Vince mcleod, p.1
Vince McLeod, page 1
THE VERITY
KEY
a psychopunk
novel
by Vince McLeod
© 2012 VJM Publishing
Cover art by Joseph Jerome Wan
Also by Vince McLeod
The Cannabis Activist's Handbook
Learn Spanish Vocabulary With Mnemonics
Stop Smoking Cigarettes With the Token
Economy Method
Contents
Mindknife
Machine Cultists At Play
Stand-off In The Valley
The Serenity Reserve
The Red
New Zealand
Home With the Kahikateans
A Brief Taste of Freedom
A Visit and a Plan
Storming the Compound
Mastersen
The Siege
Back in New Aussie
A Call to Arms
Invasions
Epilogue
Mindknife
Light appeared before Jonty Gillespie. White tiled walls gleamed.
A brushed aluminium urinal gaped. He realised that he was
holding his penis in his right hand and pissing into shallow, putrid water. From behind him, electric guitars sang with a sound like
monsoon rain. He became aware of a presence, so he turned his
head to the right. A man, overweight and balding, faced him with bulging eyes and a fishlike mouth that opened and closed without sound.
Jonty felt unsafe. Inwardly he smiled, calculating his
chances in a fistfight. “Do I know you?” he asked, casting a
threatening glare at the saggy face. The man said nothing. Jonty switched his cock to his left hand and readied the right for the double snap jab that was about to encounter the aging pervert's
mouth, lacquered black fingernails hiding themselves inside a
tight fist. The acrid smell of syntho-laced urine, the bright yellow lights and the tumbling mercilessness of Jonty's drug trip had put him on edge. He didn't want further provocation.
The man tried to say something, but could only rasp as if
being strangled. Jonty had never heard such incoherence from a
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man who retained the ability to stand, and he shook his head with disdain, half-hoping there'd be a fight. The man continued to
stare, his body tense as if straining to free the words trapped
inside his tower of fat and bone. Then he pawed Jonty's black
satinplast shirtfront, so the machine cultist struck him. The blows landed fast like a double-click, producing for the man a rivulet of crimson from the corner of his mouth, and for Jonty the exquisite sensation of someone else's lips mashed between his knuckles and their teeth. This feeling brought him back to his locus in the
actual world: Cut Hands, an illegal bar in Brisbane, New
Australia, a place where he'd had such an experience before.
The man appeared unperturbed by the punches, his face
devoid of emotion. Keeping an eye on him, Jonty shook himself
off and went to wash his hands. He could guess the flesh-
mountain's intentions. He had been aware, from the earliest age
that one can be aware of such things, that his physical appearance
– his lean, boyishly slender body, lithe limbs, soft and rounded facial features, and inviting bright eyes – attracted carnal attention from men not inclined to women, as well as from some that were.
His were the sort of looks that made older women wish they were
younger and younger women wish they were more experienced.
“Moneybook... the Verity Key...” the man burbled, his
teeth stained with blood.
“What?”
“Jonty Gillespie... we need you.”
Jonty snorted. “Who's we, mate?”
“Not working... opiates... receptors blocked. Contact
again. Soon.”
Jonty left the man and returned to the bar, sitting down on
a stool as his stomach backflipped from nausea, sensitive to the sugary perfumes in the air. The dozens of screens hanging around the bar assaulted him with light and colour, and the air trickled with conversation. As he closed his eyes to decrease the
stimulation, memories rushed before him. He and Kris, in an alley on the way to Cut Hands, jecting some Cinque Nuevo, a new
synthdrug that causes the user to experience a total psychotic
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breakdown twelve times, at five minute intervals. Sanity peaking, Jonty's lips twisted into a grimace as he admitted to himself that jecting Cinque Nuevo was a poor idea. He wished he had told
Kris to get stuffed, but the big man was so persuasive when in a mood for mayhem.
Jonty spotted Kris talking to a tall, chestnut-haired girl
who held a glass of beer, a light in the bottom flickering blue and red. Probably European, he thought. It was the fashion for
European women to drink beer before last year's Mindvirus
Plague hit the Northern Hemisphere and the northern parts of the Southern, wiping out ninety-five percent of all human life. A
bright halo, growing in intensity, surrounded Kris and the girl.
Jonty blinked to get rid of it.
Kris' demonic icy eyes flashed as he noticed Jonty looking
at him. He made an apology to the girl, touching her lightly on the forearm, and swaggered over to his best mate.
“Jonts! How's the Cinque Nuevo treating ya?” he asked,
clapping Jonty on the shoulder with a big hand like a rugby
player. Jonty noticed a telephone number written on the back. “Is it making the haloes worse?”
“I think I've just witnessed a Moneybook visitation,” he
said.
