Circle of Fate and Pain
by Elliot Bowers
"Epitaph"
lyrics and music by King Crimson
Chapter 11—You Cannot Escape Disease
1.
He stopped running a while ago and did not feel like running any more today, and there was nothing else to do. Nothing else to do, he stared at this street-lamp here. It is a tall and thick pole set on a meter-square steel plate—the plate bolted to the concrete. The pole itself was about twenty meters high. Near the top was connected a horizontal bar with a halogen-arc florescent lights fixture at the end. Whenever the day darkened to night, the thing would turn on—blazingly bright. It was wired under the streets and sidewalks.
Under the city sidewalks, under buildings, powerful electrical cables connected street-lamp poles and buildings together, connected to wires that went beneath sidewalks and through the sewers. He had the idea that it must use an awful lot of electricity when turned on. But this city had electrical power to spare, lots of it. There were nuclear fusion generators a kilometer or so underground—something like that. Those nuke generators must be at least a few hundred years old, still working correctly.
And if a fusion generator stopped working correctly, the unofficial phrase for that sort of situation would be Uh-oh... Unofficially speaking, when that Uh-oh happened, Jack Bent would much prefer to be at least sixty miles away when the blast happened. And as the radioactive cloud from the explosion began to fall, he would much prefer to be a hundred and sixty miles away—and at least six stories underground somewhere. If Jack Bent knew a month ahead of time which reactor was getting ready to rapidly expand in a blaze of radioactive glory, he would likely not even be in the same landscape of the thing. Oh yeah, those underground nuclear power plants were very, very old fusion generators. Old fusion generators could blow up at any time.
It happened before, that Uh-on sort of situation. And it was just too likely that a nuclear sort of Uh-oh would happen again. Somewhere in Scrap Iron City, some unknown time in the future, another fusion generator would go boom—maybe killing a few thousand folks in the process, then giving skin and intestinal cancers to a lot of fleshies People died in the blast. And if they didn't die then, they would most certainly die at some unknown point in the first few months.
Skin cancer from nuclear radiation really sneaks up on a person. First, that sort of problem looks like acne and freckles. There would just be those little spots on the skin exposed to the sinister light of the nuclear explosion. Except, it sure as Hell isn't acne. And it sure as Hell wouldn't clear up. Then come the tumors—lumps on the skin. The lumps grow inward, conquering muscle and nerve tissue. Worse still was how those lumps had little bits of themselves travel along the bloodstream to spread throughout the rest of the body. Death was then a long and crippling process—and inevitable.
Then there were the various sorts of cancers that grew inside of victims, like those who so happened to drink some of the water contaminated with the nuclear radiation. The most likely such malady from drinking Uh-oh water would be intestinal cancer. It made people become weak and thin from not being able to eat. Then came the blood and vomit leaking from both ends of their digestive tract. Most died before their hair began to fall out and their bones became weak as dry twigs.
There was hope in the destruction of their bodies. A fleshie who catches symptoms early can go to a clinic and hope that there is a low-cost cyborg body available. Then the fleshie's brain would be chopped out of the dying body and placed within a solid and reliable cyborg body. That is, if the brain was not already developing little baby cancers of its own.
So some people died, so what? Lose a fusion reactor, lose some fleshies, everybody and everything is replacable. The Factory can usually just make some more parts to rebuild the nuclear reactor that went Uh-oh. Some Deck-men would get the commands to hire a few thousand more cyborgs or so to go way underground to replace the nuclear fusion reactors—usually rebuilding the thing in the same underground place where the previous one exploded. As for replacing the meat-bag humans that died in the catastrophe... Well, humans can replace themselves. Human reproduction happens all the time.
