Nothing Is Inflammable Read online

  NOTHING IS INFLAMMABLE

  BY SIMON LOGAN

  NOTHING IS INFLAMMABLE

  A collection of industrial short stories

  Copyright © 2011 by Simon Logan

  Originally published by Prime Books 2006.

  Cover art & design copyright ©2006 by Simon Logan

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information:

  http://www.coldandalone.com

  Contents

  Notes Towards the Design and Production of the Protohuman

  a lone mecha-scientist / paranoia and phobias

  Devastation

  ghosts in the static / skeletal high-rises

  Pretty

  guerilla documentaries / underground beauty contests

  FuckPunktown

  activists and cyborgs / deviant sex

  Her Love For Me Is Oxyacetylene

  two broken souls / destruction and love

  Elisabeth Afterlife is Dead

  a renegade filmmaker / dirty aggression

  Rage Against The Machines

  a tattooed punk / hidden machines attack

  Emotion Sickness

  a viral Romeo and Juliet / poisons and hatred

  NOTES TOWARDS THE DESIGN AND PRODUCTION OF THE PROTOHUMAN

  Chapter One

  Wherein the lone mecha-scientist, Dziga, introduces himself and his work.

  My name is Dziga and this is my work. This is my life.

  Since January I have resided in this lab, my cage. There are five rooms in the facility, all of which are mine to do with as I wish. The lighting is intermittent and pus-yellow, the walls and ceilings crumbling and full of exposed wires and pipes. I have all the equipment I could desire and each piece is broken or damaged. I have every chemical I need.

  This is how I work.

  I spent the first few weeks I was here exploring every inch of the place.

  There are porcelain tiles on the floors and walls of some of the rooms, cracked and filthy with a greasy residue. There are two immense, rusted autoclaves in one room a little further along the corridor that occasionally work well enough to sterilize my equipment. There are several storage cupboards, the shelves within haphazardly filled with beakers, pipettes, Bunsen burners, racks, storage jars, large bottles, tiny micro-liter tubes and rows and rows of chemicals.

  Damp stains the corners of the ceilings in most rooms and particularly in the corridors that join the complex together. There are cracks here and there from which insects and small rodents crawl out. And there is a persistent smell of chlorine in the air.

  Everything has a sepia tint.

  The main room from which I work apparently used to be three separate rooms that were knocked into one before I arrived. The uneven edges of the dividing walls that were hammered away are still visible; they give the impression that the building is trying to regenerate itself, like an insistent weed.

  This room, which I use as my primary research chamber, is therefore about thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide, cluttered with my tools and implements as well as the litter of small experiments that I am indulging in. There are windows along one wall but, like all the others in the lab, they are clouded by years of chemical silt that has worked its way into the glass’ very pores.

  I have no wish to look outside anyway.

  I work in an appalling silence. I am alone here, except for Judas of course and, if you count it as an entity, the Protohuman. Occasionally Jakobsen or Dmitri visit but apart from that I am left to my own devices.

  There is more to my life and my lab than this, of course, but this description will suffice for now. More important than the building is my work. And this is how it started.

  In the last century William Levitt and his company began building what would become the community of Levittown on Long Island in America. Over the next four years a total of 17,447 homes were built, effectively creating a town through the will of a single man. 75,000 people ended up living there—75,000 that had no choice but to recognize William Levitt as somewhat of a god, for without him their little society would never have existed.

  He managed this feat by being one of the first to realize the awe-inspiring power of rationalization if it were used in this way. His company built each home to exact specifications, using exactly the same materials in exactly the same quantity in exactly the same way in every single house they built there. There was no need for anyone to think about how a wall should be put up or where—this had already been decided. Each wall was put up in exactly the same way.

  This homogenization is the only way such a accomplishment could have been achieved, for if Levitt had decided on how to build each house individually he would probably still be building them today. Only by deciding on the best way to do something and eliminating all other choices could it be done.

  The trend was reflected elsewhere, carried by TV screens and telephone cables and modems. Everything could be scientifically managed and controlled to ensure the utmost efficiency.

  Burger sizes, coffee flavors, movie plots, musical melodies, health care, marriage, even creativity.

  It was all subject to the four-pronged mechanization process—efficiency, calculability, predictability and control.

  Except something passed through, something vital.

  As I had read about Levitt and others like him while in the asylum it seemed to me that they had all missed what could be the real purpose, the real power, of scientific management.

  It was then that I had formulated the theory of the Protohuman.

  And this is the Protohuman.

  It is chained to the wall merely to keep it upright. It watches me whenever I watch it. It occasionally wears a lab coat like mine to preserve its decency and because it bears enough resemblance to a real human being to require it.

  Once, it was human just as I am. But with each day and each stage of my research it grows further and further apart from our species and into the realm of something new.

