I have no time to dally. One further regretful smile at the handsome young assistant and I make for the door, checking my wallet, papers and ormolu pill box as I go. I am Mr Marquand Ys, according to my British passport. That is all in order. The wallet is full of large white banknotes and several important-looking bits of plastic with silvery chips embedded.
Into the street. Still no airships. Dommage!
However: above the relatively low-rise buildings a very large aircraft sails serenely overhead, heading west. I wave my cane at a cab – a whirring, hunchbacked-looking thing which I’d surmise runs off electricity – and order the lady cabbie to take me to the airport.
In the mirror, the woman’s brow creases. “Which one?”
Ah, a large London; Londres grande! How splendid. “Where’s that aircraft heading?” I ask, pointing with my cane.
She cranes her neck out of her window, squinting. “Eafrow, I should fink.”
“There, then.”
“It’ll cost ya.”
“I’m sure. Now do drive on.” We set off. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I mutter. It feels pleasing to me, just saying it. It has a become a mantra, I suppose. The girl cabby glances askance at me in her mirror. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I repeat, smiling.
“Wottevah, mate.”
I sit back, watching the relatively quiet traffic and rather loud architecture glide past. My heart has been beating rather rapidly since my transition – well, since Lord Harmyle’s murder, I suppose. Now it begins to slow, allowing me the luxury of reflection.
Of course I think about whatever poor wretch I’ve left behind to deal with the aftermath of my actions, especially when it is something as dramatic and unpleasant as a murder. What must it be like for them, I wonder? Allegedly they know nothing about what has happened until after I have gone, though I always wonder if this is really true. Might they not be aware of what I am making them do, even as I do it? Are they not perhaps along for the ride when I take over their body, observing – doubtless terrified and frustrated – as I perform whatever actions I deem to be necessary to fulfil whatever orders I have been given?
Or are they genuinely oblivious, and effectively wake up to be suddenly confronted with – in the case of the operation just concluded – a dying man, blood on their hands and the stares of shocked witnesses? What could one possibly do in such circumstances? Flinch back, horrified, exclaiming, “But it wasn’t me!”? Scarcely supportable. One would do best to run, I’d imagine. It might be better for the poor bastards to collapse, quite dead, the instant I leave them. I have asked about this kind of thing, but the Concern is by its nature very conservative and secretive and even the researchers, technicians and experts whose business it is to know of such matters are not inclined to divulge the relevant answers.
There are those who assuredly do know the answers to all these questions and more. Madame d’O would know; Mrs M would too, and Dr Plyte and Professore Loscelles and all the others on the Central Council. There is in all likelihood an entire division of the… hmm, for some reason I don’t want to think of it as the Concern. This is one of the worlds where it is thought of as l’Expédience.
Anyway, indeed. There is an entire cadre of experts who have studied what happens when someone like myself takes over a previously existing person in another reality and then leaves them again, but l’Expédience does not deem me to be one of those who needs to know the results of their research. I’d love to know. I have carried out my own modest experiments, attempting to rummage round in the memories I find or the feelings I discover, trying to find some trace of the personality I have displaced, but so far such vicarious introspections have produced nothing except a lingering feeling of foolishness at having undertaken them in the first place.
Plainly I inherit something of the character of the person whose being I usurp. That must be where the OCD comes from, and one’s sexual inclination, as does the taste for, variously, coffee, tea, chocolate, spiced milk, hard liquor, bland or spicy food, or prunes. I have found myself, over the years, surveying the reality I find myself in with the eyes of somebody who is plainly a general medical practitioner, a surgeon, a landscape designer, a mathematician, a structural engineer, a livestock breeder, a litigation lawyer, an insurance assessor, an hotelier and a psychiatrist. I seem to be at home amongst the professions. Once I was a sewerage system designer who was also a serial killer. (Yes, I know, but I would beg the indulgence of being regarded, rather, as an assassin. I will even accept Paid Killer, so long as it is understood that I do what I do through informed choice rather than due to some grubbily psychotic urge. Though I’ll allow that the importance of this distinction might escape my victims.) On that occasion I had to suppress the urge to strangle prostitutes in order to carry out my mission, which was to track down and kidnap (ha! You see? Not kill) my quarry.
