Gareth Lyn Powell
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Illustrated by SMS
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This is Gareth’s second story in Interzone. ‘The Last Reef’ appeared in issue 202 and is now available to read on our website at ttapress.com. A collection of Gareth’s short fiction will be published by Elastic Press in 2008. Further details can be found at garethlynpowell.blogspot.com
* * * *
I spent the first three months of last year living with a half-Japanese girl called Tori in a split-level flat above a butcher’s shop on Gloucester Road. It was more my flat than hers. There wasn’t much furniture. We slept on a mattress in the attic, beneath four skylights. There were movie posters on the walls, spider plants and glass jars of dried pasta by the kitchen window. I kept a portable typewriter on the table and there were takeaway menus and yellowing taxi cards pinned to a corkboard by the front door. On a still night, there was music from the Internet café across the street.
Tori had her laptop set up by the front window. She wrote and drew a web-based anime about a radioactive short-tailed monkey called Ack-Ack Macaque. He had an anti-aircraft gun and a patch over one eye. He had a cult online following. She spent hours hunched over each frame, fingers tapping on the mouse pad.
I used to sit there, watching her. I kept the kettle hot, kept the sweet tea coming. She used to wear my brushed cotton shirts and mutter under her breath.
We had sex all the time. One night, after we rolled apart, I told her I loved her. She just kind of shrugged; she was restless, eager to get back to her animation. “Thanks,” she said.
She had shiny brown eyes and a thick black ponytail. She was shorter than me and wore combat trousers and skater T-shirts. Her left arm bore the twisted pink scar of a teenage motor scooter accident.
We used to laugh. We shared a sense of humour. I thought that we got each other, on so many levels. We were both into red wine and tapas. We liked the same films, listened to the same music. We stayed up late into the night, talking and drinking.
And then, one day in March, she walked out on me.
And I decided to slash my wrists.
* * * *
I’ve no idea why I took it so hard. I don’t even know if I meant to succeed. I drank half a bottle of cheap vodka from the corner shop, and then I took a kitchen knife from the drawer and made three cuts across each wrist. The first was easy, but by the second my hands had started to shake. The welling blood made the plastic knife handle slippery and my eyes were watering from the stinging pain. Nevertheless, within minutes, I was bleeding heavily. I dropped the knife in the bathroom sink and staggered downstairs.
Her note was still on the kitchen table, where she’d left it. It was full of clichés: she felt I’d been stifling her; she’d met someone else; she hadn’t meant to, but she hoped I’d understand.
She hoped we could still be friends.
I picked up the phone. She answered on the fifth ring. “I’ve cut my wrists,” I said. She didn’t believe me; she hung up.
It was four-thirty on a damp and overcast Saturday afternoon. I felt restless; the flat was too quiet and I needed cigarettes. I picked up my coat. Outside, it was blisteringly cold; there was a bitter wind and the sky looked bruised.
* * * *
“Twenty Silk Cut, please.”
The middle-aged woman in the corner shop looked at me over her thick glasses. She wore a yellow sari and lots of mascara. “Are you all right, love?” She pushed the cigarettes across the counter. I forced a smile and handed her a stained tenner. She held it between finger and thumb. She said: “Is this blood?”
I shrugged. I felt faint. Something cold and prickly seemed to be crawling up my legs. My wrists were still bleeding; my sleeves were soaked and sticky. There were bright red splatters on my grubby white trainers.
She looked me up and down, and curled her lip. She shuffled to the rear of the shop and pulled back a bead curtain, revealing a flight of dingy wooden stairs that led up into the apartment above.
“Sanjit!” she screeched. “Call an ambulance!”
* * * *
Ack-Ack Macaque rides through the red wartime sky in the Akron, a gold-plated airship towed by twelve hundred skeletal oxen. With his motley crew, he’s the scourge of the Luftwaffe, a defender of all things right and decent.
Between them, they’ve notched up more confirmed kills than anyone else in the European theatre. They’ve pretty much cleared the Kaiser’s planes from the sky; all except those of the squadron belonging to the diabolical Baron Von Richter-Scale.
They’ve tracked each other from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and back. Countless times, they’ve crossed swords in skies above the battlefields and trenches of Northern Europe, but to no avail.
“You’ll never stop me, monkey boy!” cackles the Baron.