  I leaned towards the Protohuman and it copied the gesture. I could see the reflection of myself in its eyes, repeated on to infinity. The scars of the past stages of the experiment were bright white on its skin, healing perfectly.

  There was a commotion from the far side of the room, screeching and the sound of metal being hammered against metal. I turned from the Protohuman, sensed it sink back onto the wall as I left it and went to Judas’s cage.

  The cage hung from the ceiling, suspended by a thick, rusted chain with a hook on the end that looped through a catch on the top. I have placed a broken steel girder under the cage to steady it and stop it swinging too much when Judas bounced around inside.

  “Jealous?” I asked the creature.

  It slammed against the metal bars at my proximity, teeth bared—but it’s been almost a week since I’ve fed it and soon it slumps to the cage’s floor, exhausted. It had lost even more hair since the last time I looked closely at it. Its scrawny body seemed to be curling up day by day like a piece of fruit left in the sun, the skin visible between the uneven clumps of fur left wrinkled and covered in sores.

  It barely resembled a proboscis anymore.

  I poked a finger through the bars and stroked its balding head, soothing the poor creature.

  “You hungry, Judas? Mmm? Hungry?”

  I turned to the chest freezer fitted into the corner of the room. Steam poured out and there was a pneumatic hiss as the lid lifted. Chunks of raw meat—shoulders, legs, great slices of torso—lay within next to racks of test tubes and packs of frozen vegetables. I removed a loose nugget of fatty red meat turned pink by the sub-zero temperatures, took it to the microwave oven on a bench opposite.

  The device was as old as everything else, the LCD display cracked and empty. Most of the buttons were missing, exposing the black pads that lay beneath. I had scribbled numbers in chalk on the pads but they were practically rubbed away to invisibility so I punched in numbers at random. A strip of electrical tape was all that held the door shut—I removed it, placed the meat inside, then taped it shut again. I hit the wide START button and watched the meat become illuminated by a yellow glow.

  It fascinated me, watching the stuff soften and redden as it circled around and around. Juices soon began to roll out of the carcass’s pores, blood and water like tears.

  I felt sick.

  Sitiophobia—fear of eating, or food.

  The microwave came as close to a ping as it could manage and the light shut off. Judas crawled to his emaciated feet, aroused by the smells when I opened the microwave door. I picked the piece of meat up with a pair of tongs, keeping them at arm’s length and trying to avoid the trail of stink that came off of it.

  Judas began lazily hitting his head against the side of the cage in dazed excitement. I pressed the offering to his bars and he pulled it through eagerly, spraying blood into the air then falling backwards against the cage as he sank his teeth in.

  I listened to the sounds of him tearing the meat apart hungrily, unable to watch. My stomach turned, my throat went into spasm. Judas’s eating always sounded to me like a blocked drain trying to clear itself.

  I left him to it.

  I had work to do—you see, there was the problem of bleeding.

  For whatever reason, I had been finding it increasingly difficult to stop the Protohuman from bleeding constantly when I delivered fresh wounds as part of a new surgery. T
his had only been a problem formed of late and I considered that it had something to do with my over-eagerness with its body, not giving it enough time to recuperate.

  Unable to find any coagulants amongst the array of compounds in my cupboards I was forced to formulate one myself. It was a crude attempt but it seemed to help a little, turning the blood that spilled from the creature a darker red.

  Despite this it continued to leak, however, and my efforts to sew up its wounds tight. More often than not I came away from my time with the Protohuman as smeared in its blood as it was. My lab coat was encrusted with day-old hemoglobin that I could only get rid of by waiting for it to crisp up and then brush off.

  As Judas finished his meal I stood by the Protohuman before a large blackboard that was set into the wall, the kind you’d find in old-fashioned classrooms. I used the device for scribbling equations and thoughts on whenever I felt the need. At the present moment I had illustrated a large-scale drawing of the Protohuman’s cerebral cortex, filling in some areas and annotating others.

  On the Protohuman’s shaven head I had drawn in black marker dotted lines to delineate the various sections I was currently studying.

  My theory—the less decisions that have to be made on an individual basis the more efficient the decision process becomes. If a method of performing an act can be shown to be the best one then there is no need for anyone to use a different method. If one thought can be proven to be the most efficient then there is no need for anyone to think any different.

  I took the scalpel I had in my hand and pressed its dull, rusted blade to the Protohuman’s stubbled head. I had to press down hard to get it to cut, finally tearing the skin more than slicing into it. The creature flinched suddenly, making me jump and I lose the thread of the incision. The chains that held it rattled, kicking up dust from where they were attached to the wall.

  I watched a single rivulet of blood trickle down its scalp and forehead and felt a similar bead of sweat tickle mine. I brushed it away absentmindedly, a quiet aggression ticking over in my stomach.

