Tales From the Nightside Read online

  A door appeared in the far wall, where I would have sworn there was no trace of a door just a moment before. A section of the metal just slid suddenly sideways, disappearing into the rest of the wall, leaving a brightly lit opening. I started towards it, and once again Dead Boy and Liza fell in beside me. You’d almost have thought I knew what I was doing. We threaded our way through the motionless robots, and I held myself ready in case they came alive again; but they just stood there, in their stiff awkward poses, utterly inhuman even in defeat. Dead Boy pulled faces at them. Liza wouldn’t even look at the robots, all her attention focused on the open door, and the answers it promised her.

  We passed through the narrow opening into a long steel corridor, comfortably wide and tall, the steel so brightly polished it was like walking through an endless hall of mirrors. It occurred to me that none of our reflections looked particularly impressive, or dangerous. Dead Boy had lost his great floppy hat in his struggle with the robots, and his marvellous purple greatcoat was torn and tattered. Some of the stitches on his bare chest had broken open, revealing pink-grey meat under the torn grey skin. I keep telling him to use staples. Liza looked scared but determined, her face so pale and taut there was hardly any colour in it. She was close to getting her answers now; but I think, even then, she knew this wasn’t going to end well. And I . . . I looked like someone who should have known better than to come to a place like Rotten Row, and expect any good to come of it.

  The corridor finally took a sharp turn to the left, and ushered us into a large antechamber. More steel walls, still no furnishings or comforts, but finally a human face. A tall, slender man in the traditional white lab coat was waiting for us. He had a bland forgettable face, and a wide welcoming smile that meant nothing at all. Slick, I thought immediately. That’s the word for this man. Nothing would ever touch him, and nothing would ever stick to him. He’d make sure of that. He strode briskly towards us, one hand stretched out to shake, still smiling, as though he could do it all day. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. They were cold, certain, the look of a man utterly convinced he knew important things that you didn’t.

  Fanatic’s eyes. Believer’s eyes. Such men are always dangerous.

  He dropped his hand when he realised none of us had any intention of shaking it, but he didn’t seem especially upset. He was still smiling.

  “Hi!” he said brightly. “I’m Barry Kopek. I speak for Silicon Heaven. I’d say it’s good to see you, but I wouldn’t want to start our relationship with such an obvious lie. So let’s get right down to business, shall we, and then we can all get back to our own lives again. Won’t that be nice?”

  He tried offering us his hand again, and then pulled it back with a resigned shrug, as though he was used to it. And if he was the official greeter for Silicon Heaven, he probably was. Even a ghoul in a graveyard would look down on a computer pimp like him.

  “Come with me,” he said, “and many things will be made clear. All your questions will be answered; or at least, all the ones you’re capable of understanding. No offence, no offence. But things are rather . . . advanced, around here. Tomorrow has come early for the Nightside, and soon there’ll be a wake-up call for everyone. Slogans are such an important part for any new business, don’t you agree? Sorry about the robots, but we have so many enemies among the ignorant, and our work here is far too important to allow outside agitators to interfere with it.”

  “Your work?” I said. “Arranging dates for computers, for people with a fetish for really heavy metal, is important work?”

  He looked like he wanted to wince at my crudity, but was far too professional. The smile never wavered for a moment. “We are not a part of the sex industry, Mr. Taylor. Perish the thought. Everyone who finds their way here becomes part of the great work. We are always happy to greet new people, given the extreme turnover in . . . participants. But they all understand! They do, really they do! This is the greatest work of our time, and we are all honoured to be a part of it. Come with me, and you’ll see. Only . . . do keep Mrs. Barclay under control, please. She did enough damage the last time she was here.”

  Dead Boy and I both looked at Liza, but she had nothing to say. Her gaze was fixed on the official greeter, staring at him like she could burn holes through him. She wanted answers, and he was just slowing her down.

  “All right,” I said. “Lead the way. Show us this great work.”

  “Delighted!” said Barry Kopek. I was really starting to get tired of that smile.

  He led us through more metal corridors, turning this way and that with complete confidence, even though there were never any signs or directions on the blank steel walls. He kept up an amiable chatter, talking smoothly and happily about nothing in particular. The light from nowhere became increasingly stark, almost unbearably bright. There was a sound in the distance, like the slow beating of a giant heart, so slow you could count the moments between each great beat, but they all had something of time and eternity in them. And there was a smell, faint at first, but gradually growing stronger . . . of static and machine oil, ozone and lubricants, burning meat and rank, fresh sweat.

  “You said Liza’s been here before,” I said finally, after it became clear that Kopek wasn’t going to raise the subject again himself.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, carefully looking at me rather than at Liza. “Mrs. Barclay was here yesterday, and we let her in, because of course we have nothing to hide. We’re all very proud of the work we do here.”

  “What work?” said Dead Boy, and something in his voice made Kopek miss a step.

  “Yes, well, to put it very simply, in layman’s terms . . . We are breaking down the barriers between natural and artificial life.”