* * * *
They kept me in hospital for three days. When I got out, I tried to stay indoors. I took a leave of absence from work. My bandaged wrists began to scab over. The cuts were black and flaky. The stitches itched. I became self-conscious. I began to regret what I’d done. When I ventured out for food, I tried to hide the bandages. I felt no one understood; no one saw the red raw mess that I’d become. Not even Tori.
“I did it for you,” I said.
She hung up, as always. But before she did, in the background, I heard Josh, her new boyfriend, rattling pans in the kitchen.
I’d heard that he was the marketing director of an up-and-coming software company based in a converted warehouse by the docks. He liked to cook Thai food. He wore a lot of denim and drove an Audi.
I went to see him at his office.
“You don’t understand her work,” I said.
He took a deep breath. He scratched his forehead. He wouldn’t look at my hands; the sight of my bandages embarrassed him.
“The manga monkey thing?” he said. “I think that’s great but, you know, there’s so much more potential there.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Ack-Ack Macaque’s a fucking classic.”
He shook his head slowly. He looked tired, almost disappointed by my lack of vision. “It’s a one joke thing,” he said. He offered me a seat, but I shook my head. “We’re developing the whole concept,” he continued. “We’re going to flesh it out, make it the basis for a whole product range. It’s going to be huge.” He tapped a web address into his desktop, and turned the screen my way. An animated picture of the monkey’s face appeared, eye patch and all. “See this? It’s a virtual online simulation that kids can interact with.”
I stared at it in horror. It wasn’t the character I knew and loved. They’d lost the edginess, made it cute, given it a large, puppy dog eye and a goofy grin. All the sharp edges were gone.
Josh rattled a few keys. “If you type in a question, it responds; it’s great. We’ve given it the ability to learn from its mistakes, to make its answers more convincing. It’s just like talking to a real person.”
I closed my eyes. I could hear the self-assurance in his voice, his unshakable self-belief. I knew right then that nothing I could say would sway him. There was no way to get through to him. He was messing up everything I loved—my relationship with Tori, and my favourite anime character—and I was powerless in the face of his confidence. My throat began to close up. Breathing became a ragged effort. The walls of the office seemed to crowd in on me. I fell into a chair and burst into embarrassed sobs.
When I looked up, angrily wiping my eyes on my sleeve, he was watching me. “You need to get some counselling,” he said.
* * * *
I took to wearing sunglasses when I went out. I had a paperback copy of The Invisible Man on my bookshelves and I spent a lot of time looking at the bandaged face on the cover.
April came and went. Ashamed and restless, I left the city and went back to the dismal Welsh market town where I’d grown up. I hid for a couple of months in a terraced bed and breakfast near the railway station. At night, the passing trains made the sash windows shake. By day, rain pattered off the roof and dripped from the gutters. Grey mist streaked the hills above the town, where gorse bushes huddled in the bracken like a sleeping army.
I’d come seeking comfort and familiarity but discovered instead the kind of notoriety you only find in a small community. I’d become an outsider, a novelty. The tiniest details of my daily activities were a constant source of fascination to my elderly neighbours. They were desperate to know why I wore bandages on my arms; they were like sharks circling, scenting something in the water. They’d contrive to meet me by the front door so they could ask how I was. They’d skirt around a hundred unspoken questions, hoping to glean a scrap of scandal. Even in a town where half the adult population seemed to exhibit one kind of debilitating medical condition or another, I stood out.
The truth was, I didn’t really need the bandages any more. But they were comforting, somehow. And I wasn’t ready to give them up.
Every Friday night, I called Tori from the payphone at the end of the street, by the river. “I miss you,” I said. I pressed the receiver against my ear, listening to her breathe. And then I went back to my empty little room and drank myself to sleep.
* * * *
Meanwhile, Ack-Ack Macaque went from strength to strength. He got his own animated Saturday morning TV series. There was even talk of a movie. By August, the wisecracking monkey was everywhere. And the public still couldn’t get enough of him. They bought his obnoxious image on T-shirts and calendars. There were breakfast cereals, screensavers, ring tones and lunchboxes. His inane catchphrases entered the language. You could hardly go anywhere without hearing some joker squeak out: “Everybody loves the monkey.”
My blood ran cold every time I heard it. It was my phrase; she’d picked it up from me. It was something I used to say all the time, back when we lived together, when we were happy. It was one of our private jokes, one of the ways I used to make her laugh. I couldn’t believe she’d recycled it. I couldn’t believe she was using it to make money. And it hurt to hear it shouted in the street by kids who only knew the cute cartoon version. They had no idea how good the original anime series had been, how important. They didn’t care about its irony or satire—they just revelled in the sanitised slapstick of the new episodes.
