Yesterday Tomorrow, Tomorrow Today!

Retro Sci-Fi or just behind the times? Who can tell, not me. I prefer stories about Upper Sixth gels at boarding school with crushes on the Head girl and the Head Gardener respectively, who find themselves struggling with their burgeoning womanhood.... But perhaps the less said about that - especially with Mrs T. around - the better! My own preferred reading aside, I bring you the second and final part of Mr Lewis' comic (so he tells me) time-travelling story. It's not bad I suppose, but not a boarding school gel in sight!

Timeless Trevor T.

Proprietor and lover of saucy literature and not ashamed of it by gad!

The story so far: Leonard Skrane, scientific genius and budding science-fiction author, gate-crashes the virtual sixth annual Big Brains of Sci-Fi convention, (remotely thanks to the virtual-reality relay, the numbskull - or braindrayne, depending on your financial position) to bring all those present the startling news that he has not only invented a form of time-travel, but has used it to inadvertently tamper with the past. If he hadn't the delegates and audience would have remembered that Albert Gore, a young man from the East End of London, circa 1888, was the Biggest Brain of Sci-Fi ever. The delegates and audience have no memory of the name Albert Gore, and so, Skrane proceeds to tell them how the biggest brain in Sci-Fi ever, was accidentally erased from their memories ...

by Mark Lewis

Part 2 - Tomorrow Yesterday

2.

It was a Sunday evening in the autumn of 1887 when I arrived in Grapeshot Lane. Dusk was falling like the heavy lid of a dark eye, slowly closing upon the low roofs of all the houses. I had expected to find the streets swathed in a pea-soup fog, but the air was surprisingly fine and clear. The smell of soot from the hundreds of chimneys strongly perfumed the air, and even though a native might have ignored it, it added an excitingly foreign tang to my adventure.

As well as the fog, I had also expected to find the street full of the kinds of colourful characters you see on the Numb; prostitutes and barrel-organ grinders, shoeless street-urchins and old lady flower-sellers; but instead the street was practically deserted. A few Hansom-cabs jingled over the cobbles, a few moustachioed gents in their best but still shabby suits sauntered past, no doubt on their way to the pub; but that was the sum total of human traffic on that clear, September evening. No one noticed me as I walked along in search of Gore and sons master butchers, and as I strolled nonchalantly along the pavement, I congratulated myself on the effectiveness of my disguise.

Gore and Sons stood at the furthest end of the street. On one side of the shop stood a cobbler’s and on the other, a second-hand clothing store. All three shops were rather poor and mean-looking but far from disreputable.

The windows of the shop were darkened and the shop door was bolted, but as I pressed my nose up against the glass, I could see a faint glow of light coming from inside. Someone at least was home. I looked around me carefully, and seeing that the street was empty once again, I walked through the locked door and into the empty shop.

Perhaps at this juncture I ought to explain the basic principles of my time-travel device.

As many of you are no doubt aware, since Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity were published, physicists such as Hawking, Firmi and Pod have been arguing the impossibility of time-travel.

Whilst it has long been thought possible that, thanks principally to the phenomenon of time dilation, a person travelling faster than the speed of light might travel to what we might perceive as the future; no one has yet come up with a satisfactory theory to answer the question of how to travel backwards in time.

However, to go back to the theory of time dilation, as you know the theory states that during this phenomenon, external time slows down to the observer who is travelling faster than the speed of light, whereas their own local time continues at a constant rate. Therefore, when the observer arrives at their destination, only days may have elapsed for them, whereas back on their own planet, far, far away by now, time may have moved on a thousand-fold. But, in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, time dilation is reciprocal, so that an observer standing at the same point of the time-traveller’s departure, looking at the time-traveller’s destination, would see only an image of a long dead past.

Giving this theory a practical basis, I began to wonder if it were then possible to project an image back through to the past from that future point? After all, the light that reaches us from the stars is already aeons old by the time our eyes perceive it. What if, using a vehicle travelling faster than the sped of light, I could place a device in the far future that could project an image of myself back to the Earth of the distant past, couldn’t it then go where my body couldn’t; back in time to the London of Albert Gore?

So I began to work on this idea of mine, using a far more complicated version of the basic theory I have just outlined. And, adapting current Nubskull technology, I experimented and refined a technique whereby I could send a projection of myself from a relay placed in the far distant future, (sent there on board one of the new automated faster than light freighters supplied by my dear friend, space-shipping magnate Zu-Zu Sarthrust). This relay would also allow me to receive an image from the past and assimilate enough visual data to simulate a sensory impression of my surroundings.

And that eventually, was how a projection of my self was able to walk through the solid, wood and glass door of Gore and Sons, with all the ease and stealth of a prowling ghost.

Entering the shop, I noticed that the light was coming from a back room. I moved swiftly past the empty counters, and the meat-hooks, toward the source of the light.

Around me, the tin trays that on workdays would be filled with meat, and the white wall-tiles, glistened eerily in the creeping gloom. Beyond the shop, there was another room filled with scarred benches and big wooden meat-lockers that were stained with blood, and then finally a heavy wooden door, topped by a pebbled window that led to the shop’s back parlour. And it was from here that the light was shining.

Once again I floated through the door with ease.

The Gore’s back-parlour was neat and snug. The floorboards were painted brown and dotted with rag-woven rugs. Solid, heavy furniture and dark framed photographs gave the room a feeling of gloom and oppression, as if making a statement that this was owned by serious, sober people.

It was now dusk outside, but inside the small parlour I had the impression that it would always be dusk there, no matter what time of day elsewhere.

Besides the dark, oppressive furniture, the room had very little ornament: a few improving texts; a thick, leather-bound family bible; some fire-irons and a large fire-place, its coals weakly smouldering; a brass oil lamp with a frosted globe. And then of course there was the occupant.

At a small polished dining table beneath the lace-curtained window, sat a young man in his late teens. He was a sturdy, round-faced youth, with wispy, flaxen hair that would be gone by his mid-twenties and a florid complexion that they would have called choleric in the Middle-Ages. And yet for all his angry colour, the youth looked mild and placid. His only real feature of note was his slightly protruding lip, which added a slight aspect of idiocy to his otherwise plain appearance. He was respectably dressed in the style of the times, shirt and waistcoat, heavy black trousers; the only concessions to the informality of the room was that he had removed his starched collar and donned a pair of carpet-slippers.

In front of him was a card-backed ledger, the sort that the shop accounts would usually have been kept in. The pages were thinly ruled and divided into columns by heavy blue lines. But the young man was not keeping his accounts. Instead, in the precise handwriting instilled in him by the parish elementary school, he was hurriedly, almost feverishly inscribing sentences and paragraphs that spilled over the ruled columns and rushed down the page like a river that had burst its dam. This was the man I had travelled two hundred years to meet. This was Alfred Gore the Biggest Brain of Sc-Fi.

I stood and watched him at work, feeling understandably awed by the experience of being so close to genius. On his part, Gore was so engrossed in his writing that he completely failed to notice me. His eyes were rapt, and I noticed that as he wrote the tip of his tongue protruded slightly from the corner of his mouth.

For a while there was only the sound of his pen, scratching across the page, alternating with the tap of his pen in the ink-well, and a slight, adenoidal whistling coming from his nostrils. I crept closer, trying to peer over his shoulder at what he was writing. I wondered if it was The Metal Bird Menace or perhaps Upwards to the New Babel, both of which were known to have been written in the late 1880’s. I had no chance to find out for as I drew closer, as if through some sixth sense, Gore suddenly shivered and turned round.

To say he was astonished is an understatement. Catching sight of me, Gore suddenly turned pale. His pendulous lip fell and began to quiver. His pupils dilated to the size of dinner plates; and he jumped in such a violent manner that he upset his chair and knocked the table, almost spilling the ink-well over his ledger in the process.

For a moment he was rigidly silent as if all the air were being squeezed from his throat; and then after what seemed an hour, he finally managed to ungrammatically stammer: “A .. a apparition!”

I felt embarrassed. I had meant to announce myself more properly, rather than be caught sneaking a glance over the genius’ shoulder. But nevertheless I gathered myself together and did my best to explain:

“In a way Mr Gore, I am indeed an apparition as I have no real, corporeal form. However if I am an apparition, it is one of science rather than the supernatural.”

This didn’t seem to help. Gore still looked terrified and there seemed to be tears welling at the corners of his eyes. He clutched at his chest with one chubby hand and for a moment I thought he were about to have a heart-attack. Luckily for both history and myself, he wasn’t.

“W … what do you mean, ‘an apparition of science’?”

“I mean that I am able to visit you through the intervention of a mechanical device. I have in short come from the future to ask you to help me prevent the terrible things I have seen. Only you with your big brain can help.”

This didn’t have much of a calming effect. Instead, Gore began to sway, and if it hadn’t been for the table behind him, propping him up, he would have ended up a crumpled heap on the floor.

I tried a different angle of attack.

“I come from the future. A future where you are worshipped and adored as one of the Biggest Brains in Sci-fi. A future where your great literary works have made you almost as famous as Shakespeare.”

He blinked at me with his – it must be said – rather stupid, bovine eyes.

“Famouser than Shakespeare? But I’ve only had one story published: ‘The Underground War’.” He spluttered with amazement. “ - in the Reverend Crisparkle’s Good News and Ill Omens. I don’t think it has that much of a circulation beyond Hampton Wick”

“Believe me maestro, your fame has come to pass in the future of which I am part.”

But Gore was still not convinced, and it took a further hour before he finally began to realise that he was not being visited by spirits from the grave; or a product of a combination of brain-fever and the worry over some loose change he had purloined from his father’s overcoat pocket.

Finally, as we heard the sound of his parents in the back yard, arguing bitterly as they returned from a visit to relatives, Gore hurried me upstairs.

“We better talk in my room,” his hissed urgently, “I can’t begin to think what Ma and Pa ‘ud make of you.”

So I followed him up the dark and rickety stairs, to his dark and rickety back bedroom. I cannot say I was impressed. It looked more fitted for a meat locker.

“So how exactly can I ‘elp Mr Skrane? Though I hardly believe I can help.” He was still whispering as the angry shouting went on, muffled, but still audible, below.

“Mr Gore, your stories will offer the most exciting and plausible visions of the future for over a century and a half. And then, even more remarkably they will cease to be merely plausible but in fact frighteningly prescient as well …”

His eyes lit up, but not for the reason I’d first imagined.

“Prescient, that’s a good word. Let me write that down. What’s that mean exactly?”

I explained with a sigh as he scribbled it down on a celluloid cuff that had been sitting on a shelf above his tiny bed.