Jack Bent wondered why most of the older nuke plants hadn't gone Uh-oh yet. Maybe cyborgs or something kept those fusion reactors going—or not. Hmm... Or maybe they had? Maybe most every part of Scrap Iron City had already been nuked at least once. Then the holes just built over with concrete buildings and paved asphalt while the underground facilities were put back into place as if nobody was blown up—sealing the intense radioactivity down there as well. Or maybe they were just sealed up way underground under the assumption that the people of Scrap Iron City would be too stupid to operate them? Worse, it could be that maybe those nuclear power plants were already malfunctioning and leaking radioactive coolant and other contaminants into the water supply. That would already be mixed up with whatever chemicals seeped from smokestack smoke or dripped from machine-buildings.
People drank city water because there wasn't exactly any other kind of water to drink. This wasn't like Ancient times--when a person could just mosey on into any old store and buy some bottled water from some place a thousand miles away. And maybe, that place a thousand miles away had cleaner water. Nah, there was just one source of water in Scrap Iron City. And it was water from the pipes, faucets, water tanks (and sewers) of The Factory. Of course there were little companies that just re-bottled Factory tap-water, slapped fancy labels onto the bottles, sold it to businessmen who thought they were getting cleaner water that was maybe like the water they drank up in Zalem. One such bottling corporation was the infamous Trench-Bloomcorporation--once a Motorball sponsor of a certain dark-haired female cyborg.
The Trench Bloom corporation gave the illusion of choice. All corporations ultimately just redistributed goods for one corporation: The Factory. All water, like all goods, ultimately came from just one source. And all a person could do was simply live with it.
Jack Bent drank the water. He drank it even though the city water always had a faint hint of chemical taste to it. He drank the mess even though he never got used to that chemical taste... That could likely be the reason why so many fleshies past a certain age began to have limbs rot off and be replaced with metal ones. Jack Bent was lucky so far in that he never had to have any of his limbs replaced just yet. Every so often, though, his left arm would go numb. And sometimes there would be little dark spots on his toes that wouldn't go away for a week or so. But Jack Bent took it down the mouth just like every other fleshie of Scrap Iron City—and them some. Just open the mouth and start sucking and swallowing whatever it is that the Factory has got for you.
So... Jack Bent had nowhere else to go at the moment. So why was he standing here at all, out in the open and right under a street-lamp that would—no doubt—light up really brightly as soon as sunlight began turning to sunset? If he needed an excuse to be standing here, it was that this particular street-lamp was somewhat special because it was one of those streetlamps at the edge of Tire-Wire Alley. This was a point where Tire-Wire Alley ended and the deeper streets of Scrap Iron City began. He arrived here because of a fear-fled mad dash away from where Sieben fought her last--where some more of those odd-skinned midgets in sunset-colored coveralls were starting to climb up out of the sidewalk to get him. There were no such industrial mutants in sight. Then again, Tire-Wire Alley was the only place he saw those midget-things.
He really ought to leave this neighborhood before they find him. This border-neighborhood was really just a few blocks of storefront businesses along one street. None of the buildings were over three stories high—low buildings all around. If he really wanted to run and hide somewhere, Scrap Iron City would be the place! Scrap Iron City wasn't just some one-street border neighborhood. Scrap Iron City was a gigantic land of hard paved concrete and churning machine-buildings taller than mountains—all going along jumbled streets. Scrap Iron City is thousands and thousands of industrial cityscape and hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods with millions and millions of cyborgs and fleshies. One more meat-bag human going to live among the churning hundreds of millions of downtrodden working people would be very hard to find!
Yeah, those little bastards in the gold-colored coveralls wouldn't be able to find him then! Or would they? They had ways of finding him, because they always seemed to pop up out of the sidewalk at the worst of times just when he thought he was rid of them. So, should he leave Tire-Wire Alley?
He crossed his arms and kept staring up at that street-lamp. It was still daylight, the street-light not on. Also true was how a man on the run was best not served by standing out in broad daylight in a small border-neighborhood and be in the process of contemplating a dang street-lamp--dang-nabbit. At least he was not on the run from bounty hunters as far as he knew. None of the local television broadcasts had pictures his face next to amounts of money. Nor were Net-men spreading the word about him.
