narcotic transmissions

"Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country."
- JFK

The Jubilee Line was stuck again. Engineering works at Neasden. Not that it mattered very much to the people on the tube. The voice over the tannoy could have lied and lay the blame squarely on signal failure at Wembley Park for instance, and the people on the tube would be none the wiser. All they cared about was how much longer the journey was going to take. But on that subject the voice on the tannoy was vague.

John Rice didn't mind though. There were worse places to be on a December evening than sitting in a warm, near-empty tube carriage just outside Dollis Hill. Far worse places. And John should know, he was on his way to one of them.

For now though he was content to sit in the flickering fluorescence and contemplate the black felt-tip graffiti written in exquisitely precise lettering above the window opposite. That famous couplet from Kennedy's inauguration, attributed to "JFK" lest there be any confusion. There it sat devoid of any other context.

John had spent the entire time between Swiss Cottage and Kilburn carefully re-reading the quotation convinced he was missing a deliberate misspelling that would reveal some kind of joke or social comment. Or just reveal whatever point the writer was trying to make.

Between Kilburn and Dollis Hill he'd become convinced that the quotation was a response to some advertising poster, since removed and replaced with a map of the Jubilee Line, and that it only really made sense if you could see the juxtaposition.

After the train ground to a halt just outside Dollis Hill, John spent a good ten minutes trying to imagine what kind of advertisement could have prompted that particular response. There was something pleasing about the careful penmanship, and yet the faithful reproduction of the quote without context unsettled John. He wasn't exactly sure why.

The train jolted suddenly into movement and there was a murmur of appreciation and even a faint ironic cheer from a couple of lads in the neighbouring carriage who had decided to get a head-start on the evening's drinking with a bag of cans. But having moved just a few feet, the train shuddered to a stop again. John clutched the rucksack on the seat next to him. He really didn't want to be carrying this thing, but when Smith asks you for a favour you don't refuse. "Take this to a man named Kurt", Smith's clipped, precise voice still had an echo of his early years in Russia if you knew what to listen for, but was now so appropriately vague that had someone told you he was from Brixton or Cardiff or Ireland or Scotland or Canada or Sydney... well, you couldn't have contradicted them... you'd know they were wrong, but you couldn't correct them. John had heard that when he spoke Italian or Spanish or German that his accent was similarly vague. A French speaker would swear he was from France, but couldn't place whether Paris or Marseilles. A really attentive French speaker would suggest he was definitely from France but had probably spent a few years in eastern Europe when he was younger.

You didn't say no when Smith asked for a favour. Not out of fear, not because you worried he would punish your refusal, but because Smith never asked for favours. And the idea of someone like him asking one of you? That was a big deal and John knew it. It wasn't exactly being let into the inner circle, but it was a big deal. Doing a favour for Potemkin Smith wasn't an opportunity a smart person would miss.

"You'll find Kurt in the back room of a bookies in Canons Park. I can't bring it myself. There will be someone watching the door and my face is known to them. This package must reach Kurt. In return you will receive an envelope. Bring it back to me."

John had just nodded. The instructions continued. "Carry the envelope back in this rucksack. You cannot enter the betting shop with a bag and leave without it, that would tip them off. As it is, you may well be watched anyway. Go into the bookies. Place a bet or two. Watch whatever is showing on the TV in there. Then place a bet of exactly £12.28 on a horse called Calendar Boy running in the King George VI Chase on Boxing Day. Sit back down. Give it five minutes. Then go to the toilets. Kurt will meet you there."

Again John nodded. Smith went on. "However, the exchange won't happen there. Kurt will probably exercise an abundance of caution. You will be taken somewhere at gunpoint. Do not protest. Kurt is not a good man and he runs some businesses neither of us would approve of. But he will not cross me, so you will be safe. But he will try to intimidate you. Men like him can't help themselves. He may walk you past things you don't want to see. Just stick to the plan. Hand him the package. Take the envelope. Then return here. You are sufficiently skilled to shake any tail you might pick up when you emerge from the bookies, but don't make it obvious. Don't make it look like you're trying to shake them."

John nodded for the last time and left the hotel lobby.

The train kicked forward again. This time it picked up speed and slid with a screech into Dollis Hill. John half-hoped the tannoy would crackle into life and tell everyone to disembark. But instead, after a short pause, it continued on its way towards Neasden. After that, just 4 more stops and a short walk down Whitchurch Lane. John stared at the graffiti again. "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. - JFK"

What the fuck had he got himself into?

"Effectively I'm something like 28 years old in real world terms." Soma Jones picked through the tech detritus in the flea market. "Having said that, on my first appearance I wasn't even called Soma Jones, I was Daniel Pica."

"That's an unusual choice." Billiamina Carrow rattled a Psion Organiser. It really shouldn't have been making that noise. "I'm assuming it refers to the typeface rather than the eating disorder, although I could be wrong. I was invented about three years later. My goggles were the key to my visual. There are handwritten notebook entries that might pre-date that."

"What interests me is that the new version of the narrative suggest that we never met in person. The early iteration suggests that we lived together somewhere around the Isle of Grain." Soma Jones picked up an OS Landranger map of the Medway Towns.

