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The books she sought high and low were about the 20th century, that sink of degradation and physical excess.

  Best of all, she loved books about inner-city fun running.

  In the depths of the empty municipal sewers, during darkest night, aided only by the light from her Watchplate tuned to an empty channel, she pounded out the klicks in her handmade track shoes, until inhumanly shaped muscles swelled in her legs.

  Next of all she loved books about working out with weights.

  Staring with a swollen heart at flat photographs of Bev Francis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in their heyday, she hack-squatted and bench-pressed, chest-flyed and lat-extended, leg-lifted and bicep-curled. What this did to her already distorted atavistic frame can only be left to the imagination, because I really couldn’t stand the aggravation.

  How did the robot Bugs know what Shan-yun had been up to? She’d taken every precaution. The whole thing had been planned out in exquisite detail for nearly fifteen months. She’d gone over every single detail of the operation a dozen times, from the initial routine of getting a job in Pacific Data Central to the final step of smuggling her home-plaited Striped Hole into the terminal terminal.

  She hadn’t been able to find a flaw in the plan but obviously there’d been a flaw you could drive a Bug through.

  The robot cop rolled up beside Shan-yun just as she was entering the Personal Information Bubble Banks, as she had every right to do, being assistant trainee data slibber.

  She watched it coming at her from the corner of her slitted, tilted, jade-glowing eyes and kept walking.

  Even though she was by now very, very good at running, running would not have helped, as it turned out.

  A cloud of gossamer filaments belched from the Bug’s chest spigots and settled on her like acid rain.

  “Shit!” cried Hsia Shan-yun, proving yet again that she was an evil lowlife throwback.

  Tiny itching threads coated her from head to foot, leaving uncovered only her eyes, ears and nostrils. Achieving that effect had consumed a decade of nonstop dedicated research in the National Goo Laboratories, but Hsia Shan-yun was not impressed. She hissed with rage. She spat. There wasn’t much else she could do, because the filaments put their tiny hands together and squeezed, tightening into a body-hugging plastic shell. Just enough slack was left around Shan-yun’s hideously overdeveloped rib cage and chest for her to breathe, but only just enough.

  She started to fall flat on her face. Before the statue-like form she now was could topple to the tiles and shatter, the monitor Bug whipped out metal tentacles and nestled her carefully against its own hard torso.

  “Citizen Hsia,” the thing intoned, “it is my unhappy duty to take you into protective custody, for both your own highest good and that of the republic.”

  “Mmmnbbn,” Shan-yun explained. “Gmmngb.”

  “I regret the temporary restraint on your freedom of speech,” the tin cop said unctuously, “but rest assured you will be permitted full range of expression as soon as we arrive at Medical Six. And how,” it added with a low chuckle, and spun about, accelerating out of the Bubble Bank.

  “We intend to indict you for conspiracy against the State,” it re-added for good measure. “Appropriate remedial steps will follow forthwith. Oh my, yes.”

  Did this unwelcome mechanical badinage affect the apprehended criminal?

  What do you think? Shan-yun was rather miffed.

  No, that doesn’t quite capture it. She was seriously alarmed at her prospects.

  Actually, she was in a turmoil of panic. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was ready to shit herself.

  The monitor Bug rolled swiftly though the foyer of Data Central with Shan’s rigid torso tucked against it like a huge ungainly swaddled baby, except that they didn’t deal that way with babies anymore.

  When her head happened to tilt that way, Shan-yun had no difficulty in seeing people scurrying out of the way. The chief slibber, coming in from a lunch of chives, peatgrowth, and yogurt sausages, blenched and turned aside without a word.

  “Fair-weather friend,” Shan tried to shout bitterly, but it came out as another collection of vowelless unpalatalized consonants.

  Outside the building, machine and captive swung down a ramp to a thoroughfare marked MEDICAL ONLY.

  In 197 years’ time, that’s a sign to make your blood run cold. Well, I suppose it is already, to be brutally frank.

  The monitor jacked without hesitation into a high-speed conveyor unit, thoughtfully raising a shield to keep the wind out of Shan’s eyes.

