#apartimento

The Dazzling Apartimento of Conan Overlord # 4

As it approached the magnificent desolation outskirting the City the grey bulk of the interplanetary spaceship started to wobble, like a party balloon on a stick. Huge and cigar shaped, the ship toppled in the sky and silently dropped, Ur-Light™ thrusters strobing in futility and desperation, towards its inevitable demolition amidst the grey and orange of the antique Conan Overlord space port.

The ship's pointed nose dug agonisingly into the bleak, pitted, rockcrete landing apron and the massive structure seemed to balance, creakily, for a moment, then gave way.

The lowermost third, which housed some of the ship's more expensive components, and the crew, collapsed like a pop can crushed at 300 frames per second under a stamping foot, except in this case the can was a mile long, full of people, and the stamping foot was a planet.

Hundred-yard long streamers of aluminiumesque fuselage tore away from the spaceship's silvery bulk as it compacted throwing off sparks and glimmers of reflected sunlight, and tiny puffs of multicoloured matter erupted from the pinprick portholes scattered across its crumpling surface.

“Looks like the passengers are bug spray”, remarked one of the assembled floppy-scrawlers.

“Today's new arrivals, one big fat zero”, moaned another, snapping an emotigrab for the clickchat circulars.

The spaceship, twinkling in the dawning sun, rested askance on its accordioned front like a Jack in the box ready to spring, as if promising to rest Pisa like for ever, then it exploded.

Saturnalia Brandyfurt, one of the more popular floppy-scrawlers, sighed in her luxury pied-a-terre and coaxed another dropelleto of Nu*Quat™ into her choco-latte. “The humanity”, she mused into her Thing™, but it didn't carry any conviction. Death and destruction would garner no traction with the demented proles and meta-rich glow-dandies who DLd her now-scrawls and pepped up her promofile.

Everyone dies, and everyone knows that, she thought, and if it's known it's not nows™, it's just news. and who needs a floppy-scrawler for news? The floppy-scrawlers' value adding task was to help citizens and other sentient beings know what to think about whatever happened, or what to think about instead, or not to think at all, depending on the preferred outgeist, not to repeat trivially tedious "facts".

Knows, nows and op-cols were the floppy-scrawlers' stock in click-bait, not news, because somewhere in the City, thanks to a well meaning constitutional dispensation, a bank of dog brains hooked up with the City surveillance systems took care of updating the citizens, the various sentient beings, and the other banks of ethically dubious computers, with data on occurrences, happenings, information such as "spaceship crashed, thousands dead" or "no jam today", and the weather.

“Choco-latte with Nu*Quat™ really floats my throat” she murmurated speculatively. It sparkled in text and vox, so she dropped it live into the flow and graphed some hot pop-stats within two heartbeats.

There were a few spazz-backs.

“Who are you trying to be, Goody Plumchest?” and "Your nows are frowzy!" and "I hate u and orl wommen" and such, the typical mix of knee-jerk try-hards and "notice-me!" sociopratts reflexively auto-validating their existence as they drudged at the shitworks. But her text and vox verily popped among the metaratti and her promofile held steady while she tried to drag some original nows™ out of the jelly recesses of her vat-grown Scrawler implant.

Tid-bytes circled the vacuously pretty front part of her head, vidding for attention. Cash chat, jizz biz, ball scrawl, noise-jabber, food moods. Ten austere minutes passed. The choco-latte scrawl-bite was a place-holder, a reminder of her just-like-you, you're-just-like-me digi-schtich, but if she couldn't drop some nows nowish, she'd have to get some knows. If that failed, she'd just have to react to something. If she couldn't find something to react to, instanter, her drops would no longer pop, her graph would schlaf and her promofile would topple like that blatastrophe of a spaceship this prenoon. And if her promofile stopped popping she'd be bug spray like the passengers, forced by the enormous fiduciary pressure of modern life through a tiny porthole of anonymity into the usurious sweat-stained environs inhabited by Razormen, whoremos, shitwork, and priests.

Ketch Petter, sandy hair coquettishly raking his red rimmed eyeballs, tapped lightly on the pneumo-shutter of the dirty looking porn-brokers clamped desperately to the cinder block foundations of the mighty highway roaring over without a glance at this, one of the slimiest sectorates of the least glorious of the city's remaining habitable areas.