Whir-r-r-r... The sound was familiar. He turned to seea Netman, one of those silver-bodied robots with the funny heads and silvery bodies with waterproof keyboards attached. Also attached to the Netman's body--and not so funny--were miniature versions of weaponry one associates with the Wars of long ago. "Hey, Netman," said Jack Bent. He was starting to talk before he could stop himself. "If I told you about some problems, could you maybe help me out?"
To this melancholy questioning, the Net-man responded in its typically cheerful metal voice. "Greetings, citizen! You have a concern? Well, friend, you may have come to the correct unit—one of many friendly neighborhood Net-men! If the Factory can be of help largely depends upon the nature of the issue. If it pertains to the violation of the basic but generous laws of the Factory, then we shall gladly assist you! Please state the nature of the alleged problem."
Came the thought, What the Hell am I doing! He, Jack Bent--a career criminal--was talking to a Net-man, one of the robotic investigators of Factory law. If this robotic joker had known even half of one percent of what Jack Bent had done in his lifetime, then it would not be long before there were pictures of his head on television everywhere and a great big amount of money next to it. And if any of his criminal cohort-associates found out that Jack Bent was doing this, then they would likely lop off his head for free.
Ah, what the Hell... He'd already been beaten up too many times within the past twenty-four hours. Most of the hurts still gave twinges of pain. He was even bleeding a little right now. "Mind if I sit down?" he asked. The Net-man just gave a blank stare—its chubby rubbery face with no particular expression. Then again, Net-men never really had any sort of expressions on their chubby rubbery faces.
So he sat down on the sidewalk and put his hands on his knees. "It goes something like this... There is a really cute girl around here. Girl, woman... It's hard to tell. She's on the petite side, slender, looks like a living doll--has really big eyes and long pretty hair... That's the trouble. She's too cute and beautiful. Someone up in..." No, he would not say Zalem. "Someone in a certain special city wants her. First she wants the girl dead. Then she wants the girl's body. The girl is supposed to die according to a certain deal."
"You are referring to the destruction of an entire human organism--including the brain?" inquired the Net-man--still cheerful. Though talking of death and mutilation, this damned robot was still talking in that happy-go-lucky voice of a toilet-brush salesman talking up the benefits of good oral hygiene and clean toilets. "The destruction of a human brain is a Class A violation of Factory Law. Any information pertaining to individuals involved in such criminal action is cheerfully accepted and may lead to financial reward."
Uh oh, thought the career criminal, sitting here on this sidewalk. It wasn't a nuclear sort of Uh-oh, but it was an Uh-oh regarding where his life was going right now. He thought Uh oh with fear and annoyance exactly because he was an individual involved in criminal action, exactly what they were talking about right now. "I'm just saying, though," he continued. "There is this girl... And some really bad people..."
What bad people? In the hundreds of years since big ol' Scrap Iron City was built, the criminal underground was built up right along with it. Stopping the most basic and obvious crimes were cyborg bounty hunters with insane melee weaponry and Net-men with heavy artillery not seen since the Wars. Yet you couldn't stop what you couldn't see, and the Netmen were too stupid to see or understand the concept of secret criminal organizations. Nah, all the robots of the Factory and all the other corporations were too busy worrying about levels of product output.
Then there were other ways to make Net-men stupid...or at least more stupid than they already were. Not too well-advertised was how the local band of gangsters and thugs had smart people working for them--people who learned how to use and build those Ancient devices called computers. Those smart people hired by criminals found out how to tap into the Net-men's data networks and tweak information about gangsters and such. Those smart hired people with the home-made computers would have been called hackers a thousand years back--before the world was the way it was now...
And those hackers had ways of never being caught. When all law enforcement is run by computer technology that has not changed for hundreds of years, of course they are going to be vulnerable to cybernetic attacks. Of all the millions of fleshies born, there was always the probability that a few dozen or so would grow up figuring out how to not only read, but also learning how to use computers. Then they learned how to use computers for the sake of screwing up Net-men.
