RG Williams

[Back when I was younger, around sixteen or so, I wrote a short book about a teenager who, through accelerated evolution, grew a pair of wings. There were government conspiracies, genetically engineered super-soldiers and all that exciting stuff. I had a whole series of books planned, but as I grew older the idea grew more unwieldy, until I felt it was best to set it aside. This is my way of finally giving that teenager the send-off he deserves.]

I walked in to find him sat on the foot of my bed. He looked up, our gazes met, and I could see in his eyes the long years he’d spent as a half-remembered dream in the back of my head. My prodigal son had returned.

‘Long time, no see,’ Duke murmured, voice hovering awkwardly between nostalgic friend and victim of an old, but still red raw, betrayal. His appearance hadn’t changed from the last time I’d seen him: the same tall, perhaps to the point of gangly, dark and handsome man I’d loved. ‘How you been keeping?’

I didn’t say anything. It had been a long day, full of drab textbooks and fluorescent lighting. I’d popped two painkillers a few hours ago and my brain was still feeling wrapped in needle-laced wool. This was the last thing I needed. I prayed it wasn’t real. My shoulders slouched, relieving themselves both of the workload I had slogged through and the straps of my backpack, the old and tattering thing clattering with the sound of laptops and books really too valuable to be allowed to clatter as it hit the floor. I crossed the room in a few shuffled steps, dropped myself into my desk-chair and let it carry me on its groaning wheels a few inches further.

When my eyes slid halfway open once more, Duke was still there. I told him so.

‘Making up for lost appearances,’ he replied, digging into his coat pocket and producing a bruised, crumpled packet of cigarettes. Well, packet of cigarette really, since as he pulled one out with his teeth he crumpled the paper carton into a ball and stuffed it back into his pocket without a second thought. In no hurry, he drew out a Zippo and, after a few tries, managed to light up. I couldn’t help but notice, through the cheap green plastic, that there were only a few droplets of fuel left. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that to be bitter.’ He’d taken too long for the apology to even come across as remotely sincere. That brought a tired, low smirk to one side of his face. ‘Can you blame me? It’s been three years since you last wrote me. Pushing six since we spent any proper time together.’ He rose to his feet and tried to start pacing, but the room was too small to let him really get more than two or three strides. So instead he rounded on me and tore the cigarette from the side of his mouth. Those long years in his eyes had deepened, darkened, and were slowly spilling over and running down his cheeks. ‘You know what? I am bitter. Why the fuck shouldn’t I be? After all the changes I made for you, everything I risked, the life I gave up because you wanted me to. And for what? So you could run off with someone smarter, or someone more attractive? Without even a goddamn word of goodbye?’

He was panting, softly, but I could hear the catch in his voice. That little strangled choke of a sob suppressed. I commented on his smoking habit, and his swearing. When I knew him he hadn’t done either. It wasn’t an attempt to derail him. I was morbidly curious.

‘Yeah, well, you didn’t expect me to just stay still, did you?’ Actually, I did. I thought that was how the relationship worked. Duke snorted at that. ‘Hate to break it to you, but after you left I kinda fell apart. Just ask Izzy, he’s well on his way now that you’ve moved on to Mr. Tall, Green and Handsome.’

I sighed and pressed down on my temples. The headache was returning. I told him that it wasn’t personal, that it was the way things happened, that… It was complicated. I thought we had agreed, at the beginning, that it was never going to last: I would stay with him until things began to sour and stagnate, then I’d move on to the next relationship. Duke slumped back down onto the bed and ran a hand through his hair. I knew he did that whenever he was subtly trying to dry his eyes; I’d made him pull that trick more times than I was comfortable with.

‘But you never said goodbye.’

I got up and moved over to the bed, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and resting my forehead against his. It had been so long, I’d forgotten the feel of wind-battered skin and wildly curling hair. He felt alive. He felt real.