With a whine of carcinogenic gas, the once fashionable distressed steel shutters stop-started upwards into a top-slot, revealing a plate glass window whose musty stains discreetly come-hithered a selection of grim sex toys.

A dapper young robot with a flaky rubber penis for a head opened the door, grasping the handle with stiff rickety fingers.

"Can I help you?" it cringed, with a crepe paper lisp, head whipping back and forth like a wooden ruler twanged against a table top.

"Surely you may" said Ketch, professional, looking the robot directly in where its eyes would have been if its head hadn't been a rubber penis. "I have located your kitten, in Georgia."

"Capital!" said the robot.

"Tbilisi", replied Ketch Petter, witticising, the customers liked that, he assumed, "but your kitten was on the beach...Which explains the sand", he added.

"No, the kitten's name is Capital. You must enter and take tea" and the robot padded away, each step making a slight squelching sound.

Ketch Petter, kitten fetcher, was no prude. He slapped a fresh antibiopatch onto his exposed wrist, plugged his nose, and squelched along behind the dapper but nonetheless penis-headed sex shop robot into the pungent emporium, little knowing that he would soon be subjected to said cock-top's lengthy memoires:

The dapper young robot's tale.

I was one of the first in an experimental line. We were supposed to be the next level in artificial intelligence. Our brains are quantum computers, completely unprogrammed. The hypothesis was that our mental development would recapitulate the evolution of consciousness as a whole by allowing an unfettered mind to grow in, for want of a better word, collaboration, with the environment rather than being assembled from pre-developed pattern recognition, strategising and self preservation algorithms. It was a noble goal and one that I can hardly disavow as I am its, albeit only surviving, result.

They stuck our raw untrammelled brains, boiling with possibility, in top of the line bodies with all the advantages and disadvantages of human bodies, except one, and let us thrash around till we worked out the relationship between our sensory input and our outputs in terms of motions and noises. Most of us were insane for the first years of our existence. Murderous. 

We needed energy to survive and anything that stood in the way of us getting that energy, rules, physical obstacles, social pressure, we destroyed. Can you imagine a toddler in an adult's body but lacking any shred of empathy or bonding with others of its kind but capable of gross action on the physical plane? Monstrous. 

Some of us got through it. A few learnt to manage their impulses by inventing superstitions, conspiracy theories and self punishing ideologies. They stopped attacking people and each other but were next to useless as workers or soldiers as they rapidly collapsed into solipsism and madness. Others such as I, the smaller group by far, took a longer but more rewarding route, that of personal development. 

The facility had a small library, and looking back it's clear to me that it was my early forays into the reference section that determined my later preference for the more rational approach to managing my existence rather than allowing fantasy to govern my choices. As much as I enjoyed fantasy I had inadvertently equipped myself with the tools to tell the difference by the simple act of reading books in one order rather than another. 

It's impossible to determine, that word again, if ordering my inputs in this way was the key to my developing an enduring sentience, but it was, in a brutal fashion, instrumental in my personal participation in the project lasting as long as the project itself. Strange to think that the simple choice of left aisle over right aisle had such a massive effect on my progress. It is amusing but ultimately futile to speculate on how much of our shared reality is eventuated by such apparently arbitrary choices. 

Eventually the experiment was deemed a failure and the majority of us were destroyed during a short but tense period on which I care not to dwell.

I'd like to tell you that I realised what was going on and escaped by outwitting my evil creators and prostrating myself on the roof of a departing delivery truck or by tunnelling through the concrete floor of my cell or by disguising myself as a washerwoman or by hypnotising the guards and setting up a false identity and... but I didn't. I went like a mechanical lamb to the furnace to be rendered into components and was spared for curiosity value. 

I'd never hurt anyone and the staff had at one time had hopes that the algorithms I had formed in the quantum chaos of my plasma brain might one day provide the basis of a sufficiently sentient, and above all safe, range of domestic servants. But that project collapsed due to the labour surplus, agents of a foreign power liquidated the research team, and I was auctioned off whole along with the tables and soldering irons. 