In some respects, this had turned out to be a disappointing meeting. Perhaps I should have tried the older, and definitely more learned Gore of ten years in the future. And yet, would the older man rather than the impressionable youth have listened to me? I doubted it and so persevered.

“To put it plainly,” I explained, “people will think you saw the future in some almost magical or mystical way. But the worst thing about your gifts of prophecy is not that they will come true but that people will make them come true. You will show people what terrible things they will be able to do with technology, and they will act upon them. Don’t misunderstand me, it won’t be your stories alone. Artists, philosophers, clergymen, poets and scientists, but mostly the film-makers will translate your stories into essays, paintings, poems, machinery and films that will make your nightmare vision look, well, ravishing, desirable – ahem – sexy even.”

Gore flinched at the word ‘sexy’, but he understood all the same.

“These great thinkers and artists won’t do it to arouse society, to whet its appetite if you will. Like you they will act out of a sense of duty. Unfortunately they will be the only ones who understand. The rest of humanity will only get excited and see concrete and neon, high-rise buildings, killer robots and interstellar warfare desirable or fun (here I had to explain the concepts). But be assured, it is human nature that is at fault maestro, not you your-self.”

There was a moment or two of silence, punctuated only by the bitter argument still going on downstairs. And then Gore spoke again in tones of awe.

“But what can I do about it short of stopping writing now? Which I must say I’ve half a mind to do; not write another bleeding line, if you’ll excuse the profanity.”

“No, no, no maestro. That would be more terrible than a world where your stories come true. You must continue to write, it is your duty.”

“But what about all this prescience business, I can’t change human nature, so the word ‘ull all come out the same anyhow if I keep on writin’.”

“Not if you change the emphasis of your stories maestro. Not if instead of writing about a robot that maims and destroys, write about one that nurtures and frees a man from back-breaking, soul-destroying chores so that he might teach his children to love, not destroy their world.”

It was a heart-felt and impassioned plea, and I think a very successful one.

Gore looked like a new man. His eyes shone and the weak, fleshy curves of his face and body seemed to harden and take on a new aspect of determination. Even his pendulous lower lip seemed to be drooping a little less.

Yes my mission had succeeded. We spoke a little more and then, as the hour was growing late, I bid the Biggest Brain of Sci-fi a fond farewell and slipped away from 19^th Century England, happy in the knowledge that at last I had helped humanity a little further up the evolutionary ladder, away from its violent and recidivist past.

3.

The entire, virtual audience and delegates of the 16^th Conference of the Biggest Brains of Sci-Fi sat in stunned silence. Skrane looked around him at the millions of amazed virtual-faces and all their mouths hanging wide open, and felt ashamed.

“Imagine my surprise when I returned to find the world in an even sorrier state than the one in which I had left it. As I looked around me at the high-rise city tenements and people, pushed by killer robots falling from the high-rise tenements, I am not ashamed to say I wept. Not only had my plan failed but it was even possible after my meddling with time, that I was partly responsible for the terrible state the world was in!

But what had gone wrong? The answer soon came to me as I dialled up the complete works of Albert Gore on my numbskull. There wasn’t one, not a solitary story, not a single reference except, perhaps an obscure one that might have occurred to one or two of you when I first introduced his name this afternoon.”

A few dozen of the virtual mouths closed as recognition dissolved their earlier stupefaction. They were beginning to get the picture.

“Yes, Albert Gore and his goody two-shoes stories had completely failed, and consequently the outlet of creativity having been bunged up, so to speak, poor Albert became a beast himself.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the only mention I found of poor Albert Gore the butcher, was in connection with a list of possible suspects for the notorious Whitechapel murders of the late 19^th century. Once they were known by a different name, but now ladies and gentlemen, thanks to my intervention, you will know them properly as the crimes of Bert the Butcher!”

The End

Tomorrow, Today - Yesterday, Tomorrow!

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away? They certainly did!

Yesterday I was resting on my chaise-lounge eating hot buttered teacakes and reading the collected works of Saki whilst listening to Edith Piaf on the gramophone. Today, I am in the hot broiling city, in scratchy tweeds looking down at the pale and pimply faces of my staff and their proffered words and pictures as they shuffle across the office floor on their bony knees.

Thank goodness then for the jottings of Mark Lewis, new enfant terrible of the Gindylow literature factory, he of such past glories as ‘The Skin Suitcase’. Alright, so his work has a certain lower-sixth naivety and would seem rather more Sci-Fi Then than Sci-Fi Now, and certainly reads as if there’s never been a Bladerunner or a Neuromancer or indeed New Romance, and seems rather more John Wyndham’s maiden aunt’s hobby-horse than real cutting edge stuff. And though it was laughed out of the offices of both Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, I still feel that, well, it’s better than the rest of the random and ridiculous jottings my staff are currently vomiting out. Also, though embarrassingly short on scientific fact, cogent plotting and believable characters, it does at least have a reasonable amount of long words spelled correctly and some nice, accompanying pictures; and though the idea of time-travel is incredibly hackneyed and overused in Sci-Fi, it does at least contain a couple of laughs in reference to toilets, and a bit of almost quite persuasive social comment, which is what it’s all about really; or so I tried to console Mr Lewis as I helped him off the filing cabinet and unwound the kettle-flex he was trying to hang himself with.

So, sit back in your well-upholstered mahogany and brass time-chair, put your slippered feet up on the Axminster-topped chrono-footplate and with a cup of Darjeeling at your elbow, enjoy our latest fictive offering: Dive into Yesterday’, it’s really not all that bad.

by Mark Lewis Part 1 - Big Brains of Sci-Fi

According to all the advance publicity, the 16^th conference of the Big Brains of Sci-Fi was to be held in the Victoria Hotel, Lagos, Nigeria. This was all very well, but for twenty die-hard fans it was to prove both misleading and a major disappointment.

When the small cluster of jet-lagged fans arrived from the airport, still shaking the dust of Nairobi from their safari jackets all they found in the Victoria hotel’s conference-room was a solitary service-engineer sitting on the vacant stage. He sat in silence, intently reading a copy of the Jet-Boot Nooz, whilst behind him, a large and unwieldy numbskull relay squatted like a Neolithic monument.

In reality the two hundred and twelve conference delegates were relaying their speeches via the numbskull network or alternatively the braindrayne (depending on a viewer’s financial situation) so that a million-or-so less keen, but infinitely wiser Sci-Fi fans, were able to enjoy the conference in the comfort of their own homes, thanks to the large and unwieldy relay squatting on the stage of the Victoria Hotel, Nairobi.

The delegates also enjoyed themselves. In fact, not having to be physically present at the conference, some of the delegates enjoyed themselves so much that they were often to be seen delivering their keynote speeches in the comfort of their own kitchen; or in the comfort of an expensive restaurant with a few intimate friends. Veteran author Dag Maggertone, was even spotted delivering his speech from the comfort of his own toilet, but the less said about that the better.

So that was the 16^th conference of the Big Brains of Sci-Fi.

Everything was going swimmingly. The service engineer was able to finish his newspaper in perfect contentment and then move onto an edition of the Jet-Boot Gazette. The twenty or so mistaken but still die-hard fans enjoyed taking bets on who was speaking now and what a particular series of blinking lights on the relay meant; whilst the other million or so less keen, but infinitely wiser Sci-Fi fans enjoyed the facial contortions of Dag Maggertone as he tried to alleviate some of the colonic irritations he had suffered since lunchtime.

Everything in fact was going swimmingly until Leonard Skrane burst into the conference unannounced.

If you had been one of the less keen, but infinitely wiser Sci-Fi fans sitting in your own living room, this is what you would have seen: viewing the conference by numbskull (or the cheaper and let it be said, far inferior brayndrayne), your own front room would have been transformed into a virtual conference hall. In front of you, where perhaps your treehee or your quadro usually sat would be the darkened stage, and seated (squatting or standing according to what they were up to at the time of transmission) would be the delegates attending that particular session.

So for instance if you had been watching the debate on ‘Who Is the Biggest Brain in Sci-Fi’ , you would have seen Gray Howser on the left, dressed in sarong and open-toed sandals, lying in his hammock and sipping on a cocktail; Dag Maggertone on Howser’s left, still unfortunately straining on his gold-plated toilet bowl; Saybe Goff, on Maggertone’s left, wearing dressing-gown and slippers and sitting in a comfy armchair; and finally May Yang O, seated in a restaurant enjoying a fine steak and claret, dressed to the nines and laughing at a joke her (unseen) companion has just told. Then suddenly, as Howser drawlingly lets rip about the genius of Sladek, Skrane fizzes onto the scene.

Skrane is dressed strangely for a young man of the twenty-second century: bowler-hat, black frock-coat, waistcoat, cravat, a pair of black, narrow trousers and shiny, narrow-toed Chelsea boots. His face is hooded and serious and there is a maniac gleam in his eyes. He removes his bowler and strides across the virtual stage pointing it angrily at Howser.

“Poppycock!” He bellows at the top of his virtual voice. “Bilgewater and tripe!”

Howser meanwhile has spilled tequila sunrise all over his sarong and is mopping at it furiously as Skrane marches towards him. So, with Howser otherwise engaged, it is left to Saybe Goff to leap to her feet in indignant fury.

“What gives you the right to rudely barge-in without an invitation? And besides whatever your opinions of our esteemed colleague’s opinion, this is neither the time nor place to voice them. I myself would love to thunder ‘Nonsense, Bradbury was a far superior writer, why just look at his sensual imagery coupled with …”

But Skrane has no time for this. He waves his hands emphatically as if scrubbing Goff’s sentences away.

“You’re missing the point all of you!” He shouts passionately. “I came here today not to argue but to tell you without contradiction who the Biggest Brain in Sci-Fi is, was and will be and the great tragedy is, once you might have all agreed with me!”

There was a brooding silence as the other delegates looked at each other; perhaps searching for an explanation or an indication of what to do. But despite the combined power of their big Sci-Fi brains, their faces remained blank.

“Yes fellow science-fiction writers,” Skrane continued, “from your vacuous expressions I can see it has already come to pass that the man whom once you would have celebrated as the Shakespeare of Sci-Fi has been expunged from your memories as easily as a tear wiped from the eye; and as I am most ashamed to admit, it is I brothers and sisters who am to blame!”

The faces of the delegates remained blank, all except that of May Pang O, who had broken off her meal to make a phone-call. She turned her own, broadcast volume off and began a silent but clearly furious tirade into the ‘phone. She had called the broadcasting network in an attempt to have Skrane’s signal blocked.

It was no good.