"A lot of the early material has a Medway and north Kent fascination, actually Dungeness and Folkstone appear repeatedly. It took a long time for things to settle into a reimagined London." Bill scratched her bum.

Soma Jones laughed. "That's my fault for becoming the non-protagonist thirteen years ago. My easy on the eye everyman styling was probably responsible for that. What does Soma Jones look like, what does he wear, what is his brand of cigarettes? None of that was important, and of course this was crucial. Building the multiple utopias that branch off the endless traffic systems expanding as a ceaseless linguine from Dashanka Junction was more important than its ostensible point of view character."

Bill led him into a canteen area. She handed him a Diet Coke from the fridge and took one herself. "I was revived fairly soon afterwards, with a threatening femme fatale aura. I've retained some of that threatening energy ever since. My development arc has been more jagged than yours; you've never been anybody."

"Not entirely true!" He cracked open his Diet Coke. "With my first few appearances I was pulling an all-nighter typing code into a C64, living somewhere on the Holloway Road that had become a canal, because there was some obsession about a flooded city at the time, but that's from the author living in the proximity of the London Flood Barrier in the early 80s."

"That early material almost won you a place in early New Weird history." Bill set fire to a Jeff Vandermeer novel. "Your debut was on the original Fantastic Metropolis site before the big boys wrote Gabe Chouinard out of the picture while he was having mental and financial issues. Essentially you are the lost poster boy of that era."

Soma Jones gave the burning novel a kick and launched it out across the car park. "Well, don't ever go telling Sally that! She might find a reason to stop finding me pathetic."

"Sally doesn't think you're pathetic." Ball laughed.

"You think so?" Soma Jones gave a look of interest.

"Sally doesn't think about you at all."

John's train crawled towards Neasden. He expected things would pick up soon after. Always assuming the tannoy's "engineering works at Neasden" hadn't just been a ruse to reassure the passengers... give them the impression they knew what was going on. He patted the rucksack again. It contained two items, both clothed in expensive Christmas wrapping paper, all silver and shiny with embossed snowflakes. One was cylindrical, about 40cm in length. The other rectangular, half as long and tapered at one end. Both were dense and surprisingly heavy for their size. John had already decided to ask Kurt for a couple of bricks to put in the rucksack along with the envelope he was picking up. If someone was watching him enter and leave the building, and assuming they were good at their job, then it wouldn't do to have an obviously lighter bag on the way out.

He was pretty sure what the packages contained. It was one of the two zen guns Smith had sourced from Soma Jones. John pictured it... the long barrel and the detachable stock containing an array of recessed buttons and dials. Why would Smith want something like that to fall into the hands of Kurt Rejoinder? If he was as bad a man as Smith suggested... as his reputation suggested... then why give him a zen gun? It's not like there were many of those things left. Sanchez certainly wasn't making any more. Not since he turned Serial Number 23 on himself and could now be found sweeping leaves from the courtyard of a Buddhist moon-astery in Belgium.

Kurt manufactured and sold Relevance Drugs and boredom. He no doubt already had a small armoury of exotic weaponry, but why add to it?

But John pretty much knew the answer. A zen gun in return for an envelope. There's only one thing that envelope could contain that made it a fair trade. Leastways as far as John knew. It had to be a scrap of the manuscript. Or at the very least a map pointing to where a page might be found. John had heard on the grapevine that Potemkin Smith only had one more mission to complete, after which he planned to retire to the castle outside time. And of course, the only way to enter the castle was to complete that mission. He needed the Stockhausen Manuscript to get through those doors.

It didn't surprise John that Kurt Rejoinder might have found a fragment. Lots of people owed Kurt lots of money. But he was less interested in the money than in what they might offer him when the money ran out. And there's nothing quite like Relevance Drugs to run up a large tab.

As far as John knew, Smith had gathered more pages of the manuscript than anyone else. But he was still plenty short. John himself knew where one could be found. A location nobody else knew about. A page everybody thought was lost.

Of course, a few missing pages wouldn't be the end of the world. Billiamina had already proved anyone with 75% of the pages could extrapolate the rest. In fact, Bill had already written the software that would do it. It was rumoured it would run on a C64 with the Simon's BASIC expansion cartridge. But only she knew for sure. It wouldn't be free of course, but if Smith approached her with enough fragments, a deal would be done.

Hell, who knows? For Potemkin Smith, she might provide the software for free. That's the kind of respect he commanded. Not that he took it for granted. He'd have something worthwhile to exchange. Something nobody else could get their hands on. John planned on retrieving the page he knew about soon. A favour for Potemkin AND a page of the manuscript? Now *that* was some real inner-circle shit right there.

The train picked up speed again. Still not at Neasden, but he knew it was close. After that, presumably plain sailing to Canons Park. John stood up and glanced around the carriage. The few other occupants had their heads buried in their prosthetic memories and paid him no heed. He whipped out a black felt tip and quickly, but neatly, blacked out the JFK graffiti.

"Fuck that shite" he muttered to himself and sat back down just as Neasden's platforms scrolled into view.