  The harsh violet lights of the tunnel went blurry with speed. Shan-yun’s tummy tried to sneak away, but her backbone wouldn’t let it. Half a minute later it got its revenge.

  “All still in one piece, I hope, dear,” the machine said in Shan’s reeling ear. “Here we are. Have a nice day, now.”

  The monitor coasted into the aseptic whiteness of a medical bay. You can always tell, 197 years from now, when you’ve reached a medical bay. The atmosphere reeks of such a high-toned blend of purity and righteousness you want to throw up.

  Two crisp blue-garbed apes stepped out of a lift. Mental health and social adjustment radiated from their every pore.

  “Citizen Hsia!” cried the one on the right. “Welcome to Medical Six.”

  His demeanor blended professional cheeriness with personal stoic resignation to the iniquity of social deviants with Striped Holes tucked inside smelly parts of their bodies.

  “Kindly place the citizen on the couch and return to your post,” said the one on the left.

  Still locked solid in her plastic cocoon, Shan-yun was positioned carefully on a form-fitting cot. The Bug rolled away whence it had come without a word of farewell.

  The mind-crackingly ugly woman stared up at her doctors and tried to set off the Hole. Nothing happened. Her fingers would not bend. The muscles in her belly spasmed but she lay motionless. The Hole spun uselessly inside her, quite beyond her control.

  “Well, Ms Hsia,” the first ape told her, “you’ve certainly got yourself into a peck of trouble.”

  “Yep. No double ungood untruth there. Let’s hope for your sake we can straighten you out, ethics-wise, without having to reduce you to a vegetable.”

  Under the plastic skin, cold sweat jumped from Shan’s forehead in almost exactly the way moisture develops on the inside of a loaf of plastic-wrapped bread. It was a disgusting and depressing sensation.

  “Brainscrub . . .” one of the creatures said reflectively. “You can’t use it, you gotta lose it.”

  “It’s a tragedy, though, Frank, she’s a person of evident resource. How many of us could plait a Striped Hole without being picked up at the nudge-horizon stage? That’s skill, Frank, whether or not we care to admit it. Talent.”

  “Yet we mustn’t forget that she’s abused her abilities to the detriment of the State.”

  “I’d never let that slip my mind, Frank, but it seems our fellow citizen must have done so.” He peered down into Shan’s eyes with a look of loathing and concern. Shan’s eyes by now were brimming to overflow with tears of fury and terror. In fact, Shan’s eyes took the opportunity to try to leap from her head and tear the ape’s sanctimonious tongue from his head, but being organs ill adapted by evolution to that function, they had to content themselves with bulging in red-shot hatred.

  “You should have recognized your own sickness,” Frank told her. “You ought to have boldly stepped forward for voluntary treatment.”

  The threads of the cocoon tightened and the ape shook his head ruefully.

  “Relax, Ms Hsia. Anger is a wasteful and antisocial emotion. A good case has been made for the view that all emotion is wasteful and antisocial, but I don’t subscribe to that view. Live and let live, I say.”

  A colorful board of indicators flashed and chimed. Shan-yun seethed.

  “We’ll be sending you through to the Analyst any moment now, Ms Hsia, and I’ve got to tell you, it won’t look good on your record if you’re har
boring resentment.”

  A muffled series of explosive noises came from the cocoon.

  A melodious tone sounded from the lift.

  “Ah, there we are now. No need for anxiety, Ms Hsia. Truly. You’ll go straight through for analysis and judgment as soon as the techs have removed the cocoon and that Striped Hole you inserted into yourself.”

  The other ape nodded vigorously, leaning across Shan-yun with an aerosol can. “Absolutely correct. Remember – our job is to get you well.” He squirted spray into her nostrils. The room tilted and banged the side of her head.

  She was not quite unconscious as the apes began to push the couch and her numb body into the lift. “Candidly, Ted,” she heard Frank say, as the darkness ripped her mind into silly small shreds, “these deviants give me the gol-durned creeps.”

  The cell Hsia Shan-yun woke up in was dank, foul, almost lightless, and, she decided with horror, very possibly rat-infested.

  This was impossible, of course.

  The future’s not like that. You know that and I know that.