Unlike the other big Brains of Sci-Fi, Skrane was also a scientific virtuoso and thanks to his technical know-how, he had set up a number of hidden numbskull relays so that it was impossible to trace his original signal. The only way to remove him from the conference, the numbskul network’s technical manager confided solemnly, was to pull the plug on the whole conference and begin again. May Pang snapped her phone shut angrily and then fizzed out of the conference altogether. Evidently the steak, the burgundy and the witty conversation had more to offer than Leonard Skrane’s nonsensical invasion.

Skrane meanwhile was beginning to strut and fret across the stage in a distinctly Shakespearian manner; one thin white hand thumping his breast whilst the other fanned the air with his bowler.

“Yes my literary brethren, I am the guilty party and must answer for crimes not only to the good and noble name of Science-Fiction Literature, but to the very progress and development of human society itself!”

The blank looks of the delegates turned to looks of alarm. Either Skrane was telling the truth or (and this was the more likely suggestion of the two) he was insane. But, insane or not, he continued to hold court:

“And now I feel I owe you a proper explanation and so I will deliver an explanation such as you have never heard before …

“As you know I have long been at the forefront of my field, indeed perhaps the greatest living exponent of the science-fiction genre (coughs and splutters of outrage from the other delegates). To what I attribute this genius I cannot truly say except a natural brilliance combined with a beneficial regime of hard work and efficiency. Also, as you know, I have kept myself abreast of all the new scientific developments, so that in my own small way I have produced much that is innovative and new in the field of quantum physics; my own particular field of expertise.

“What has always disappointed me however is the inability to really help my fellow Man, except perhaps by giving him a few hours of relief with my many wonderful stories. So it was with this unfulfilled desire to help humanity in mind that I set out to contribute something to what I perceived as the untold suffering of Mankind. But where to begin?

“It seemed to me that the worst thing about our modern age is the grim, dehumanising effect that technology has on ordinary people. People live in isolation. They have laboursaving devices, but because labour is saved it is also devalued. Esteem and personal worth is measured in terms of economic wealth, and yet, ironically the only people who possess that wealth are the most unworthy; people possessed of freakish skills or a selfish tenacity that has propelled them into a near god-like stratosphere of obscene wealth and appreciation.

Wars are still fought but the casualties are no longer the soldiers but rather the poor civilians who starve or die of thirst whilst their governments and the ones they are fighting spend all their resources on bigger and more devastating weapons. The only way to escape these horrors is through a mixture of narcotic abuse, sexual adventure, home-decorating and technological opiates.

“In short ladies and gentlemen, technology is the hand-maiden of our modern horror. But how so? Surely, our forefathers dreamed of technology as an aid to mankind? Surely they thought that technology would free humanity from the unlovely drudgery of existence, which would in turn enable humanity at last to create the kind of enlightened utopia that mankind had always dreamed of? If so, what had distorted our aspirations and dreams? And it was whilst pondering this last question that the answer came to me; why my friends the answer was: ‘stories’; stories had distorted the dreams of technological utopia, and in particular the stories of one man: none other than Albert Gore, the biggest brain in Science-Fiction ever; bar none!”

Once again the conference guests and delegates regarded each other with blank looks; except this time there was a faint glimmer or frown of concentration in several of the faces; as if, even though they had no memory of the name Albert Gore, once, lurking amongst their neural connections there had been an Albert Gore-sized memory. And now, as they struggled to remember his name, they were probing the gap that had been left, like a tongue feeling the hole where a tooth had once been.

Skrane carefully scrutinised his audience for a glimmer of memory, and then sighed. The blank looks had won.

“I suppose then it behoves me to explain in more detail,” said Skrane sadly.

“Albert Gore was born on the 24^th of August, 1867; and with the exception of a few day trips to France, spent his entire life, living and working in the East End of London, England. His father and grandfather were butchers and so naturally it followed that the young Albert would on reaching his maturity, join the family business. However, Albert was a gifted and sensitive child and fired by the religious mania of his mother, dreamed of helping mankind in the role of a teacher, a doctor or an engineer. That young Albert could have been all three there is no doubt. However, as the story all-too-frequently goes, his overbearing and autocratic Victorian father would hear nothing of Albert’s higher aspirations. What was good enough for him and his father would be good enough for Albert too. And that was that. Leaving school at fourteen, Albert Gore became an apprentice butcher in the small but prosperous firm of Gore and sons, butchers, Grapeshot Lane, Whitechapel, London.

“Nevertheless, Albert had not forgotten his aspirations and so during the few hours of respite he earned; on Sunday afternoons, on high days and holidays - he began to write stories full of warnings and fears for what might happen if humanity gave itself over to its darkest side; and strangely enough, just as a draper’s assistant from Bromley in Kent began to write about a possible Martian invasion of Earth, Gore was writing with almost godly prescience about all the things that would eventually take place in his future and our present. It was those stories that made him famous throughout the world and earned him the title of the biggest brain in Sci-Fi.

“But what of his prognostications? Even though he had warned us about a world overrun with machines, where human lives were as cheap as dirt; why did we not take heed? Because to be frank ladies and gentlemen, they were so damn exciting and interesting in precisely the way that something pious and noble isn’t. But there was something more chilling still about his predictions; something about his stories which seemed to inspire or even compel mankind to emulate them. Yes, I had no doubt that albeit unintentionally the wonderful, compelling but ultimately bleak stories of Albert Gore had influenced and therefore indirectly created the modern world we are living in today. And so friends with this in mind, I set out to do something about it. I set out to travel back in time to stop Albert Gore destroying the glorious progress of mankind towards Utopia …”

After clearing his throat theatrically, Skrane began to tell his story in the narrative style that had yet to earn him a place amongst the Big Brains of Sci-Fi.

End of Part 1.

Down, but not yet out! More Art for the downtrodden!

Where do you go to my lovely? Well, I’ll tell you, (though I suggest you stop being so forward – a simple ‘Mr Tweedthwack sir’ will usually suffice) the Gindylow management in the form of Mrs Tweedthwack and myself have been on our hols, far away from the steaming grey cauldron of the city; away amidst the rolling green and the boundless blue of the yorkshire dales, staying at a small, ever-so-la-di-dah establishment with the unlikely name of the Austwick Traddock; a name out of MR James if ever there was one!

Of course whilst we were bathing in fine Moulton Brown shower-gel and eating locally-sourced organic sausages (though of course at different stages of our visit, approximately on a rotation of five minutes: wash – sausages – wash – sausages etc) the Gindylow ethic of furious industry seemed to be on vacation also!

It seems that whilst Mrs T and I were away, my weak and scrawny, whey-faced staff that clutter the tiny, oak-panelled Gindowlow office had a holiday of their own; or it would seem so from the knee-high pile of paper-aeroplanes and towering piles of photocopied posteriors that greeted us on our return, not to mention the total lack of a blog entry for nigh-on an age!.

Still, as I type this, the inquisition is on, heads shall roll; but only after the paper aeroplanes are shovelled up first. Meanwhile, to you out there in the grey, soupy blogosphere, fortunate enough to have opened our bright yellow Gindylow envelope, we send another beam of brilliance in the shape of one of Mr Bove’s Ministry of Disinformation posters. It is a strange and purple offering and may serve to warn others of your own purple patch to come, following yet another wasted hour or two spent in an interminable office meeting. Click on it, download it, print it out (handily tying up office resources) and place it on your partition wall as a kind of ‘V’ sign to the cheeriness of your co-workers.

The meaning of Mr Bove’s poster is at once unambiguous and mysterious in equal measures. Perhaps, I should take it as a cry for help by the artist? Or perhaps I should just take it as the normal, self-pitying, self-obsessed offering I always seem to receive from him? Who knows?

I do however feel it my duty to point out that Mr Bove is rather less svelte and certainly not as youthful as the depressed lad in the picture, which rather leads me to the opinion that it is a work designed merely to point out the ambivalent nature of both the depressive and those more jaunty folk who interact with said mentalist, as well as an opportunity for Mr B to play around with Corel Paintshop Pro. Of course, in the long-run, as with all works of Art, great or small and even smaller (like those of Mr B) the choice of meaning is up to you. I can only offer you my conjecture, especially as I try to avoid conversation with my staff as much as possible.

Anyway, I’m back, and don’t you forget it!

Slippery (on account of the lavish applications of Moulton Brown bath products) but oh-so sweet-smelling, Mr Tweedthwack.

What? More Skin? Is This An Obsession?

Aaaarrrrgghh, the agony, the pain, the terrible, itching and burning ...

Yes, it looks as though Summer has arrived here in good old Blighty, bringing with it all the concomitant joys and agonies of seemingly endless sunshine and heat. Some of the joys we might categorise as bird-song trilling through your open window; tea, supper, breakfast, snacks and sleeping them off - on the veranda; smiling faces; loose clothing; a sense of time slowly melting like butter on a windowsill ....

And the minus points? Flip-flops for men to start off with - urrgh; flip-flops in general; loose clothing; water-bombs thrown at the bus by gangs of youths; rubbish in the park; hay-fever and of course the terrible itchy, burning heat, crawling beneath your lobster-pink epidermis like an engorged ant...

The brand new post provided by the pen of Mr Bove (Mr Bove being indisposed due to his being slumped in a sorry, heat and drink induced coma on his bathroom floor, the brave pen pluckily stepped into the fray and produced a rather fine cartoon, infinitely superior to Mr Bove's usual scrawl) rather reminded me of the agonies of the heat; the unbearable nature of one's skin in the merciless heat of noon, and the secret longing to tear it open and step out, to wander hither and yon in your nice cool bones.

Of course the strip has nothing to do with this latter feeling, being more to do with the dreadful burden of self-image and the conflict with the the way that others see us; not to mention a large dollop of self-loathing and madness into the bargain. But heigh-ho, I am in charge and if I and wish to identify the skin-ripping strip with the prickly heat I am currently suffering due largely to being overweight as a result of a life of lavish excesses; I can, so nyeeer!

So, enjoy Mr Bove's / his pen's new amusement. There is one in black-and-white for those of you cursed to work in dark, forbidding offices out of the stone-age with leaky-ceilings, wooden filing-cabinets, nicotine coloured carpets, and of course a total absence of colour inkjet printing facilities. Whilst of course for those in the 21st Century, there is a colour version which Mr Bove (or his pen) has hand-coloured with Corel Paint Shop Pro in the hope of evoking the four-colour comic strip of a bygone age. Two strips for the price of one! That is how generous we are at Gindylow! So touch then with your virtual fingers, select them, copy them, print them, pin them over your dull schedules and drab to-do lists and generally enjoy them in this new fangled sunshine thing (but of course do not attempt to rip off your skin, you may not be as lucky as our hero!).

