The sensation was instantly familiar, and her mind swam with the faintest recollection of a thick, warm sea. She retched, tasting plastic in her mouth, the horrible memory of pipes snaking down her gullet and into her stomach.
Behind her the door hissed open again, and a gust of warm air wandered into the chamber with Heywood Rope at its centre.
“Oh dear,” he said, lilting and mocking, unconcerned and hateful. “Don’t you know it’s wrong to peek behind the curtain?”
Juno began to cry. Her world was coming adrift, huge icebergs of her personal reality breaking off and sinking.
Rope came close, snatched the tarot card from her stiff grip and shoved her down. “What have we here?” He raised it to his nostrils and took a long, deep sniff. “Where did you get this?”
Juno shook her head, backing away.
His face twisted. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you know. There’s no time for the pattern to be altered. You’re going to do what you were made for, you little bitch.”
Tears streaking her face, she glanced at the glassy spheres, the sleeping girl and the other, unfinished things. Rope answered the unspoken question.
“Them? Oh, they’re just leftovers, darling. Remnants and remainders. Understudies, you might say.”
She found her voice again. “I’m not… going to help you. You kill people.”
He laughed and the sound made her whimper. “I’ve murdered you in a dozen different ways, each sweeter than the last. So know that. Know that you will do what I tell you. You don’t have a choice.” He rolled a Z3N capsule between his thumb and forefinger, and she wanted it more than anything in her life.
“I hate you,” she wept, collapsing in on herself.
Rope knelt by her, the horrible facade of his outward face coming to the fore again. “Don’t,” he said mildly. “I’ll give you what that witch doctor offered. You want to know yourself, Juno? Here you are.”
He bent close to her ear and whispered a word. The command made a post-hypnotic suture in her RNA tear open and bleed memory. Juno went into quiet shock as she remembered…
The songs fading. The channel into her sealed and dark; disconnected, the world ending.
Around her, the slow thick ocean pulling, dragging as she turns. New sensations of movement and direction, and the ocean falls away.
Muscles spasm. A burning stream of pain from her belly, out in a plug of expelled jelly. Weight pulling her into places and directions she’s never known. Cold hardness pressed into the length of her, light flooding over, coming in some impossible way from outside of her head. Fluids dripping out of holes in her body.
Something digs into the skin of her face and the light blazes inward like the ignition of a supernova.
“Eyes are open.”
Convulsing. Burning coming up again, a million times worse.
“Got your smock?”
Out in a rush, a torrent of agony.
“Aw, shit!”
“I told you, always point the head towards the drain. Stupid. ”
Voices? Moving her mouth, pushing and pulling at her muscles. The slow waters are gone, a cold, invisible ocean around her. Wet hiss from her lips.
“Meat’s awake. Dose it, then.”
“There’s a lot of blood in the ejecta. Shouldn’t we-”
“Just get it done.”
Light breaks apart into shifting pieces, growing large or small.
“Uh, okay.” Something at her neck. Hard. Sharp. “Full dose.” It bites her.
Sound like a pressure leak sings out of her mouth, dropping into a thick gurgle.
“Juno Seven decanted at fourteen-forty. No anomalies, cleared for processing.”
“Let’s go, hurry it up.”
Movement. Light falls away. Touching her belly, there’s a fleshy stub, crusted with drying fluids. The cord is cut! She spits out bone-jarring coughs, ejecting droplets of dark colour from her mouth…
“Do you understand now, little doll?” whispered Rope. “Little plastic girl?” He took a handful of her hair and pulled her to her feet. “You’re nothing but a wind-up toy, the ballerina on the music box. We made you.”
“Yes,” she cried, her body shaking with fear. “Oh, yes…”
Frankie shivered, feeling scattered droplets of Phoebe Hi’s blood cooling where they had spattered on his face. Monkey King’s inviolate grip held him erect, and all he could do was turn his head away as Tze came closer. “I want you to comprehend, Francis,” he said. “I want you to appreciate how special you are. Those others are just the first morsels of the banquet; you are the delicious feast. The gift you are given will be sweeter than anything the rest of us can imagine. The King of Rapture will take you into himself…” Tze shook his head. “Such a glory.”
He used the fluids in the bowl to write shapes on himself. One of Tze’s other minions, a man in a spotlessly clean laboratory coat, offered up a tray bearing a stone bottle and cups. Tze poured out equal measures of thick syrup. The fluid was sparkling blue.
Frankie saw what was coming and struggled, but the Mask tipped back his head. Tze threw back the liquid Z3N and tipped the other cup into Frankie’s mouth.
He tried to cough it out, but the fluid tingled like cold fire in his gullet and it surged into his body. Monkey King let him go and he fell to his knees.
Frankie’s vision swam, his senses became woolly one second, ultra-sharp the next. Tze crouched down to face him, grinning. “Yes. Don’t fight it.”
He’d done drugs before, but the stories that came with the Z3N caps had always scared Frankie away, of how it was used at sex parties and bloodclubs, of the mad psychedelic high and the weird way it made people speak alike, act alike, think alike. Something about the blue had always seemed invasive to him.
Tze started laughing, and Frankie felt the echo of it in his chest. He couldn’t stop himself from joining in, the bitter humour overtaking him. In the haze of his vision he could see dark tendrils unfolding from the old man, whip-fast and sharp. They penetrated Frankie’s skull and wormed into his mind. Tze was in there with him, sharing his thoughtspace.
You see? boomed the mindspeech. This is His gift to us, the means to unchain the psyche and marshal it to our cause.
He heard Juno singing, somewhere very far away. Touch my thoughts and flow. There’s no world we can’t know.
Tze roared, and Frankie had no choice but to shout with him.
ROLL CREDITS
ANNOUNCER: Live! From Ocean Terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui! Panda-Vision presents Musical World, with Xing Xing Xing!
FX: APPLAUSE
PANNING SHOT: AUDIENCE
ESTABLISH MEDIUM ANGLE
XING: Hi-hi-hi! It’s my super-happy pleasure to introduce my special guest! Let’s hear it for Juuuuuuuuno Qwaaaaan!
FX: WILD APPLAUSE
JUNO: Hello Xing, how are you?
XING: Better-better-better now that you are here! Phew! She’s ice-hot, huh guys?
FX: MALE LAUGHTER
JUNO: You’re making me blush!
XING: Ha-ha-ha. Juno-Juno-Juno, China is happy-wild to have her famous singer-babe home at last. Did you miss us, bwah?
JUNO: Every day. America was fun, but XING: Whoa-whoa-whoa, those crazee ’merrikins! Too much red meat and too much drinky-winky!
FX: LAUGHTER
XING: Pop-pop-pop, I gotta six-gun! Jack Daniels and Cola! Ah shaw thunk yoo’s a reel purty laydee, missuhjuuuno!
FX: LAUGHTER
JUNO: Some of them are… a little… intense. But I love all my fans.
CUT TO CLOSER ANGLE: TWO-SHOT
XING: But-but-but to be Mr Serious for a moment. Hmmm. It was a trying time.
JUNO: Yes. America is such a fantastic place, but many people there are living day by day. I hope that my music can bring some light to them.