Hub - Issue 26 Read online

  That was bona fide, a precursor to a real scorching of cranial synapses. It was a warning: pull out now or die.

  About to unplug, Wilson heard the ghost of a tonal sequence, familiar. It was the melodic theme the boy in the ad-blip had played. He searched for the recurring phrase, found it, lost it, felt the heat wash closer.

  A flash of choice and choosing, like wobbling, arms flailing on the edge of a precipice. Which way to fall? One side promised a net but no Taro, the other a chasm of pain and dementia, but maybe, if he was lucky, his son.

  Wilson chose.

  The stench of burnt carbon. He shut down both olfactory and tactile data receptors, the better to trace the auditory trail. It was a dangerous strategy, for these sensory translations were the only inputs that might warn him of speeding death.

  The melody so faint, but growing as his attention honed closer, magnified by his fixation. It was a trail, winding through a forest of circuitry wolves and electric lions. He wondered if the damage coursing up his leads would leave him ambulatory. Or sane.

  The music was a pattern, guiding him in a meandering, purposeful fashion. At journey's end, the crescendoing overture and a door.

  He threw it open.

  Wilson pulled enough of himself out of the secure-loc to register the outside. The pulse in his head beat a hobnailed jig in his skull. Night had thickened the sky as he'd assaulted the system. Silvery shadows turned opaque, bleeding to seamless black. The darkness hurt his eyes.

  Gathering his tech, he pushed open the door.

  Within, a corridor stretched to a blue light flashed above parted doors, the interior of an elevator.

  The blip-blip was blinding in his fragile, post-burnout state. Wilson fought nausea, his sense of time pop-hopping, distorting and stretching. The elevator was spacious with a selection of buttons in an assortment of colors.

  Green was Taro's favorite.

  The subtle vertigo of his insides sinking to his feet told him the lift was rising. One too many pop-hops. He expelled the contents of his stomach onto the sterile floor. When he was done, Wilson felt better--and also guilty, ashamed at mussing the pristine chamber.

  The doors opened on a room lit by a faint, green phosphorescence. Children sat illuminated in ordered regiments beside trim bunks. To his hazed eyes, they looked older than Taro, but definitely younger than the boy in the ad-blip.

  He skirted the wet mess he'd made and sidled into the room. At his entry, banks of overhead lights awakened. None of the occupants registered either the change or his presence.

  The brightness revealed what the shadows had concealed. Each child was wired to a synthichord, one with more knobs and dials than he'd ever seen. The music machines looked like menacing parasites with slender tendrils reaching for young limbs, clear brows, and nimble fingers. The boards thrummed sub-audibly, a vibration beneath his feet that spoke of muted power.

  Nearing the first line of recitalists in training, Wilson glimpsed padded speakers nestled in young ears. Tech-encased fingers rested over soundboards, black and white keys like antique piano mock-ups. Some of the children sat in rapt postures of listening, their hands still, serene smiles on their lips. Others pressed keys with obsessive purpose.

  The vague, empty look in each pair of eyes was terrifying.

  He kneeled before a child--a dark skinned boy, maybe six or seven--and waved his hand in the boy's face. The child neither blinked nor tracked the movement.

  He was blind.

  So was the child beside him, a girl with a golden fringe of hair and eyes so clear they were colorless. And the child beside her and the child beside him. They were all blind.

  He turned back to the dark skinned boy. "Hello?" Wilson's voice grated in his throat.

  No response. The boy couldn't hear him over whatever the speakers were transmitting. Gently, Wilson removed one.

  The boy wailed, an inhuman, wordless cry, and thrashed his arms, slapping with a clumsy backhand. Wilson stumbled back, the clamor in his head flaring to agony as the boy keened. Flailing hands struck the keyboard. A bray of disharmonious notes shrilled from the speaker bud and the boy calmed. He clapped one hand over his speakerless ear and played chords with the other--simple triads, then modulations of major and minor--tinny but clear from the receptor Wilson still gripped.

  "Son, can you hear me?" Wilson whispered.

  The child ignored him.

  He tapped the boy's shoulder. "I won't hurt you. Please, I just want to ask you a couple questions. Do you know where the new recruits are?"