  “If you’re so proud, and this work so very great, why did you send those cyborged taxis to attack us?” I said, in what I thought was really a quite reasonable tone of voice. Kopek’s smile wavered for the first time. He knew me. And my reputation.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “That. I said that was a mistake. You must understand, they were some of our first crude attempts, at melding man with machine. Those men paid a lot of money for it to be done to them, so they could operate more efficiently and more profitably in Nightside traffic. We were very short of funds at the beginning . . . When they found out you were coming here, Mr. Taylor, well, frankly, they panicked. You see, they relied on us to keep them functioning.”

  “Who told them I was coming?” I said. “Though I’m pretty sure I already know the answer.”

  “I said it was a mistake,” said Barry Kopek. “Are they all . . . ?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He nodded glumly. Still smiling, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “I’m not surprised. Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Taylor, like an attack dog on a really long leash. It’s a shame, though. They only wanted to better themselves.”

  “By having their humanity cut away?” said Dead Boy, just a bit dangerously.

  “They gave up so little, to gain so much,” said Kopek, just a bit haughtily. “I would have thought you of all people would appreciate . . .”

  “You don’t know me,” said Dead Boy. “You don’t know anything about me. And no-one gets away with attacking my car.”

  “Being dead hasn’t mellowed you at all, has it?” said Kopek.

  “Is Frank here?” I said. “Frank Barclay?”

  “Well, of course he’s here,” said Kopek. “It’s not like we’re holding him prisoner, against his will. He came to us, pursuing his dreams, and we were only too happy to accommodate him. He is here where he wanted to be, doing what he’s always wanted to do, happy at last.”

  “He was happy with me!” said Liza. “He loves me! He married me!”

  “A man wants what he wants, and needs what he needs,” said Kopek, looking at her directly for the first time. “And Mr. Barclay’s needs brought him to us.”

  “Can we see him? Talk to him?” I said.

  “Of course! That’s where I’m taking you
now. But you must promise me you’ll keep Mrs. Barclay under control. She reacted very badly to seeing her husband last time.”

  “She’s seen him here before?” I said.

  “Well, yes,” said Kopek, looking from me to Liza and back again, clearly puzzled. “I escorted her to him myself. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “No,” Liza said quietly, though exactly what she was saying no to, I wasn’t entirely sure. She was all drawn up in herself now, looking straight ahead, her gaze fixed, almost disassociated.

  The corridor finally ended in a flat featureless wall, in which another door appeared. Kopek led us through, and we all stopped dead to look around, impressed and overwhelmed despite ourselves by the sheer size of the glass-and-crystal auditorium spread out before us. It takes a lot to impress a native of the Nightside, but the sheer scope and scale of the place we’d been brought to took even my breath away. Bigger than any enclosed space had a right to be, with walls like frozen waterfalls of gleaming crystal, set so far apart the details were just distant blurs, under tinted glass ceilings so high above us clouds drifted between us and them. Like some vast cathedral dedicated to Science, the auditorium was so enormous it had generated its own weather systems. Kopek’s smile was openly triumphant now, as he gestured grandly with outstretched arms.

  “Lady and gentlemen, welcome to Silicon Heaven!”

  He led the way forward, between massive machines that had shape and form, but no clear meaning or significance. So complex, so advanced, as to be incomprehensible to merely human eyes. There were components that moved, and revolved, and became other things even as I watched; strange lights that burned in unfamiliar colours; and noises that were almost, or beyond, voices. Things the size of buildings walked in circles, and intricate mechanisms came together in complex interactions, like a living thing assembling itself. Gleaming metal spheres the size of sheepdogs rolled back and forth across the crystal floor, sprouting tools and equipment as needed to service the needs of larger machines. Dead Boy kicked at one of the spheres, in an experimental way, but it dodged him easily.

  Kopek led the way, and we all followed close behind. This wasn’t a place you wanted to get lost in. It felt . . . like walking through the belly of Leviathan, or like flies crawling across the stained-glass window of some unnatural cathedral . . . So of course I strolled along with my hands in my coat pockets, like I’d seen it all before and hadn’t been impressed then. Never let them think they’ve got the advantage, or they’ll walk all over you. Dead Boy seemed genuinely uninterested in any of it, but then he’d died and brought himself back to life, and that’s a hard act to follow. Liza didn’t seem to see any of it. She had a hole in her mind, a gap in her memories, and all she cared about was finding out what had happened the last time she was here. Did she care at all about husband Frank, any more? Or was she remembering just enough to sense that her quest wasn’t for him, and never had been, but only to find the truth about him and her, and this place . . .

  There was a definite sense of purpose to everything happening around us, even if I couldn’t quite grasp it, but I was pretty sure there was nothing human in that purpose. Nothing here gave a damn about anything so small as Humanity.

  “I was here before,” Liza said slowly. “There’s something bad up ahead. Something awful.”

  I looked sharply at Kopek. “Is that right, Barry? Is there something dangerous up ahead, that you haven’t been meaning to tell us about?”

  “There’s nothing awful here,” he said huffily. “You’re here to see something wonderful.”