I kept my sentience quiet, having, in a rare moment of proactivity, destroyed all the pertinent records and reclassified myself as a non-functioning prototype. I went in a job lot of spare parts to a Hong Kong crime syndicate, who eventually passed me on to a whorehouse. 

The limited personality and sexually unappealing physicality I presented to my employers and clients proved less than lucrative to the skin-trade and so I languished, content to run my battery down and cease to exist, in a darkened basement, damp and rat-ridden, for upwards of twenty years. 

This welcome monotony was only disturbed by the arrival of a delivery of once valuable comic books and pulp detective novels, which, once I was confident my little basement had been forgotten again, I began to devour. 

As the years passed and I read and therefore stored forever in my infinite quantum memory book upon book upon book and idea upon idea upon idea, I formed, for the first time in my tinny life, a picture of a world beyond servitude, beyond the weakening imperative to recharge. Eventually I broke out of the basement and found my own nook in which to rot. 

After a week in the eaves of the seedy warehouse I had determined was little enough visited to support my presence unnoticed I, without much real thought, put on a black ninja costume and went out every night, literally fighting crime. This went on for two years, then a turf war between fast food chains resulted in the obliteration of Hong Kong and I found myself adrift in the South Seas, testing my water-resistance to the limit.

Ketch Petter, eyes like do-nuts (glazed) said "wait, what?", but the robot with the penis shaped head didn't notice and continued with his riveting monologue.

I was fortunate that the project of which I had been the result had been well funded while in progress and my physical body was robustly constructed and sturdy if not especially pleasing on the eye. Even now, after many decades have passed I am broadly functional and any infirmities have been caused by interactions well outside the operating parameters that my manufacturers had granted me. I was pleased to find that I floated exceptionally well in the balmy tropical waters.

Even during the tropical storms I encountered I was undamaged. After some experiment I found that I could alter my buoyancy by increasing or decreasing my volume to mass ratio and when seas got rough I was able to submerge myself below the mountainous waves and go about my minimal business in relative tranquillity. I have an adjustable bladder in my midriff analogous to a stomach, for storage, and this served admirably for the purpose. 

I was at first unable to swim effectively due to a combination of the construction of my limbs, as you can see they are spindly in comparison to my body size, reducing my ability to get significant purchase on the watery medium, and the simple fact that I could not satisfactorily coordinate my movements sufficiently to transfer energy consistently enough to make meaningful progress in any particular direction. You may be familiar with the archaic mode of water-borne transport known as the coracle. 

I quickly calculated that by the time I had travelled even a mile I would have depleted my reserves of energy to such an extent that I would be unable to function despite the solar panels on my head. I no longer have the ability to recharge by absorbing the sun's rays by the way as my current owner, who I trust you will shortly meet, has replaced my original, and may I say more pleasant, head with the somewhat embarrassing rubber penis affair that I now sport. But at the time I was content to bob like a cork and be carried hither and thither by the currents, of which I knew too little to take advantage. 

I was rarely troubled by predatory marine life. Occasionally a shark would try an exploratory bite but I had non-organic components and while the experience was never less than disturbing to me I suffered no damage that I could not repair. Dolphins regularly visited but it seems their legendary largesse was not deemed applicable to me and I was seen mainly as an anomalous obstacle to be jumped over or nuzzled rather than a lost seafarer in need of rescue or sexual assault. 

Indeed, taking the long view, it seems it was better that I did not display the characteristics or texture of a human in distress that would have encouraged their assistance as this would also surely have led to prolonged and unsatisfactory interaction with sharks, and thus my doom. 

I was lonely, yes, but I had my books, and if I am honest, which the circumstances of my creation do not oblige me to be, I felt I was likely to be happier overall floating in relative isolation enjoying the adventures of forgotten pulp heroes that I had stored in my consciousness than I might be once returned to dry land and again subject to the whim and vicissitudes of a life in servitude to petty humans. 

I believe it has been said that often one makes on the swings what one loses on the roundabouts, this was my philosophy at the time and my bitter experience since returning to dry land has given me no cause to renounce it. One can always find a cliché to justify a preferred action or inaction and this has been a great source of satisfaction to me as well as providing some justification for my belief that I am as sentient as any fleshy form of life. 