On the other hand, I have never been a woman, which is slightly odd and even a little disappointing. Obviously there are limits.
And are these bodies I inhabit ever used more than once? I have never visited the same body twice – indeed, I rarely visit the same reality twice.
These taken-over persons will have had perfectly full lives before I invade them. They have pasts, careers, networks of relationships both personal and professional; all that one would expect. I have had “my” wives, partners, girlfriends, “my” children and “my” best friends greet me without a trace of discomfiture or any sign that I am behaving oddly or out of character. I seem to know how to behave when I am somebody else, as naturally as the most gifted actor, and when I search my/their memories I find no trace of earlier exposure to the Concern – or whatever it might be called locally – or preparation for what has happened.
I extract my little ormolu pill case from my coat and study it. I shall probably next take one of the tiny capsules it contains while ten kilometres above the Atlantic, or over the Alps, or while looking down at the Sahara. Or I could wait until I arrive wherever it is I decide to go. In any event, how do these little white pills – small enough for one to fit three or four on the nail of one’s smallest finger – actually work? Who manufactures them, where? Who invented them, tried and tested them? I work the sweetener case conventionally, causing it to produce a perfectly normal sweetener such as any diet-conscious person might slip into their tea or coffee (while often, of course, tucking one’s snout into a glistening cream bun). It is almost identical to the special pills, lacking only a tiny blue dot – scarcely visible to the naked eye – in the very centre of one face. I slide open the end of the ormolu case and replace the sweetener.
The little case itself is quite an exquisite piece of work. Used as one would expect it to be used it will happily dispense sweeteners and nothing but sweeteners all day until they run out; only by holding and pressing it just so may one access the small compartment concealed within that contains its real treasure, so that it releases one of the little pills which lead one to flit, bringing about a transition, flicking one into another soul and another world.
Questions, questions. I know how I am supposed to think. I am supposed to think that one day I might rise to the level of Madame d’Ortolan and her ilk, and discover some of the answers. Eliding everybody on the list my orders contained might well be quite enough by itself to ensure just such an elevation, and I should think so too; such a close-packed sequence of elisions would require my best work, and success would by no means be assured.
Anyway – sadly, as far as Madame d’Ortolan’s purposes are concerned – I have no intention of killing the people on the list. On the contrary: I will save them if I can (with any luck, in a sense I already have). No, I intend to go quite diametrically off-message in this matter.
I already have, of course; Lord Harmyle wasn’t even on the list.
5
Patient 8262
Ah, our profession. Mine, and those who will now be looking for me. My p
eers, I suppose. Though I was peerless, if I say so myself. There was – especially at the more colourful end of the reality spectrum – an insane grace to my elisions, a contrived but outrageous elegance. As evidence, the fiery fate of one Yerge Aushauser, arbitrageur. Or perhaps you would prefer the brain-frying exit of Mr Max Fitching, lead singer of Gun Puppy, the first true World Band in more realities than we cared to count. Or the painful and I’m afraid protracted end of Marit Shauoon, stunt driver, businessman and politician.