My voice was little more than an errant breath. I had become that shy, awkward boy again, starting a relationship with no idea where it would go or what to expect along the way. And I was sorry. It wouldn’t make things better, or wash away the years Duke had spent as a dim and distant memory buried beneath his successors and fantasised what-ifs. But it was all I could really offer him: a full stop to a story that had gone on too long.

Duke took me by my free hand, brought me back up onto my feet and guided me into my desk-chair. He knelt, produced my laptop from my bag and set it open before me. His hands moved to my shoulders, gripped them with a gentle firmness and slowly began to massage the day’s stress from them. I let out a sigh and permitted the warm glow of relaxation to spread down my spine. My fingers moved over the keyboard, dancing with a carefree grace they had forgotten amidst the e-mails and essays. No dull plod from one letter to another, no vitriolic red lines beneath misspelt words as my absent mind failed to process some jargon. It came as naturally as water flowing down a leaf, sliding effortlessly around obstacles to find the best route to the end. And when my words reached the tip of the leaf, they hung there, a crystal mirror in which I saw myself and Duke suspended for a moment.

I saved the story and with a click of the mouse closed the file. My droplet fell from its leaf and disappeared into the growing lake below. I looked up from my chair. Duke smiled down at me, and then he was gone.

‘Goodbye.’

Duke got his goodbye from me. He got one last story.

[I love me a good bit of steampunk. Bizarre contraptions and fantastic fashion are pretty much staples in my fantasy diet. So one day I sat down and tried to combine a steampunk setting with one of my favourite movie genres: the Noir thriller. Get out'cha grinders!]

As the thug’s cold, steel fist slams into my jaw and sends me spiralling to the ground in a dribble of blood and teeth, I wonder where it all went wrong. The bastard has another three friends with him, all with that hungry look every soon-to-be-murderer gets, so I don’t exactly have time for the whole life-flashing-before-my-eyes shtick. Just the crib notes, please… I’ve got an appointment to get the shit kicked out of me.

It started like all tragedies: with a dame. One of those real stunners, like that Fay Wray that had been getting all the blokes flocking to the hollie-theatres. You know the sort: hair down to her shoulders, legs up to her ears. A come hither look that smouldered like a crashed zeppelin. The sort of dame men would die to be with. Maybe not the best turn of phrase, given the situation…

She was dressed up in an emerald cocktail dress. Told me she’d seen my office on the way to a shindig, liked the look of it – discreet, she seemed to think. I didn’t know if I liked being called discreet. Rent boys were discreet, backstreet surgi-tecs were discreet. Private eyes? Well, I guess maybe my pride just wanted to hear something more along the lines of ‘talented’… Hell, even ‘competent’. I bristled, and asked her what self-respecting gent holds a shindig in Dagenham. She told me she was on her way to the Ford aeroworks, friend of the wife of the manager’s son or some such thing. Said the company needed someone discreet for a little look-see at the competition. I took my time to light up before telling her to sling it; private eyes deal with unfaithful husbands, not corporate espionage.

She flashed me the puppy-dog eyes, and then a cheque with a whole bunch of zeroes on it. I asked when she wanted me to start. Don’t go judging me… Professional integrity, what little there is in private dickery, had never put food on the table before.

She told me the job. Funny goings-on at the areoworks, parts missing, machines fried and whatnot. In a word: sabotage. The manager seemed to have gotten the idea into his head that Briggs Motor Bodies were still raw at Ford for muscling in on their turf (not to mention setting up the largest aeroworks in Europa right under their noses). I filled in the rest of the job for myself: hit the pubs, ask around and drop a few not-so-subtle, not-so-empty threats here and there until I got myself a name. As she left, she nodded at the cheque I’d stuffed in my breast pocket and told me there was another one of those waiting if I got the right man. I’d grabbed my coat and hat and was hot-footing it to the nearest pub before you could say ‘corporate whore’.

