face and instead of demanding a flight to Cuba, snarled, ‘The cultural space vacated by logic and morality has been filled at once with an automated and meaningless simulacrum which is nevertheless of precisely the same dimensions.’ A kidnapper started assembling a ransom note from scissored headline letters and finished a year and forty thousand words later with the words ‘and won’t accept the jig’s up even when faced with a show of apathy equal to their own’. The kid he kidnapped had long since escaped. Another sparkhead entered a bank right after a romantic break-up and delivered a bitter monologue on how ‘women send signals but men speak English’ while performing the most mawkish heist in Beerlight history. He later wrote and signed a confession which, published under the title The Seahorse’s Gaze , replied to theories of gender manipulation with those of hermaphroditic self-fertility and indifference.
Some denizens would mix anodynes with smarts and watch everything gain and lose meaning, need it and not give a damn. The very walls pulsed in a fast alternation which made cloaker-smart cocktails a fashionable substitute for rave strobes. Those who could afford strobes and pills practised the art of intersecting the two elements by synchronizing and desynchronizing the strobe frequencies to provoke a series of profundity pile-ups or empty vistas depending on whether you were tuned in.
Dante Two wondered if he should have downed a few cloakers before the Deal heist. He’d agreed with himself that if he entered the bank to find he was the second Dante on the scene he’d allow the time-tripper to ventilate him. A necessary sacrifice. But he hadn’t gotten rebellious - he’d followed through and didn’t feel in any way guilty for surviving the shot. In any case he’d felt weird about dumbing out, even as a disguise.
‘ We are acting much too well, and procrastinating,’ Costello told Dante Two, staring him in the eye with his fist. ‘Digitizing guns as if we cannot trust our own senses. Look at this.’ He picked up an AMA Long Range Rifle. ‘Thirty-four pounds of dismissal, my friend. Fired by you or me, it has a meaning. Computer-assisted, it’s merely a movie. Carry on that way, we end up on the stinking dump out there. Take it from me - Costello Ignore Anaya.’
The party started breaking up to attend the convention, which was kicking off around now. Dante Two said thanks but no thanks, thinking about Rosa. He loved her from the black ice of her boots to the pink icing of her brain. If she were blown to pieces he’d love the pieces. He headed out.
6
RESTRAINT
Restraint had stupidly volunteered to provide an amusement at the snipers’ rip - he’d got a degree of notoriety for his performances at the Delayed Reaction. ‘I spy,’ he’d announce, ‘with my little eye, something beginning with T.’ Then he’d release Ramone the wren, who would pluck the wallet of a bleary onlooker and return it to Restraint amid applause. ‘Theft,’ Restraint would explain, tossing the wallet back, empty. But he found the audience would bellow guesses regardless - ‘tree’ - ‘trampoline’ - ‘turtle’ - and be genuinely baffled at his consequent rage.
Today he had something different planned. When he was a kid his mother had always tried to stop him picking his nose by saying ‘God can see you when you pick your nose.’ This guarantee had led him to create a snot graffiti which said YOU FUCKED UP BIG TIME. But in adulthood it occurred to him that maybe God couldn’t read. The thing needed to be simpler.
So now he stood on stage before an assembly of rivet-eyed mercenaries and picked his nose, backed by a fast-cutting projection of starvation, death and disease. The worse for Jones’s joltware, he began laughing and performing a strange, jerking dance. He had forgotten the purpose of the exercise, and the MC’s introduction of the piece as ‘Mister Restraint and his
Some denizens would mix anodynes with smarts and watch everything gain and lose meaning, need it and not give a damn. The very walls pulsed in a fast alternation which made cloaker-smart cocktails a fashionable substitute for rave strobes. Those who could afford strobes and pills practised the art of intersecting the two elements by synchronizing and desynchronizing the strobe frequencies to provoke a series of profundity pile-ups or empty vistas depending on whether you were tuned in.
Dante Two wondered if he should have downed a few cloakers before the Deal heist. He’d agreed with himself that if he entered the bank to find he was the second Dante on the scene he’d allow the time-tripper to ventilate him. A necessary sacrifice. But he hadn’t gotten rebellious - he’d followed through and didn’t feel in any way guilty for surviving the shot. In any case he’d felt weird about dumbing out, even as a disguise.
‘ We are acting much too well, and procrastinating,’ Costello told Dante Two, staring him in the eye with his fist. ‘Digitizing guns as if we cannot trust our own senses. Look at this.’ He picked up an AMA Long Range Rifle. ‘Thirty-four pounds of dismissal, my friend. Fired by you or me, it has a meaning. Computer-assisted, it’s merely a movie. Carry on that way, we end up on the stinking dump out there. Take it from me - Costello Ignore Anaya.’
The party started breaking up to attend the convention, which was kicking off around now. Dante Two said thanks but no thanks, thinking about Rosa. He loved her from the black ice of her boots to the pink icing of her brain. If she were blown to pieces he’d love the pieces. He headed out.
6
RESTRAINT
Restraint had stupidly volunteered to provide an amusement at the snipers’ rip - he’d got a degree of notoriety for his performances at the Delayed Reaction. ‘I spy,’ he’d announce, ‘with my little eye, something beginning with T.’ Then he’d release Ramone the wren, who would pluck the wallet of a bleary onlooker and return it to Restraint amid applause. ‘Theft,’ Restraint would explain, tossing the wallet back, empty. But he found the audience would bellow guesses regardless - ‘tree’ - ‘trampoline’ - ‘turtle’ - and be genuinely baffled at his consequent rage.
Today he had something different planned. When he was a kid his mother had always tried to stop him picking his nose by saying ‘God can see you when you pick your nose.’ This guarantee had led him to create a snot graffiti which said YOU FUCKED UP BIG TIME. But in adulthood it occurred to him that maybe God couldn’t read. The thing needed to be simpler.
So now he stood on stage before an assembly of rivet-eyed mercenaries and picked his nose, backed by a fast-cutting projection of starvation, death and disease. The worse for Jones’s joltware, he began laughing and performing a strange, jerking dance. He had forgotten the purpose of the exercise, and the MC’s introduction of the piece as ‘Mister Restraint and his
Similar Books
