Noir In the 22nd Century:

Skull Crack Screwdriver — Unedited and Uncut, Live From the Edge

Lionel Screwit is a travelling detective, employed by World History. He moves from place to place, putting things back on their track.

“Oh thank god you’re here detective” says the scrawny police chief of Marginalia, a city on a cliff edge, “this city’s three kinds of fucked up”.

*

The man’s insides were now outsides, his torso, arms, and legs encircled by a crimson bounding ring. The pose was vitruvian. The head was detached. It had been placed atop the dripping border, just high enough that the eyes could peer out beyond.

“Whaddaya think it means eh Screwit?” says the police chief, elbowing him in the side.

Detective Screwit knows what it means. He knows the boss won’t like it.

“Get me the tapes”

Cronies scramble into action.

*

On the fuzzy video screen, a young woman with hood over her head is making the man’s insides outsides. She had been gazing absentmindedly at the camera as she’d waited — waited for the chief historian to leave the government offices through the foyer. She finishes posing the body. Obscure movements writhe beneath her hood. Last the head is placed atop the dripping border, just high enough so that the eyes can peer out beyond. A flash cooks the screen. The video cuts out.

“Never would have thought a girl like her could tear a man’s guts out like that eh Screwit?” says the police chief, bobbing up and down, “I seen a lot round here, but never quite like that. This place is three kinds of fucked up”.

He pops the lid off the tube that’s emerged from his pocket, and flicks a pill up into his mouth.

“You want one eh Screwit? This is the good stuff, on me, for a man like you – high grade pervitin from the good old days. Oh back then you could feel the fatherland in your fingertips. Back then being a copper meant something…”

Screwit shakes his head. He’s heard all the eulogising before.

A speccy young officer pokes his head around the door. He tells Screwit the computer has a match on the woman’s face.

“Her name’s been scrubbed, but we got all her movements from the past month banked, detective.”

Screwit nods, and follows him out. The chief stays behind, ensconced in electric hum, madly reminiscing to an audience of no one.

*

SAUL’S PROSTHETICS glows out in neon pink from a sign above Screwit’s head. This is the last place she’d been before the murder, before her trace went dark. Screwit feels his gun beneath his uniform, and enters.

“You know this girl?”

He shows her picture to the bulbous man behind the desk. His shifty eyes glint with recognition, but he umms and ahhs, and Screwit, unlike his boss, is not a patient man. He brandishes the pistol.

“Speak, subject – World History demands it.”

The gun, not the name, made Saul talk. He spoke with a voice from old movies.

It turns out the woman was a regular at the shop. The kind of regular who talked much more than they bought.

“She came by the night before last” he says, “broke in and made off with a bunch of the special stock. She’d always had her eye on them.”

“And you didn’t report it?”

This time the man holds his silence.

“What did she take?”

Saul leads Screwit to the storeroom.

*

Grotesqueries of metal fill the shelves. Diversity assaults the senses. One particular monstrosity captures Screwit. In miniature, encased in glass, two automaton hands roll lumps of clay into spheres, then pass them to a centre point, and place them on top of each other, atop a reinforced plate. A hammer smashes down, leaving a single lump of clay, and an imprint. A knife follows, then the arms reach back over, and roll the spheres anew. Screwit gazes closer. A small nameplate sits at the base of the device. He reads it. It reads LOVE. Wires, clamps and screws dangle off below.

“I thought you sold prosthetics,” he says, revulsion in his voice.

“Prosthetics for the soul, Detective. Nothing your kind would care about of course — the badge is all you lawmen need to feel complete. I can’t compete with a need that simple.”

“I am an agent of Spirit. It is in respect to that that I am whole.”

“Sure, sure, detective. Sure, sure. That’s another one I can’t compete with.”

Screwit turns to survey more merchandise. RAGE is a camera obscura, the width of its image restricted by blinkers. Within FEAR two mirrors present a localised infinity.

“So this is what she took?”

“Nah, this kind of stuff didn’t interest her.”

Saul flicks a switch and a shelf rotates.

“Back here, detective, these are my real passion. People think my work is just to make up for a lack, a perceived deficiency relative to some arbitrary whole, but here are copies that got no originals, simulations that never had no real — prosthetics that serve themselves, detective.”

More machines waited on the other side. Spiked balls attack each other in a bowl shaken by a plate like a paint mixer. Two springs, interlocked, hold their partner in mutual tension. A blunted guillotine bounces off a rubber strip.

“No labels for these ones. There’d be no point in that.”

Screwit sees an absence on the back shelves. The whole rear wall is empty.

“What did she take? What were their mechanics? Get me an inventory immediately. Compliance may mean your case is tried with sympathy.”

But Saul doesn’t answer, and when Screwit turns around, he’s gone.

*

“We got a track on the rat detective,” says the speccy officer over the radio, “she’s up by the cliff edge, near the old observatory. Me’n the boss’ll meet you there. Let’s go and skin her to her bones. Rip out her eyes. Scum that do what she’s done don’t deserve to live. ”

“Oooh I’ve not shot a girl like this since back in the good old days Screwit,” crackles out the Chief’s voice, “well, apart from all those other times – but today I’m really feeling it. I got a tingle in my toes and blood flowing through my loins. Time to spread some justice eh Screwit? I just wish the old man could see me now.“

He said ‘justice’ like a market geezer sucking through a cigarette.

