Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [238]
Dee looks up from rummaging through Parris’s picture collection. She feels nauseous. It’s impossible to tell if the pictures are of real scenes, or posed, or are simply computer-generated imagery. She doesn’t particularly care. She wants to wipe them from her memory, and their originator from the world.
She still doesn’t know if she can do it, or even stand by and let Ax do it. She doesn’t know if the permissions for her lethal skills have been reset. She suspects that if they haven’t, it won’t be anything dramatic; no staying of her hand, no rooting of her feet; just some quite reasonable and natural-seeming inhibition, a distaste or disquiet that won’t let her follow it through.
‘Haven’t you done enough of that?’ she asks Ax.
Ax tugs the knife out of the wood once more. ‘I suppose so,’ he admits. He grins at her. ‘You get carried away.’
Dee takes her pistol out of her handbag, tucks it in her waistband and walks over.
‘Well I say finish it,’ she says.
‘Fine,’ says Ax.
He opens the splintered door. Inside, Parris is still hanging in his bonds. His eyes are tightly closed. Tears are running down his face, and the sticky-tape gag is slimed with the snot that the tears have brought with them and which he’s blown from his nostrils in frantic snorts.
Ax traces a line with the knife’s tip, along the man’s bare belly. Parris’s eyes open, and roll from side to side, looking at Ax and then, as if in appeal, to Dee. Blood wells along the cut. The sight of it makes Dee stop, and catch Ax’s arm.
‘No!’ she says. The images from Parris’s collection are crowded out by images from Soldier, an encyclopaedia of injury and blood: spurting, spraying, oozing, dripping. She imagines it spattering her clothes, and shudders.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s enough.’
Ax glares at her, but she outstares him. He backs off. Dee sets to work, loosening, unshackling, unbinding. She steadies Parris as he stumbles out, and lets him sink to the floor. He’s making noises through his nostrils.
‘Oh,’ says Dee. She’d forgotten that. She stoops to rip the tape from his mouth, and as it comes off she notices that Parris has come, and more than once, even with his cock bound back. Semen is drying on his thighs.
He falls forward into a kneeling posture, and looks up at her, gasping and smiling.
‘Thank you, mistress,’ he says in a low voice. ‘I deserved that, all of it, I truly did!’ He looks at her with sly hope. ‘When can you visit me again?’
Dee stares at him. She takes a few steps backward, still thinking of keeping her nice new clothes clean. She turns and walks further away, past Ax, to the top of the stairs.
‘Mistress, please…’ Parris calls after her.
‘Oh, fuck this,’ she says.
She draws the pistol from her skirt, takes aim, and blows his head off.
The shot echoes around the circular spaces of the room and the stairwell and leaves her ears ringing. She grins at Ax, who despite his instigation of the whole thing is looking at the remains of Parris, and then at her, with a shocked pallor.
‘Now I know,’ she says. ‘I do have free will.’
‘That must be very useful,’ Ax says. ‘I’m a bit of a determinist, myself.’
Dee smiles at him reassuringly as she briskly gathers up her stuff.
‘Time to go,’ she says.
Ax is pointlessly wiping the tip of his knife on a piece of drapery.
‘Shouldn’t we, you know, clean up?’ he asks. ‘Can’t you see fingerprints and stuff?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Dee says, fastening her cloak. ‘They’re all over the place. And our skin-cells. Not to mention our images on the house’s cameras.’
She looks up and smiles and waves at a tiny, hooded lens.
‘Shit,’ says Ax. ‘Can you do anything about it?’
Dee flashes him a puzzled look and starts to go downstairs.
‘Of course I can,’ she says. ‘But it’s very important that I don’t, and you know it. Come on, before somebody comes.’
Ax follows her, still reluctant.
‘Nobody’s gonna come,’ he says. ‘I don’t think Parris