Ultimately, I feel it gives a new meaning to the words comic STRIP.

Poor, hot and itchy and ever-so slightly twitchy Trevor.

What Lurks Within the Skin?
by A. Bove

Your Bag? Or a Bag of ...... Skin?

Good crikey! Could it be a post at last after all these weeks of pining and endlessly scrolling up and down the blog to see if we hadn't slipped in a sneaky one whilst you weren't looking.

Yes to mark the impending wet bank-holiday weekend, we have a post for you, and what a post!

What, a post? Yes a post! Not wood, nor driven into the ground, not holding up telephone wires or a litter bin, or indeed a bit of fence, but in fact a story posted or pinned notice-like on this virtual billboard of delight.

It is in fact a work from a virtual virtual newcomer who begged and wheedled and threatened to reveal that my sordid past was not so sordid after all (well with my reputation what could I do, I couldn't let the world and his wife or indeed his pekingese know that I am not the cad or bounder they all hold in such esteem - especially the peke!); so I gave in and let his story drag it's muddy and scuffed shoes across the threshold of our Gindylow portal.

So what have you got for absolutely only the cost of your electrcity and the very expensive laptop on your lap? .... Well don't say I didn't warn you. A brisk and breezy black dystopian sci-fi comedy with violence, suicide, murder and Marilyn Monroe thrown in for good measure - and what is more we think Mr Lewis may be suffering from a hint of mysogeny as well. But, with none of our other cringing lackeys able to get time off from counting paper-clips, we had no choice but to publish and be damned!

So, er if you like it, well I always told you I was good at spotting talent!

And er if you don't, well erm, how did this awful violent filth find it's way here, just wait til I get my hands on that Mark Lewis!

So, enjoy the bank-holiday, download the pictures, copy and paste the text into apocket-digest sized edition so that you can take it on your hols, and laugh yourself silly in your train carriage, all the way to the seaside!

Toot toot and a pip, pip, pip!

Talent-spotter Trev
Your terribly top-whole Editor

The Skin Suitcase by Mark Lewis

Mike Michaels woke with a groan. He had heard the voices in his sleep again, and when he opened his eyes he found that things were just as horrible as he’d thought: Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner were lying next to him in bed.

The young Ava (circa 1956, ‘The Killers’, way out of copyright), lay on Michael’s left. Her long raven hair cascaded over her shoulders, pooling liquid and dark on the pillow beneath. Her lips were decorated with a dark and glistening lipstick that matched her lustrous hair. Over her pale body she he wore a see-through black negligee which left nothing to the imagination.

On Michael’s right, lay Marilyn (circa 1953, Niagra also out of copyright). She was wearing a pink negligee fringed at top and bottom with a line of pink feathers. Marilyn licked her pink pink lips and pouted like a disappointed child.

Mike lay back and put his pillow over his face, hoping the girls would take the hint; but just like every morning, the long dead movie stars were there to stay.

Marilyn began to stroke his inner-thigh whilst Ava began to move her hands across his chest.

Marilyn spoke first: “Oh you’re a man, a real, real man.” Marilyn’s voice was breathy and low, somewhere between a little girl asking for ice cream and a woman on the brink of an orgasm. Even with the pillow over his face, Michaels couldn’t ignore the voice.

Marilyn continued to wheedle, whisper and moan: “A girl like me knows a real man when she sees one, yes sir! I’ve been around; I know what real men are like. I know there’s a rage inside of a real man that’s like a burning thirst, a thirst that not even a couple of soft cool girls like me and Ava can slake. I know there’s only one real way a real man can douse that awful burning rage and that’s with a …”

Michaels couldn’t stand it any more. He threw the pillow off his face and with an animal-like howl ran straight for the bathroom. But when he got there, Marilyn and Ava were already waiting for him.

Ava was perched on the edge of the bathtub, her legs crossed provocatively. She leant backwards, resting on her hands, whilst the flimsy material of her nightie was stretched to its limits. She smiled her evil, razor-sharp smile as he entered.

Meanwhile, Marilyn stood naked in the bathtub. The shower was on, and under the torrent of steaming water, Marilyn stood glistening and pink like a naked doll. Water cascaded over her face, forcing her to close her eyes in a kind of feline ecstasy. Her mouth on the other hand was as wide open as she could manage, and as the water filled her mouth, she laughed and gurgled like an idiot. Strangely though, in spite of the water and the steam, her hair still retained its perfect bouffant.

Michaels sighed; the hair of course spoiled the whole illusion.

He fixed his gaze on Marilyn’s hair, forcing himself to remember that despite seeming so very real, down to the gentlest caress, the softest whisper, or even the subtlest nuance of their perfume; the whole thing was just another cheap advertising gimmick. Unfortunately for him, it was a cheap advertising gimmick that he had to wake up with every morning.

He sighed again. If only he’d noticed that last tick-box on his numbskull contract, the one that allowed him to opt out of the sensoverts; then he wouldn’t be in this mess. Still at least he only got advertising during daylight, non-work hours. There were some poor souls he’d heard about who had to put up with sensoverts twenty-four-seven!

He turned his back on the two long dead film-stars and filled the sink with hot water. Next he popped open the plastic container of Bristeez, took out a new strip and dropped it in the water to soak. As he stood and watched, the flat gluey strip begin to swell. He tried not to listen to Marilyn.

She had started from the beginning: “Oh you’re a real man, she gurgled through the water. “Yes you are …”

Michaels stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. His dark, drooping eyes were full of pain. He wondered how long he could stand it. Somehow he had to block it out…

Marilyn had come to the point of her advertisement: “…so you need a Whipping Boy to alleviate those growing sensations of rage and frustrations.

Tongue-tied? Strangled by the politeness laws? Can’t hit your wife? Can’t hit your neighbour? Can’t hit that annoying man in the bus-queue who laughs like a donkey? Well soldier, why don’t you hit a Whipping Boy today instead! Then you’ll feel the cool waves of peace gushing forth, dampening that hot rage inside you forever and a day …”

Michaels twitched his left eye.

One wall of the bathroom vanished. Where it had been now lay, a deep, shadowy room. The room looked almost empty apart from two oversized grey-green leather sofas. The sofas were facing each other; a coffee-table shaped like a boulder squatted between them. Both sofas were angled slightly so that Michaels could see their occupants clearly.

On one sofa lounged two academic-looking men, who were dressed in distinctly unacademic, up-to-the minute Scoot Suits. The other sofa was occupied by an academic looking man and woman, both dressed in drab second-hand clothing. All of the academics looked rumpled and tired. Their shirt collars stuck up at crooked angles whilst their loosened ties and garvey-ponts hung limply on their sweat-stained shirt-fronts. The sleeves of their jackets were rolled up messily whilst their knickerbockers were baggy and creased from a lengthy period of sitting. The ash-tray on the coffee table was overflowing with syntharette butts and the floor was littered with scrunched paper-cups. Between the sofas, artificial cigarette smoke hung in the air like cobwebs and there was a stale, foetid smell of sweat, smoke and bad-breath.

The four academics had obviously been discussing something important. Their faces showed the signs of mental anguish.

The academic-looking woman; lean, jaundice-coloured with long, untidy grey hair was pointing an accusing finger at the man opposite her. The stub of a syntharette smouldered between her fingers. The woman looked angry and tired.

“How can you sit there all smug and calm - ” the woman was hissing through clenched, yellowing teeth, “ - and say that the Remington Fuzzaway is a mere irrelevance? How can you sit there with that stupid grin on your face when there are millions of people out there whose lives might otherwise have been destroyed by the depressing layers of fuzz on their clothing?”

Michaels swore. Trust his luck to get a discussion on lint again.

He took the swollen Bristeeze strip by the corners and lifted it dripping from the sink. Behind him, Marilyn was still laughing whilst Ava licked her dark lips in an alluring but also terrifyingly predatory way.

Michaels spread the strip over his chin, carefully compressing his lips so that none of the strip would get into his mouth. When it was firmly plastered-on he stood and waited whilst it did its job.

He leant heavily on the sink and stared across at his flabby and partially mummified face. The discussion on lint went on. He blinked his right eye, but nothing happened. The four academics; the dark room; the sofas; even the hideous, boulder-shaped coffee table remained.

Michaels almost swore again, but remembering the Bristeeze strip and it’s tendency to rip at the slightest movement, he changed his curse into an angry grunt instead.

His Numbskull had broken again, and was now stuck permanently on the discussion channel, just like the other forty times it had broken down since he’d had it installed last Easter.

Michaels twitched his nose. The volume of the discussion on lint rose to an almost deafening pitch, drowning out Marilyn as she began her sales pitch for the third time. The voices of the academics boomed inside his head and made the back of his skull reverberate like the skin of a drum. The noise was painful and unintelligible and as the accused man shouted his opinion back at the angry woman, his voice sounded like a drunken whale blowing down a tuba. Michaels smiled inwardly. At least he couldn’t hear Marilyn anymore.

He grabbed a towel from the ring by the sink and rubbed it vigorously over his jaw and beneath his nose. At once the Bristeeze strip began to dissolve into the towel.

When he’d finished he felt his jaw with his finger-tips, carefully checking for left-over stubble. Finding none he replaced the towel and stomped out of the bathroom.

Ava and Marilyn followed and sop did the discussion panel.

Michaels sighed; it was going to be just like every other gulching day in this gulching awful city. But what could he do about it? It was a case of having to carry on as always. He either carried on as best he could or gave in. And if he gave in … well, all that would be left for him then, would be a long drop out of the nearest window.

He got dressed quickly trying not to think of the long drop to the pavement outside.

First he slid on a fresh pair of ice-skuds (he winced as the cold bit into his groin); next he pulled on his thermies.

He sat on his bed and adjusted the dials at his hip so that the thermies were just the right temperature to counteract the numbing effect between his legs (people had been killed by not getting the balance right goddammit!).

Lastly he put on his yellow Council overalls and cap. Then, all dressed for the busy day ahead, he dashed past his wife’s bedroom grunting a ‘good morning’ at the woodwork, and finally out the front door.

*

A glaring, atom-bomb light blasted through the narrow channels of the city. It was a cold light followed by an even colder wind which howled and screeched round the sharp edges of the surrounding high-rise blocks. All at once, a cloud passed uncovering a shaft of light as it went. The beam smacked against the windows of an office block, making them light up like a score-board. Below, crowds of office-workers and shoppers stood out against the light like fists of burnt matches.

Four hours later, Michaels stopped pushing the handle of his schloop and looked about him. He leaned on his schloop and watched the indifferent crowds go by.