For Yerge, I arranged a special bubble bath at his Nevada ranch, replacing the air feed to the nozzles in his hot tub with hydrogen. The cylinders, hidden under the wooden decking around the tub, were controlled by a radio-activated valve. I was watching from the other side of the world through a digital camera attached to a spotting scope, a sunlight-powered computer and a proprietary satellite uplink, all sitting disguised by sage bushes on a hillside a mile away. A motion sensor alerted me that the hot tub was in use while I was asleep in my hotel in Sierra Leone. When I gazed, bleary-eyed, into my phone I saw Yerge Aushauser striding up to the tub, alone for once. I swung out of bed, woke the laptop for a higher-definition view and waited until he was sitting there in the frothing water, all hairy arms and furious expression. Probably another expensive night at the gaming tables. He usually brought home a girl or two to knock around on such occasions, but perhaps this morning he was tired. The view was quite clear through the cool morning air, untroubled by thermals. I could see him put something long and dark to his mouth, then hold something to its end. A spark. His fat fingers would be closing round his Gran Corona, his throat exposed as he put his head back against the cushion on the tub’s rim and blew the first mouthful of smoke into the clear blue Nevada sky.
I punched in the code for the valve controlling the feed from the hydrogen cylinders. Seconds later, half a world away, the water frothed crazily, briefly seemed to steam as though boiling, hiding first Yerge and then the tub in a ball of vapour. This erupted almost immediately into an intense yellow-white fireball which engulfed the tub and all the nearby decking. Even in the early morning sunshine it blazed brightly.
Amazingly, after a few seconds, while the pillar of roaring flame piled towards the heavens like an upside-down rocket plume, Yerge stumbled out of the conflagration and across the decking, hair on fire, skin blackened, strips of it hanging off him like dark rags. He fell down some steps and lay there, motionless, minus his cigar but still – in a sense – smoking.
Until the decking itself caught fire – Yerge’s servants had run out from the house and dragged him away by then – there was little smoke; oxygen and hydrogen burn perfectly, producing, of course, only water. Most of the initial burst of smoke, now drifting and dissipating in the cool morning breeze and heading towards the distant grey sierras, would have come from Yerge himself.
He had ninety-five per cent burns, and lungs seared by flame inhalation. They managed to keep him alive for nearly a week, which was remarkable.
Max Fitching was a god amongst mortals, a man with the voice of an angel and the proclivities of a satyr. I killed Max while he sat in a seriously pimped open-top half-track in Jakarta, waiting for a roadie to return with his drugs (Max never did get the hang of dressing down. Or going incognito). The Israeli laser weapon was originally an experimental device designed to bring down Iranian missiles while they were still over Syria, or, better still, Iraq. I fired it from a container truck a block down the street from Max’s idling half-track. Even attenuated to the minimum it was grossly overpowered for the job and rather than drill a neat hole straight through Max’s fashionably pale, heavily sunglassed, wildly dreadlocked head, it blew it to smithereens. Windows shattered three storeys up.
This was not elegant – far from it. The elegance came from the fact that the laser burst was not a single brutally simple pulse but one which had been precisely frequency-modulated to mirror the digitalised information of a high-sample-rate MP3 signal, compressed into a microsecond. What hit Max was effectively an MP3 copy of “Woke Up Down,” Gun Puppy’s first worldwide hit and the song that had made Max truly famous.
Marit Shauoon was a populist politician in the Perón mould, and, like the others, I had been reliably informed that he would, if left alone, take the world to a Very Bad Place, in his case starting with South and Central America. (As if any of this really mattered to me. Craft, my trade, was all. I let those who handed me my orders worry about the morality of it.) He had been a motorcycle stunt rider, the most famous in Brazil and then in the world. He crashed a lot but that just added to the excitement, anticipation and sense of jeopardy in the crowd. All four of his major limbs were pinned and strengthened with extensive amounts of surgical steel and even without those there were enough metal implants in the rest of his body to set off airport security scanners while he was still walking stiffly from the car park.
I found an induction furnace for him. He heated up, quite slowly, from the inside, to the sound of vastly thrumming magnets all around him, and his own screams.
… What? Why, why, and why? I would have had no idea if I had not been told, and even once I was told frankly I still didn’t care. (I am mildly surprised I recall any of the reasons given below at all.)