Kris laughed, throwing his head back and grinning like a
wild man. “I was fighting in the Vietnam War before. Probably
because it's so hot tonight.” Behind him, the girl laughed and
whispered to a blonde friend, both of them stealing glances in
Jonty and Kris's direction.
“No, really. I just had a Moneybook visitation in the
toilet.”
“Come on Jonts, you're sparking on Cinque Nuevo, you're
okay. There's no Moneybook visitations going on here.”
“The guy said he needed me.”
“Was he hitting on you?”
“I don't think so.”
“Did you get any footage? I'm making a skavload off the
Moneybook footage I've ripped off TruSec.”
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“I – skav, this Cinque Nuevo's kicking my arse.”
“Let's sink some Satan's Piss and hit the V-Gens.”
“Satan's Piss makes me sweat. I don't want my makeup to
run.”
“Don't wear so much makeup then. Just rely on animal
magnetism, like me.”
“That works for the girls, but what about the boys?”
With a smile, Kris shrugged. “No clue. I'm a Kinsey zero,
remember?”
Kris turned to the barman and owner of Cut Hands, an
enormous Anglo-South African named Captain Bloodspill, who
moved into Jonty's peripheral vision. “Do you sell Cinque Nuevo
yet, Captain?” Kris asked. Behind the barman, whose battle-
scarred face bore hideous tales of human cruelty, metal racks of small plastic containers held the promise of euphoric oblivion.
Bloodspill shook his head with menace. Jonty knew he
wouldn't have appreciated Kris' implication that he was out of
date.
“Alright, I'll have an aerite thanks. Two, actually.” Turning
back to Jonty, Kris rubbed his jaw with his left hand, white tape holding his two smallest fingers together. “A Moneybook
visitation, you reckon?”
“It was just like the vids, brother. The guy was babbling
about Moneybook. He mentioned something called the Verity
Key.”
“Probably a faker. Out for attention from a cute boy like
you. Like that guy who tricked you into drilling him because he
said he had a terminal neurodegenerative disease. Don't worry
about it.”
“But it could mean there's going to be a shooting here.”
“Doubt it. There was a Moneybook killing already this
morning, and they never happen twice in a day.”
“Where?”
“Perth. Twenty-one dead, a new record. Don't you have a
news feed on your Hudd-glasses?”
“I didn't put them on. I went Normo on the way to meet
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you. Kris, I don't feel right.”
Jonty had suffered from this sense of unease ever since
taking a synthdrug called TRC Prime two weeks ago. It wasn't a
popular drug, and probably never would be, because it allowed
the user to tune into the Great Fractal itself, giving them an
intense and terrifying look into the future up to the point of their death. Like other people's TRC Prime experiences, Jonty couldn't remember the specifics, only that his death was to be young and
prophecy, but the TRC Prime experience brought to the user a
striking confidence that they had truly seen into another
dimension of time.
“Hey, that Cinque Nuevo's gonna kick in again soon,” Kris
said.
Bloodspill slid forth two tumblers full of a clear jelly with
a red sphere suspended in the centre. In the background, the
thundering of the electric guitars gave way to crashing drums and a haunting whistle. Jonty's ears rang.
“Ten anzacs,” Bloodspill growled. Kris thrust the back of
his hand under a credit chip reader, and a red light changed to
green.
“Cheers, Captain,” he said. Bloodspill turned away to
serve the next customer, a gangly girl whose kittenish face carried an expression of absence.
“Shall we do it?” Jonty asked.
“Quick, before we go voyaging again.”
Jonty downed his aerite in one, chewing on the raspberry-
flavoured sphere. As he swallowed, the Cinque Nuevo came back.
Jonty's last rational thought was wondering whether some
conditioned response related to the taste of the aerite had kicked it off. His vision folded in half, folded again, pulsating triangles of fractured colour forming in the spaces between folds and then he was gone. A fifth dimensional entity, nothing more than a bright golden ball of energy, approached him with an aura of peace and
welcoming, saying “You made it, you made it, you finally made
it,” and Jonty was only one second old, and he asked the being
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how long it had been alive for, but it just laughed. He looked around and saw a landscape of stunted forest and glittering lakes.
Striding through the scene on long, bony arms was a row of
gigantic coins, each with a huge potato nose underneath beady
black eyes. Their arms bent under their weight as they sang a
mournful dirge.
Then he saw dancing letters in front of him, which he
recognised as belonging to the English alphabet, and then a box of polished wood – a coffin? he wondered. It resolved itself as the bartop. The letters became smaller and flew to the edges of the
bartop, arranging themselves in lines that stretched into infinity.
Underneath them Kris cowered on the floor, his hands on his
head. He mumbled: “I can't join the army. We can't fight them,
they'll kill us all.”
The bar was now quiet: the band, all skinny teenagers in
black denim, were preparing for their next set.
