and down the hall. All drones and robots, nobody alive to challenge
me as I walked right out the front door and headed north for Lou's, in the
heart of rager turf. When I got there, the place was already crawling with
guys. Saturday was ladies night, and we were playing. There was a moral here
somewhere, one which I didn't bother looking for.
Lou was tending, as usual.
"Sup?" He made me a Stygian Delight: Vodka, peppermint extract, lemon juice
over crushed ice. Some eat it with a spoon -- I gulped it. Lou gave me one
of his patented looks.
"I already have a headache." He gave me another. "So, who was he?"
"Knight. Andy Malarkas?" I shook my head -- knight, as in night, as in PM,
or Professional Mercenary. We had our way of talking circles without saying
a thing. Pitiful, really.
"You watch out fer guys like that from now on, 'kay?" Lou looked devious.
I raised an eyebrow -- the grafts were taking well.
"It's his eye you got." He smirked. "I think they needed somethin' quick,
and it jusso happened you two were on the same wagon, so it made sense I
guess." He shrugged again and walked away to help someone else, and I walked
onstage and helped set up. It made me forget.
***
Ricky started with fire today, an inferno which quickly died down when the
ice hit, consumed the heat. We danced around him. It felt right tonight,
just like my drink had cooled my rage. It felt good.
We were an odd band, to be sure, and we never really understood why so many
people came to watch us. Hell, we didn't even have a logo, simply a black
field with a violet G in the center. Or was that a logo? We were never sure.
We never released an album, we never even wrote a real song. We each played
our own song, our own music -- at one time, it might have been called jazz.
Five different songs playing off of one another, against one another, for
one another. Five different moods. Drums, two bass, two lead. No one ever
sang - no words to create with. We didn't need them. Usually Ricky'd lead
off on one guitar, setting a tempo, then we'd all add on. If it sounded
discordant, all the better -- we were often gods at war. Every night was a
Genesis and a new Apocalypse.
Our only stipulation to the music, our only rule about the set, was that we
would always end at one minute to midnight. Always. We always died at 11:59.
Why? Who the hell knows? It was just something Ricky thought up.
We had no manager, so we drifted west until we hit this new place called
Lucifer's Pit in one of them domed cities called New Aurora, where we were
hired on as one of the house bands. Free meals, room 'n board, half the
cover. Not bad actually. Until I'd been shot the other day.
Already I was playing it down...what an idiot. Maybe I had been brain
damaged.
Why would a Knight pop me? And why did I end up with his eye? It sure as
hell wasn't just a coincidence, I knew that for sure. Impossible -- a guy
tries to kill you so they give you his eye? Although an eye for an eye was
considered justice at one point in the past. It would be poetic justice.
But I didn't believe in justice, even if it rhymed.
We ended the set with the usual flourish, and I headed over to the bar. Lou
looked over at me and gestured to the booth in the corner, shrugging his
shoulders. I glanced over -- two figures, one female, one with his head
jacked into a 'puter and drooling all over the place. Only problem with that
sort of link; you lost all motor control for the duration of the run. It got
messy.
I knew Marcie. I knew them both, actually, but I'd never admit knowing that
piece of veal sprawled on the table to anyone. She was a specialist of
sorts, a damn good one; too good to be playing deckhand for any except the
best. And this guy was nowhere near the best.
"Whatcha handin' this guy for? You're better than that." I slid next to her.
"Malarkas. The knight who shot you. You've got his eye." The daemon sat up
and pulled wires from his temples, reading off of a screen now.
"And?"
"And," he said, "that eye is worth more than this bar. It's gov' shit.
You've got gigs of intel engraved on your retina there."
"Military?" It figured.
"Not quite. Law enforcement. Matrix stuff. It's some sort of digitizer.
Takes images and breaks them down, simplifies them, then reprocesses the
important bits."
"Meaning?"
Splatman pulled the last few trodes away and answered.
"Meaning that what you have there is a sniper scope which can knock a fly
off the wall without scratching the woodwork." I gave him a look. "That eye,
with the proper hookups, can let you zoom in on an area as small as the
pupil of someone's eye, allowing you to, for instance, blow their eye out
without causing brain damage. Theoretically." He grinned.
"It's never been field tested. Till now."
"Why would he want to knock out my eye?" I said, unconsciously touching it.
It felt like a real eye... "I'm supposed to get this eye?"
"It would appear that way. Rumor has it the knight got paid to hit you, to
test the eye. The city paid him 50,000 credits for you. It's all over the
boards."
"50K? For the lead guitar player of a house band?"
"It's as good a test as any ... a nobody singer in a nowhere band in a dive
like this," he gestured. "He wasn't counting on the flechette shotgun Lou
keeps behind the bar, however."
I stared at the wall, trying to envision the atoms behind the phosphors
dancing in my vision. No good -- I couldn't do it.
"We figure that you need a chip or something along with the eye to make it
work," Marcie said. "The chips can probably be mass-produced, but the eye is
a prototype. So you're just a...carrier, until they want it back."
I checked my watch ... time for our next set. I'd have to wait until later
to hire some of my own meat to guard my ass. It was my last mistake.
We hit the stage as usual, started our set. The crowd was great, the
atmosphere better. Tonight was going rather well, actually. That's when I
should have realized something was wrong. Kiko-man suddenly slumped to the
floor, half his head on the wall. We heard the shot a second later.
I felt a searing pain in my chest even as Kiko-man's bass hit the floor, and
I followed him down. The bouncers and roadies leapt into action, but they
were only there after he'd popped four more off, dropping each of the guys
and then blowing his own head off. Damn -- I'd never get any answers now.
Pieces of android hit the ground floor over a span of several seconds.
For the first time ever, the Pit was silent; utterly silent. I could hear my
own sticky breathing, and I slid a finger along my chest; the breastbone was
shattered, and bubbles rose from the hole. Damn. I crawled somehow to the
edge of the stage, still clutching my guitar, feeling like a wounded deer
trying to escape the hunter. Someone saw me gasping and slapped something on
the hole. It hurt, but I breathed again.
They were helping me offstage when Ricky started playing. We all turned to
look -- there he was, blood trickling from the perfect hole in the side of
his neck, fire and wind. A minute later Tito brought the heartbeat back, his
shoulder and arm no more. We weren't dead, not yet. It wasn't 11:59 yet.
Frank couldn't stand, but he'd crawled into a seated position and joined
Tito with the beat.
I joined them. Kiko-man was dead, but he'd dropped earlier than this before.
We played his song. His dirge. For 7 more minutes.
We were gods. And this was our twilight, after all.
Ricky was still playing when I died.