"Forget about it," said Jack Bent--imagining a bored but too-intelligent computer hacker breaking into the Net-men's data networks—some kind of slight mutant with an inhumanly large head and lumpy fingers poised on keys. Such a mutant could be using the Net-man's camera-eyes to look at him right here, right now. "Forget I ever said anything about the girl being in trouble for her life."
"Very well, then!" cheered the Net-man as if none of this conversation happened. That was Net-men: emotions and minds small enough to stop and turn on a coin—digital coins. "Have a
good day! And remember, production comes before safety!" Then the metal-bodied robot-thing went trundling away."
Very well... Hell, thought Jack Bent. He remained sitting on this sidewalk even after the Net-man robot trundled itself away. Was there even a point to trying to rat himself out of the crime-thug's life he had wriggled his way into by now? Once in the game, you stayed in the game--until you were dead. The game went like this. You received a job—a dangerous, illegal job. Then you did the job and hoped that you were not maybe killed in the process, killed by way of bounty or by those who were trying to stop you. When the job was over and you still lived, they gave you another go-around—making you receive another job.
Becoming a career criminal was the end of the road for too many off-beat folks like him. And from there, doing wrong was like riding through that Motorball circuit. One of these days, he'd just have to drop the ball given to him in life. Thinking about this gave him...one of those headaches. It hurt like Hell... It made him everything in a darkened reddish haze, and his left leg went numb. Dang it, he thought, collapsing to lie on his back as a spasm hit. He had the idea that some of those mutants were getting ready to come up out of the sidewalk..
2.
Spasms, numbness, it could only mean something that fleshies feared worse than losing an arm or so. It was brain damage. Damaged body-parts could be replaced. Damaged parts of brains could not. He likely must have suffered brain damage during the course of the beatings dispensed to him. But he was fine before! This was him just walking along and trying to get along. Except now the pain was back--for more.
Nevertheless, there was no arguing with the personal agony and pain that gripped round his head--reached into his head and throughout himself. "Augh," he grunted, staggering to his feet and holding his head, making him stagger to the left--because that side of his body suddenly wasn't working too well. And the vision out of his left eye took on that cracked-lens look, also becoming darkened. He must have bumped into a cyborg at some point because someone with metal hands was standing in front of him and yelling something--yelling about Freakin' fleshies... Just seconds into his agony, and he was already getting himself into more trouble. One thing about pain was how it could make seconds seem like minutes--stretched into the pain of eternity. Or maybe, this time, the pain would not go away at all. "Ai-i-ia-ai-aiagh!" screamed Jack Bent.
"A-a-augh, a-a-a-augh... Ai-ia-a-aia-ia-a-agh...!" He couldn't stop himself from screaming. Not only that, but the ringing sound from the right side of his head only seemed to make things worse. Though once familiar, the keening sound was now giving him agony. The agony and pain just blended into one another while his mind was being distorted with suffering.
What kind of sound was it? That keening sound was the sort of sound a person hears when in a dark and quiet room at night. Except it sure as heck wasn't dark and quiet right now. Everything was bright and loud and filling his head. The high-pitched keening began spreading over from the right side of his head and...taking over. Suddenly, Jack Bent...couldn't take it any more! "Aia-ia-a-agh!" he screamed once more as he flopped onto his bac to writhe on the hard gritty paved surface.
Damn, he was fine a second ago! Now this was happening. For all knew, he was dying right now--his brain dying because of one blow too many from those cyborg thugs. There was the vague idea of a sliver of misplaced skull-bone lodged in his brain. Or maybe a tiny little blood vessel was slowly bleeding raw blood into part of his brain. He suddenly sat up and flopped back down again while the left side of his vision kept that fractured-lens sort of look and the right side of his head was full of that loud electric sound.
Whamp! So lost was Jack Bent in his own pain that he did not see what just happened. Nearby, a section of the sidewalk flipped up and open--like the lid of a concrete dumpster. This revealed a darkness beneath again... And in that darkness were those mutant-midgets in gold-colored work-clothes. "Saty-a-a-agrah!" came the sound of a voice from below.
