Mardock Scramble

Apparently the dead girl used to refer to herself occasionally as a bomb. A ticking time bomb. Her friend only understood why when she saw the diagnostic charts at the hospital. The dying girl had AIDS and had been slowly dying from it for many years, working the streets all the while. Then the dying girl told her how she had ended up infected with such a disease. She had been raped one day on her way home from school.

Since then she had lived only for her work. For revenge. On her deathbed, she dreamed of all the bombs that she had spread, hoping they would explode in a fiery blast inside the men to whom she had successfully passed on her disease.

Then there were the girls who worked in groups to ensnare the big earners.

Not just ensnare, either—often their behavior would descend into blackmail, forcing their marks into handing over increasing amounts of money under the threat of public disclosure. The gangs often ended up getting sucked into larger criminal organizations—some girls went voluntarily, others in order to protect themselves from the backlash from the disgruntled blackmailee. The girl who told Balot this story was one of the former group, having joined a large criminal gang by choice, but she had run away shortly after realizing that she had made a mistake. Men do understand on some level that women feel pain too, she said, but what they don’t realize is that the pain we feel has just as much impact on us as it does on them. Pain couldn’t fight gravity and always flowed downhill toward lower ground, finding the path of least resistance. However bad life at the Date Club was, it wasn’t as painful as the alternative.

Well, at least nothing like that ever happens here. This was the platitude so often used as the moral of one of the girls’ horror stories—so much so that it became a cliché. The man at reception said so. The girls, who had grown so used to their jobs, said so. It became a mantra, an inoculation; so long as you spoke those words, no harm would ever befall you. But danger came in many shapes and sizes. It wasn’t just the unknowable future that could be dangerous—sometimes danger came in the form of shadows from the past that had finally caught up with the present. Danger could grow and expand to fill any void.

There were teenage outcasts from society, man-boys with no place in the world and at their wits’ end, who abducted middle school girls to use as their slaves. There were middle-aged, outwardly respectable government officials who walked past children’s playgrounds at the same fixed time every day, hoping to catch a glimpse of the young children that they were sexually attracted to. There was the Peeping Tom who had focused all his attention on one girl, and when the object of his affection failed to show any gratitude for his solicitude he raped the ungrateful bitch before dragging her to the local registry office to forcibly marry her, at which point he was promptly apprehended by the police.

A seventeen-year-old did some babysitting on the side to earn some pocket money, and she committed unspeakably cruel atrocities to over ten different children before she was caught and the alarm raised. When asked by the district attorney what could have possibly motivated her, her honest reply was that she thought that was what love was. Such was the reality of how her own parents had treated her.

People who labeled themselves as sadists or fetishists operated a network. Some of them were out in the open, appearing in the media, proud and unashamed of their otherness, and were recognized as outcasts. Different, maybe. Alien, definitely. But not necessarily dangerous per se.

But then there were the other aliens—the ones who didn’t go out of their way to call themselves sadists or fetishists. Not because they weren’t, but because they considered themselves to be absolutely normal. They had no more humanity in them than a giant shredding machine: flick their switches in the right way and they’d rip anyone to pieces without a moment’s hesitation, whether a complete stranger or their own flesh and blood.

These people weren’t particularly complicated, not in terms of what they wanted out of life. Their motivations were really quite straightforward. The only thing that was at all complicated was the process that they needed to go through to get what they wanted.

Sunny side up—the good life: no worries, no boredom, no contradictions.

A desirable goal for people from all walks of life, rich or poor. Ask a child why she had run away from the Welfare Institute, ask a rapist why he repeatedly committed the most horrendous of atrocities, and the answer would be the same: I wanted to be happy. It was the only answer there could be.