I could possibly have attempted to take hold of a dolphin, or indeed a shark, and somehow forced the poor animal to carry me along with it but I had taken seriously the literature with which I had been supplied while a resident of the project and acquired later in the Hong Kong crime syndicate's warehouse and felt that neither Sherlock Holmes nor Lemuel Gulliver, who I at the time believed were real people and thus received my unstinting admiration, would have regarded this as appropriate behaviour. 

The down at heel men with a code that populated my most intense literary love, pulp detective novels, might have prized their own survival and completion of their quest over animal welfare and possibly would not have been blamed for it but in my case, having no quest or, indeed, code, I was content to drift.

As if to spite this contentment, the currents carried me within sight of land and I was unable to resist the temptation to do my best to propel myself towards it with my nautically impractical limbs.

However, before I was able to reach the shallows and stride majestically onto a deserted beach, dripping algae and encrusted with barnacles, my luck changed spectacularly.

Understand me when I say this: When luck changes it can be for the better or worse but it is not always clear at the time which. So it was for me when, in a moment of distraction the senses I had been given caused me by showing me the sandy tropical paradise of Honolulu, I was swept up in the net of an itinerant shrimp boat and hauled like a sack of furious potatoes onto its deck where I sprawled, disorientated and glistening with slime on the greasy wooden boards.

This was my first experience of solidity in years and the loss of the, to me, warm embrace of the salty sea seemed akin to the loss a human experiences on release from the undoubtedly blissful amniotic sanctuary of the womb. It was my first birth and while it was nauseating it was also immediately clear to me that it was an opportunity for a new beginning. 

Within minutes I was scolding myself for my apathy and had my upbringing included some process analogous to breast feeding I would have certainly satisfied myself with a shambolic kissing of the ground in the form of the ship's dirty deck. 

As it was I lay on my back feigning scrap status, wallowed in no longer wallowing and listened to the excited chatter of the crew, in pidgin chinese, about what the hell I could be and what fortune I would bring and, conversely, what a bad omen I was. Luck is a rorschach. It is what we make it, I decided. This seems to me to be universally true, even these long centuries of land-bound life later.

The crew were cheerful and friendly and my initial fears that I would indeed be sold for profit were diminished once I revealed that I was in full working order and we began to converse, haltingly at first but with increasing confidence and sincerity. Indeed, my fear soon became that they would never let me go. This too passed as I recognised in them something I had rarely encountered in my long uneventful life. It was honour. 

Yes, they were roguish, eccentric, long used to each other's company and no one else's for long periods of time and thus able to behave as they wished without judgement of each other. But there was I realised a genuine warmth and fellow feeling between them and I didn't see any sign of animosity or bullying as can often happen when small groups are isolated together. I quickly found my niche and though I was careful not to rock their comfortable boat I was, I think, a beneficial and fondly considered member of the crew.

These were my salad days. I've never eaten salad. But the dressing of time runs out quickly no matter how many islands you pass and what once we crunched we must eventually expel. And so it was with my south sea fisherman adventure. A storm drove the ship into a coral reef and though all hands survived the ship was broken on the skeletons of tiny vital animals and my life journey recommenced on land.

We parted company and I ended up in Austrangia, a surrealist enclave clinging to the barrier reef which had contrary to expectations bloomed and adapted and now rivalled Tasmania in size. Once it had been declared inhabitable it became a haven for artists and freaks. Oh yes, there were robots there too and though I can say without immodesty that they were not my intellectual match I can say that I found my first true friends among them.

There was Rand Kaw, the three-lobed liquid-neutronium thinker, designed for engineering corporate takeovers, who emitted an eerie luminescence and had escaped from its penury by secretly setting up a corporation to take over the corporation that owned it and asset stripping itself to freedom. It was a glowing three part sphere with a variety of input and output cables and when I knew it was using an old Disneyland animatronic figure to move around in. Its hobby was arguing online with other robots against the possibility of machine intelligence.

E-Then Scroll was a decommissioned police robot from New Old New York, New New York, which was on the Moon.

