Psychotopia, p.26
Psychotopia, page 26
The EntryCam sounded at seven fifty-seven. She was keen. A good sign. Though her face in the screen seemed somehow tense. It was back, he thought ominously. The suspicion. The lack of trust. He saw it in her eyes. She was starting to piss him off. Maybe the evening wouldn’t go so smoothly after all. He may not have an actual tank of sharks in the basement, but he did have a way of dealing with bitches who pissed him off.
Still. She was here. That had to mean something.
He buzzed her in. And went for the heedless blithe act. ‘Hi, honey. Come straight up. Sixth floor. I’ll pick you up at the lift.’
He checked his smile in the mirror on the way to the door. If that didn’t melt her little heart and win her over, he didn’t know what would.
He lived in a semi-vacant high-rise. He liked the fact that so many of the apartments were unoccupied and owned by wealthy absentee foreigners. Most of them were furnished. And he had somehow contrived to come into possession to the entry codes for most of them. A little bit of bribery here, some blackmail there, and occasionally some good old-fashioned deception. Sometimes it was convenient to pretend that you lived somewhere other than where you actually did. Some of the entertaining he did got a bit messy, and he didn’t see why he should be the one to clean up after. And sometimes it was just for the hell of it, as with the shoplifting. It made life more interesting to fuck a whore in a stranger’s bed.
You might have thought he’d get lonely surrounded by so many empty residences. Far from it. He found the sense of richly furnished desolation suited his temperament perfectly.
The high-speed lift decelerated with a whispered shush. The doors opened. And some random guy he’d never seen before in his life was squaring up to him.
‘It is you,’ the guy said.
Had they met before? He had no memory of the guy’s face. But then he wasn’t good on faces. He didn’t look at them to remember them. He looked at them to discover weaknesses. But there was something about the guy’s tone he didn’t like. He didn’t like the way he couldn’t see his right hand either. He kept it in his coat pocket. Like he was ashamed of it. Maybe it was a misshapen claw or something. Or there was some kind of unsightly rash all over it. Pustules. Yes, that had to be it. Pustules. He looked like the kind of guy who would have boils and pustules all over his body.
‘I’m me. That’s true. The question is, who the fuck are you?’
‘Do you remember a girl called Aimée?’
‘What? You used to be a chick? Did I fuck you when you were a chick? I don’t think so.’
‘Aimée is my wife.’
‘I’m very happy for you. Now if you don’t mind, I have a hot date.’ He made a show of looking behind the guy, though he knew there was no one else in the lift with him. ‘She must be coming up in the other lift.’
‘Sal’s not coming up. I sent her home.’
‘You know Sally?’
The guy gave a grim little nod.
‘What the fuck is going on here?’
‘This is what’s going on here.’
And now he realized why he didn’t like the way the guy was keeping his hand out of sight. It wasn’t misshapen or plague-ridden or anything like that. It was holding a gun.
He couldn’t help it. He had to laugh. It was so fucking funny to have this guy he didn’t know waving a gun in his face. What else are you going to do but laugh?
It was only the deafening explosion of the gun that silenced his laughter.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Welcome to Psychotopia!
Alpha Games announces the launch of its most innovative, most controversial, most exciting, most insane, most challenging, bravest, bloodiest, most bad-assed game ever: PSYCHOTOPIA.
Mixing both VR and AR elements, PSYCHOTOPIA is the brainchild of the games genius Oscar Winslett, whose early death at the hands of a jealous husband could have come straight from the gameplay of one of Oscar’s own thrilling creations.
They say he died laughing. We can believe it. This is a game created by the kind of man who dies laughing.
PSYCHOTOPIA gives players the opportunity to enter into the mind and get beneath the skin of a deliriously cold-blooded psychopathic killer. And to walk in their shoes as they go on a glorious – or should that be gory-ous? – killing spree. There will be blood. There will be bones. There will be brain spatter. And as you play this uniquely immersive game, you will live and feel every moment of the murderous mayhem. You will never feel more alive than when you’re hunting down and mercilessly killing your victims.
Featuring stunning game architecture and hyper-realistic character design, this is the closest you can get to killing without actually killing. In fact, we have it on good authority that it’s ‘more fun than killing’. We can’t tell you who said that, but take it from us, he knows what he’s talking about.
Unpredictable, death-affirming, terrifying, relentless and unashamedly gross, PSYCHOTOPIA is …
The game for the times we live – and die – in.
The game you have played in your sickest nightmares.
The game the world has been waiting for.
In a final twist added after the death of the game’s creator, Oscar Winslett himself appears in the role of Mefistofolo.
As everyone at Alpha Games agrees, it’s what he would have wanted.
• Single-player and multi-player modes
• Real-time gameplay
• Includes hidden features
• Psychotropic interaction may result in modified personality
• Game played at player’s own risk
For more information, MindMessage ClariceⓂ@alphagames
SUITABLE FOR ALL AGES
TWENTY-FIVE
I still don’t get it. Why he did it. It’s not as if he was a P. We tested him. Naturally. We tested everyone who we pulled in, especially the ones who have blown some random stranger’s brains out with a gun they bought on the DarkMind.
I really don’t like it when civilians mess with the DarkMind. Don’t they know it’s not for them? They should leave it to the paedos and the psychos and the terrorists. And the paedo-psycho-terrorists. We do get those, believe me.
He tested NP, of course. He was shaking so much and weeping so much you didn’t need an Arbus-Lubany machine to know what the result would be. I think he might even have pissed himself, he was that upset.
Maybe it would have made more sense if he had been a P. Though sometimes I wondered if labelling people P was a way of avoiding making sense of things. A way of not understanding what was going on. Of taking refuge in an easy answer, when the truth is just too hard to get your head around.