*

Detective Screwit drives under lavender skies up through the mirth filled streets of Marginalia, the city on a cliff edge. The cliff edge is the edge of history. It juts out into a deep ravine, where all that doesn’t belong ends up. There is no other side in sight. Marginalia attracts the marginals. They are pushed here by the forces that govern the world. The most marginal among them get pushed right off the edge.

All around him Screwit is assaulted by debauchery. On the cobblestones of Old Queen’s Street a touring troupe of fire eaters blow dragons for cooing groupies. Behind silken veils in the meat district beggars spend their earnings on fine dining. Screwit hates debauchery. Debauchery is an intense point that burns so bright it hides the whole. Fireworks fill the sky as the full moon rises.

*

The Chief and the speccy officer are lying dead on the observatory courtyard floor. It’s the same pose from earlier. Looking at their severed heads Screwit wonders what they saw. He darts his eyes around the scene. The tube of the telescope, it’s aperture long closed, extends through the dome, over the precipice, and points off out into the beyond. On a white steel balcony a shadow moves. Screwit whips his pistol out and shouts up at the darkness.

“Surrender now suspect. History has judged you guilty.”

“History would crush me like a bug, detective,” returns a woman’s voice, “but I ripped its guts out, and showed it it’s own outside. I’ll rip your boss’s guts out too, if you want it. I’ll show him what he doesn’t think exists.”

He fires. The bullet ricochets into nowhere, and the figure dives to her left, scrambling away. Screwit follows – across the ground and up a ladder, round and round the spiral stairs. Now, on the balcony, his quarry isn’t showing. Sweat drips down his forehead. Clanging, scraping sounds ring out, wrenching his head upwards to their source. He sees her climbing up the dome, her fingers punching holes through the sheet metal. Before he can shoot her she’s passed behind the curve.

*

Detective Screwit climbs through a service hatch out onto the roof, up a rusty ladder from the inside. He sees her standing with her back to him, on the edge of the telescope, gazing outwards. Her hood is ripped to tatters. The moonlight shows prosthetics, wires caked with red where they jack into her skull. A mechanical figure grinds glass into a lens. A flailing paint brush makes strokes at random. Blender blades ping a diamond chunk around a globe. They sprawl over her body, and pile on top of one another, jostling for space like buildings in a slum. Some are clearly Saul’s handiwork, sleek and sealed in glass, but other’s Screwit thinks she must have made herself. Jagged edges and scrap materials, exposed to the outside air, grope about into nowhere.

She looks back towards him, pointing down into the ravine.

“That’s the trash of history down there, detective,” she shouts, “but it’s not just stuff that gets thrown out — there’s also what you won’t let in.”

“You can go no further now. Rest assured, your interrogation will be thorough.”

But she is already stepping off the edge. Screwit pulls the trigger. The bullet strikes the mess of metal and a few obscure shapes scatter into the dark. Then she was gone.

*

Suspended from a metal cord, Detective Screwit rappels down the edge of history. Through bodies, cars, and wrecks of something other, he treks towards the point where he knows the woman fell. The ground breaths beneath his feet. It’s cold. With his back to Marginalia, and everything behind it, he looks at the beyond. The light of day has brought the view no clarity — the grim expanse still seems to stretch away forever.

Archipelagos of trash shift in the currents of the moaning earth, punctuated here and there by larger structures that jut out at jaunty angles. In some shadows mushrooms grow. Cat things slink around a corner. Soon enough, atop a sideways library, he finds what he’s been looking for. Dried blood accents some bricks where the wall has crumpled beneath an impact. Nearby, a pool of vomit festers. For the first time in a long time, Screwit doesn’t know what he should do. Neither the woman, nor her corpse, is anywhere to be seen.

*

Detective Screwit sees the woman smash into the ground, loose prosthetics raining down behind her, sees her pick herself up and vomit. She reattaches some missing parts and walks off into the distance. Screwit replays her path in his mind, straining his eyes, trying to pierce right through infinity and find his quarry behind it. It was hopeless.

In the world of universal spirit no loose thread could be tolerated. Seated on the rim of a balcony, Screwit contemplates the price of failure. He would reincorporate the exception, or he would not return.

Numbing fear creeps around his temple. His body retreats and being shrinks into his vision. Then sunlight glint off metal wrests Screwit from his depths. A capsule, behind some rubble, obscured by a head of moss. It pulls him forwards, and Screwit finds it sitting coldly in his hands. In the whole pantheon of prosthetics it is especially raw and inelegant, a flimsy knife cut from sheet metal, skewering a sphere of cork. It sits within a rusting dented cage of mesh. Wires dangle down, leading to an improvised implant with a drill head operated by a mechanical crank. Are you listening, Screwit? What are you going to do?

Yes, crank that handle now, Screwit — a hole in your skull will make you feel whole. Crack the bones. Keep going. That’s it, that’s it – the chill of the screw is colder when you feel it on the inside, right? Now, now, it’s alright, it’s alright, look over there, off into the distance — don’t you think you can make out something on the other side? Something great and heaving? Something fluid? Mercurial? Or deep? Does it look like your guts, Screwit? Does it look like hers?

Off you go now, Screwit. Off you go. Look how big it all is. Taste that silken tingle on the wind. Oh, but you will be coming back at some point, won’t you, Screwit? We know you want to get back in. At some point, atleast, that is.

I wonder when we’ll see you again.