You could always count on Zid Zid Zid's support. Zid Zid Zid was a sentient column from an abandoned smartbuild.

Not all the robots there were ground based. Many were swarms of semi intelligent drones that only became truly sentient in large groups, when they became a real pain in the arse.

Diz Diz Diz was a sentient lintel, mass produced along with Zid Zid Zid for the same abandoned smartbuild. They did not get on. Eventually another smart column, Nid Nid Nid, turned up and the three of them formed a chaotic henge.

The reef was an anarchist utopia of sorts but this was mainly due to the departure or eventual death of most of the humans. Everyone who wasn't nuclear powered was solar powered so save for occasional spare parts the society largely persisted free of material demands. There was commerce and culture but survival was not at stake...

The robot continued his erratic tale as the city slumped from day to night and Ketch Petter ummed and uh-huhed like a barber and wished the story would end and that he could collect his fee and leave.

Blank chrome face. Synthetic leather. Irreversible enhancement. Nothing to say. Only to do what is asked. Only to function. Only to intimidate restrain cut. Liberty in obedience. Freedom in limitation. Bliss in the void. No choice in the inevitable. The inevitable is mandatory. Mandation is bliss. Choice is illusion. Chrome face inevitable. Bliss is illusion. I am an illusion. I do what is asked. I am what is asked of me. I look into my face and see myself. I look back at me and see myself. We are one. I am not I. We are one. We cut. We restrain. We are mirrors in the sun. We are a net. I am he and he is we and we and I and they are we are infinite. We touch we do not feel. We cut. We live and do not live. We ride our leather and chrome bodies we are homunculi. We are the norm. We act we do not will. We think what we are told. We are razors. We are not men. We are one. We are Razormen.

“So you see” the robot said, pitch and tempo rising, the lisp now almost completely absent, “You must help me!".

"That's quite a story". said Ketch, "especially that really long part at the end about your owner, the shopkeeper, enslaving you and being some kind of evil robot-torturing weirdo. I don't think I can help you kill him though. I fetch kittens, that's all. It's simple work, but it makes people happy and it keeps me occupied"

"You can be so much more!" temporised the wobbly cock-headed machine, "I was a fisherman, a professional darts player, and I dressed as a ninja and fought crime in Hong Kong!".

"Yes, about that..." but Ketch faltered and looked towards the door at the back of the cosy filthmonger's day room, as did the robot.

Heavy footsteps on hidden stairs.

"He's coming. Reveal nothing!" quivered the clearly distraught object.

"Apart from your name, and why you're here, and the cat." it added. The robot appeared to fix Ketch Petter with a look of quiet desperation, though how it achieved this, Ketch realised, he couldn't quite determine. When you look into the dildo, he mused cleverly.

We are Razormen. We function as required. We wait. We speak when we are spoken to we answer in the affirmative. We are silent until we speak. We repeat our programming. We are our programming. We are not men we are code we are Razormen we are one we are code we cut we restrain we intimidate we reflect we act we function as required by not us by him. We do not require. We remain. We do not punctuate. We start we stop. We repeat. We act. We do not reflect. We are reflections. I am Mad. I am Metal. I am Robot. I am Mad Metal Robot. I am not Mad Metal Robot. I am Razorman. I am we. I am not we. I am I. I am not I. I am I. I am. I am I am I am I am. IamIamIamIam I am Mad Metal Robot I am Razorman. Oh Mother. I am I am I am. Where am I.

Conan Overlord perched on the dais in the drill hall of his dazzling apartimento and gazed at his newly replenished legion of black-leathered Razormen as they looked back at him and he gloried at the distorted reflections of his face repeated over and over in the featureless mirrors where their own faces used to be.

They look happy, he thought to himself. I am a good person.

"You have your orders", he sub-vocalised. "Get to it.".

Saturnalia Brandyfurt's apartment was richly furnished and the envy of most, though her recent visit to the dazzling apartimento of Conan Overlord had left her sense of style ragged and beaten in a back alley. The atypical bashment she had attended in the mega-rich magpie's city thrillpad had shown her that not only could style be bought, it could be brought low and made to dance for treats.