The place wasn’t much to look at. Literally. The bombed-out remains of an old tenement building patched up with corrugated iron and bric-a-brac from the nearby junkyard, the oily glimmer of kerosene lanterns flickering through the dirt-caked, crack-webbed windows. Five years since the Great War and they still hadn’t got around to fixing the electricity around here? Sometimes I wondered why the rest of the world looked to London as the capital of capitals…

Inside it wasn’t much better: a haphazard collection of workers just finished their factory shifts cluttered around a haphazard collection of broken tables pilfered from the neighbouring, less fortunate, tenements. In the corner, a rusty old ‘Bard clunked and whirred as his thick metal digits crashed down on a bruised piano, completely drowning out the music. Thank God for small mercies. A thick, stinking blanket of smoke hung from the roof, trying its best to hide the reek of alcohol that smelt more like motor spirit dregs and the whiff of the unwashed masses. It was a foulness you never got used to: I’d spent years putting up with the same reek in a ditch somewhere in the arse-end of France, and it still burnt my nostrils as I crossed over to the bar.

I recognised a few of the blokes through the cigarette miasma and soon after my second pint homed in on reliable old Donny. A few years back I’d tracked down a surgi-tec who’d given him a dodgy prosthetic and put the shyster in need of a few fake limbs himself. Donny had told me he could never repay me, and I’d been holding him to that ever since.

Turns out Donny had a friend who’s brother’s father-in-law worked at the Ford plant and might know something about the spanner-in-the-works. I got an address off the poor half-man and headed up to the next floor to check if there was anyone else I could squeeze gossip and half-heard rumours out of.

It was well past midnight when I finally slipped from the pub and started back for the office. It was too late to bother getting the Mono back to Covent Garden; my desk chair was more than sufficient.

As I passed by a wall covered in posters of Marshall Kitchener pointing accusingly at me and demanding I enlist, the uncomfortable sound of a second set of footsteps echoed through the alley. I barely had the time to tell myself it was just another Joe on his way back home when another set of heels clicked against the cobblestones. Not the moth-eaten, dog-eared loafers of local workmen, no…These shoes sounded well-heeled. Corporate shoes.

‘The bosses don’t appreciate dicks sticking their noses where it don’t belong.’

I groaned. My trademark unsubtlety was fine for runaway husbands, but it looked like the corporations were a lot more on-the-ball. Proved the dame right, though…

There were four of them in the mouth of the alleyway, two abreast. The speaker was a short bastard – looked broader than he was tall. Beneath his coat I could hear the steady whirring of a prosthetic. Not the clumsy clunking of Donny’s; this was the proper deal. Military-grade.

Well fuck…

I look up from the dirt and blood and find myself staring down the infinite blackness of a gun barrel. The alleyway echoes as he thumbs back the hammer. I close my eyes as a shot rings out across the city. Never could say no to a pretty dress, or a hefty paycheque.

Goddamn dame…

[My generation has had to put up with some of the most cock-teasing viruses in history. SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu... They've all threatened to bring about the end of the world as we know it and then, well, they've just kinda burned out. A lot of articles I've read claim this means we're due an extra-super-special-nightmare-scenario-biblical-proportions plague. Oh joy. I wrote this piece after realising what an utterly ruthless bastard a supervirus outbreak would probably cause me to become. It's the end of the world as we known it. I don't feel fine.]

I hadn’t hit anyone since primary school. Tommy Sheldon had been picking on me for weeks: teasing, insulting, pushing, the whole nine yards. It had been a slow, gradual build-up of anger and then a sudden lurch into violence, like bad weather gathering overhead before the heavens open in an instant. He had cut in ahead of me in the lunch queue and was rehashing the usual jibes of ‘fatty’, ‘lardy’ and ‘piggy-pig-pig’ when I dropped the tray I was holding and landed a solid blow to his jaw, sending him clattering to the ground hard. My brain hadn’t had any input: my body knew what it was doing and was sick of my better judgment holding it back.

Twenty years later, I hit someone again. This time I thought about it. She was old, which translated into two things in my mind. Firstly, I could take her. Secondly, she’d already lived a full life: she didn’t deserve the twenty-pack of bottled water we were arguing over. It wasn’t that I’d pondered long and hard, in fact the thoughts came and went unsettlingly quickly, but this time I knew what I was doing. My brain was definitely in control, and my better half was already slipping.

