Mean Streets

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. "

"She talked her way in, yesterday," said Kopek. "Determined to see her husband. But when we brought her here, and showed her, she went berserk. Attacked the computer. Did some little damage, before the robots drove her off. We wouldn't let her hurt Frank, or herself, and after a while she left."

"And she blocked out the memories herself," I said. "Because they were unbearable."

"How could you?" Liza screamed at Frank. "How could you want this} It doesn't love you! It can't love you!"

Frank stirred for the first time, his one remaining eye slowly turning to look down at her. His face showed no emotion, no compassion for the woman he'd loved and married, not so long ago. When he spoke, his voice already contained a faint machine buzz.

"This is what I want. What I've always wanted. What I need… And what you could never give me. I've dreamed of this for years… of flesh and metal coming together, moving together. Thought it was just a fetish, never told anyone… Knew they could never understand. Until someone told me about the Night-side, the one place in the world where anything is possible; and I knew I had to come here. This is the place where dreams come true."