Men and women blithely chatted to each other or to the phantom people at the other end of their seelies. On the whole they seemed happy and bright like the day, nurses turned up, smiling and twice as cold as the wind that screeched past them.

Not one of the crowd noticed the crimson pool which lay at Michael’s feet or the ragged island at its centre.

Michaels sighed and switched his schloop back on, blankly watching as it began to efficiently suck up the red liquid. He didn’t blame the crowd. He was too used to ignoring such sights himself, and yet at the same time he hated his own indifference. He should have been screaming, throwing-up, grabbing some passer-by to come and look, because it wasn’t just a spillage he was cleaning up; the pool was blood and the island in the middle was the corpse of some poor soul who had lost his battle with the city.

It was a tragedy for someone, but for the passers by, it was just something to pass by, and for Michaels even though he hated the fact, it was all just part of the day’s routine.

Michaels frowned as he worked. Still, at least he wasn’t completely dead inside like the rest of the crowd. Something still bothered him. For instance, this was the sixth Leaper of the morning. When he had started the job five years ago however, besides other deaths they had to schloop, there had only been four, maybe five Leapers a week. Nowadays there seemed to be nothing but Leapers.

Homicides and pedestrian-deaths were almost nil, but the quota of Leapers had risen to ten maybe even fifteen a day, and it didn’t take his master’s degree in psychology to tell him that there was something substantially wrong about that figure.

Michaels switched off the schloop. His thoughts had begun to bother him. He decided to see what his co-worker Valerie thought of the situation.

Valerie was sitting on the chemolley alternating between scribbling furiously in her notebook and ponderously nibbling her pen. As she wrote or thought, she swung her feet, making the carboys of acid and cleaning fluid that filled the trolley, sway and clink in time to the rhythm of her legs.

Valerie was a good six inches taller than Michaels, with shoulders like a cliff and arms like bags full of bowling balls. Concentric circles of steel pins studded her bald scalp, and every time she began scribbling in her notebook, zigzags of blue electricity crackled around the pins indicating how hard she was concentrating.

She was writing poetry again and would probably be peevish if he interrupted. But even though he knew how much it would bother Val, the question welled up in Michael’s throat like bile. He couldn’t hold it back any longer, he just had to ask. So he did.

“Here, Val, you think there’s something’s weird about all these Leapers?? Like there’s a connection somehow between all these masses of new Leapers and something new? Like it could be the Whipping Boys. I mean all of a sudden they’re everywhere and all these extra people are jumping … I mean what do you think?”

As he finished, Michaels silently cursed himself. What a lot of incoherent schloop.

The electricity crackling between Val’s pins changed to red. She was annoyed.

She closed her notebook with a snap and jumped down from the chemolley. The carboys jiggled and clinked more vigorously whilst the brooms and schloops rattled in their tin bucket like bones.

“You’re just paranoid Mike. We may not like them, but the Whipping Boys have made a real improvement around here.” She pocketed the notebook and began to unroll the superschloop.

“Remember all the homicides? Husbands killing wives; wives killing husbands; children killing their parents; babies killing the baby-sitter? Remember all the pent-up frustration; the normal rage of living in a big city? The rage you get from scurrying everywhere like an ant and being treated as having no more significance than one?

“Believe you me, if the Whipping Boys are evil; they’re a necessary evil in a city like this.”

She sounded like someone on the discussion channel. Michaels eyed her suspiciously. “Are you on a commission or something?” he asked half-joking.

Val laughed and grabbed the superschloop of its rack. Next she positioned it over the Leaper’s corpse. She went back to the chemolley and turned on the power. The Leaper disappeared into the superschloop with a smack of compressed air. There was thud as the body dropped into the bin.

“Just don’t see the problem; that’s all.”

Michaels stared at her in disbelief. “Not see the problem? Not see the problem? But it’s exponential, the growth in suicides and the growth in sales of the Whipping Boys! I looked it up on the Eye. And you know what I think; I think people are being damaged by them.

“Nature’s way,” Valerie countered enigmatically. “That’s what it’s really all about.”

Michaels didn’t understand and said so.

“Look you know as well as I do that life is all about the survival of the fittest; and I don’t just mean the best runner or the best at lifting weights, or even the best looking. I mean the people who are best fitted to survive; the best equipped either mentally or physically or both.

“Nature selects those that are equipped and they prosper. They reproduce, breeding more like themselves until a new set of circumstances comes along making their life skills redundant and requiring a new kind of people who are better equipped to take on the new challenges. As for the rest who don’t make the grade; nature eradicates them. And all this, all these Leapers are part of that cycle of nature.”

Val smiled radiantly at her workmate. Michaels just scowled and began to wind the schloop-pipe up.

“Why is nature always a woman?” He asked grumpily.

“Because women are stronger mentally. And to make those kinds of choices requires the utmost mental detachment and strength, don’t you think.”

Michaels didn’t know what to think. “But that still doesn’t explain why these Leapers and every other Leaper for that matter is part of nature’s great, horrible plan.”

Val began to roll a syntharette whilst Michaels switched off the schloop. She gazed contemplatively at the grey, artificial shreds of syncco as she packed them tightly into the syntharette paper. When she had finished, she licked the skin on one edge and sealed it with her large, coarse fingers. Then replacing her syncco pouch in the top pocket of her overall, she felt ready to speak

“All these Leapers are obviously unequipped to cope with the demands of modern life. They’re probably the types of people still longing for the simpler, homespun days of the jet-boot, free love and the African Economic Union. In other words, bigots or feebs who still think the 360˚ jet-spin was the height of cultural development.

“Everyone knows that the Leapers are best left to get on with it. Just ask yourself: why isn’t the Council doing anything about it? Because they know, like everybody else, that these people can’t and shouldn’t be saved.

“Trust me, it’s not pleasant, but it is better in the long run. The planet needs the room.” And that it seemed, was the end of her lecture.

Michaels remained unconvinced.

Val laughed again. “Oh Mike you’re so lovably paranoid. You know what I think: conspiracy theories are for people who’ve lost their faith in God. They provide a reassuring sense that someone somewhere understands all this mess.”

Michael’s eyes widened in horror as this new and chilling idea occurred to him. “You think it’s a conspiracy? Like somehow the manufacturers are in on it?”

But Val went on laughing as she climbed back onto the chemolley. She opened her notebook and began writing again, leaving Michaels alone with his theories. He climbed into the driving seat and fired up the chemolley’s engine and as the vehicle whined away, Michaels had the awful feeling of being alone.

He looked at the crowds of people rushing in and out of the square, trying somehow to reassure himself. But it was no use. They might as well be a million miles away. He was like the body of the Leaper, stranded in the middle of a pool of blood whilst all around the edges, crowds walked and talked indifferent to the horror that was creeping up on them. Talking to Val, to anyone for that matter, was like shouting across that bloody lake and hearing your words whisked away by the wind and the uncrossable distance.

“Perhaps you should get a Whipping Boy,” laughed Val over the electrical whine of the engines. “Then maybe you’d see for yourself how good they make you feel. I got one last week. Haven’t felt this good in years.”

*

It was a week before Michael’s resolve broke. A week of Marilyn and Ava; a week of pushing and shoving passed the crowd; a week of being baked on public transport and being frozen out on the concrete plazas; a week of Leapers rotting at the centre of their blood lakes; a week of broken numbskull and Val’s newfound happiness; a typical week in his life more or less. But there is always one routine week that can be one week too many; and so, one evening he decided had had enough and standing there facing the open window and the curtains flapping in the breeze, he knew that he either had to jump or make a call….

The next evening, when the doorbell rang, Michaels found to his surprise that he was trembling like a leaf. It was almost as if he had arranged a sly visit form a lover whilst his wife was away: he had had four glasses of neat vodka already; had tidied the living-room twice; and changed in and out of his newest clothes at least a half-a-dozen times. Then the doorbell rang and Michaels found himself in a daze, opening the door with numb, rubbery fingers.

A scrawny middle-aged man in yellow overalls stood on the threshold, a golf-bag hung over his right shoulder. In his left hand he carried what looked like a suitcase made out of human skin.

The next evening, when the doorbell rang, Michaels found to his surprise that he was trembling like a leaf. It was almost as if he had arranged a sly visit form a lover whilst his wife was away: he had had four glasses of neat vodka already; had tidied the living-room twice; and changed in and out of his newest clothes at least a half-a-dozen times. Then the doorbell rang and Michaels found himself in a daze, opening the door with numb, rubbery fingers.

A scrawny middle-aged man in yellow overalls stood on the threshold, a golf-bag hung over his right shoulder. In his left hand he carried what looked like a suitcase made out of human skin.

“The name’s Grainger, I’m with WB Enterprises.” Wheezed the man in overalls. “I understand you gave one of our operators a call this afternoon?” The man spoke in a monotone as if he had grown bored of reciting the company script and wasn’t afraid to show it. As he spoke he withdrew an ID card from his top pocket and thrust it under Michaels’ nose.

Michaels looked the man over. He was wearing yellow overalls, the same kind which every employee of the local council (including Val and himself) were forced to wear. And with a vague feeling of horror barging through all the other vague feelings of horror within him, Michaels realised that like himself, the man was a Council employee, which of course meant that WB Enterprises was owned by the government….

“I understand you gave one of our operators a call this afternoon?” The man repeated his sentence, his monotone edged by irritation like an experienced actor feeding an amateur his line.

Michaels confirmed that he had, and guiltily ushered the man into the living room. He was too nervous to make small-talk, or else he might have asked about the golf clubs or the skin covered suitcase. As it was the man – Grainger was it? - didn’t seem to want to enlighten him. Instead, Grainger went about his job with the air of a man thoroughly bored with his routine but determined to be efficient nonetheless. He propped the golf bag neatly against the nearest wall and then laid the suitcase in the middle of the carpet. Then, with his back to Michaels, so that he was completely blocking his view, Grainger began to briskly set about putting the contents of the suitcase into operation.

There soon followed a lot of tapping, clicking, squeaking, rasping, pinging and rattling.

Michaels hovered nervously at the fringes of the room, half heartedly trying to peer over Grainger’s shoulders.

“Is the Whipping Boy in that?” He asked stupidly.

Grainger just grunted noncommittally.

After a final loud pop it was over.

Now a Whipping Boy stood in the centre of the room. Of the skin covered suitcase there was no sign. Michaels stared at the Whipping Boy, a sickly, vodka-tinged feeling growing in his stomach.

The Whipping Boy seemed quite ordinary at first; like an old-fashioned shop-window dummy with unnervingly realistic-looking skin and eyes. Also, like a window dummy, it was hairless and androgynous. Apart from the eyes and skin the only other thing that set it apart from a mannequin was that it lacked any visible joints; where the arms and legs met the torso there was only smooth, simulated skin, just as with a real person.