Jonty laughed, his sense of unease and the hollowness in
the chest gone. “Hey Krissy, that Cinque Nuevo, it's something,”
he said. Kris nodded, his eyes distant, as if his subconscious was trying to suppress some tormented memory.
“I need a game of Mindknife,” he said with finality. As he
rose from the floor, Jonty looked up into his face. Kris was not tall enough to have to duck under a doorway, but he was too tall to safely bound through one. Next to him, Jonty felt not
intimidated but somehow underfed.
Jonty watched him slip through the crowd to get to the
Mindknife tables. The Cinque Nuevo felt like it had ended – the
electricity in the veins gone – so Jonty looked around for more
entertainment. He found it in the display in the centre of the room.
A heavily-built couple in their late thirties had sex on a raised wooden stage while a crowd of onlookers watched with Hudd-glasses.
Slipping his own white plastic Hudd-glasses from the
front pocket of his shirt, Jonty slid the frames behind the dark fringe that covered his temples. Referring to a floating panel
above the couple, where bright green letters danced against a
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black backdrop, he entered 02:07:99:89:50:12 on the virtual keypad that hovered before him and went into mixed reality.
The scene in front of him transformed. Tropical bird calls
shrieked as the array of screens vanished behind luscious
vegetation, and the onlookers on the Hudd channel (called
'#xenozoovoyeurism') became squat, hairy apes, as did the two
lovers in the centre. Their simian eyes stared with wonder and
primal lust. Jonty was impressed by the quality of the effect – at the very least, it gave him something to look at besides two
unappealing naked people in the midst of sexual congress.
His toothphone vibrated, so he raised one hand to his
molars. “Jonty Gillespie.”
“Hey Jonts, it's Adam. Party at the Watchtower tomorrow
night. We're celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?”
“It's official. The Elders picked us to be Team Progress.
Smithy's happy. He's jumping around into the walls.”
Jonty rose from his seat and pumped his fist. “We did it!
Sweetness and light!”
“Kris is seeded first. You're second, I'm third, Smithy
fourth. Feel good?”
“I'm exhausted, brother. Forty hours of V-Gen training
already this week. On top of work. I'll be ready for another
rampage tomorrow, though.”
Besides, he couldn't say no to Adam, his training partner.
Together with Kris and another mecher named Smithy, Jonty and
Adam were the foursome that had hoped to represent the machine
cultist temple of Progress in this year's New Australian Savannah Boxing Championships. This was the most prestigious V-Gen
tournament in New Australia, and therefore, what was left of the world. Six weeks out from the tourney, Jonty was psyched.
“How's Progress?” he asked.
“Great. Smithy and I were just training when we found
out. I'm trying to figure out a counter for his ball-crushing move.
Getting a knee in the way isn't working, so I'm experimenting
with a sweep of the left arm to deflect it and following up with a 10 Like this book? Support the author and buy it on Amazon!
right jab, but it doesn't do much damage. How was Mt. Ida?”
“Full of traditionals.”
“Drill any of them?”
“They weren't really my type. Hairy, sweaty,
hypermasculine fucks. One guy I was keen on until he said he
was a recreational chronos user. I don't do people I know I can't trust.”
Adam laughed, a deep, throaty sound.
“Anyway, all they were interested in were the V-Gens I
was installing. Lots of brutish aggression to be discharged. It
almost scared me. And they're not allowed to have any drugs on
site because they're operating heavy machinery. I've been dry for a week. Until a few hours ago, when Kris and I jected
something.”
“I thought you'd given up on jecting.”
“Kris talked me into it.” Jonty looked at the small red
prick on the inside of his left elbow and smiled. “And you know
how it is. A new experience, hard to say no to.”
“Sounds busy where you are.”
“It's not too busy yet, but it's simmering. You should get
down here. Help kick it off.”
“Can't. Got a HeavyStrike tournament loading. Bit of
cross-training. See you at practice.”
“Later.”
Jonty put his hand down to break the connection,
impressed by Adam and Smithy's dedication, and resumed
observing the scene before him. He hadn't known about
xenozoovoyeurism before tonight, so he hadn't included such a
module in the VR suite that he built at Mt. Ida, but then again the miners probably wouldn't have been interested. In any case, the
job was completed and the bounty collected, so now he could
concentrate on enjoying himself with Kris, in their usual self-
destructive fashion.
Kris Smashtonovski – synthdrug abuser, Savannah Boxing
maestro, machine cultist orphan and Jonty's closest friend and ally
– was easy to spot, even through the Hudd-glasses and the crowd, 11 Like this book? Support the author and buy it on Amazon!
and Jonty grinned through his nausea at the sight of him. Kris was seated at a heavy-duty Mindknife table in one of the shadowy
corners of the bar. His Asian opponent was a picture of unfocus, his body language serene. In this sadomasochistic game, the