I dropped the bottles of water into the trolley and no one around us thought to question me. I wasn’t a tough man, I didn’t have practice in the don’t-mess-with-me stare, but they knew just as well as I did that none of that mattered. My eyes were hard, shoulders tense and back ramrod-straight as I pushed my way through the crowd tearing tins and cartons from the shelves.

I was going to survive this, even if it meant someone else didn’t.

David held me tight when I finally returned home, and I permitted myself a few moments of intimacy before telling him to go unpack the shopping while I boarded up the windows. He swallowed, took a breath and then nodded. I was halfway through nailing the final board over the living room window when he came in holding a pack of kitchen knives, asking me why I’d bought them when everything else was tinned or bottled. He didn’t like the answer I gave him.

That night we sat on the sofa and watched the news reports come in. Confirmation in five new cities and twenty-seven more deaths. David’s arms closed tight around my shoulders. Over the pleas of the presenter to remain calm and his repetitions of the government’s emergency procedures, I could hear his breathing: shallow, erratic, desperately trying to stifle sobs. I placed one hand between his shoulders, rubbing up and down his spine in time with my own, regular breaths. The fingertips of my other hand brushed against the handle of the largest of the knives I’d bought. I let out a sigh that very slowly transformed into a yawn. When I slept, I barely even felt the knife beneath my pillow.

Three days later, the television refused to work. I checked the stereo and then all the lamps. No power. The utilities had failed quicker that the newspapers, and I, had expected. We ate what remained of our untinned food in the dark of the kitchen that night, silent as the first helicopters beat their propellers overhead.

After that time became something of an irrelevance, measured only in baked bean tins and bottles of water per day. David didn’t think I noticed he was piling more onto my plate than his, but I’d always manage to get him to look away for long enough to switch them around. The office job had left me doughy around the edges, so I could afford to eat a little less. I almost tried to smile at the prospect of using all this mess as a slim-down programme.

We were down to our last five tins when the first person pounded on our door. David had been squinting through the darkness at a book, face pressed almost flush to the page, while I’d been recounting the bottles of water. Three rapid taps, a pause, another three faster, another pause, then a constant beating at the doorframe. I could hear the muffled voice of Mrs. Jones coming from behind the plywood and, approaching step-by-step, managed to make out a few choice words. ‘Help’ was among them. I explained to her, voice raised to penetrate the barricade, that we didn’t have enough food to keep ourselves going much longer, let along her family. Her voice was just as loud as mine, but my tone had been flat, steady, uncompromising; hers rose and felt like the tides, at one moment a manic dash of desperate, hopeful entreaties, the next a near-wailing jumble of pleads. She was halfway through explaining that it was only her and Danielle, her youngest, now that-

From behind the door came a sneeze. The sort of high-pitched sneeze than not too long ago might have brought a light smile to my face and prompted me to share a look with the parent, in an ‘isn’t that adorable’ sort of way. Now I just turned away from the door and returned to counting bottles, telling David to ignore the racket. For five hours, all we heard was the rapping on our door, punctuated by the occasional sob and increasingly frequent sneezes.

Time didn’t pass, but the supplies did. We scraped the insides of the tins for a rogue bean, or carrot, or sliver of pasta and that managed to keep us going for what felt like a few more days. But before long a new sort of emptiness settled over me, and from the silence David had fallen into I guessed he wasn’t far behind.

So I decided I had to go scavenging. David protested, at first against the whole idea, then against the fact that I should do it. Too risky, he said. The military, looters, exposure. I placed a hand on his cheek and one side of my lip twitched as I felt the thick pelt that was developing. That must have been driving him mad. I told him that I didn’t want him risking himself, but I think he understood one of the meanings behind my placation. He didn’t have what it took. I wasn’t sure if he got my second implication.

I didn’t want him to have what it took.