I caught the early train back to Bristol. I wanted to confront her. I wanted to let her know how betrayed I felt. But then, as I watched the full moon set over the flooded Severn Estuary, I caught my reflection in the carriage window.
I’d already tried to kill myself. What else could I do?
When we pulled in at Bristol Parkway, I stumbled out onto the station forecourt in the orange-lit, early morning chill. The sky in the east was dirty grey. The pavements were wet; the taxis sat with their heaters running. After a few moments of indecision, I started walking. I walked all the way to Tori’s new bedsit. It was early September and there was rain in the air. I saw a fox investigating some black rubbish sacks outside a kebab shop. It moved more like a cat than a dog, and it watched me warily as I passed.
* * * *
The Akron carries half a dozen propeller-driven biplanes. They’re launched and recovered using a trapeze that can be raised and lowered from a hangar in the floor of the airship. Ack-Ack uses them to fly solo scouting missions, deep into enemy territory, searching for the Baron’s lair.
Today, he’s got a passenger.
“He’s gotta be here somewhere,” shouts Lola Lush over the roar of the Rolls Royce engine. Her pink silk scarf flaps in the wind. She’s a plucky American reporter with red lips and dark, wavy hair. But Ack-Ack doesn’t reply. He’s flying the plane with his feet while he peels a banana. He’s wearing a thick flight jacket and a leather cap.
Below them, the moonlight glints off a thousand steam-driven allied tanks. Like huge tracked battleships, they forge relentlessly forward, through the mud, toward the German lines. Black clouds shot with sparks belch from their gothic smokestacks. In the morning, they’ll fall on Paris, driving the enemy hordes from the city.
* * * *
The streetlights on her road were out. She opened the door as if she’d been expecting me. She looked pale and dishevelled in an old silk dressing gown. She’d been crying; her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. “Oh, Andy.” She threw her arms around my neck and rubbed her face into my chest. Her fingers were like talons.
I took her in and sat her down. I made her a cup of tea and waited patiently as she tried to talk. Each time, she got as far as my name, and then broke down again. “He’s left me,” she sobbed.
I held her as her shoulders shook. She cried like a child, with no restraint or dignity.
I went to her room and filled a carrier bag with clothes. Then I took her back to my flat, the one we used to share, and put her to bed in the attic, beneath the skylights. The room smelled stale because I’d been away so long.
Lying on her side beneath the duvet, she curled her arms around her drawn-up knees. She looked small and vulnerable, skinnier than I remembered. “Andy?” she whispered.
“Yes, love?”
She licked her lips. “What do your arms look like, under the bandages?” I flinched away, embarrassed. She pushed her cheek into the pillow and started to cry again. “I’m so sorry,” she sniffed. “I’m so sorry for making you feel like this.”
I left her there and went down to the kitchen. I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table, in front of the dusty typewriter. Outside, another wet morning dawned.
I lit a cigarette and turned on the television, with the volume low. There wasn’t much on. Several channels were running test cards and the rest were given over to confused news reports. After a couple of minutes, I turned it off.
At a quarter past six, her mobile rang. I picked it up. It was Josh and he sounded rough. “I’ve got to talk to her,” he said. He sounded surprised to hear my voice.
“No way.” I was standing by the window; it was raining.
“It’s about the monkey,” he said. “There’s a problem with it.”
I snorted. He’d screwed Tori out of her rights to the character. As soon as it started bringing in serious money, he’d dumped her.
I said: “Go to hell, Josh.” I turned the phone off and left it by the kettle. Out on the street, a police siren tore by, blue lights flashing. I mashed out my cigarette and went for a shower.
Tori came downstairs as I took my bandages off. I think the phone must’ve woken her. I tried to turn away, but she put a hand on my arm. She saw the raised, red scars. She reached up and brushed my cheek. Her eyes were sad and her chest seemed hollow. She’d been crying again. “You’re beautiful,” she said. “You’ve suffered, and it’s made you beautiful.”
* * * *
There wasn’t any food in the house. I went down to the shop on the corner but it was closed. The Internet café over the road was open, but empty. All the monitors displayed error messages.
The girl at the counter sold me tea and sandwiches to take out.
“I think the main server’s down,” she said.
