Mean Streets

"Lady and gentlemen, welcome to Silicon Heaven!"

He led the way forward, between massive machines that had shape and form, but no clear meaning or significance. So complex, so advanced, as to be incomprehensible to merely human eyes. There were components that moved, and revolved, and became other things even as I watched; strange lights that burned in unfamiliar colours; and noises that were almost, or beyond, voices. Things the size of buildings walked in circles, and intricate mechanisms came together in complex interactions, like a living thing assembling itself. Gleaming metal spheres the size of sheepdogs rolled back and forth across the crystal floor, sprouting tools and equipment as needed to service the needs of larger machines. Dead Boy kicked at one of the spheres, in an experimental way, but it dodged him easily. Kopek led the way, and we all followed close behind. This wasn't a place you wanted to get lost in. It felt… like walking through the belly of Leviathan, or like flies crawling across the stained-glass window of some u

There was a definite sense of purpose to everything happening around us, even if I couldn't quite grasp it, but I was pretty sure there was nothing human in that purpose. Nothing here gave a damn about anything so small as Humanity.

"I was here before," Liza said slowly. "There's something bad up ahead. Something awful."

I looked sharply at Kopek. "Is that right, Barry? Is there something dangerous up ahead, that you haven't been meaning to tell us about?"

"There's nothing awful here," he said huffily. "You're here to see something wonderful."

And finally, we came face-to-face with what we'd come so far to see. A single beam of light stabbed down, shimmering and scintillating, like a spotlight from Heaven, as though God himself was taking an interest. The illumination picked out one particular machine, surrounded by ranks and ranks of robots. They were dancing around the machine, in wide interlocking circles, their every movement impossibly smooth and graceful and utterly inhuman. They moved to music only they could hear, perhaps to music only they could hope to understand, but there was nothing of human emotion or sensibility in their dance. It could have been a dance of reverence, or triumph, or elation, or something only a robot could know or feel. The robots danced, and the sound of their metal feet slamming on the crystal floor was almost unbearably ugly.

Kopek led us carefully through the ranks of robots, and at once they began to sing, in high chiming voices like a choir of metal birds, in perfect harmonies and cadences that bordered on melody without ever actually achieving it. Like machines pretending to be human, doing things that people do without ever understanding why people do them. We passed through the last of the robots and finally… there was Frank, beloved husband of Liza, having sex with a computer.

The computer was the size of a house, covered with all kinds of monitor screens and readouts but no obvious controls, with great pieces constantly turning and sliding across each other. It was made of metal and crystal and other things I didn't even recognise. At the foot of it was an extended hollow section, like a large upright coffin, and suspended within this hollow was Frank Barclay, hanging in a slowly pulsing web of tubes and wires and cables, naked, ecstatic, transported. Liza made a low, painful sound, as though she'd been hit.

Frank's groin was hidden behind a cluster of machine parts, always moving, sliding over and around him like a swarm of metallic bees, clambering over themselves in their eagerness to get to him. Like metal maggots, in a self-inflicted wound. Thick translucent tubes had been plugged into his abdomen, and strange liquids surged in and out of him. Up and down his naked body, parts of him had been dissected away, to show bones and organs being slowly replaced by new mechanical equivalents. There was no bleeding, no trauma. One thigh bone had been revealed from top to bottom, one end bone and the other metal, and already it was impossible to tell where the one began and the other ended. Metal rods plunged in and out of Frank's flesh, sliding back and forth, never stopping. Lights blinked on and off inside him, briefly rendering parts of his skin transparent; and in that skin I could see as many wires as blood vessels.

The computer was heaving and groaning, in rhythm to the things going in and out of Frank's naked body, and the machine's steel exterior was flushed and beaded with sweat. It made… orgasmic sounds. Frank's face was drawn, shrunken, the skin stretched taut across the bone, but his eyes were bright and happy, and his smile held a terrible pleasure. Cables penetrated his skin, and metal parts penetrated his body, and he loved it. One cable had buried itself in his left eye socket, replacing the eyeball, digging its way in a fraction of an inch at a time. Frank didn't care. He shuddered and convulsed as things slid in and out of him, changing him forever, and he loved every last- bit of it.

Liza stood before him, tears rolling silently and unheeded down her devastated face.

I turned to Barry Kopek. "Is he dying?"

"Yes, and no," said Kopek. "He's becoming something else. Something wonderful. We are making him over, transforming him, into a living component capable of being host to machine consciousness. A living and an unliving body, for an Artificial Intelligence from a future time line. It came to the Nightside through a Timeslip, fleeing powerful enemies. It wants to experience sin, and in particular the hot and sweaty sensations of the flesh. It wants to know what we humans know, and take for granted; all the many joys of sex. Together, Frank and the computer are teaching each other whole new forms of pleasure. He is teaching the machine all the colours of emotion and sensuality, and the very subtle joys of degradation. In return, the machine is teaching him whole new areas of perception and conception. Man becomes machine, becomes more than machine, becomes immortal living computer. A metal messiah for a new Age…"

Kopek's face was full of vision now, a zealot in his cause. "Why should men be limited to being just men, and machines just machines? Human and inhuman shall combine together, to become something far superior to either. But like all new life, it begins with sex."

"How many others have there been?" said Dead Boy. "Before Frank?"

"One hundred and seventeen," said Kopek. "But Frank is different. He doesn't just believe. He wants this."

"Oh, yeah," said Dead Boy. "Looks like he's coming his brains out."

Liza collapsed, her knees slamming painfully onto the crystal floor. Her face was twisted, ugly, filled with a horrid knowledge, as all her repressed memories came flooding back at once. She pounded on the floor with her fist, again and again and again.

"No! No, no, no! I remember… I remember it all! I came here, following Frank. Following my husband, into the Nightside, and through its awful streets, all the way here… Because I thought he was cheating on me. I thought he had a lover here. He hadn't touched me in months. I thought he was having an affair, but I never suspected this… Never thought he wanted… this. "