  And finally, we came face-to-face with what we’d come so far to see. A single beam of light stabbed down, shimmering and scintillating, like a spotlight from Heaven, as though God himself was taking an interest. The illumination picked out one particular machine, surrounded by ranks and ranks of robots. They were dancing around the machine, in wide interlocking circles, their every movement impossibly smooth and graceful and utterly inhuman. They moved to music only they could hear, perhaps to music only they could hope to understand, but there was nothing of human emotion or sensibility in their dance. It could have been a dance of reverence, or triumph, or elation, or something only a robot could know or feel. The robots danced, and the sound of their metal feet slamming on the crystal floor was almost unbearably ugly.

  Kopek led us carefully through the ranks of robots, and at once they began to sing, in high chiming voices like a choir of metal birds, in perfect harmonies and cadences that bordered on melody without ever actually achieving it. Like machines pretending to be human, doing things that people do without ever understanding why people do them. We passed through the last of the robots and finally . . . there was Frank, beloved husband of Liza, having sex with a computer.

  The computer was the size of a house, covered with all kinds of monitor screens and readouts but no obvious controls, with great pieces constantly turning and sliding across each other. It was made of metal and crystal and other things I didn’t even recognise. At the foot of it was an extended hollow section, like a large upright coffin, and suspended within this hollow was Frank Barclay, hanging in a slowly pulsing web of tubes and wires and cables, naked, ecstatic, transported. Liza made a low, painful sound, as though she’d been hit.

  Frank’s groin was hidden behind a cluster of machine parts, always moving, sliding over and around him like a swarm of metallic bees, clambering over themselves in their eagerness to get to him. Like metal maggots, in a self-inflicted wound. Thick translucent tubes had been plugged into his abdomen, and strange liquids surged in and out of him. Up and down his naked body, parts of him had been dissected away, to show bones and organs being slowly replaced by new mechanical equivalents. There was no bleeding, no trauma. One thigh bone had been revealed from top to bottom, one end bone and the other metal, and already it was impossible to tell where the one began and the other ended. Metal rods plunged in and out of Frank’s flesh, sliding back and forth, never stopping. Lights blinked on and off inside him, briefly rendering parts of his skin transparent; and in that skin I could see as many wires as blood vessels.

  The computer was heaving and groaning, in rhythm to the things going in and out of Frank’s naked body, and the machine’s steel exterior was flushed and beaded with sweat. It made . . . orgasmic sounds. Frank’s face was drawn, shrunken, the skin stretched taut across the bone, but his eyes were bright and happy, and his smile held a terrible pleasure. Cables penetrated his skin, and metal parts penetrated his body, and he loved it. One cable had buried itself in his left eye socket, replacing the eyeball, digging its way in a fraction of an inch at a time. Frank didn’t care. He shuddered and convulsed as things slid in and out of him, changing him forever, and he loved every last bit of it.

  Liza stood before him, tears rolling silently and unheeded down her devastated face.

  I turned to Barry Kopek. “Is he dying?”

  “Yes, and no,” said Kopek. “He’s becoming something else. Something wonderful. We are making him over, transforming him, into a living component capable of being host to machine consciousness. A living and an unliving body, for an Artificial Intelligence from a future time line. It came to the Nightside through a Timeslip, fleeing powerful enemies. It wants to experience sin, and in particular the hot and sweaty sensations of the flesh. It wants to know what we humans know, and take for granted; all the many joys of sex. Together, Frank and the computer are teaching each other whole new forms of pleasure. He is teaching the machine all the colours of emotion and sensuality, and the very subtle joys of degradation. In return, the machine is teaching him whole new areas of perception and conception. Man becomes machine, becomes more than machine, becomes immortal living computer. A metal messiah for a new Age . . .”

  Kopek’s face was full of vision now, a zealot in his cause. “Why should men be limited to being just men, and machines just machines? Human and inhuman shall combine together, to become something far superior to either. But like all new life, it begins with sex.”


  “How many others have there been?” said Dead Boy. “Before Frank?”

  “One hundred and seventeen,” said Kopek. “But Frank is different. He doesn’t just believe. He wants this.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Dead Boy. “Looks like he’s coming his brains out.”

  Liza collapsed, her knees slamming painfully onto the crystal floor. Her face was twisted, ugly, filled with a horrid knowledge, as all her repressed memories came flooding back at once. She pounded on the floor with her fist, again and again and again.

  “No! No, no, no! I remember . . . I remember it all! I came here, following Frank. Following my husband, into the Nightside, and through its awful streets, all the way here . . . Because I thought he was cheating on me. I thought he had a lover here. He hadn’t touched me in months. I thought he was having an affair, but I never suspected this . . . Never thought he wanted . . . this.”

  “She talked her way in, yesterday,” said Kopek. “Determined to see her husband. But when we brought her here, and showed her, she went berserk. Attacked the computer. Did some little damage, before the robots drove her off. We wouldn’t let her hurt Frank, or herself, and after a while she left.”

  “And she blocked out the memories herself,” I said. “Because they were unbearable.”

  “How could you?” Liza screamed at Frank. “How could you want this? It doesn’t love you! It can’t love you!”

  Frank stirred for the first time, his one remaining eye slowly turning to look down at her. His face showed no emotion, no compassion for the woman he’d loved and married, not so long ago. When he spoke, his voice already contained a faint machine buzz.