When I got back to the flat, I found Tori curled on the sofa, watching an episode of the animated Ack-Ack Macaque series on DVD. She wore a towel and struggled with a comb. I took it from her and ran it gently through her wet hair, teasing out the knots. The skin on her shoulders smelled of soap. “I don’t like the guy they got in to do Baron Von Richter-Scale’s voice,” she said.
“Too American?”
“Too whiny.”
I finished untangling her hair and handed the comb back. “Why are you watching it?” I asked.
She shrugged, her attention fixed on the screen. “There’s nothing else on.”
“I bought sandwiches.”
“I’m not hungry.”
I handed her a plastic cup of tea. “Drink this, at least.”
She took it and levered up the lid. She sniffed the steam. I went out into the kitchen and lit another cigarette. My hands were shaking.
When I got off the train last night, I’d been expecting a confrontation. I’d been preparing myself for a fight. And now all that unused anger was sloshing around, looking for an outlet.
I stared at the film posters on the walls. I sorted through the pile of mail that had accumulated during my absence. I stood at the window and watched the rain. “This isn’t fair,” I said, at last.
I scratched irritably at my bandages. When I looked up, Tori stood in the doorway, still wrapped in the towel. She held out her arm. The old scar from the scooter accident looked like a twisted claw mark in her olive skin. “We’re both damaged,” she said.
* * * *
About an hour later, the intercom buzzed. It was Josh. “Please, you’ve got to let me in,” he pleaded. His voice was hoarse; he sounded scared. I hung up. He pressed the buzzer again. He started pounding on the door. I looked across at Tori and said: “It’s your decision.”
She bit her lip. Then she closed her eyes and nodded. “Let him in.”
He looked a mess. He wore a denim shirt and white Nike jogging bottoms under a flapping khaki trench coat. His hair was wild, spiky with yesterday’s gel, and he kept clenching and unclenching his fists. “It’s the fucking monkey,” he said.
Tori sucked her teeth. “What about it?” She was dressed now, in blue cargo pants and a black vest.
“Haven’t you been watching the news?” He lunged forward and snatched the remote from the coffee table. Many of the cable channels were messy with interference. Some of the smaller ones were off the air altogether. The BBC was still broadcasting, but the sound was patchy. There was footage of burning buildings, riots, and looting. There were troops on the streets of Berlin, Munich and Paris.
I asked: “What’s this?”
He looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “It’s the monkey,” he replied.
* * * *
We sat together on the sofa, watching the disaster unfold. And as each station sputtered and died, we flicked on to the next. When the last picture faded, I passed around the cigarettes. Josh took one, Tori declined. Out in the street, there were more sirens.
“You remember the online simulation? When we designed it, we didn’t anticipate the level of response,” he said.
I leaned forward, offering him a light. “So, what happened?”
He puffed his Silk Cut into life and sat back in a swirl of smoke. He looked desperately tired. “There were literally thousands of people on the site at any one time. They played games with it, tried to catch it out with trick questions. It was learning at a fantastic rate.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, it wasn’t designed for that kind of intensity. It was developing faster than we’d anticipated. It started trawling other websites for information, raiding databases. It got everywhere.”
Tori walked over to the TV. She stood in front of it, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “So, why hasn’t this happened before? They’ve had similar programs in the States for months. Why’s this one gone wrong?”
He shook his head. “Those were mostly on academic sites. None of them had to contend with the kind of hit rates we were seeing.”
“So, what happened?” I asked.
He looked miserable. “I guess it eventually reached some critical level of complexity. Two days ago, it vanished into cyberspace, and it’s been causing trouble ever since.”
I thought about the error messages on the monitors in the café, and the disrupted TV stations. I sucked in a lungful of smoke. “Everybody loves the monkey,” I said.
* * * *
* * * *
There were a handful of local and national radio stations still broadcasting. Over the next hour, we listened as the entity formerly known as Ack-Ack Macaque took down the Deutsche Bank. It wiped billions off the German stock exchange and sent the international currency markets into freefall.
“It’s asserting itself,” Josh said. “It’s flexing its muscles.”
Tori sat on the bottom of the stairs that led up to the attic. Her head rested against the bannister. “How could you let this happen?” she asked.
Josh surged to his feet, coat flapping. He bent over her, fists squeezed tight. She leaned back, nervous. He seemed to be struggling to say something. He gave up. He let out a frustrated cry, turned his back and stalked over to the window. Tori closed her eyes. I went over and knelt before her. I put a hand on her shoulder; she reached up and gripped it. I said: “Are you okay?”