Somehow, Jack Bent heard that through...the haze of Hellish pain in his head. He also knew that he ought to get the Hell away from here. Those midgets living beneath the sidewalk were likely going to get him if he did not move. But there was no getting away. The left side of his body was numbly cold with pain, and the right side was filled with that keening sound. "Oblamah!" came a cheer from the darkness. "Satya-a-agraha!"
'Satyagraha' to you too, whatever that means...you mutant-bastards, thought Jack Bent. Then most of the pain went away. The left side of his vision was still split up into that cracked-lens sort of look. Yet at least it was bearable now. He could get up.
So he did—though the pain was still enough to make him stagger a little. And there was still that keening sound...which just kept getting louder the longer he stayed around those mutants.
Come over here, came a thought in his head. Jack Bent managed to lift his head upon hearing something through that ke-e-e-e-e sound filling the right side of his hearing. The voice... It sounded dark and rasped slightly with damage, like the voice of a cyborg-man with a damaged torso. Come over here. You must become the receiver of the ball.
He looked up...and managed to stand up. It still felt as if the sidewalk was trying to take him down to Hell. Or the midgets were going to take him down to Hell. Hell, wasn't life on the ground enough like that? What the Hell...
They want you. They want you to become the bearer of the ball. They want you to bear the ball that shall come around. It comes again and again.
What the Hellindeed!Standing up, he looked forward to see something he had never seen before in his life. A rabbit, it was a freakin' six-foot bunny-rabbit. More exactly, it was a six-foot figure wearing a fuzzy bunny suit. The body was primarily covered up with fuzziness, but the face was bare: a grotesque cyborg-face of exposed metal, with bunny ears sticking up. That face was the worse: a gleaming metal skull-face to go with articulated metal jaws, silvery camera-eyes looking in this direction.
The eyes in the metal face began to glow. That glow became bright, like two little stars that were very close... No, there was something beyond the twin glow of those eyes. Staring into that florescent twin-eyed gaze was like peeking into something. Jack Bent had the idea that if he was to take hold of those metal bunny-ears like hand-holds and put his face right up against those eyes to look in, he'd see into another world...
Come over, went the six-foot cyborg-faced figure in the bunny suit. We must return something to your current body. Become one with the circle.
Jack Bent thought to himself, What the Hell are you talking about? He really wanted to turn himself right around and get as fast and as far away from that cyborg-creature in the bunny suit as possible. Except he couldn't. Kee-e-e-e...! That high-pitched sound in his right ear suddenly became louder while the vision in his left eye became even worse. His senses were muffled.
He felt his left foot touch down onto the sidewalk. Another second, his...right foot...touched the sidewalk after the left. The left foot...and the...right foot...and the...left foot...again, and again... He was walking right in the direction of the cyborg-faced creature in the bunny suit--electromechanical face and all. The cyborg-creature in the bunny suit turned and walked into a doorway, Jack Bent following...
It was...a darkened version of a certain restaurant again--or something like that. Most all the lights in the place were turned off, except for two of them. One of them was a spotlight shining on the raised stage at the far end of this room: a brassy gold-colored trumpet set atop a chair. The other spotlight shone down at the table that Jack Bent found himself approaching right now. That ringing in his right ear was still there, and the left side of his vision was still cold and blurry--but the pain was tolerable. It gave him more of an idea of the pain maybe becoming permanent. He could not worry about that now, though.
You will sit down now, said the cyborg man-creature in the bunny suit. Or did Jack Bent imagine that the cyborg-creature in the bunny suit said it? Anyway, the curly haired man found himself sitting down in a seat set before a circular wooden table. Jack Bent had the impression that something was very, very important about the fact that the table was circular. He just couldn't quite get it at the time.
That cyborg-faced man-creature in the bunny suit was already sitting down--sitting stiff-backed, metal ears pointed up. Come to think of it, those robotic ears sort of resembled insect-like ears instead of rabbit ones. Staring into those eyes also brought about This world dies tonight, declared the cyborg-faced man-creature in the bunny suit. He--or it--then raised the right arm to touch something that was suddenly in the middle of the table. A cotton-muffed hand touched rounded metal.
