Necrochip Read online

  Necrochip

  Liz Williams

  Copyright 1999 by Liz Williams

  Published by NewCon Press at Smashwords

  Contents

  Necrochip

  About A Glass of Shadow

  What the critics have to say about

  Liz Williams:

  “Williams has mastered the art of writing clearly and believably about weird, alien worlds.” The Times

  “Williams weaves a rich, complicated tapestry that merges life with afterlife, otherworldly with worldly and human with inhuman.” Publishers Weekly

  “Williams’ forte is her depiction of driven characters in richly realised settings.” The Guardian

  “Williams is one of the most original and distinctive voices in British SF.” SFX

  “A cocktail of styles, flavoured by the fruits of an astounding imagination.” SFCrowsnest

  “Adventurous, thought-provoking science fiction.” The Times

  “An author who continually produces intelligent, creative and entertaining stories.” Green Man Review

  “Williams’ unique cross-genre voice is a reinvigorating one for SF, fantasy and horror.” Publishers Weekly

  A complete story taken from the collection…

  by Liz Williams

  NewCon Press

  England

  “Necrochip” copyright 1999 by Liz Williams. This story originally appeared in Albedo 1.

  “A Glass of Shadow” compilation copyright 2011 Ian Whates

  All rights reserved.

  “A Glass of Shadow” cover art by Anne Sudworth

  “A Glass of Shadow” cover design by Andy Bigwood

  Minimal editorial interference by Ian Whates

  Text layout by Storm Constantine

  e-Book design by Tim C Taylor

  “Sure, you can sleep with me,” she said, with a small, cool smile. “But only after I’m dead.”

  I have to admit that this was not precisely the answer I’d been expecting when I made my rather incoherent proposition, and if I hadn’t been a bit the worse for wear due to a combination of vodka and spray-on opiates, I doubt whether I’d have had the courage to proposition her in the first place. She was so far out of the league of blokes like me as to be practically out of sight. She was one of those international girls: tall, with skin like suede plastic and a slight crease to her long eyelids that made me suspect Asian ancestry – unless, like so many of the fashion set these days, she’d had her eyelids tucked to give her that essential Pacific Rim mystique. The accent was neutral; anywhere between Sydney and Beijing. It did not occur to me that she might be native to Singapore Three; only the poor remained where they were born these days and the franchise city was full of voyagers. I’d been here for almost eighteen months now, which made me virtually indigenous. I was supposed to be making videos, but I ended up working in a bar in the backstreets of Jiang Min and it was here, fortunately on my night off, that I made my disastrous proposition. I peered at her through the haze.

  “Sorry?” I mumbled. “Did you say ‘dead’?”

  She reached into her Miucci wallet and took out a sliver of something. It had the soft glaze of organic material; like a very thin slice of liver.

  “Here,” she said, distantly. “This is my necrochip.” Her voice took on the sing-song note of a rote lesson. “If you’d like to sleep with me after my death, we can put it on your credit card now and then when I’m dead, you will be notified and can come and visit me.” She added in a more normal tone, “I’m due to be placed in one of the franchise facilities in Reikon, so you won’t have far to go.”

  “I’m sorry,” I echoed. I felt like a complete idiot; this was obviously some game she enjoyed playing on hapless Westerners. “I’d really rather you were alive when we, um, I mean…” My voice trailed uncomfortably away. She shrugged.

  “As you wish.”

  She slipped the necrochip back into her wallet and stood up to leave. She was wearing a pair of hydraulic Japanese pattens, I remember, and when her weight came down on them I heard a faint hiss. She gained an inch or so in height and stood looking down on me. This wasn’t difficult: at that point in the conversation I felt about three feet high.

  “Wait,” I said. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you doing this? I mean – hiring out one’s corpse for sexual purposes… It’s hardly usual, even these days. I just wondered – well, why?”

  “Isn’t it usual?” she said, with vague curiosity.

  “Not unless I’m very far behind the times.”