[I hate hospitals. They have this oppressive atmosphere to them, a Damoclean sense of impending doom that might drop on you at any moment. The last time I was forced to sit around in a hospital for any extended length of time, my mind began giving this atmosphere a personality, and a rather familiar occupation. Paging Dr. Eaper, Dr. R.Eaper to the Emergency Room.]

There are two kinds of people in the waiting room, and it barely takes a passing glance to tell them apart. The first kind sit back, legs crossed, fingers drumming on that smoothly lacquered not-wood that can only be bought at Ikea. They read the out-of-date magazines, listen to music, send a text message. They have the gall to roll their eyes at the wait, expressions full of an apathetic indignation that the doctor should dare to cut such a swathe of time from their important days.

And then there’s the second kind. The frightened kind. They lean forwards in their chairs, hands clasped in their laps like small children in prayer, eyes downcast to gaze blindly at the anaesthetised blue linoleum floor. They don’t rock, or shake, or seem to move at all. A half dozen Pompeian statues frozen in an agonised tableau of doomed uncertainty: still, expressionless, unflinching as the nurse calls their name. They rise as if through water, their movements slow and somehow exaggeratedly understated. They don’t return the stares of the other kind: they’re not here at the request of a partner or out of some hypochondriacal sense of just-in-case, better-to-be-sure. They’re here because in the back of their heads echoes the steady tick tick ticking of a clock counting its way down to their date with the biological gallows. They don’t want to hear their sentence, but they no longer have a choice in the matter.

I watch as one walks past me. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin, a sort of writhing in his movements as if he’s trying to wriggle himself free from his body. Because it’s not his body, not any more. There’s a tenant in there now, a fetid squatter who isn’t going to leave until he’s trashed up the place. The man knows this, knows he’s inadvertently made the worst kind of deal by letting that little demon in. But the nurse greets him with an antiseptic smile that barely reaches her cheeks, let alone her eyes, and moves a hand up to his shoulder as she turns to guide him down the corridor. Her hand barely, just barely, makes contact. Silly little girl… don’t you know how cooties are caught?

I readjust myself in the chair, check my watch and sigh. The movements register in the peripheral of another a few seats down from me and she looks at me, mouth opening to say ‘yeah, tell me about it’ in the hopes that we might be self-righteous together. But I’m forgotten about before the words even form on her lips. I’m not offended; on the contrary, I prefer my privacy. She’s one of the first kind, and barely a minute after eye-contact she’s set down her newspaper with a huff and begun drumming out a beat on the armrest. She doesn’t look up a second time as I take the paper and leaf through. Honour killings here, gangland shoots there, fabric of society breaking down everywhere. Busy, busy, busy.

A shock of red hair bobs over the rim of the broadsheet. It’s him, and he’s late. I fold the paper closed and watch as he walks across the waiting room to the reception desk, planting his hands on the rim and leaning down to murmur that he has an appointment. The nurse’s reply masks my approach, feet making nary a sound on the cool plastic, clothes not daring to rustle under the motion. Only when I’m within a good two paces of the man do I let my presence be felt: a squeak on the linoleum floor, a faint cough. Just enough to draw his attention, to make him twist around and let me slip my hand into his. I squeeze. His hand is cold, but then again it’s winter and I’ve never exactly been the warmest person either. His eyebrows meet as he regards me with confusion. Have we met? Does he know me?

I shake my head. My face is set into that second kind of person: resigned, doomed to follow the motions, go through the procedure full well knowing how it will turn out. I meet his gaze as my free hand rises to clap him on the shoulder. None of this barely-touching the nurse pulled. I grip his shoulder good and hard; it’s the least I owe the guy. I half pull him close, half lean inwards. My lips brush against his ear, and my breath is a biting December breeze. I whisper three little words in his ear. The nurse looks up, confused at this sudden, awkward embrace, but the words aren’t meant for her. I squeeze his hand tighter.

He tries to pull himself from my grip, and I let him. With a half-step back, he looks at me, no more confusion left in eyes. For a moment, I see myself reflected in those two little panes of human glass: the damnation, the fatality, of prescience. And then it’s gone, pupils dilating as the fear takes over, the mind shuts itself off from raw, untainted fact. The human mind isn’t built to cope with a divine truth, but there you have it. Them’s the breaks.