  No response.

  "Do you know a boy named Taro? He'd have arrived recently, in the last few days."

  The boy began to rock back and forth, moaning softly.

  "What's wrong with you?"

  Unsettled, Wilson set the displaced bud back in the boy's ear. Immediately, he quieted.

  When Wilson plucked both speakers from the gold-fringe girl, she screamed. He clamped his hand over her mouth. It only muffled the outcry. With trembling fingers, he replaced the speakers. She took longer to console, whimpering and crying for long moments before she returned her attention to the keyboard.

  But touching her had shown him something. He'd felt it with his pain-sensitized faculties, the hard, smooth ridge of flesh behind her jaw, under her ears. Peering close, he saw the healed incision, traced the surgical line of it as it disappeared into her hair.

  Wilson limped from child to child. They did not register him, his touch, his probing fingers, as long as he didn't disrupt the receivers in their ears. Each child bore a scar and a data port like his; each had been surgically altered.

  What was the Music Company doing to these children? And had they done it to Taro?

  He hated the idea of invading their minds, possibly hurting them, but he had to find out. Wilson crouched beside a boy with dark hair and pale eyes, like Taro, and unreeled the tiny input from his PDS. As gently as he could, he plugged into the boy's port.

  The boy didn't respond, didn't seem to notice the penetration that was so intimate Wilson had never even wanted Lidi to share it with him. He read the data feeding to his screen. The details were beyond his edu rating, but for sure they'd diced the boy's gray matter. They'd cut into tissue Wilson knew you weren't supposed to muck with, severing visual receptors. No, not severed, burned out. Even visual implants and cutting-edge tech wouldn't be able to restore light to this boy's eyes.

  Wilson sensed movement a moment too late. He gazed down the barrel of a tazer rod gripped in the beefy hand of a guard. A flash, and he went down, wrapped in insensate blackness.

  #

  Wilson woke mired in a zap net, bound to an operating chair like the kind medics used. His head throbbed in painful intervals, a counterpoint to his heartbeat. The joe who'd zapped him stood beside him, tazer in hand. He wore blue coveralls with the Music Company logo emblazoned on the breast.

  "Hello, Mr. Wilson." The voice was monotone and concise. A fem garbed in civvies--gray trousers and shirt, again marked as Music Company gear--stepped into his line-o. She held his PDS.

  "I'm Dr. Trefford. Would you care to tell me what you were doing, trespassing and downloading data from our trainees?"

  "My son, Taro. You have my son. My wife had no right to sign him over."

  "That's an interesting tale. Want to hear my theory?" She didn’t wait for his reply. "I think you're a thief. Only a skilled hacker could've gotten past our gate. I think you were going to kidnap one of our protégés or maybe just the data from his brain?"

  Wilson's instincts clanged. The fem hadn't threatened him with the law, hadn't said anything about charges. He was savvy enough to know that spelled a quiet death and disposal for him if he was lucky, a messy one if he wasn't. He willed his fizzing limbs to push off the zap net that wrapped his wrists and ankles, but every build-up of energy was met by an immediate shock that turned his muscles to slag.

  "You're mutilating children," he snarled, "severing key cortical regions and blinding them." />
  Dr. Trefford activated his PDS and attached a familiar device he'd seen techies use, a hack strip. "Awfully perceptive for the worried parent line, aren't you? But yes, the destruction of their optic nerves is necessary."

  "Why?"

  "In order to achieve their potential, we subdue some of the left hemisphere pathways so the right has to take over. It gives our protégés an enormous capacity for musical retention and reiteration. Such talent is worth a lot of money, for them and us. You should be amiable to the concept of technological enhancement in the name of profit." She tapped his head, low where his port lay. "Hacker."

  The joe leveled the tazer.

  Wilson lunged and felt shocks run in a cascade through his limbs, sending muscles into a trembling, useless dance. All except his leg, his clumsy proxleg. The impulses that powered it were of a more rugged variety, built to withstand currents that would render flesh useless.

  Wilson kicked and the flimsy net strands tore. He caught the doctor a glancing blow, an unintentional bonus. She stumbled, sending his PDS spinning to the floor.