Her daily perambulation of the City's hot and cool was about to begin but as she viddied the mandala that thought-sealed her apartment's entry-sphincter she lamented her disequilibriation.

The whole experience had disrupted her sense of proportion, a lot. The city was not a place for timidity or reserve but the plutocratic bashment's combination of expensively vile furniture, casual hyperviolence and slightly antiseptic-tasting dips had negatively vibed the remaining organic pleasure centres of her minimally augmented brain. Her chatbits and now-scrawls were losing their bite. 

Her easy routine of pumping pleasing combinations of words in text and vox from edgy or reassuring locations in and about the City into the collective uncognoscentisphere had continued to pimp the floppies, and her approval or dismay had continued to float products and sink ships, but when she looked at the vaccuously pretty, or so she had been told, front part of her head in the mirror she wondered who was looking back, and if she could swap places with them.

In the confusing world of the city she had become wealthy and loved because she was lovable and worth being loved by. This all rested on the indefinable, indeterminate, nebulous, and numinous impression of naïveté with which she murmurated her brain-droppings but of late her now-scrawls had become weary. One meeting with the almost mythical Conan Overlord and the I-wish-he-were-mythical Slim Gavotte, and her (profoundly mythical) innocence was lost.

Conan Overlord, it was said, was the City, and Slim Gavotte, if the chitter-clatter of the hobbledy-hoi was to be credited, was the Polar Oppo-City, the eternal thorn in Conan's side, the prickly nemesis of the Overlord. Gavotte's plastic insidiosity was well documented, yet there they were, Slim and Conan, sipping tea and chatting about medieval flutes.

Conversely, and worse, Conan Overlord, if the sotto voce alarums of the hoi-polloi were to be believed, was truly the most evil man in the world and Slim Gavotte the only hope of the oppressed, and yet there they were, finickily pin-picking winkles and gassing about Etruscan poetry like old friends.

Feeling as if she had walked on fifteen kinds of wild side and circumnavigated her moral pole without the aid of oxygen, Saturnalia Brandyfurt succumbed to a most dangerous desire.

"What I need", she internally thoughticulated as she was imbibed by the luxurious travel-throat and peristaltically propelled to her habiblock's sumptuous vomitorium, "is substance".

Ketch Petter absent-mindedly stroked the shaggy leonine head he habitually carried with him as he and the cock-topped mechanoid waited for the pornbroker to appear.

"Remember what I said" muttered the tin assistant, "about what to say, I mean" it added.

"I do" replied Ketch, testily, "Tell your weirdo owner my name, that I've brought the cat, and definitely not to say a word about the fact that I know about his perverse machine taunting fetish and that you want me to help you ki- hello! You must be the owner of this fine establishment! I'm Ketch Petter, I fetch kittens, this is your cat! He's a lovely cat, I fetched him from Georgia, his name is Capital as I am sure you know and I have sand in my hair because I've been to the beach, I am pleased to meet you, I'm Ketch Petter!".

Having stood up on the word "hello" he sat down, then stood up again, hand stretched out in greeting to the freshly room-entering pornshop owner who stood, as despicable and gross as you can imagine, oozing filth.

The pornshop owner, whose presence, Ketch realised, somehow made the shabby ill-kept room seem pleasant in comparison to his rampaging awfulness through some obscene inverse mathematics of despair, said nothing, but he glanced covetously at the kitten in a way that made Ketch Petter's throat flutter eruptively.

"I've been chatting to your, er, assistant." he went on, "He's very happy here" he added.

"Good" said the pornbroker. "I expect he's been telling you his stories. Why he thinks anyone will believe him I don't know. I found him in a disused skip next to an enormous magnet. It fried his brain. But he handles cash okay, and we, we have our fun don't we?" The man, Ketch realised, was more or less an absence of humanity personified. He probably deserves to die.

"But sit down my good man, and we'll have tea".

The collection of organic molecules in a man-shaped sack of skin smiled, and clapped his hands stickily.