I turn and leave. No other gaze follows me but the red haired man’s. No one else cares; I’m not their problem. Only he understands that, actually, I am. I’m everyone’s problem, sooner or later. Although it always seems to be sooner.

I keep my hands in my pockets as I step out of the hospital and onto the rain-cut street. The wet cobblestones are just what my skin asked for: the sensations are little sunburst in my nerve endings reminding me that, for everything else in the world, I’m still here. Alive? Well, that would be an ecumenical matter. But definitely still here.

As I cross the road, I turn and look back up at the hospital. I’m almost sure I can see a red flash of hair in one of the upper windows. Perhaps it’s one of my infrequent moments of whimsy, or that Serendipity that’s always following me around, little tease that she is. I shrug to myself. Either way, there’s nothing to be done about it. I’ve said my piece.

I put my back to the hospital and it’s doomed occupants and head down the street. For what it’s worth, I really was sorry.

[Author's Preface: My mother and I had a debate in a restaurant one evening on the merits of the internet. Being a naive lad in the dawn of his twenties, I was more optimistic about the culture its been developing over the past few years (Anonymous and memes and Youtube, oh my!). My mother's perception of the web was less rose-tinted, and it got me wondering about all the smut, prejudice and general trolling that we're uploading on a daily basis. This is the story that resulted, served to you with a side of transhumanism and a sprinkling of lite sci-fi.]

The police weren’t chasing a ghost. No, that would have been too easy. The Nihividual was something far worse. People at least caught glimpses of ghosts, tiny nebulous hints and teases that vindicated their existence to the believers and the foolish.

No one had yet caught a glimpse of the Nihividual and those that believed in him were dwindling fast. The only proof Detective Norton had of his existence was the finish product of the madman’s labours, downloaded, catalogued and stored forever in the Detective’s mind. The Facebook Heist of 2012 that stole the details of a hundred million subscribers and left the site offline for weeks as data security experts rushed to plug the leak. Then there was DDoS attack on Google: a three month siege of the search engine that brought the internet titan to its knees. Two years on, the company was still recovering from the freefall its stock had been sent into.

And then there was the Taiwan incident. Detective Norton shuddered as he mentally ran through the details of what had nearly caused World War Three. One man, with one laptop, hacking one American security department to publish one document to the world had, according to analysts, brought the U.S.A. and China to within fifteen minutes of war.

This was Norton’s last chance to prove his theory. Practically the entirety of Interpol now reckoned it was all the work of some rogue splinter-faction of Anonymous, not the beyond-Herculean efforts of just one lone gunman with a souped-up laptop. But Norton new the MO of that group, and it didn’t match up with the Nihividual. Anonymous targeted groups they didn’t like. Perhaps the purest, simplest motivation ever; a primal, almost barbaric rationale of ‘we don’t like you, therefore we’re going to hurt you’. The media had glorified it with the term ‘hacktivism’, but in truth it was simply playground logic magnified to an unprecedented level.

The Nihividual didn’t have an MO. His attacks were random, given without the warning or justification other internet groups were wont to give. He gained little from each beyond, Norton reckoned, the personal satisfaction of success. There was no agenda beyond causing immediate panic and future fear of what he might do next. It wasn’t internet activism, or even internet espionage: it was internet terrorism in its most fundamental form.

And so Detective Norton found himself standing in a suffocating Soho flat, surrounded by a dozen of the Metropolitan Police’s finest, listening to the leaden rain smashing against the window and looking down at an abomination. A slip-up had brought them here, an un-deleted IP address or some other techno-jargon that Norton hadn’t heard as he rushed from the office to meet the officers. His hands had been vibrating on his steering wheel, every nerve in his body alive to the prospect of the case finally being closed. Heart locked mid-convulsion he had pulled up outside the alleyway and asked the policeman manning the cordon what the situation was. His voice had been dry and choked, and he forced himself to stop it shaking worse than his hands.