  The security joe charged, but instead of neutralizing the man still snarled in webbing, he rammed the barrel of the tazer into the spasming, violent leg.

  Wilson screamed and overamped proxflesh lashed out. The super-charged kick caught the other man in the knee, and he dropped, howling.

  Electricity coursed through the proxleg, spreading hellfire. Wilson used the biting, mindless thing to thrash apart the webbing, suffering the feeble twinges firing into frenzied muscles.

  Limping, gagging on the pain, he staggered to the writhing guard and smashed his spasming leg on the man's neck. The guard convulsed and lay still.

  Wilson's fingers were nerveless, jelly limp, but he gripped them around the tazer rod and swiveled to Dr. Trefford.

  She huddled on the floor. So easily unsettled by a little violence? Surely this woman had never set foot in the metro fields.

  "Where's my son?" He aimed the weapon. With fingers that felt as nimble as if he'd taped plump sausages to them, he dialed the setting to lethal.

  "W-when did he arrive?" she stammered, her eyes riveted on the red, flashing indicator.

  "Recently. Sometime in the last week."

  "He'd be in the recovery wing, on orange."

  "Recovery." Wilson's fingers vibrated on the trigger.

  "All new contracts undergo the surgery within forty-eight hours." Dr. Trefford, so cold and confident before, cringed from the look on Wilson's face.

  "Is it reversible?"

  He knew the answer before she shook her head.

  "Get up. The elevator. March."

  En route to the double doors, Wilson scooped up his PDS. The stink of bile and partially digested food assaulted both of them when the doors slid open.

  Dr. Trefford minced around the pool of vomit. Wilson kept the tazer steady and watched as she pressed the orange button.

  When the doors opened, a faint, green light illuminated a floor gizmoed up like a hospital ward. As they entered, the brighter overhead switched on, displaying a dozen bunks arrayed in military-straight rows. Between each was a lifesigns monitor that clattered a stream of vitals in lines of green and blipping red. Each bunk held a child, head swathed in bandages. A synthichord trailed speaker leads to each child to ears protruding from stratums of white.

  Wilson knew Taro, even under a thicket of gauze. The boy reclined, his head cocked in an attitude of listening.

  Wilson kneeled at his side, the tazer clattering away. He remembered the brown boy and the gold-fringed girl in green sector. Instead of ripping the speakers free as he longed to, he reached for Taro's hand. He had to pry it from the synthichord's keyboard.

  "It's Dada, son. You remember me, don't you?"

  The boy's fingers explored Wilson's, taking in the calluses and the rough, wiry hair. Taro's other hand continued to press the keys of the synthichord.

  Wilson glanced at Dr. Trefford. "Why won't he stop playing?"

  "His Corpus Collosum is severed," she said. "We split it and the Septum Pellucidum."

  At his blank look she gestured impatiently. "The right and left sides of his brain no longer communicate. The part of him that's exploring the musical curriculum we have programmed into his tutor is unaware of your presence."

  Wilson plucked at Taro's other hand. It was harder to dislodge the boy's last link from the machine, but when he did, Taro turned his muffled head to his father.

  "Dada," he said.

  "He knows me!" Wilson loosened the bandages, peeling off layers until he had a pile of white on the floor.

  But his son's eyes, free of their binding, didn't light up, didn't register anything.

  The boy reached for his left ear and removed the speaker bud. He groped for Wilson, smiling sweetly. When he touched his father's face, he pushed the bud at him.

  Wilson guided Taro, let him set the device in place in his ear. The boy beamed and turned back to the synthichord. With more dexterity than a two-year old ought to have, his son began to play.

  With only one speaker, the music wasn't fully dimensional; it came across flat and tinny. Even so, it was exquisite. Taro's hands were sure, nimbly teasing poignancy and beauty from the machine.

  When Taro finished, he turned his glowing face to Wilson, waiting.

  "That was great, Taro. Fantastic."

  The boy grinned, basking in his father's approval.