The object atop the table had a very familiar look to it. At least, the appearance was familiar to most anyone who lived around a certain border-neighborhood of Scrap Iron City. It was a sphere roughly the size of a head. There were also fist-sized stubby projections extending out from the sphere, big nubs resembling large cleats. It was these large cleat-like projections that kept the object from rolling around on the table. To Jack Bent's eyes, it looked like the prime object of the sport Motorball. He also had the idea that it was actually not a Motorball ball: it only looked like a Motorball. There was something else about the object that wasn't quite right—something very odd
You cannot run from the returning truth, invoked the cyborg-creature in the bunny suit. An entity can only run with the truth. The cyborg-creature then raised one of those muff-covered hands to pat the Motorball object atop the table. This is the truth, to go around, go around...
The Hell it is! Somehow, Jack Bent was then able to get himself up and away from the seat. He did not get far. That keening sound in his right ear...overcame the rest of his head. That, and the vision in his left eye was almost totally eliminated by now. One side of him deaf, the other side nearly blind, he really was in a world of pain and suffering.
Then those mutant-midgets in the gold-colored coveralls stepped out of the darkness. One of them now had the Motorball object. Five other midgets took various holds of Jack Bent: one holding his right arm, another holding the left arm, two more for his legs, and one held his head. That midget in the gold coveralls twisted and shoved the Motorball object into Jack Bent's guts. They then began to drag him away, his blood smearing along the grimy floor...
Everything was seen through a haze of pain and dizziness. Above was that old infinite darkness again... No, there was a spotlight shining down from above--even if the glare of the actual light-fixture itself was not visible. There had to be light coming from somewhere because it illuminated the head of the blurry and labcoat-wearing figure above him. One of the blurry figure's tools raised up. Bwe-e-e-e-e...!
Oh no, not again, came the thought. The blurry figure moved the tool away and out of sight--towards the abdomen--the high-pitched squeal of the tool moving with it. Then the sound of the tool lowered in pitch when it began cutting. This made for far too much pain--blacking out...
The man...was standing on the sidewalk. He swayed on his feet, and there was a lost and drunken sort of look on his face. Yet it was not drink that made for that sway in his stance. It was instead the result of far too much pain filling his midsection. There was a feeling of being struck in the abdomen and consuming something terrible.
"Hey guy! Watch out!" complained a tall cyborg-man in expensive business clothes. Though his business suit and pants covered most all of his body, shoes on his feet and gloves on his hands, there were nevertheless glimpses of metal at the wrists. He was apparently one of those wealthy sorts involved with sports: not playing the sports themselves. It was this expensively clad figure that brushed past the curly haired man swaying on the sidewalk.
Can't watch out, thought the man... What was his name again? Hmmph... Jack Bent, that was it--or something. And if his own name was hard enough, trying to remember where he was became even harder. All that he knew at the moment was that he was standing on a city sidewalk and everything was swaying.
He tried saying it through the swirling nausea and feeling filling him. He tried to take in a deeper breath to talk... Something was very wrong, because it was hard for him to inhale air past a certain point. Worse still was how too deep a breath put pain in his midsection. That feeling of something being wrong only made things feel worse still. Can't watch...out...
The curly haired man in overpriced slacks and tee-shirt just knew was that something was very wrong inside of him. "Like, watch where you're going!" exclaimed a female cyborg--a pink-haired female figure dressed in a tight-fitting dress. The skirt portion barely covered her hips, and the top clung like skin to her electromechanical female body—skin that her metal self didn't have. "Ew! And quit eyeing me like I'm one of those fleshie sluts! Perv!"
Help me, he thought and tried to say. Except it came out something like Elp-rip or something. The pain in his midsection also worsened upon trying to talk. It was also an effort to try focusing enough to talk as well. So he did not try talking anymore. Help... He needed a way out.