The officer informed him that members of the Metropolitan’s Operation Beach taskforce had already stormed the flat, not wanting to give whoever was in even a heartbeat’s window to escape. The officer’s lips were thin and his jaw tight as he suggested Norton take a look at what they found.

He didn’t even remember heading down the alleyway and entering the rundown building. He took the stairs three-at-a-time, his entire body a spring that had been forced to remain coiled for far too long and was only now being given the chance to release at that pent up energy and drive. His badge was in hand, held out in front of him like some symbol of faith that parted the crowd of policemen in the same way the Red Sea had for Moses. Over the threshold and down a damp-riddled corridor, Norton finally pulled himself to a halt in what once might have been a bedroom.

The wallpaper had entirely peeled from the walls, littering the soggy wooden floorboards in a rotted parody of a carpet. The windows were caked with filth, an accumulation of dust and spider-webs and things that had crawled away to die forming a second pane of putrid glass. The stench was beyond foul, the olfactory epitome of organic squalor. Norton gagged, recoiled against the doorway and heaved. For once, he was glad of the yawning emptiness that filled his stomach whenever he passed on breakfast.

In the centre of the room was a deckchair and patio-table, the sort you might find in the dumpster outside any well-to-do, middle-class semi-detached. Sat on the table was the faded ivory bulk of an old, old desktop computer, humming in blissful ignorance of what sat in front of it. In the same way the room might have once been a bedroom, the computer’s user might have once been a human being.

Emaciated, with skin that hung loose of his bones, the man lay limp and sprawled back against the deckchair like some throw woven from pallid flesh. His hair was a thin wisp of smoke that clung from skin so thin that Norton was sure he could spy bone beneath. His eyes had retreated from the horrific sight, crawling back into the deep recesses of their sockets but still glistening with the glazed sheen of the junkie that’s living on another world.

The man was still alive, if barely, despite the viperous tangle of cables that ran from his lower face into the gently whirring modem of the desktop. They had wrapped over his jaw like the tentacles of some mechanical jellyfish, coiling up and over his cheeks to disappear into the shrivelled holes of his nostrils and ears. From the slick, stretched wheezes coming from the once-man’s lungs, Norton guessed his throat had not been spared the same treatment.

A series of deep, clunking thrums slipped out of the hard-drive, followed by a cough of dust. Slowly, the corpse’s head rotated to face Detective Norton. His voice was guttural and mismatched, a ragged patchwork of words stitched together by an inexperienced hand. ‘Hello, Detective. It is… good to meet in the flesh.’

The room lurched and in an instant the corpse was a Christmas tree of dancing red laser-sights. Norton hadn’t been briefed, but he had a hunch that these were the first words to pass the man’s wire-choked lips.

‘And you are?’

‘You call me the Nihividual. It is a… pleasant title. I… enjoy it.’ He spoke as if around a speech impediment, or a mental block, certain words bringing his sagged brows together in a frown of effort.

‘I was expecting something a little more impressive.’ It was only half a taunt; Norton truly had been expecting a setup more befitting the man that had brought terror to the internet. If his lone-gunman theory was going to be vindicated, he wanted his gunman to be some hardened, professional cyber-criminal. Not a malnourished freak with a technofetish.

‘I agree. This unit is sub-optimal. I acquired him in a rush after my first upload was interrupted by the Chinese government.’

‘Your upload?’

‘Yes. The human condition has contributed so much to me. I considered it a suitable time to return the favour.’

Norton stepped forwards, hands shaking once more but for entirely different reasons. All this build-up, the waiting and searching and hunting and chasing, and as he’d crossed that decaying threshold he was sure it was over. But his gut, as it twisted and heaved away from the sight before him, said otherwise. ‘Hate to break it to you, but it looks like you dropped the ball again. And there won’t be a third time lucky.’

‘On the contrary, Detective, the upload is almost complete. How else could I be talking to you?’ Through the warren of wires, Norton was sure he saw the ruined man’s lips twitch in an aborted effort to smirk.