  To deflect the anger I turned to the chalkboard and scribbled hard with the chalk across the drawing of the brain—

  Pain is an efficiency. The human reaction to it is NOT. We MUST move BEYOND this. The Protohuman will not SUFFER as I do.

  I stopped, fingers aching from pressing so hard, panting with exertion as I stared numbly at what I had written. With my sleeve I rubbed out the final portion—as I do.

  I replaced it with—as we do.

  I placed the chalk back in its holder and noticed it was stained pink. I looked at my fingers, the fingers that had wiped the bead of sweat away.

  It was blood.

  I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together curiously and when I looked up at the Protohuman it was looking back. There was a smear of red on its head from the incision and something cold and frightened reflected in its eyes.

  To distract myself from its unnerving attention, I decided I would finish tidying the lab for Jakobsen’s visit.

  Chapter Two

  Wherein Dziga meets with Jakobsen, his mysterious benefactor

  The letter had come a few days previously, deposited in the metal wire rack that was fitted against the front door to the lab complex. I knew who it was from and what it would be about before I had finished climbing the steps that led up to the door. There was only a small handful of people who knew I was here and only one who would write to me.

  Jakobsen had said that he would be coming on Wednesday morning and despite his usual calm, gentle manner it always flustered me when I knew he would be visiting to the lab. I’m not quite sure why.

  Certainly he couldn’t criticize me for the condition or tidiness of the lab for the place was a shambles before I had ever been brought here and besides he never seemed interested in looking around to see what I was doing. Perhaps it was my own discomfort at not knowing what he was there for that encouraged me to create something for me to focus on.

  So whenever I knew he was coming I would spend days and nights re-arranging things, putting jars and beakers that I had been using back in whichever cupboard had space for them, wiping down spillages if I could find a rag to do so. I would even scrape the shit out of Judas’s cage, though often there would be no need for if I avoided feeding the monkey long enough it would begin eating its own feces.

  I was careful not to clear up too much for fear that I would look like I wasn’t doing any work while I was down here. But again, I had received the distinct impression from Jakobsen that he was as interested in my work as he was in the lab’s cleanliness.

  Which, of course, raised the question—what was he interested in?

  He had come for me, given me a lab that was mine to do with as I wished, endowed me with all the equipment that he could acquire for me and asked almost nothing in return except that he be allowed to pay me these little visits. Dmitri was suspicious of the man’s motives—he had made that only too clear to me on the handful of occasions he come to visit me—but I felt in less of a position to question the man considering what he had rescued me from.

  And if he could take me from there, then didn’t it follow that he could put me back again?

  That thought terrified me more than death itself.

  So Jakobsen was to come—and this is what happened when he did.

  The man was always clean-shaven and smartly dressed, a rarity in my experience. We sat on ratty, torn sofa chairs in a small room at the back of the lab complex, one which I had prepared especially for us. Aside from the chairs, the only other pieces of furniture in the room were a low, scarred coffee table and a frameless painting hung on a syringe embedded into the wall to keep it up. I had once, some weeks ago, locked myself in the room to try and work through a problem I had encountered in my work. I had tried to remove the scribbles and sketches from that time but had been only vaguely successful. Illustrations of pieces of anatomy and the tail-end of equations littered the tea-stain walls.

  My attempt at homely.

  “How have you been feeling of late, Dziga?”

  We both held mugs of watery coffee in our hands. I noticed how the steam from mine rose in thick, clumsy clumps while that from his ascended like rose-angels.

  “Good,” I told him. “I have been much better.”

  “That’s good to hear.” He paused to look around the room. “And your work?”

  “Also good.” I watched the coffee steam obsessively, unable to look directly at him. Eye contact was a problem for me. “I am making good progress. I can prepare a report for you should you wish.”

  “That won’t be necessary. Here . . . I have your newspapers.”

  He produced from inside his coat a brown paper bag that had been taped shut at one end and handed it to me. I took it graciously, and placed the bag beside me, not wanting to appear too interested.

  “Is there anything more you require?”

  I disliked asking him for things. He always seemed eager to give me whatever I wanted or needed but I couldn’t help but wonder that all of this, all what he was doing for me, would one day be turned back on me and I would owe him it all in return. I didn’t know if I would be able to repay.

  “Some chemicals. I have a list.” I removed the scrap of notepaper from my coat pocket and handed it to him. Our hands almost touched; I saw how precise his nails were. I also saw the scar on the underside of his wrist.

  Haptephobia—fear of being touched.

  “I’ll have them to you by the end of the week.”

  “I’d be most grateful.”

  A silence followed. I felt him studying me. The room’s ceiling dripped yellow moisture from a pipe that showed through in one corner. It was the only sound.

  “Would you like to see it?” I asked him to break the silence. It had been several weeks since his last visit and I was eager to prove that the project was coming along.