As Michaels approached the Whipping Boy he noticed that a faint buzzing came from its chest; meanwhile Grainger stood behind the Whipping Boy, making a few last-minute adjustments within a concealed recess on the object’s back. Then he stepped round to the front and tapped the dummy on the chest. Two skin coloured flaps sprung open and a panel covered in dials and digital displays, smoothly slid out.

“Your manual’s all in the system.” Grainger explained flatly. “You can access it through the keyboard here or through a vocal command of your choosing. At the moment the default is set at ‘help’ but you can programme whatever keyword you like through the manual.

“Settings and functions are here.” He pointed at various dials displays on the panel. “Power and fault-locator here; template control and balance here.”

“Any questions so far?”

Michaels had thousands of questions, but instead of asking any he just croaked a feeble ‘no’.

“Ok, now for a brief introduction:

“First thing you’ve got remember is that the WB 098c is your slave. It’ll take on whatever appearance and characteristic you desire (the word desire sounded strange delivered in a heavy monotone). You can transmit your desires via the keyboard or by a spoken command or even in some cases imputed via an optical scan, say from a family photograph. You can also choose from a range of ethnic, demographic or gender-types, or from a series of preset templates.

“Also within your choice of template you can set different behaviour levels currently ranging from craven to berserk. The choice, quality and level of violence you inflict on the Whipping Boy is of course entirely left to your discretion or indeed your lack of it. Is there anything I haven’t explained clearly or that you do not understand?”

Grainger asked his question with a mixture of religious and judicial severity, making him sound like a priest addressing a dubious couple at a wedding service.

Once again, Michaels was silent.

“Ok, now for the demo. If you’d clear the way please.”

Michaels stepped back to give Grainger some room. The WB man tapped the dials and keys on the Whipping Boy’s control panel. With a fluid movement, he panel slid fluidly back inside its chest cavity and then the flaps clicked shut. Once again the object’s chest was smooth and seamless.

But not for long.

The object’s buzzing rose in pitch and intensity until it made Michaels’ teeth ache. Suddenly the object’s skin began to bulge and ripple all over, extruding strange tumours and nodules of different colours. Slowly the coloured areas began to merge, blending together like congealed paint.

After a few more minutes the blending and the buzzing stopped, and instead of the faceless Whipping Boy, a short, balding man in a business scoot stood in the middle of the room. He had a bulbous, drinker’s nose and blood-shot eyes staring sightlessly ahead. Like a ragged bird’s nest, a fringe of black hair circled the man’s bald skull.

Grainger seemed satisfied. He gave the command ‘start’, and the Whipping Boy shivered into life.

“Don’t hurt me please!" The man squealed, “I’ll do whatever you want. I’m sorry for breathing I really am, just don’t hurt me – puh – uh – uh – leeese!” The man began to sob, falling to his knees with a gesture of supplication. Still on his knees, he began to shuffle toward Grainger.

With a very workmanlike air, Grainger went over to the golf bag which was still propped against the wall and he carefully studied the variety of clubs on offer.

Meanwhile the balding man was gaining on him, still sobbing and pleading as he shuffled across the floor on his knees. He came to Grainger’s feet and began to tug at his overall trousers.

“Please, master, king, your honour – I won’t do it again. I’m just a worm, a dirty, disgusting worm that deserves to crawl in the dirt …”

Grainger ignored him. Instead he selected a driver from amongst the clubs. He gave it an experimental swing, flexing and tightening his fingers to get a better grip.

“…I’ll lick your boots if you want, it’s all I’m good for …” the man’s whining was growing with sickening intensity.

Wham!

Grainger swung round and brought the club down squarely on the man’s bald skull. Then again …

And-again-and-again!

The man collapsed, falling onto his face. Unable to move, he screamed into the carpet, sounding like a pig in the slaughter-house. Grainger dealt blow after blow on the man’s back and legs; his hands; his neck and of course on his naked skull.

Michaels stared in horror. Each blow fell with a sickening, wet thud that he could feel in his stomach. Suddenly he felt sick and leaving Grainger still chopping away like a madman, he ran to the bathroom.

Vomit burnt his throat and he was suddenly uncontrollably sick into the toilet.

Meanwhile the screams and pleas of the little man mingled with the chopping and thud of Grainger’s club.

Michael’s wiped his mouth with a piece of toilet-roll and stared groggily at himself in the bathroom mirror. ‘Is there no end to it?’ he wondered.

After a few minutes he felt better and so staggered back to the living room. Grainger had stopped. He was standing over the little man’s body, the bent and useless club hanging limply in one hand, whilst with the other he wiped perspiration from his forehead. He panted like a marathon runner, and when he saw Michaels return he gave him a wolfish almost sexual leer of satisfaction.

“Stomach give you the old heave-ho?” Grainger panted. “Don’t worry, gets most people like that the first time. You’ll soon get used to it.”

The little man lay spread-eagled on the floor, a silent lump of torn clothing. Strangely enough after such a terrible beating there was not a trace of blood. The man’s bald skull was still as smooth and unscarred as before. Michaels stared in disbelief.

“Probably wondering about the blood?”

Michael looked up. Grainger was smiling kindly at him now. After the vicious beating he seemed a changed man.

“The old model; the 098a, that used to have blood, gouts of it; really nasty. People just couldn’t handle it, too realistic they said. Drove a few of them mad, with the guilt of it you know. So all the new models come as you see: no blood. Bit of a shame if you ask me. The old 098a used to pour a real nice colour of red; a real fine claret, just like they used to call blood in the old days; in the gangs you know.”

Michaels felt a hot flush crawl up his back and over into his cheeks. The man was a sadist; an ex-gangster or something, and Michaels suddenly felt very uncomfortable sharing the same room with him.

“Go on then, you have a try” urged Grainger. “Mind if I smoke?”

Michaels said he didn’t and watched as Grainger lit his syntharette. The luxurious suck he gave it looked positively post-coital.

“Go on, do you the world of good. Make a new man of you!” Grainger urged again. He picked another club, a five wood, from the golf-bag and held it out for Michaels to take. As Michaels took it, his arms felt limp and the club impossibly heavy.

“Template one refresh! Subject, owner, Michaels, Mike!” Grainger barked, making Michaels jump with surprise.

All at once the bald little man came to life. Clambering to his knees, he launched himself at Michaels with a flurry of tears.

“Oh please don’t hurt me,” the little man snivelled, “I’m just a useless worm …”

His fingers clawed frenziedly at Michaels socks, digging deeply into the flesh of his ankles. Michaels gave a surprised gasp of pain. The little man was surprisingly strong.

Michaels tried to take aim on the little man’s bald crown, but the heavy club lolled uselessly in his weak fingers. Somehow the little man’s pleas seemed to suck the vitality out of him. He knew he was looking at a machine, and yet some instinct for compassion seemed to be reacting to the sobs and wails that assaulted his ears.

He pulled himself free from the little man and lowered the five wood. It was no good, he couldn’t bring himself to hit a small, defenceless man for the fun of it.

Grainger cocked his head and squinted at Michaels through a haze of syntharette smoke. “This one doesn’t do it for you ay?” He gave the syntharette another drag and stared contemplatively up at the ceiling. “Never mind. We’ll soon fix that. Let’s try another template shall we.”

Grainger ordered the Whipping Boy to stop. Immediately it sprang to its feet and stood staring blank-eyed at nothing in-particular. Grainger repeated the programming stage and in no time the Whipping Boy was reconfigured.

Now a completely different man stood before them. A few inches taller than Michaels, the man was thickset and brawny, with yellow, highlighted hair. He boasted a pair of protuberant eyes, fleshy lips; as well as two red, windblown cheeks. He was dressed in the most up-to-date satin knickerbockers and silver stockings. A tweed cravat decorated his throat whilst his broad chest was covered by an immaculate south-seas cotton shirt and smart cricket-club blazer.

Grainger ordered him to begin.

Almost at once the man assumed a bold, swaggering attitude. He strutted around the flat with a swinging, ape-like gait. He looked the apartment over with a sneer of distain, and finding it not to his taste, turned to its owner to tell him what he thought of it.

“What a dump!” he sneered, his voice dribbling out of his nose with a strange, mid-Atlantic drawl. He loomed over Michaels, sneering into his surprised face.

“What an anal-cavity of a place! Only a snivelling little turd like you could stick up the flu of this excrement covered swamp!”

Michaels automatically took a step backwards to escape the man’s contempt, but the newly configured Whipping Boy followed.

He continued to abuse his owner, laughing as he went.

“You gob of snot! You pustulent boil on the backside of humanity! How dare you stand in front of me! Get down on your knees and lick my shoes! That’s all you’re fit for anyway, you piece of festering offal!”

Grainger, noticing that Michaels was more surprised than angry, barked out another command: “Order: set intensity, level three!”

The blonde swaggerer began to add blows to his list of insults. With every new insult, he gave Michaels a slap about the head. His face turned red and spittle flew from his lips as he screamed down into Michaels’ face.

Grainger stood behind his customer, urging him on. “Go on my son, hit him! Go on give it to him! Smack the arrogant bastard right in the mush!”

Michaels felt Grainger’s breath hot and wet on his neck. He felt invaded and assaulted as Grainger’s large, red fingers gripped his arm, forcing him to stand fast. Meanwhile the blond man kept taunting him, insulting his manhood, insulting his very existence. And now Michaels felt trapped between the two unpleasant men.

Suddenly like a knife, a feeling of panic and rage stabbed through him, flying from his guts into his arms. All at once, he panic and rage jerked him into action, and unable to hold himself back any longer, he swung the club.

Thwukk! The five wood connected with the side of the man’s head. He went down, folding up like a paper lantern.

Thwukk! Michaels hit him again …

And-again-and-again!

The first blow had jarred through Michael’s arm, numbing his fingers. But as well as this there had been a sudden release, a gushing, loosening feeling in his shoulders and groin. Each blow he dealt shuddered through him, dislodging a thick and encrusted feeling of despair and self-disgust. He hit and hit and hit, feeling himself growing strong; growing clean; growing free…

“That’ll do chum, you’ll do yourself a mischief if you carry on.”

Michaels came to a juddering halt. He was out of breath and weak at the knees. He dropped the club and sank into the nearest chair. The five wood was bent out of shape, and as Grainger picked it up, Michaels noticed that the once smooth head of the club was chipped and splintered.