  “The man at the facility said there’d be plenty of interest,” she said. “And you’d be number six – there is a queue, you know.” She made it sound as though I’d questioned her desirability.

  “Wouldn’t you be a bit – well, past it by then?”

  Disdainfully, she said

  “I’d be perfectly preserved. Quite flexible. I wouldn’t want to be involved in something distasteful.”

  “But why are you doing it in the first place?”

  “To pay for my treatment.”

  “Your treatment?”

  At that point, a group of similar girls swept in, giving those thin high cries that Japanese women seem to emit at moments of astonishment or pleasure. They clustered around my new friend and gathered her up with them. The last thing that I saw of her was her blonde head at the bar, bobbing over the assembled crowd. She seemed to be laughing, but I wasn’t. I drained my drink and left; the alcohol didn’t seem to be working any more and the opiates had long since worn away. I scratched absently at the rash they had raised on my skin and shambled out into the street. Before I headed home, I bent down and dropped a couple of cents into the little shrine that stood at the foot of the wall. Inside, the small plastic god stared placidly out and, as I watched, he raised a hand and blessed me. It was only the motion of the coins crossing the infra-red sensor that made him do this, but I felt better, somehow. It was hard not to be superstitious in Singapore Three; ironically, for such a high-tech city, the media was full of talk of magic and demons and it got to me, after a while.

  Back at the box I rented on Hsin Tsu Street, I stared out of the minuscule window at the lights of the city. The night sky was a permanent orange glaze, but up the coast, towards the Yellow River estuary, I could see an edge of darkness: a storm coming in over the South China Sea. I shivered, despite the stuffy night heat. I had no wish to spend another steaming summer in Singapore Three, but it wasn’t looking as though I had much choice. I was living pretty much hand to mouth in those days, and if I really wanted to get back to Glasgow (which I sometimes doubted), I’d have to find a better-paid job. That night, however, thoughts of home didn’t occupy me for long. I couldn’t get the girl out of my mind. I’ve never considered myself a particularly moral individual, but her matter-of-fact acceptance of something so extreme disturbed me. I told myself that it was up to people what they did with their own lives and their own bodies, but my brief conversation with her had given me an insight into the macabre that I didn’t feel I could handle. And what had she meant by ‘treatment’?

  I didn’t see her again for a couple of days, and when she next came into the Azure Dragon I was once again working behind the bar. In between serving drinks, I watched her as she struck up a conversation with some middle-aged businessman. He was wearing one of those heat-sensitive suits that had been all the rage in Beijing the year before last and I could hear the drift of colloquial Mandarin as they talked; the slurring accent like a drift of static above the words. With a disorientating sense of déjà vu, I saw her fish in her bag and take out the necrochip. She handed it to him. The businessman studied it for a moment, then reached into his pocket and took out a credit card. I watched, disbelieving, as she ran
it through her pod. He gave a small, curt bow and walked away. It seemed my friend had collected number six. Her face did not change as she replaced the necrochip in her wallet, but remained the same passive mask. She clicked her bag shut and walked towards the unisex restrooms.

  On impulse, I put down the glass I was polishing and followed her. I think I had some hazy thought of offering to help her, save her from a life of prostitution – or a death of one, to be more accurate. How I intended to accomplish this, I had no idea. I suppose she appealed to whatever vestiges of romance I still possessed: I saw her as a tragic figure, desperate to be saved. I didn’t want to alarm her, so I opened the restroom door quietly. She was leaning over the basin, spitting blood. As she heard my footsteps her head came up and I met her eyes in the mirror. They glittered a crystalline red, like neon in the rain. Her head swivelled around and she hissed. I took a hasty step backwards and fell over a mop that someone had thoughtfully placed by the entrance to the restroom. When I extricated myself, she had gone. The tiny window beneath the ceiling, a good eight feet from the ground, was hanging open. Tottering back into the bar, I told the manager that I was feeling unwell and would have to go home. He acquiesced with a sour nod.

  Before I left, however, I went over to the dark booth where Number Six was sitting over his whisky.