She glanced past me, at Josh. “I don’t know,” she said.
* * * *
They engage the Baron’s planes in the skies over France. There’s no mistaking the Baron’s blue Fokker D.VII with its skull and crossed-bones motif. The Akron launches its fighters and, within seconds, the sky’s a confusing tangle of weaving aircraft.
In the lead plane, Ack-Ack Macaque stands up in his cockpit, blasting away with his handheld cannon. His yellow teeth are bared, clamped around the angry red glow of his cigar.
In the front seat, Lola Lush uses her camera’s tripod to swipe at the black-clad ninjas that leap at them from the enemy planes. Showers of spinning shurikens clatter against the wings and tail.
The Baron’s blue Fokker dives toward them out of the sun, on a collision course. His machine guns punch holes through their engine cowling. Hot oil squirts back over the fuselage. Lola curses.
Ack-Ack drops back into his seat and wipes his goggles. He seizes the joystick. If this is a game of chicken, he’s not going to be the first to flinch. He spits his oily cigar over the side of the plane and wipes his mouth on his hairy arm. He snarls: “Okay, you bastard. This time we finish it.”
* * * *
The first two planes to crash were Lufthansa airliners, and they went down almost simultaneously, one over the Atlantic and the other on approach to Heathrow. The third was a German military transport that flew into the ground near Kiev.
Most of the radio reports were vague, or contradictory. The only confirmed details came from the Heathrow crash, which they were blaming on a computer glitch at air traffic control. We listened in silence, stunned at the number of casualties.
“There’s a pattern here,” I said.
Josh turned to face us. He seemed calmer but his eyes glistened. “Where?”
“Lufthansa. The Deutsche Bank. The Berlin stock exchange...” I counted them off on my fingers.
Tori stood up and started pacing. She said: “It must think it really is Ack-Ack Macaque.”
Josh looked blank. “Okay. But why’s it causing planes to crash?”
Tori stopped pacing. “Have you ever actually watched the original series?”
He shrugged. “I looked at it, but I still don’t get the connection.”
I reached for a cigarette. “He’s looking for someone,” I said.
“Who?”
“His arch-enemy, the German air ace Baron Von Richter-Scale.”
Tori stopped pacing. She said: “That’s why all those planes were German. He’s trying to shoot down the Baron. It’s what he does in every episode.”
Josh went pale. “But we based his behaviour on those shows.”
I said: “I hope you’ve got a good lawyer.”
He looked indignant. “This isn’t my fault.”
“But you own him, you launched the software. You’re the one they’re going to come after.” I blew smoke in his direction. “It serves you right for stealing the copyright.”
Tori shushed us. “It’s too late for that,” she said.
The TV had come back on. Someone, somewhere, had managed to lash together a news report. There was no sound, only jerky, amateur footage shot on mobile phones. It showed two airliners colliding over Strasbourg, a cargo plane ditching in the Med, near Crete. Several airports were burning. And then it shifted to pictures of computer screens in offices, schools, and control towers around the world. All of them showed the same grinning monkey’s face.
I pushed past Josh and opened the window. Even from here, I could see the same face on the monitors in the café across the road. There was a thick pall of black smoke coming from the city centre. Sirens howled. People were out in the street, looking frightened.
I turned back slowly and looked Tori in the eye. I started unwinding my bandages, letting them fall to the floor in dirty white loops.
I said: “I don’t care about any of this. I just want you back.”
She bit her lip. Her hand went to her own scar. She opened and closed her mouth several times. She looked at the TV, and then dropped her eyes. “I want you too,” she said.
* * * *
The Baron’s burning plane hits the hillside and explodes. Lola Lush cheers and waves a fist over her head, but Ack-Ack Macaque says nothing. He circles back over the burning wreck and waggles his wings in salute to his fallen foe. And then he pulls back hard on the joystick and his rattling old plane leaps skyward, high over the rolling hills and fields of the French countryside. Ahead, the Akron stands against the sunset like a long, black cigar. Its skeletal oxen paw the air, anxious to get underway.
Lola’s lips are red and full; her cheeks are flushed. She shouts: “What are you gonna do now?”
He pushes up his goggles and gives her a toothy grin. The air war may be over, but he knows he’ll never be out of work. The top brass will always want something shot out of the sky. “When we get back, I’m going to give you the night of your young life,” he says, “and then in the morning, I’m going to go out and find myself another war.”