“Of course you can’t harm the WB. Impervious to everything but a volcano they are; but I have known people who’ve done themselves a bit of harm. You know, breaking the odd bone; rupturing the odd ligament; that sort of thing. ‘Course even though the go laughing all the way to the hospital; I wouldn’t advise it.”

Grainger placed the damaged golf clubs in his bag and hefted the lot over one shoulder.

Michaels looked down at the man he had murdered. He lay face down, his limbs splayed at impossible angles. His fashionable clothes were shredded and his arms and legs seemed to sag as if their bones had been turned to powder. Once again there was not a trace of blood.

“You look all-in mate!” Grainger said kindly. “ I should have a nice nap if I were you. Do you the power of good. When you wake up you’ll be a new man. Now if you’d just sign here I’ll be on my way.”

Grainger produced a small dipad from his golf bag and passed it over to his client. Michaels held the stylus between trembling fingers and did his best to sign his name, then he pricked his thumb on the pin and pressed a bloody fingerprint onto the pad’s reader.

As Michaels signed, Grainger reconfigured the Whipping Boy to neutral. Again it stood to attention gazing at nothing with its altogether too realistic eyes.

Michaels handed the dipad back and Grainger dropped it into his bag with an air of satisfaction.

“Any problems, don’t hesitate to call; not that there will be any but you know …

“Any thing else I can help you with before I go?”

Michaels voice emerged croakily from between parched lips. “How does it work? I mean, does it feel anything? Does it know what we do to it?”

Grainger laughed kindly. He sounded just like a father whose child has asked him what the moon was made of.

“Don’t stress yourself. The Whipping Boy is just a machine with no more feelings than your ordinary toaster or your basic berflinger.”

“But it seems so – so real. Close up I could see its skin, it had pores and veins and …”

“Bless you, all synthetic.” Grainger chuckled.

“But they said in the papers that Whipping Boys have some sort of an ‘organic’ element …?”

“A few artificially grown brain-cells is all. Every senipliance has them these days. Your toaster or your berflinger couldn’t work without them. It just helps them react intelligently, it doesn’t mean they are intelligent; and even if they can think; it don’t mean they can feel. So forget about it. Don’t give it another thought.”

Michaels passed a weary hand over his eyes. Closing his lids he began to massage them. He felt weary beyond belief.

“But nobody knows for sure?” He persisted. “About them being able to think I mean. Nobody’s ever actually tried to find out?”

Grainger sighed. Now he was a father whose child’s questions were stopping him from enjoying the kedball on TV.

“Believe you me, I’ve been working with these buggers for the past five years and I’ve never known one yet that had what you or I’d call thoughts or feelings.”

Michaels opened his eyes and gave the older man a long, searching look. Grainger’s face was friendly and plausible, he was telling the truth, it was obvious and yet …

Michaels studied him carefully for what seemed an age, but even then he still couldn’t be sure. Grainger was a professional. He worked for the Council. The Council told him what to say. How could you trust anyone in his position?

Suspicion and paranoia welled up within him. He wanted to scream at Grainger to take his Whipping Boy and get the hell out of his flat; but then he remembered how good he had felt for a moment, how loose and free …

Grainger gave him a wink, and as he got up to open the door, Grainger strolled jauntily out of the flat, whistling and swinging his golf bag behind him.

Later that evening as Sallymand, Michaels’ wife carefully scrutinised the new appliance, Michaels tried to reassure her about its safety. He trotted out all Grainger’s comforting words, but somehow as he nervously explained the Whipping Boy’s functions, his words sounded hollow and false.

When he’s finished he looked hopefully at his wife.

“Well don’t come crying to me if it kicks your head in.” was all she managed to say, before stomping back into her room and slamming the door behind her.

Michaels breathed a sigh of relief. At least she hadn’t said he had to get rid of it.

*

The next few weeks floated by like feathers on a summer breeze. Marilyn and Ava returned with yet another gadget to sell and he bought it straight away, not minding a jot that he was being pressured into it. People fell from windows; his numbskull jammed on the cleaning channel; his wife pestered him about the amount he was eating; his neighbour, Cobbit, played loud games of quadro at three in the morning; itchy new uniforms were issued at work; new corporation regulations shortening lunch-breaks came into force; the city roared and screamed around him; and yet through it all Michaels walked serenely like an ancient profit walking amongst the heathen. And of course it was all thanks to the Whipping Boy.

For three, maybe four hours every evening and for half an hour after breakfast, Michaels beat hell out of the Whipping Boy. At first he had used his bare fists, pummelling whichever template took his fancy. But as the days wore on and he became more expert in the use of the appliance, a good part of his fun began to be derived from the new and unusual punishments he could dream up: boiling water and oil; the arms and legs of old furniture that should have been sent to the council tip; broken bottles; bricks; a whole drawer-full of cutlery; a laser carving knife that had been a wedding-present from his mother in law; all were employed in the punishment of the Whipping Boy.

Michaels' personal favourite however was his old cricket-bat. He had hammered a number of old nails in the top, and had wrapped the main blade of the bat in barbed-wire, and it was this with which he would happily beat up and murder the Whipping Boy night after night.

And there were the different settings to play with: first he tried out the other preset templates. As well as the cringing little man and the abusive, trendy man there was also the overbearing boss; the pushy shopper; the party bore; the know-it-all taxi-driver; the selfish princess; the heartbreaker; the toady; and finally the bearded day-time TV quiz show host.

When he had exhausted all of those, he began to blend and mix new templates of his own; the bigot; the politically correct MP; the beautiful mother; the ugly mugger; all went down screaming beneath his spiked cricket-bat; and there was more. He added Valerie and his boss, Mrs Gibbon, to his list of victims; Cobbit, his offensive neighbour who smelt and routinely shouted abuse whenever he went round to complain about the noise of his quadro; but best and most frequently visited of all was Sallymand.

It went on and on, minutes and hours of violence growing to a whole evening crushing and exterminating the wrongs and cruelties that had been done to him. And in the privacy of his flat, all the people who had put him down; all the bores, idiots and bullies who had trodden on him or ignored him, or kicked him until he had been forced to crawl into the hole his life had become; all of them fell like ninepins.

*

One evening, as usual, Michaels came home from work feeling tired and dispirited. He fetched his tea from the berflinger and ate in silence whilst Sallymand stood over him listing his deficiencies in her shrill voice. When he’d finished and Sallymand had stomped off to her room to play v-ludo with her gaming group, there was a visit from Cobbit, who had come to complain about the smell of his cooking. Then, after the shouting and swearing was over, Michaels finally had the evening to himself.

He marched purposefully into the living room, grinning and rolling up his sleeves. Then he carefully removed the cricket bat from its cupboard, spat on his hands for extra grip, and finally went to work, mutilating the templates of Cobbit and Sallymand…

…..

….. Michaels giggled as his wife screamed and then he hit her and hit her until, dripping with sweat and gasping for breath, he jumped off her prone corpse and looked up at the clock. It was two in the morning. The automatic heating and light had shut off, leaving the room chilly and dark. The customary noises of the flat had gone too; no buzzing or humming of the flat’s systems; no muffled rattle and roar of his wife’s games; nothing in fact that spoke of life as he knew it; orderly, routine and secure.

Michaels switched off the Whipping Boy and stowed his cricket-bat in the sideboard. The room was in complete disarray. Torn chair-cushions and ripped books littered the floor; the extro-skull lay face-down buzzing and squeaking as if broken; even the pictures on the wall were hanging askew. Michaels stared stupidly at everything and shivered. He felt cold and dirty, and as he hastily tidied the room he was conscious of his sweat-soaked clothing sticking to his body.

Eventually, with everything as neat as he could make it, he hobbled back to his room. He quickly undressed in the dark and scrambled into his pyjamas with furtive and uncoordinated movements, almost as if he expected to be discovered at any moment. But he wasn’t, and as he tumbled wearily into bed he breathed a sigh of relief.

The relief didn’t last long.

In the dark his mind came to life. His whole body may have been wracked with the exhaustion and pain of overexertion, but his brain was alive and shivering with wonder.

He had started beating up the Whipping Boy just after tea - about half past seven - and had come to his senses at two in the morning; which meant he had been attacking it for over six-and-a-half hours.

Six-and-a-half hours!

He struggled to believe it – he had been violently active for over six hours and yet could remember nothing about it, almost as if the hours had passed like seconds! But what had happened in all that time?

The state of the room and his aching body testified to the gruelling torture he’d inflicted on the Whipping Boy, but what had gone on around him? Had his wife seen him? Had she come in during the early hours wondering what all the noise was about, only to find her husband beating up an effigy of her with a cricket bat wrapped in barbed wire? If so why hadn’t she done anything about it?

No, he reasoned, Sallymand couldn’t have discovered him. The mere fact that he was still alive proved that. So he had nothing to worry about right …?

Michaels lay in bed staring up at the black ceiling as it floated in a black sea of shadow. Although he was positive his wife hadn’t caught him, there was now something far more worrying to keep him awake: the fact that he had absolutely no recollection of the six-and-a-half hours he was with the Whipping Boy.

Was he be going mad? Had something finally unhinged him?

He had read about such things; people in a state of deep psychosis blacking out when they committed some terrible act of violence. Wasn’t it called disassociative fugue or something (he could just about remember the condition from his masters)? A state where the conscious-self disassociates itself from the action it abhors, effectively shutting down whilst the subconscious gets on with it. He had heard of it happening mainly to people who had been constantly abused. In such cases the victim not only shut themselves off from their actions but also created a dual personality to hide behind. All the same, from what he could remember, it wasn’t unheard of for someone doing violence to develop such a psychosis; especially if it was a violence that they had secretly come to loathe …

Michael turned over and buried his face in the pillow. He stifled a groan of agony and clenched his eyes tight. It was too much for his tired brain to take. He couldn’t be going insane could he? The Whipping Boy had relieved him of all the stresses and strains that might send a man mad; or so he’d thought until tonight …

His thoughts scurried back and forth across the line of hope and despair until finally, somewhere around five in the morning he dropped into a shallow and fitful sleep.

The next morning, as he sat at the kitchen table, pale, shaky and red-eyed, Michaels made a decision not to risk his wife’s template again. After all he might not be so lucky next time. If he blacked out again the chances were high that his wife would walk in on him and that would be that. But the fate he would suffer at his wife’s hands was nothing compared to the effect his wife’s template had obviously had on him; for he was sure that it was Sallymand’s template more than any other that had driven him over the edge. And if that was the case, and he could no longer trust himself, what would come next? Would he end up slaughtering the real Sallymand by mistake?