  The people who live in the future know it better than either of us.

  Gosh, if a single fact has been established once and for all, surely it’s that the future is clean.

  It’s sanitized. Everyone’s shoes are tucked neatly under the bed before they go to sleep, which they do at 10:15 or earlier.

  The future’s no banana republic. Granted, there’s that little spot of bother immediately up ahead, with the ayatollahs and the pastors and so on, but nothing’s perfect, not even utopia.

  There simply can’t be rat-infested cells with rusty chains and dried marks down the stone walls looking suspiciously like old blood (not all that old). The unions, the government, and the public service would not put up with it. The future is the last redoubt of niceness.

  Hsia Shan-yun knew that as well as we do, which is why she sat there quivering with her hands jammed into her mouth and her white even teeth clamped into the skin of her knuckles.

  She stopped after a rather commendably brief interval, and sat up straight on the wooden bench and stifled a cry.

  She’d got a splinter in her bare ass.

  Hsia Shan-yun shook her head to clear the fog out of it. A faint trace of illumination straggled through the tiny mud-caked barred window high in the opposite wall. It glistened from a rivulet of authentic dank running down the rough-hewn and palpably iron-hard blue blocks of stone of which the wall had been built, obviously by convict labor.

  “Absurd,” Hsia Shan-yun muttered. Shivering, as you will when you are naked and you have lived all your life in centrally heated buildings and there’s a nasty draft coming in somewhere, she dropped her tootsies to the ground.

  This was her next mistake, and she regretted it bitterly and at once.

  The walls were not the only feature of the cell which were dank. The floors were danker.

  Hastily, Shan-yun tucked her befouled soles back under her haunches and hugged herself tight to ward off the chill.

  Hugging herself was something, it must be confessed, which she’d had a fair amount of practice in. Nobody else in her exceptionally silly world would give her a hug, so she’d had to develop a knack for doing it herself. Nobody hugs ugly people if they can possibly avoid it, and the people in the future were even better than we are at avoiding doing what might be nice for other people but grossly unrewarding for ourselves.

  “Slimy floors,” Hsia Shan-yun muttered in disbelief. “Barred windows.”

  What Hsia Shan-yun was experiencing has been described by the social psychologist Leon Festinger as cognitive dissonance. There was a big gap between what she believed and what she experienced.

  After all, it’s evident that Hsia Shan-yun found her ambient social order so entirely and unredemptively corrupt that she’d gone to the shocking length of planning to blow the crap out of its major data stores with a Striped Hole secreted within her own person.

  Now, true, this desperate remedy was facilitated by her total lack of any sense of physical self-worth. If people often give you hugs when you’re blue, or because they think you’re nice, or just for the fun of it, you start to attend to the care and maintenance of your body. Blowing it to shreds to make a political point is the last thing that would occur to you.

  Still, in her wildest vituperations against the State, in her maddest anarchic fantasies, Hsia Shan-yun had never imagined that they had become this barbaric.

  “You evil malefactors,” she suddenly screamed at the top of her voice, leaping from the bench into the slimy muck of the floor and beating uselessly against the unyielding stone walls, “let me out of here!”

  This outburst was greeted by an equally sudden scream at her back.

  All the tiny wild black hairs at Hsia Shan-yun’s neck went rigid and tried to throw themselves overboard but got their feet caught.

  She lurched around in the penumbral gloom. A second bench stretched out behind hers, depending from the wall opposite on thick rusted chains.

  A dim figure, she now saw, huddled there also, naked and panic-stricken.

  “Keep away from me, you fiends, or I’ll tear your eyes out!” cried the voice, distorted by terror. Abruptly it broke, gave way to terrible wrenching sobs. “Do what you like to me, but leave my mind alone, you broggish snaggers.”

  Shan-yun was amazed and appalled. The dim figure was a breeding male in full heat!

  She crossed the room in two athletic bounds, scarcely aware of the loathsome grime and squelching muck and pullulating pustules of decay and skin-crawlingly horrible fragments and so on stuck to the floor.

  “Hey, calm down,” she said urgently. “I’m a prisoner, too, honey-pong. Just woke up.”