  “Good evening. Excuse me,” I said in my dreadful Mandarin. “Could I talk to you for a moment?”

  Number Six gave me the sort of look that made me wonder briefly whether I’d managed to call him an arsehole rather than bidding him a greeting: tonal languages are full of such pitfalls. I took his stare for invitation and sat down.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said. “But I saw you talking to a young lady a while ago.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “Well, it’s like this,” I improvised hastily. “I’m actually with the, uh, the franchise vice squad, and we have reason to believe that the lady in question is engaged in certain illegal activities.”

  He looked utterly disbelieving.

  “What sort of illegal activities?”

  “Well, they’re of a varied nature that I’m not at liberty to divulge right now, but I must inform you that it you have completed a transaction of any sort with her, you should contact your bank now and cancel it. I’m also asking you to hand over any information that she gave to you. An address, for instance.”

  The stare did not waver.

  “Do you have identification?”

  “No. It would put me at risk, if it were discovered.”

  He must have thought I was some sort of lunatic.

  “You’re not a cop,” he said in disgust. “I don’t know who you are. But I’ll give you the address she gave me if it will make you go away. Have you got a pod?”

  I slid it across the table and he made a quick copy from his pod to mine.

  “Now go away.”

  Did I really care, I asked myself, if this obnoxious person had some horrible fate awaiting him? I decided that I didn’t, and besides, I’d done all I could for now.

  “Thank you,” I said pompously. “The authorities are grateful.” Briefly, I remembered the adverts which littered the city, encouraging people to turn informer. They featured a young man in a pair of stripy pyjamas slumbering peacefully with his glasses on the bedside table, having presumably shopped his mates for a few franchise dollars and the gratitude of the municipal police. ‘Sleep well!’ the adverts proclaimed. ‘You have done the Right Thing!’ I wondered whether I’d sleep well that night. Somehow, I doubted it.

  I woke up somewhere around five am, with a queasy dawn coming up over the city. Opening the window, I leaned out and inhaled the usual heady blend of chemical fumes, unburned petrol and steam from the city’s many restaurants. Almost breakfast time, I decided. Yawning, I dressed and made my way down to the street. I could feel the pod in the pocket of my shirt; the address Number Six had given me seemed to weigh it down. I hadn’t even looked at it yet. I took a seat in the noodle bar down the road, among sweat-workers coming off their shifts, and mentally reviewed the range of substances that I had most recently abused. Apart from vodka, hypospray morphine and the occasional handful of tranquillisers, I couldn’t think of anything powerful enough to create a hallucination of the magnitude of the one that I’d apparently experienced the night before. I could still see the fragmented sparkle of her eyes in the shadows of the restroom mirror. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing, and besides, there was the address that the businessman had given me. Absently, I twirled a chopstickful of nasi goreng into my mouth and took out the pod. She had told part of the truth, anyway. The address was somewhere down in Reikon, which meant the waterfront. All right, I thought, with a combination of excitement and trepidation: let’s take a look. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. I guess it seemed like an adventure at the time; the sort of thing I’d drifted to Asia in order to experience. I don’t think I really believed that anything could happen to me; you don’t when you’re young. Or stupid.

  It took ages to get to Reikon. The trams were running erratically that day, the result of terrorist activity down in the banking district, and the one that I finally managed to catch stopped at every halt. I dozed in my seat as the city lurched by, waking with a start to find that we had reached the docks. The water glistened in the heat, shimmering out towards the silhouette of the islands. I could see a hoverfoil ploughing out beyond the typhoon shelter, bound for Macau and leaving a white furrow in its wake. I watched it go, wishing I was on it. I walked down towards the docks, picking my way over fish wreckage and machine parts. The warehouses were marked, but it was some little time before I located the address that I’d been given. It was one of the new facilities: a smooth high curve of grey plastic some three hundred metres long, tucked away behind a mesh fence. The gates were closed. I could hear the hum of the vibrolock from where I stood, and as I stared at it a short, squat figure bolted out from behind the warehouse and bounded towards the gate. It hurled itself at the wire, barking. The long wedge-shaped head wove from side to side like a cobra; within, I could see a triple row of teeth. Weird women I thought I could handle; sharkhounds definitely not. Even though it was contained behind the wire, I backed off hastily. Well, that was that, I told myself. My little adventure had ended in the usual inconclusive way, but it had been diverting enough at the time. Filled with a kind of pleasantly world-weary ennui, I made my way back to the tram.