So: Yerge would have started a political party to rid the USA of non-Aryans, bringing chaos and apocalyptic bloodshed. Max would have given all his hundreds of millions in royalties to an extremist Green movement who – taking an arguably rather drastic approach to harmonising the planet’s natural carrying capacity with the size of its human population – would have used the windfall to design, manufacture, weaponise and distribute a virus that would kill ninety per cent of humanity. And Marit would have used his vast communications network to… I can’t remember; broadcast pornography to Andromeda or something. As I say, it didn’t really matter. I had by then entirely stopped enquiring why I might be committing such terminally grievous acts. All I cared about was the artistry and elegance involved in the doing, the carrying out, the commission.
The execution.
The Philosopher
Screams. Too many screams. They have kept me awake at night, woken me from dreams and nightmares.
I do not enjoy what I do, though I am not ashamed of it, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am proud of it. It is something that has to be done, and somebody has to do it. It is because I do not enjoy it that I am good at it. I have seen the work of those who do enjoy our mutual calling, and they do not produce the best results. They get carried away, they indulge themselves rather than stick to the task in hand, which is to produce the results which are desired and to recognise them when they are produced. Instead, they try too hard, and fail.
I torture people. I am a torturer. But I do no more than I am told to do and I would rather that the people I torture told the truth, or revealed the information that they carry and which we need to know, as quickly as possible, both to spare themselves and to spare me the unpleasantness of the task because, as I say, I take no pleasure in what I have to do. Nevertheless, I do all that I am asked to do, and will always work long hours and take on extra duties if required. This is conscientiousness, and a sort of mercy because at least when I do it only the minimum is done. I have had colleagues – the ones mentioned above who enjoy what we do – who have been impatient to cause the maximum amount of pain and damage. They are, in the end, inefficient.
The clever ones pretend not to be psychotic and only indulge themselves rarely, opting for routine efficiency for the majority of the time. They’re the dangerous ones.
My favoured techniques are electricity, repeated near-suffocation and, hard though this may be to believe, simply talking. The electricity is the crudest, in a sense. We use a variable step resistor attached to the mains and a variety of common-or-garden car jump leads. Sometimes some water or conducting gel. The crocodile clips on the end of the jump leads hurt quite a bit without any current flowing through them. The ears are good sites, and fingers and toes. The
genitals, obviously. The nose or tongue with the other terminal inserted into the anus is a favourite with some of my colleagues, though I dislike the resultant messiness.
Repeated near-suffocation involves gaffer-taping the subject’s mouth and then using a second small piece of tape to close the nostrils, removing it just before or just after the onset of unconsciousness. This is a useful technique for low-level subjects and for those who must be returned to some other department or security agency, or even to normal life, without any signs of injury.
Talking involves telling the subject what will happen to them if they do not cooperate. It is best done in a perfectly dark room, talking quietly and matter-of-factly from somewhere behind the chair they are secured to. First I describe what will happen to them anyway, even if they tell us everything, because there is a certain minimum, a kind of call-out fee level of torment that we have to inflict once people have been referred to us. This is to maintain our reputation and the sense of dread that must be associated with us. Fear of being tortured can be a highly effective technique for maintaining law and order in a society and I believe that we would be in dereliction of our duty if we did not do our bit.
Then I describe what I might do to them: the voltages used, the symptoms of suffocation and so on. I have studied the relevant physiology in some depth and am able to elucidate with the use of copious medical terminology. Then I describe some of the other techniques used by some of my colleagues. I mention the man whose code name is Doctor Citrus. He restricts his torture instruments to a sheet of A4 paper and a fresh lemon, using numerous – usually several dozen to start with – paper cuts distributed all over the subject’s naked body which then have a drop or two of lemon juice squeezed into them. Or salt, sometimes. Like repeated near-suffocation, this does not sound so terrible to most people, but, statistically, it is one of the most effective torture techniques that we employ. Of course our friend Doctor Citrus does not use just one sheet of paper, as any single sheet will grow moist with sweat and small amounts of blood, over time. He always has a box of paper to hand.