From: gdg019@cch.coventry.ac.uk (Ridley McIntyre)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK [revised] (4/6)
Keywords: Rat 2.4
Organization: Fifth Column, Coventry, UK
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 08:57:58 GMT

                  	MONKEYTRICK - by Ridley McIntyre

                            4. Shock The Monkey.

The living room smells of plastic roses which invades Dex's nostrils and causes
his over-worked breathing to calm down.

 "I thought you were dead, Dex. Then it told me you were still alive. It
knew you'd come here." Her voice is sweet, carried along by the warm rose air.
It has a strange tinny quality to it that never used to be there, but it's her
voice. Her tones.

 She walks about the room with a resigned comfort, like a prisoner walks
around her cell. This room has become something she's used to, something she
wants out of but she knows her place now. And it is here. Dex reads all that
from the look in her eyes when she turns to him.

 "I'd give you a hug, Dex, but I can't touch you."

 He sits on the right arm of a black leather sofa and rubs his face. "This
is going to sound shitty, I know. I know you as Pain, but that's not your
name is it? I mean, whenever I became close to you in the dream, I..."

 She moves away from him. "You went into convulsions. It was part of the
program."

 Dex shakes his head as she takes an apple from a fruit bowl on the black 
plastic sideboard and nips a small bite from it. He looks back at the bowl 
and another has appeared to take it's place.

 "Like this one?" Dex asks finally. "I mean, that's what this is, right?
A construct of your father's living room with you in it."

 She talks through gritted teeth. "This isn't a construct, Dex. This is
*me*. Rhea has stolen my body and now I'm here."

                                ***

"So you say he'll lead us to it?"

 Sarah squirms nervously in a brown leather office chair, her face contorted
into a squint as the sun's light diffuses across the tower's windows. She nods
to her skinny superior.

 "I think of him more as bait, Mister Shelley. He'll lure Rhea to where we can 
find it," she says.

 The skinny man in the tan-brown suit takes a drag from a slender Havana cigar,
as he exhales, every swirl of the grey smoke seems to tumble through the hard
rays of light through that large window.

 "A monkeytrick," he says softly to himself. It's a business term for using 
outside agents to steal data, knowing that the agent will die at the end. 
If something goes wrong, then the company involved loses nothing. If it works, 
it gains everything. He touches a screen on the long, brown trapezoid desk and 
the screen is alive with the chubby face of his secretary. "Bring in Mister 
Hix," he says to the screen and the face fizzes to black.

 "What of the other boy? Motorhead."

 She shrugs. "Motorhead was Dex's idea. I didn't have any plans for him."

 The man in the tan-brown suit pouts and rocks back and forth slightly on his
booted heels. "I'll leave him be for now, then. Until he makes a mistake. Then
I'll hammer him down with the rest. You've done a good job, Sarah. Go back to 
Milton Keynes and do some real work."

 Mister Hix is a skinny young man in a cheap polyester suit. A man who smells
of the Outzone. She passes him on the way out and he smiles to her, showing
yellow teeth. She reckons he thinks she's another secretary.

 Alone in the Executive Elevator, she looks out over the zones she's growing
accustomed to, realising how much she hates her position. She has so much power,
but she knows so little, and that's what counts in the Secure Zone. Out there,
in the Outzone, she's something, but up in that office, she's just like Dex.
Bait. Thinking of Shelley's words. 'Leave her be for now. Until she makes a
mistake.' And that's all she is. Another monkey waiting to be tricked.

                                ***

Dex taps a beat on the back of the sofa with his fingers. "Why don't I
remember your name?"

 "You don't want to," she answers. Then she takes another small bite from
the apple. "Oh, it's not your fault. Your memory brought me into the program, 
and I shouldn't have been there. So they erased me. I asked Rhea while it was
destroying me."

 She walks over with silent footsteps. "Don't you remember? You saved my
life once before. I'm Kayjay."

                                ***

Sarah dreams of the London Outzone. Her visions of the place are romanticised,
a soft-focus world of crying babies and neo-medievalism. Better still, this is
the place that created Dex and Motorhead. Now it's her ideas that have destroyed
the former, and her ways that will ultimately destroy the latter.

 She dreams of Motorhead's ignorance. She knows he's a fast and sharp kid, who,
if he were brought up in the right place - the Secure Zone - he would be higher
than she is by now.

 She dreams of monkeys and tigers. Monkeys in the trees, laughing and chattering
and living a simple existence. And down on the jungle floor, the tigers wait
so patiently for them to fall. 

                                ***

The monkey's days are finally over.

 "You have to go, Dex. You weren't meant to be here."

 "But I can't go back until I know what happened."

 She points a slender finger at Dex's chest. "You're dying up there. The witch-
hole's got you."

 "Not me... you. What happened with you and Rhea?"

 "Rhea used me. It copied me into the system and unloaded itself into my brain.
Right now, it's in an intensive care ward in the Smallpox Hospital, using my
body to escape. It just broke free of it's position, found me attached to all
those ECG trodes and got started. But there's one thing he did first."

 "What?"

 "It told me the real reason why Vijayanta want it so badly."

                                ***

Back in Motorhead's living room, the convulsions finally stop. The screen
of the Fednet PC sprays white noise static into the room. Motorhead, who had
spent the best part of three minutes trying to keep the Boy from damaging
himself too much or swallowing his tongue or drowning in his own vomit, finally
gives up.

 A pounding thunder in his skull, he searches the flat for some painkillers or
anything, but he is fresh out of luck and drugs. Deciding he needs some air,
he grabs his baseball jacket and runs out of the flat.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1993 BY RIDLEY MCINTYRE
-- 
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