  “Stay away,” shrieked the breeder, arching his fingers into claws. He was quite a specimen, she saw. They must have been pumping testosterone into him for weeks.

  “Flibble out, manjack,” she said soothingly, trying to approach him in the skilled way a trained librarian deals with a maddened overdue borrower. She padded through the unspeakable vileness underfoot, sat on the creaking, swaying bench, started to put a comforting arm about the man’s shoulders.

  The claws flashed out and raked her face.

  Fortunately, his nails were short and blunt. Even so, he nearly hooked out Shan’s left eye with his pinky.

  She slapped his flailing arm aside, caught both his slender wrists in one large hand, shook him heavily with the other.

  “Listen, tooter, get a grip on yourself. I’m not a doctor and I’m not a State spy, and it looks to me as if we’re both in the same flivver.”

  “A likely story,” the brute snivelled.

  Patiently, she said, “My name’s Hsia Shan-yun and I’m here because I tried to do in a data store with a Striped Hole.” That should give him pause. “What’s your excuse?”

  “You should know, you mendacious swine,” he mumbled.

  He was a nerdish little wimp, of course, due to the DNA-altering satellite radiations that had solved the world’s problems fifty years before by making everyone kindly, socially responsible, aggressively peaceful, noncompetitively self-regarding, and incapable of forgetting to give flowers on Mother’s Day. Even so, Hsia Shan-yun now thought she detected a steely grace in his wimpish face, which was, for the reasons just adumbrated, fairly uncommon.

  He looked at Shan-yun with watery eyes through which could be glimpsed some small spark of salvageable human worth. It was a wildly arousing sight for Hsia Shan-yun, given the narrow range of her experiences to this point in time.

  “No, I don’t know your name,” she told him patiently, “and I don’t see how we can be friends if you won’t even tell me that much about yourself.” There was no answer from the ruttish but miserable male. “Well, what sign are you?”

  He still clearly supposed that she was lying.

  “You and your henchmen must have been right through my brain by now! Why are you toying with me like this? Are you nothing but sadists? Get it over and
done with, damn you. Turn me into a zombie. Rip out my brain and crush it in a food processor. Burn out my frontal lobes and peel all my other lobes down like onions. Ravage my –”

  “Hey, ease up already.”

  “Shred my reticular activating system and unravel my cortical rind, do it! do it! and then just let me go – at least I’ll be out of this horrible place.”

  And he was weeping again, wrenchingly, rackingly, with the bitterness of newly found courage confronting archaic fears, of bravery facing down cowardice in the depths of the archetypal psyche, of ancient instincts battling with comparatively recently inculcated and historically untested utilitarian social values, of good against evil and sweet against sour.

  Hsia Shan-yun spent several minutes wiping away the salty tears he’d got all over her quite large chest.

  Even profound emotional breakthroughs into openness and trust must, sad to say, end.

  Actually, Shan-yun’s justifiably paranoid mind was starting to latch onto the idea that maybe this breeding male was the spy he accused her of being, that this primitive horror was some kind of carefully arranged and elaborate double-bluff to soften her up, damage her defenses, and cause her to spill out the names, addresses, @s, urls and datacodes of her confederates (which she didn’t have any of anyway).

  She didn’t get a chance to voice this unkind suspicion. Brain-fryingly bright lights glared on with a sizzle of ozone.

  The wall – blue stone, dried blood, rusted chains, mud, slime, ichor, and all – slid gratingly up, one monumental piece, into the cobweb-matted ceiling.

  A huge authentically ugly monitor robot hummed there on its knurled metal wheels, ruby dials flashing with menace.

  The Bug ignored Hsia Shan-yun. It fixed all seven of its nasty beady glowing red photoreceptors on the quivering person of the breeding male cowering behind her under his wooden bench.

  “Ex-citizen Turdington Jimbo, it is my grave duty to inform you –”

  “Aargh, aargh, not the brainscrub machine!” howled Hsia’s companion.

  “– that a final analysis has been made of your deviation,” the monitor ground on in its unfeeling, non-Rogerian way. “In view of your intransigent recidivism –”