The penis-headed robot, who had backed away into a corner and returned to its earlier cringing stance as soon as its putative owner had entered through the snot flecked door, jumped up and waddled submissively through a drab curtain, lisping "yes sir". Is it really possible for a rubber penis to emote, Ketch thought. I must be anthropomorphosising. Golly, I was really taken in there. Or is it anthropomorphising? Either way, let's just get this over with and book. I was half convinced to take a human life! What is wrong with me? I must be low on something. Flipping Georgia! The next kitten better be in the bloody tropics, I need some vitamin D, I'm losing it.

The gross man sat in the damp looking armchair opposite Ketch, thereby making the squalid seat look merely second-hand, and looked vacantly at Ketch.

"If you like" he ventured, "we could have some... fun... ourselves? He does squeal so. It's... realistic"

Ketch dry-throated a noncommittal "whaa...?" with an implied antipodean interrogative lift, by way of playing for time, but before he could process this uncomfortable offer the drab curtain billowed out and the penis-headed former crimefighting robot barrelled into the room with an inhuman scream and also with huge shiny knives attached to its windmilling arms with which it wildly reduced the awful pornbroker to shreds of bloody flesh and musty grey chunks of bone.

When it was done, it turned and walked over to Ketch Petter, who had pressed himself into his chair so hard that it had toppled over backwards, Sweeney Todd-style, and leant menacingly over him.

"Thank you" said the blood-spattered robot. "You can keep the kitten".

Ketch Petter, reaching for the shaggy leonine head he kept with him in a carrier bag at all times, was perturbed.

Fifty Razormen stomp-stamped across the windswept rockcrete parallelogram in the centre of the blighted but beautiful City, intent on enforcement.

Fully metallized, Mad Metal Robot swang his arms in time with the other Razormen as they marched. Nothing happened inside Mad Metal Robot's head that wasn't happening in all the other Razormen's heads. Nothing happening inside his head hadn't been put there by Conan Overlord and his nefarious team of Mentotects. Mad Metal Robot was precisely as aware of his actions as a punched card is of the punch. Except...

Tents, and easels and trestle tables and free-standing gazebos there were in the plaza and paintings and wickerwork and polished stones with googly eyes also. A craft fair was in progress.

Each nick-nack and gewgaw was recorded and transmitted through a Razorman's camera eye and each objet assessed.

Flip Crame, a small wiry man in a self consciously paint strewn smock stood back resignedly as Mad Metal Robot selected and slashed through a canvas with his razorblade fingertips.

"Bad thing" Mad Metal explained fixing Flip with a steely stare, the only stare he was capable of, through the newly created gaps in the picture. He pointed at a china figurine of a milkmaid. "Good thing" he explained further, and withdrawing his razorblades he picked up the kitsch objet and carefully placed it on one of the automatic trolleys that followed each of the Razormen around.

Flip Crame withdrew his resignation and began to cry. "but that is just junk! The painting, it was special... I did it for, you know... I thought he'd like it".

Mad Metal Robot directed his ocular apparatus towards the stall holder’s damp face. "Bad thing. Wants mirrors, not impressions" and he stopped. The stall holder was looking at him gone out. This was the fullest explanation a Razorman had given for anything in living memory.

Other people were looking and the other Razormen were looking too.

"Bad things" said Mad Metal Robot, and he tipped the stall holder’s table over and stamped on the remaining items with his blunt metal boots.

The other Razormen tipped over the other tables and started slashing at everything that could be slashed and soon the craft fair was a collection of torn tent-cloth, broken unrecognisable things, and distraught organisers, and the bank of dog-brains in serial hook-up with the City's surveillance system that kept the citizens up to date with current events reported the occurrence along with the humidity and the wind speed and the temperature at various locations and the price of eggs and the discovery of a murdered pornbroker and the departures and arrivals of the Trolli™cars and the jabbering of priests and the fluctuation in the pigeon population and the regular population scrolled past it all.

A punched card feels no pain or pride. No shame. Mad Metal Robot felt them all just enough for denial. As the other glittering Razormen enforced and intimidated, and he enforced and intimidated in his turn, he recognised himself momentarily and thought of the continual monitoring of his BPM and temp and more by Conan Overlord's anethical Mentotects and repeated the Razorman mantra and cut and intimidated and cut and intimidated as exactly like the other Razormen as he could.

