Mardock Scramble

His Chameleon Sunglasses were a deep scarlet as they smashed against the floor, and their fragments scattered like blood. His quivering right hand no longer had a single finger attached to it. His days as a sharp—a professional gambler—were over. The right side of his face was shredded by steel shrapnel from the explosion.

Balot stared at Shell and the state he was in.

Shell could barely breathe. The right side of his face was drenched in black and reflecting light. Perhaps he was crying.

Balot knelt down next to him and reached out with her left hand, the one that held the gun.

Shell tried weakly to wriggle away from her. As he did so, the gun in Balot’s hand squelched and disappeared. Something else appeared in its place.

Shell’s eyes focused on it with trepidation.

It was the thing that Balot had received from the Doctor at the Broilerhouse. Or rather, things. Four of them. The four storage devices used in Shell’s Clapping, his memory extraction operations. The chips. Shell’s eyes grew wider and wider.

–Here you are. I want you to have these back.

Shell’s eyes moved slowly from the chips up to Balot’s face. Balot touched Shell’s temple with her right hand. She located the terminal. The fiberoptic circuit that connected straight to Shell’s brain.

Balot snarced.

Shell’s body bent backward and went rigid. His eyes opened so wide that it seemed as if his eyeballs might pop out of his skull, but instead they started flickering rapidly.

Without her realizing it, Balot’s left hand had closed tightly over her four chips.

Her right hand was still pressed against his temple, and before long Balot had got the measure of the circuits to Shell’s brain.

–Everything that you’ve lost, I’m going to give back to you.

Balot took the vast amount of information contained in her left hand and started to feed it through the circuits and into Shell’s brain. Carefully, so as not to overload or damage anything.

At first Shell didn’t understand what was happening, but soon his face started twitching, and a crazed voice leaked out.

“Stop it…”

His eyes rolled back in his head so that only the whites showed. An unearthly scream left his mouth. A cry of despair. His mouth started frothing, then bubbled up, and blood poured from his nostrils.

Balot remained silent and continued to feed Shell’s memories back into his mind. His destroyed gestalt was gradually reconstructed, and even his paralyzed nerve circuits were being repaired electronically.

It wasn’t possible to manipulate his nerve cells directly, of course, but it was possible to restore the outlines of all the events that had taken place, with details of how they all related to each other, memories of the sights and sounds and smells and other stimuli.

Shell’s scream continued for a long time. This was the man who had voluntarily chosen to be an empty husk of a man, but Balot was now forcibly pumping the rotten contents that he’d been turning away from for so long back into him.

Eventually Shell was all screamed out, but the operation continued unabated for about thirty minutes. Only because of Balot’s incredible aptitude was such a speed possible.

Her glove squelched and swallowed up the chips again for safekeeping.

When she was finished, Balot touched the still-unconscious Shell’s head and communicated directly via the circuits in his brain.

–If you take good enough care of it then even a rotten egg might eventually come back to life.

Shell slept. Throughout the whole operation, from start to end, he hadn’t even looked at Balot once. Just like when he’d waved goodbye to her from outside the car that trapped her. He hadn’t really been looking at her—only his own reflection. You reap what you sow, Balot thought, and then she realized that this applied to herself as well. She had never loved Shell and never wanted to. All she had ever wanted was to be loved.

She felt a great void disappear—where there had been a sorrowful emptiness inside her, now she was feeling complete again.

The very next instant she sensed something approaching the building they were in. She gulped.

It was threat personified. A cold killing machine in the shape of a giant. And it was drawing near.

“Boiled is coming…” Oeufcoque murmured, for he too had sensed the impending danger.

Balot nodded. She felt overwhelming pressure bearing in on her from all around, and she shivered. For a moment she forgot about Shell, forgot about herself, forgot about the dead girls and their accursed lives—everything was wiped cleanly from her mind.

For that alone, Balot found herself feeling almost thankful.

04