  After this, life continued in its customary way for about a month. I did not see the girl again, though I kept a sharp eye out for her in the bar. I did not see Number Six again, either, and after a while I found out why. I’d come home in the middle of the afternoon. It was summer by then, and too hot to do anything except melt. The humidity was running at eighty percent and I felt disgusting. I took the fifth shower of the day, donned a sarong and slumped in front of the ancient DTV that I’d inherited from a neighbour. Number Six’s face was plastered all over the news. Within the next ten minutes I learned that he was the president of a satellite company in Beijing and a man of quite preposterous wealth. He had apparently gone missing in Singapore Three several days before. It was known that he had a certain taste for the seamier side of life (this was implied in the most delicate manner possible and presented as a charming eccentricity: I suppose they didn’t want to be sued), so his family were not unduly concerned until he failed to show up for a board meeting back in Beijing. Then the harbour police found his body, floating in the oily waters of the Reikon typhoon shelter. Police had reason to link the case to a number of unexplained and recent deaths in the area. An exhaustive summary of Number Six’s most recent movements then followed; including his visit to the Azure Dragon. The police were apparently eager to interview a young man whom the victim had been seen talking with.

  At this point, despite the sultry day, I broke out into a cold sweat. The franchise police were known for their enthusiastic methods of questioning, and had little reserve about applyi
ng them to foreigners. I pulled on a t-shirt and sandals and left the flat with unseemly haste. I headed nervously out into the street and caught a tram downtown, intending to lose myself among the crowds. It was undoubtedly an over-active imagination that made me think that everyone was staring at me. I wandered aimlessly through Sheng Mai and New Kowloon until the apricot coloured sky deepened into the soft south China twilight. My steps took me down the familiar alleyway that led to the Azure Dragon. And then I saw her.

  At first I wasn’t sure if it was really her. She looked different, somehow. Her hair straggled over her shoulders and her shoulders seemed bowed. She looked twice as old as the girl I’d seen in the Azure Dragon, but her dress and the shoes were the same. She was talking to a Korean in a pale suit; as I watched, she reached out and massaged his elbow. It was a curiously intimate, affectionate gesture. Then they parted. She walked slowly along the waterfront on her high shoes, into the twilight. I followed her. She flagged down a taxi, and so did I.

  We reached Reikon and the warehouse just as darkness fell. I asked the driver to stop several streets away, and then I ran down to the docks. The lights of distant ships glowed out to sea and the city towered behind. I caught a glimpse of her as she moved through the yards. As she neared the facility, she slipped off her shoes and hobbled barefoot towards the fence. She fumbled with the latch of the gate and as she stepped through she almost fell. She vanished into the shadows, leaving the gate open behind her. The sharkhound was nowhere to be seen. Curiosity got the better of me and I followed her towards the facility. The door stood wide open. Cautiously, I stepped through. I went down a long corridor and paused before a second open door. Why was the facility so unguarded? I wondered. It was not reassuring. I could see light coming from a room ahead; a flickering glow unlike the steady gleam of neon. Stealthily, I moved towards it; here, too, the door was ajar. I peered through the crack.

  The girl was faltering as she circled the room. She was lighting sticks of incense, and the thick smoke filled the air. She groped her way towards a raised bier in the centre of the room and, as I watched, she collapsed across it. She dragged herself up, until she was lying on her back, and I heard the breath go out of her in a long sigh. Her head lolled to one side, displaying her wan face. At that point, I heard footsteps coming down the corridor. I ducked out of sight around the corner.