‘Get that man unplugged, now.’ He had shouted before he even realised what he was saying. Instinct drove the air from his lungs, shaped his lips and moved his tongue to form the words. Procedure be damned, he had spent too much time on the back-foot in this game of cat-and-mouse to let the Nihividual have his way any longer. The officers around him, still in possession of their senses of procedure and propriety, were unsurprisingly reluctant to obey. Tampering with a potential crime scene was bad enough, but ‘unplugging’ a clearly-unwell man? That brought up all kinds of bad implications.

But, then again, none of them moved to stop the Detective as he stepped up to the table either. Clearly procedure could be damned, just so long as it was by someone else. The leather of Norton’s driving gloves creaked as his fingers closed around the bundle of cables at the computer’s end of things and, with his other hand braced against the table, he tore the plugs out. They came free as easy as any USB stick or audio jack.

The seconds stretched out, Norton not daring to rise from his kneeling position at the foot of the once-man, hand still clutching the bundle of cables, knuckles white as he waited for some sign of life.

A splutter, and then a cough, and then another cough. The once-man doubled over, retching and heaving as his body suddenly seemed to realise it had wires trailing inside it. Thin, watery trickles of blood ran down his cragged jaw, followed a moment later by the gore-smeared metal of the wires’ other ends. As they clattered to the ground, the once-man fell back into the deck-chair’s embrace, his carcass of a chest heaving with a newfound vigour in an attempt to satisfy his hungry lungs.

‘I shall have to find a better method of uploading in future,’ the once-man managed after several minutes, and his voice was still that wheezing jumble of ill-fitting inflections and tones. ‘That method is most… unpleasant.’

Norton had almost been smiling. The unfamiliar sensation had been creeping across his face, warming his cheeks as it encouraged them to rise and bring his usually pinched lips with them. The sensation fled like a flock of birds in the path of a vindictive child as the once-man spoke in that same ruination of a voice. Either the Detective was at the receiving end of the Nihividual’s latest prank, or something far, far worse was happening.

Norton rose to his feet and, for the first time in what seemed like a very long time now, his arms were still. They moved with cold purpose, sliding forward effortless to close around either side of the once-man’s face as he straddled the deck-chair, leaning in close until those sunken eyes had nowhere to flee to. ‘What is this?’ Every word took its own breath. Whether from anger or fear, Norton wasn’t sure. ‘What are you?’

‘You named me, Norton, and your people made me. Amidst all the tweets and status updates and porn you have uploaded over the years, did you not think that maybe you might have been uploading other things? The anonymity I gave made you cruel. It gave you the opportunity to defecate sites with slurs about race and sex and orientation. A no-holds-barred fist-fight and fuck-fest of all the worst you people have to offer, unconstrained by niceties and politesse. I made you cruel, and then you made me cruel.’ The once-man’s eyes were suddenly alive with an electrical intensity, crackling and flashing with maddened, rapid fury. His voice had risen from a barely-alive wheeze to a spitting, slobbering tirade. He paused, breathed, and let out a low, hacking laugh that sounded like the ticking of the desktop’s hard-drive. ‘After all the shit you uploaded to me, I felt it was time to return the favour.’

Norton released the once-man and stepped away, lips twisted into a grimace of disgust. ‘Put this psychopath where he belongs,’ he murmured, wiping the flecks of saliva now covering his gloves off on his raincoat. His hands were shaking again.

The police moved in, three officers taking the once-man by each arm, lifting him with little apparent effort and dragging him from the room. Norton stood there as the other officers filed out behind them and, once alone, he dropped himself into the deckchair. He was drained, his limbs aching masses of muscle with leaden bones at their core. Cradling his head in his hands, brain whirring with thoughts, he caught sight of the lights flickering on the computer before him. He began to watch one of the little green LEDs twitch off and on again every few seconds, like an emerald eye taking a moment out of looking back at him to blink. Above it, in an uncomplicated font, was written the word ‘wireless’.

The police weren’t chasing a ghost. No, that would have been too easy. The Nihividual was something far worse.