  "He was progressing nicely," Dr. Trefford said. "As you heard, he's already building his repertoire. All of our recitalists can play back, note perfect, any melody, any tune they hear after their first exposure. Because of our enhancement, music is their preferred means of communication. Your son will be worth a lot of credits in a few years and wealthy beyond your imagining in twenty."

  "I'm taking him out of here. Now." Wilson retrieved the tazer rod.

  "Our recitalists have special needs, special requirements. If you take Taro away and force him outside, he'll go mad. He can no longer gate out all the sounds and sensations he once could. He'll overload on all the auditory and tactile stimuli."

  Wilson's grip on the weapon tightened. It would be satisfying to push the trigger home, to watch Dr. Trefford burn. But it wouldn't fix Taro, wouldn't give back what his son had lost.

  "I won't leave him."

  "You don't have a choice." Dr. Trefford dove to the ground. Before Wilson could react, he was enveloped in a glowing nimbus of electricity.

  When he could think again, he was face down on the floor. He tasted liquid metal, his own blood where he'd bitten his tongue.

  Someone was screaming. Was it him? But no, the voice was too reedy, too fragile. It was Taro.

  "Dada! Dada!"

  Every nerve jangled, flayed by sizzling energy. Wilson dragged himself upright.

  "Shh, Taro, Dada's here." He touched his son. Immediately, the boy's shrieks quieted, becoming whimpers. A phalanx of Music Company joes bristled at Wilson's back, rods still crackling. Dr. Trefford held her hand up, the signal that had stopped them.

  "You've traumatized him," Dr. Trefford said. "Your presence has accelerated the autism."

  "He's not traumatized," Wilson rasped. "He just wants his father."

  "Regardless of what you call it, it's derailed his training. Separation from you distresses him. He will require counseling and probably psychotropics that may block some of his ability."

  "Then let me stay with him. Please."

  Dr. Trefford snorted.

  "I saw the fem on your ad-blip with your performer. All of your recitalists need an escort, an assistant, right?" It was a gamble. If he'd believed in a god, Wilson would've prayed.

  "As I said, our recitalists are not capable of functioning on their own."

  "And you pay these aides?"

  "Of course."

  "Let me be Taro's. You wouldn't have to pay me. Two employees for the price of one, and you can be assured I'll take the best care of him."

  "You don't have the skills for
it."

  "Train me."

  Dr. Trefford eyed him. "I'll need to contact my supervisor."

  Wilson hugged his son. "Do that."

  #

  As the years passed, Taro talked less. Wilson fretted, but his son seemed so serene, so content to express everything but the most basic requests through his synthichord. He didn't even seem nervous today, his first concert. They'd done hundreds of private recitals to admiring clients and patrons, but this was the first that qualified as an Event. With the credits from this day, they could finally start reducing their debt to the Music Company.

  Wilson led his son to the transport that would usher them both through the purple jungle, a delicate growth shielded by force domes from the empty space outside the colony's atmosphere. In the domes a paradise, without, a vacuum wasteland, the sun too far away to give more than a feeble glow. It was a fitting amphitheater for Taro's newest composition, Heaven and Hell, a requiem in three parts.

  A year ago, Wilson had asked his son if he missed his sight or regretted his servitude to the Music Company. In response, Taro had composed this piece. Every time Wilson heard the soaring melodies that reached, straining for the cosmos yet anchored by the earthy bass refrain, he felt like crying. But whenever Taro played it, the boy laughed.

  Reviews

  Roger Corman Collection reviewed by Paul Kane

  Roger Corman Collection:

  House of Usher, The Pit and The Pendulum, Masque of Red Death.

  MGM Entertainment DVD, £24.99.

  I was over the moon when this one came in for review, because more so than any other horror movies these take me right back to my youth – to a time when I was about eight or nine and my folks would let me stay up at weekends to watch the Hammer Films, the Universals and, of course, Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe ‘adaptations’. For me, it was all about a mood they created – a creepiness that had little or nothing to do with blood and gore, but was more about psychological states of minds. And it was all about Vincent Price, who went with Corman’s atmospheric pieces of celluloid like cheese goes with a fine wine. As with all things from your formative years, though, you tend to look back with rose tinted glasses. Was this still the case as I sat down to watch them twenty six years later? I was curious to find out myself…