Whatever his reasons, I have no doubt that the seed of the deed was planted in that fierce little huddle I witnessed between him and his sister-in-law. She gave him some kind of purpose then. I could see it, though at the time I had no idea what that purpose was.
Maybe I should have tested the sister-in-law.
He didn’t try to get away with it. Handed himself in at the nearest functioning police station. We all know there aren’t many of those left.
I took an interest in the case because of the family connection. They let me sit in on a few of the interrogations. The most we ever got out of him was ‘No comment’. His privilege.
We talked to his wife. She had no idea he was going to do it. And was pretty much in a state of catatonic shock. As you’d expect. She’d lost her whole family now. In a way that might have been thought bizarre once, but it just seemed to be of a piece with the times.
I got the impression that Callum Ardagh somehow blamed this guy Winslett for everything that had happened. So maybe he believed Winslett was Siobhan’s father, or something.
We took a DNA sample from Ardagh. Standard procedure. The idea is to see if it matches any DNA we have on unsolved cases. Drew a blank there, of course. But you have to do things by the book. That gave me an idea, though. I MindMessaged Dr Arbus to see if he fancied DNA testing his ward. Given his theories about heredity, I thought it might be of some interest to him.
When I told Ardagh the results we got, he looked like I’d just murdered his baby all over again.
‘No, it’s not possible …’
I handed him the printouts so he could see for himself. ‘It’s all there in black and white. You’re Siobhan’s father. No doubt about it.’
I guess it was time for Dr Arbus to get himself a new theory.
As for the man himself, after the attempt was made on his life by a P Party thug, Arbus went into hiding, taking Siobhan Ardagh with him. Not strictly legal, or ethical. But I guess he had his reasons. I think he saw her as some kind of talisman and didn’t want to let her out of his sight.
The last time I heard from him was a garbled MindMessage. This must have been about the time that Bartholomew Bartholomew swept into power on a landslide.
Mark 2 machine now in operation. Save yourself.
It’s all very well telling someone to save themself, but what’s the use unless you also tell them how? Or what they’re supposed to be saving themselves from?
Left to work it out for myself, I guessed he and his partner never did find a way to resolve that glitch he told me about. Which meant the new government was allowing the use of machines that converted NPs into Ps. We really had reached the tipping point.
If that was true, I could see only one way forward. It wasn’t like I had a choice. Rumours were flying about that compulsory testing for police officers was finally just around the corner. Only now, the purpose of testing had been revised, if not reversed.
I reckoned there would always be some stigma about the wrong result, even if they didn’t use it as an excuse to weed you out. Instead of a distinction between NPs and Ps it would be all about natural versus induced, or some such bullshit. The pure-born Ps would rule the roost, whatever roost you cared to talk about.
You could just about tell the difference between the Mark Twos and the the Mark Ones. They’d made some subtle modifications to the design. The Mark Two was a tad slimmer and lighter than the Mark One, with a shallower curve at the edges. The on/off button was in a different position. And the Arbus-Lubany logo was engraved into the frame rather than simply printed on it. Pointless changes there only to justify some product designer’s job.
I signed a machine out on the pretext that I wanted to test a suspect. Took it to the toilet and locked myself in a cubicle.
It felt strange fitting the frame and ScanCap on my own head after I’d tested so many suspects. The whole experience was, as you can imagine, somewhat surreal. A bit like going into a photo booth but the photo you were taking was of your soul, not your face.
The device felt heavier than I expected once it was in place. Also I found it trickier than I’d imagined to operate the controls while wearing it. I was kind of blinded by the machine, so I had to just grope at the remote and guess with my fingers. But soon enough I heard the tone that let you know the main feature was about to play.
Imagine you’ve been put inside a glass missile and fired naked through Hell. I guess whether you find that an enticing or a terrifying prospect is a pretty good indicator of what result you’re going to get.
I don’t know for sure what I saw. I think there were human faces in there. I had the impression that they bore the marks of what I can only describe as a savage cruelty. Though whether they were the faces of the victims of that cruelty or its perpetrators, I couldn’t say. Everything was disconnected from everything else. But it hurtled into me – or me into it – at such speed that it was all blended together into one big mess of impossible ugliness. Like a mash-up of all the ugly things in the world, and a few from some place else. Things that should not have been put together suddenly were. Limbs, internal organs, bones were ripped out of any bodily context and pieced together as if in some insane three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. A great depression came over me. It was the feeling you might have if you saw a burned-out wasteland strewn with the corpses of dead children, like so much litter. I can’t say for sure that’s what I saw. But it’s what it felt like.
Then the depression lifted and was replaced with an equally great elation. I could not call it happiness. Because I knew that its cause was the same as the cause of the depression. The thing that felt like a field of dead children.
The whole thing lasted for only a matter of seconds. And it was weird how one moment you hated it; it sickened you to your core. And then you reached a point where suddenly you didn’t want it to ever end.
The bleep came to signal it was over. I unclipped the machine from the frame and swiped the screen to show the result. NP.
As I looked at it, the N flickered and disappeared.
I can’t remember how things felt before I did the test.
But everything feels good now. Everything feels very good.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing a book is always a risk. Especially when the book is something of a departure for the writer, as this is for me.
I’d like to thank all those who have supported and encouraged me in my recklessness, and even shared the risk.
First, the team at Severn House, in particular Kate Lyall Grant for saying yes to something that’s a little different for both of us; Sara Porter, whose restless attention to detail has helped make this book the best it could be; and Claire Ritchie, for her meticulous copyediting.
My agent, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, for his calm and consistent optimism.
And my wife, Rachel Yarham. All I can say is it’s good to have someone who is never wrong on your side.
R.N. Morris, Psychotopia