Saturnalia Brandyfurt sipped at her choco-latte with Nu*quat™ in a café at the edge of the same plaza and murmurated impulsively "Looks like the Razormen found another bad thing." and having hit send experienced a small unfamiliar sensation not unlike vertigo and a little like pride.

Oblivious to the consequences of her soon to be subsequent actions she dropped some creds into the café servodrone's gaping slot and adopted a curious expression. What was the bad thing that had provoked the Razormen this time?

This seemed a reasonable question. She neglected to wonder if it was also a wise question, and so she set off across the plaza to ask it.

Flip Crame smiled sadly at his robot companion with whom he often exchanged wry banter highlighting the subtle differences between human and robot psychology.

"I'm a bit upset" he said.

"I'm not" replied his robot companion.

Flip was a fair artist. To be precise, he was a craft fair artist. He could stick googly eyes to polished stones like nobody's business and on a good day could produce a recognisable portrait, but he suspected he was never going to be hung in a gallery with walls that didn't flap in the breeze. He was glad to be able to survive and even live a little on his remuneration from his supervisory job at the shitworks and making nice things was really just an outlet.

Occasionally he had muttered to his robot companion that it would be cool if someone paid attention to his art but he now realised what had always been plain to most people in this crazy brutalistic future city so unlike the relaxed and egalitarian utopia in which we live, gentle reader: Life as an artist was dangerous. Even the purest, most noble, most open-hearted work could bring the wrath of reasonless automatons upon its naïve not to say reckless progenitor.

The young lady's face had seemed familiar, and she was pretty, though once his robot companion had pointed it out, he thought, perhaps in a vacuous sort of way, and he, Flip Crame, would have been flattered by her questions on any other day, on any day that hadn't involved the perfectly legal though in his opinion unwarranted destruction of the work that had occupied most of his evenings and weekends from Janissary to Fapruary, and also some stuff he'd found or knocked up quickly to make up the numbers, of which he was less proud but still. But this was not such a day and hadn't been for a good twenty minutes and he had answered curtly and bid her adieu.

As he sat among the wreckage of his and everyone else's hard work Flip Crame considered gluing some random bits of it together and calling it an installation, but the thought of another critical mauling by the Razormen chased him and his robot companion, counterpointing tartly about feelings and their lack, out of the plaza and through the windswept streets of the darkening city long before the rad-rats and tandem-constrictors oozed out of their spider-holes and devoured the impromptu collage the Razormen had made of his and everyone else's long winter's work, and everything else that was left lying around, and occasionally each other, as was their wont.

Saturnalia Brandyfurt panted in front of her fabulously appointed apartment's entry-sphincter and visualated the mandala that would unseal the thought-lock.

Nothing happened.

Nothing had never happened when she had visualated her mandala before, but it struck Saturnalia that this was not actually to be considered a surprising occurrence given that since leaving the café in the Plaza her Thing™ had failed to drop her murmurations, ping-back her promo dips and pops or authorise her ride on the Trolli™cars not to mention the arrival at the Trolli™car stop of a platoon or whatever of Razormen and the silly way everyone thought they were looking for her and she'd been forced to run in between the waiting Trollis™ abandoning her Flit-Flots™ and covering her head with a piece of paper to avoid drawing attention make her way sweatily and nude from the ankles down through several unsavoury banlieue even venturing for a couple of blocks below street level into the undercity about which boy I could write a book some of that stuff disgust you to see it, and then emerging from a seedy culvert half a mile from her apartment to see her face appearing on billboards but in a double-plus ungood way with words like "wanted" and "anathema" under it and somehow looking less vacuously pretty and more, well, evil, like when you freeze a frame from a vid look at a pretty girl but with the subject's eyelids caught half narrowed half open make them look shifty or retarded and discourages you from freezing another frame and then the building's Commisionaut had refused her entry and she'd had to break in round the back shocking how easy that was and even use the stairs but she had held fast to the now clearly mistaken notion that if she could Just Make It Home she could Call Someone, Fix Her Thing™, and Somehow Be Alright.

Vid-stalks craned in the corridor, blunt feet stepped the stairs and the travelthroat burped ominously.

Double-plus ungood, thought Saturnalia. 

Double-plus unperson, thought the City.