Over the following weeks, despite the temptation otherwise, Michaels kept firmly to his resolve. Instead of configuring Sallymand, he revisited the old, tried and tested templates that had first amused him, but it just wasn’t the same. Now he found that he only had half his mind on his nightly recreation, whilst the rest of his attention was occupied in studying his own movements, just in case something betrayed the madness he feared was slowly creeping over him.

The weeks passed without any more episodes but Michaels wasn’t reassured. Something was still nagging away at the back of his mind.

And then it came to him one afternoon at work.

Michaels stood in the middle of a small concrete quadrangle formed by four vertiginous block of flats. At the base of each block lay the corpse of a Leaper, ragged and vile in the middle of its customary pool of blood. The bodies formed the sides of an uneven, unmoving square.

“My guess is a suicide pact.” Val said matter-of-factly as she unscrewed the cap on a carboy of detergent. “Some star-crossed lovers and their noble cousins, that sort of thing.”

Michaels looked from corpse to corpse, nervously chewing a fingernail. “Its getting worse isn’t it?” he whispered ominously. “We had a lot before, but now they’re appearing in the same small areas. It can’t be coincidental, can it?”

Val hefted the carboy level with the schloop’s vat. As the colourless liquid gurgled and splashed into the tin bucket, Val gave the corpses a brief glance and shrugged. When the bucket was full she replaced the carboy and dug out her notebook. In seconds she had immersed herself in her poetry again, leaving the messy job of schlooping the corpses to Michaels.

As he schlooped up body after body, Michaels mulled over his own, desperate situation; and it was then that the thought finally struck him: what if it wasn’t as Val had claimed all those months ago, a mixture of despair and the inability to cope that was creating hoardes of Leapers? What if it was something related to the growing numbers of Whipping Boys?

Michaels stopped in mid-schloop and looked up at the towers looming over him. He was suddenly conscious of how far it was to fall from those concrete and glass mountains.

It all made sense. It was just as he’d feared all those months ago, before he’d got his own Whipping Boy. Something about the appliances was making people leap to their deaths. Perhaps he had taken the first step himself, that night when he lost six-and-a-half hours of his life.

Well then, if that was the case, what if everyone owning a Whipping Boy eventually went too far, just as he had? What if everyone started experiencing blackouts? What would they make of it? Would they begin to fear they were going mad, or would they be wracked with remorse that they had gone too far? If the latter was true, wouldn’t some people see the blackouts as a kind of punishment? And in such an unbalanced state might they not finally run screaming out of the nearest window? If that really was the case then who had the ultimate responsibility? The Leaper or the person that sold them the Whipping Boy in the first place? If it were the latter then that meant that the Council …

Michaels felt sick and dizzy. Above him the towers seemed to spin and sway. He dropped the schloop and went reeling to the nearest bench. For a moment tiny pinheads of light sparkled in front of his eyes and his knees seemed to turn to rubber.

If the Council was involved, then surely it would mean that the Whipping Boys served some purpose beyond mere recreation; and then the only two intelligible thoughts that leapt around his muddled brain were the words ‘overpopulation’ and ‘cull’.

He sat down with a whoomph of expelled breath and immediately put his head between his knees. It was too much; too enormous a concept to take in. And as Val ran anxiously towards him he wondered what on Earth he was going to do.

*

Now it was dusk and a golden light was flooding into Mike Michaels flat. Outside, behind the shadowy buildings, the sky lay smooth and flat like gold foil. It was a sunset that deserved the accompaniment of trumpets, and yet, even though once he might have been moved by it, Michaels stared glassily out of the window. He felt empty and two dimensional, moved by nothing; not by sunsets or by being home; not by the warmth of his flat or the comfort of his clothes; he was a dull plastic vessel waiting only for death.

Michaels sighed a sigh that was more like a groan and moved stiffly to the centre of the room. He stared at the floor. He stared at the ceiling. He stared at the walls; almost as if he was waiting for something to happen.

And then something did.

There was the sound of muffled footsteps in the corridor outside. Then the door clicked open. The lights snapped on and a voice cried out: “What the – who the hell are you!”

Michaels stood rigid with shock, his mouth open in dumb surprise. There, in the doorway of his flat stood another Mike Michaels, identical to himself in every detail.

For a moment the two Mike Michaels’ regarded each other with horror and surprise, but then with sudden and identical timing, they both flew into a rage.

“Who the hell are you? What the hell are you doing in my house?” they shouted at each other in perfect unison. Then they rushed at each other, both seeming ready for a fight.

As they draw level Michaels suddenly realised who this impostor really was.

“A Whipping Boy!” he exclaimed in disgust, grabbing the other Mike Michaels by the lapels of his overalls. “Nothing more than a useless copy of me! You fake! You plastic parasite!”

His fury seemed to give him twice his normal strength, and before the fake Michaels could react, he had flung him to the floor and was striding purposefully towards the sideboard where he kept his torture implements.

“I’ll show you!” he screamed in fury as he ripped his equipment from the cupboard.

“That bitch! All the time I was terrified of her finding out that I’d made a template of her, and she goes and makes one of me behind my back!”

He spun round, his favourite barbed-wire cricket-bat in his hand. The fake Mike Michaels was still on the floor, shakily propping himself up on one elbow. For a moment Michaels watched with malicious glee as the facsimile struggled to get up, and then before the creature had a chance to recover, Michaels struck.

Screaming, spittle-flying from the corners of his mouth, Michaels charged at his doppelganger.

Crack!

The bat came down on the other Michaels’ skull.

Thud!

It caught him on the side of his head.

Whack-Whack-Whack!

Michaels chopped and smashed, hacked and thumped away at his copy, whilst all the time the other Michaels writhed and screamed beneath the punishing rain of blows.

Then it was over. The squealing ended abruptly and the fake Michaels lay motionless on the carpet. Michaels threw his cricket-bat down and walked out of the living room. He felt shaky and spent. He needed a drink like never before and had remembered that there was a half bottle of Grant’s Steadfast whisky on the tallboy in his room.

He staggered across the hall and into his bedroom. There on top of the chest of drawers, almost lost amongst a heap of dirty clothes, the bottle gleamed encouragingly like a piece of buried treasure. Michaels grabbed it and began to feverishly unscrew the thin metal cap. But just as he flung the cap away and began to raise the bottle to his lips, he froze. There was the sound of footsteps in the hall outside.

The footsteps moved in the direction of the living room and stopped somewhere near the doorway. There was a loud exclamation, and then the sound of footsteps unsteadily crossing the living room floor. Perhaps Sallymand had returned to see what had become of the Whipping Boy she had forgotten to reconfigure.

Bottle in hand, Michaels painfully staggered towards the living room, but when he got to the door he froze. The bottle fell from his numb fingers instantly spilling its contents onto the carpet.

There in front of him, bending over the corpse-like facsimile of himself was yet another Mike Michaels.

Michaels gave a whimper as the new Michaels got to his feet. Then the impostor gaped in amazement whilst Michaels staggered towards him, but before the newcomer could shout the question that had furiously leapt to his mouth, Michaels planted his fist there, savagely knocking the other Michaels to the floor.

“Another Whipping Boy!” Michaels screamed into the startled face of the newcomer. “Another lousy lump of plastic sent to drive me insane! Who do you belong to? Who! Who! Who!”

His question was accompanied by a staccato series of punches laid on the newcomer’s nose.

“Its Cobbit isn’t it? That bastard always hated me. I bet he’s been beating up templates of me for months the hairy – unwashed- little – shit!” He finished his sentence with a punch per word for emphasis and then stepped back as the impostor swayed and fell forward.

Michaels panted hoarsely and sank to his knees. He felt tired and weak, yet at the same time strangely triumphant.

At last he had learned the secret of the Whipping Boys.

It wasn’t what he’d first supposed after all. Whereas he’d believed that the Whipping Boys’ owners were being driven mad, it was actually the Whipping boys that had developed some kind of fugue.

In spite of the careful reassurances to the contrary, Whipping Boys were obviously able to think and feel just like the people they were designed to simulate; even to the point where stressed, humiliated, in despair, your basic Whipping Boy needed a Whipping Boy of its own.

Yes, it all made sense!

Whipping Boys could act on their own, and Michaels suddenly realised, that it was this more than self-reproach or the fear of madness, that had sent the Leapers screaming to their deaths: the fact that the Whipping Boys had suddenly and unaccountably come to life and turned on their owners.

The Leapers’ Whipping Boys had attacked them in the guises of the very people they had hoped to punish. And the fact that these victims, who should have quailed beneath their violence, had instead turned on them, had been too much.

In some ways it was lucky that the awakened Whipping Boy had attacked him rather than Cobbit or Sallymand. Instead, facing himself, there had been no confusion for Michaels. He had known who was real and who was not and had acted accordingly.

Michael’s thoughts were rapidly cut short. A groan had come from the second Whipping Boy. He was coming groggily to life, or a clever imitation of it anyway.

Michaels gave a quiet snort of amusement and began to climb to his feet. Then he chuckled and then the chuckle became a full-blown laugh of hilarity. He had had a funny idea. What if he threw this second Whipping Boy out of the window? The crew that had to schloop that plastic mess would have some story to tell all right. Perhaps it would get into the papers and perhaps then everybody would finally learn the truth about the Whipping Boys.

Michaels laughed as the second Whipping Boy struggled to raise his head, and carried on laughing as he hauled the false Michaels up by the lapels of his overalls. Michaels staggered towards the window and the flapping curtains, dragging the half-conscious body of the intruder with him.

The room was dark now; full of a blue black dusk swilling around the room like dirty flood-water. Lights were coming on in the tower blocks, and the streetlamps below were sending a faint orange cloud of light to meet the gloom of the evening. But Michaels had no time to study the peaceful scene; instead he began to manhandle the prone body of the Whipping Boy so that he was in position at the window, his head and shoulders lolling dangerously over the ledge.

Then as Michaels bent to grab hold of the Whipping Boy’s legs, the creature began to wake properly, twitching and thrashing weakly as it realised what was happening.

“No,” it cried faintly, “No, you can’t do this. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please let me go!”

Whilst the creature continued to plead, Michaels got a firm hold of its legs and heaved. In an instant the creature tumbled over the window-sill, falling with a terrible scream to the concrete path below.

Michaels didn’t look back. Instead he walked to where he’d dropped his bottle, hoping that there would at least be a mouthful left in it. He stooped painfully to retrieve the bottle and then stopped. Instead of picking it up he slowly straightened. He raised his hands to the level of his eyes and looked at them with numb curiosity.

Despite the fact that he had beaten and pummeled the second Whipping Boy with his bare hands there wasn’t so much as a scratch, bruise on them. Yet there were his hands trembling in front of him, smeared and sullied with a coating of somebody else’s blood.