Apex Book Company

Riding the SwiftTube, enroute to MainHosp for Respiratory Conversion Surgery, Marko Denna almost stepped into a Non-Breather, a FullPerson, compartment by mistake. He noticed the holoplate by the door - sexless human profile, lips pursed to exhale a noxious looking cloud, red bar slashed diagonally through the image - just in time. Not quickly enough, however, to prevent his breath condensing on the glass.

Denna lip-read an outraged “Disgusting habit” as he was pointed out by one of the compartment’s occupants. The others turned to stare, each clad in a bright, neat, FullPersons’ tunic, inhalation grids livid against the pale skin of their throats and BreatheOut reservoirs - some by Gucci, Armani or Rolex - at their hips. Status symbols. Declarations of public spiritedness - and high CredLims.

Face burning, instinctively trying to hold his breath to stop himself fouling the air around him, Denna turned away and made towards the Breather section of the Tube. Then stopped. Though still drawing air in through mouth and nose, though still inflating and deflating his chest, though still blowing out carbon dioxide, bacteria and bodily moisture, he no longer felt welcome there either. He belonged to neither camp. To nothing.

And the thought of spending the journey in a Breather compartment with its sullen, persecuted occupants - tunics as drab and much-repaired as his own, walls and ceiling stained by years of human exhaust, windows dripping with human condensation - was suddenly too nauseating to bear.

I’m already thinking like a Non-Breather, he mused bitterly. Prospective FullPerson Marko Denna, CredLim straining, bound for the flesh-paring knife of legendary respiratory specialist, Doctor Arland Randak, to become a true nature-defeating human being. For the good of City Number C405, for his fellow man. And for Karryann, his wife of four years - a long time for such an unequal yoking; he a Breather and she a FullPerson.

Passion had seen them through the early days of course. Fired by the forbidden nature of their love and parental disapproval. But passion doesn’t get a Breather a decent job or pay the rent. Passion wears thin. Passion becomes endless emotional warfare, becomes a relentless, screamed litany of “Get me out of the Breather Zone you selfish FoulBreath bastard. Get me out. Get me out. GET ME OUT OF THIS STINKING HOLE!”

He stayed in the corridor for the rest of the journey. Staring out of the curved, transparent wall of the SwiftTube as it skirted the edge of the city’s dome. Beyond, Denna could see Out - a desolate, tree-infested, uncontrolled wilderness, blighted by the ruins of man’s old, disease-ridden open cities and towns, now inhabited only by wild animals, political criminals.

And ArtiResp Deviants; perverted FullPersons who had paid prostitutes to breathe into their mouths. Their SyntheticRespiration systems forcibly removed by the authorities before they were sent into exile.

Denna shuddered. Still exhausted from filthy, dangerous extra shifts cleaning the coffin-size, methane-filled sewage tubes at the ReCyc Plant to build up enough CredLim for his Conversion, he tried to comprehend why someone would throw so much away for the sake of a quick thrill.

The SwiftTube hissed to a halt and a synthesised, vaguely feminine voice announced that this was the MainHosp TubeNode. Suddenly, Denna was afraid. He was about to be Converted, improved, changed. Totally. Irrevocably.

“Karryann,” he whispered in a fit of lately unaccustomed affection, then forced himself away from the handrail and out of the comforting womb of the Tube.

A LiftScoop took him into the majestic grandeur of the MainHosp entrance hall where the AutoRecep spewed a pair of VirtGuide Spectacles into his hands. He put them on and found himself in a ComputerSynth recreation of the building, following a trail of flashing, lime green arrows up wide, sweeping staircases beneath high, vaulted ceilings and along subtly lit, deep-carpeted corridors until he reached the consulting rooms and surgical wards of Dr Arland Randak himself.

The Respiratory Specialist was as imposing as the hospital. A majestic edifice of square jaw, steel-blue eyes and gleaming, hygienically FullShaved skull.

“There is more to breathing than simply processing air,” he said with a grand gesture toward the nearest armchair. Denna noticed that Randak wore SynthiSkin over his hands, webbing his long, delicate fingers. A surgeon needed to avoid too much human contact, he supposed. To protect himself from the bacteria-drenched offal of his clients as well as guarding the city environment from his own sweat vapour and skin-flake. The colourless, translucent membrane, steadily perspiring AntiBac glaze from the network of porous micro-veins webbing its surface, glistened wetly under the illumination of Randak’s FloaterLight.

An IntravenoFeed inlet dangled from the Consultant’s left arm. Another of man’s fouls habits conquered .

Denna sat down. Half falling into the chair, which seemed to enfold itself around him in a suffocating embrace of softness and unbearable comfort.

“The drive to drag vital gases into our lungs, the need to inflate our chests, to taste oxygen, are all basic human desires.”

Randak’s voice had the usual metallic edge produced by his SynthiResp’s audio facilitator. And the slight time-lag between lip movement and speech sound. Watching a FullPerson talk was like viewing a badly dubbed, foreign three-vee. Denna always found it disconcerting, even after four years in the intimate company of the most sensual and lustful FullPerson he had ever known.

“To roar with laughter,” Randak continued. “To shout with rage, to feel our throats fairly quiver with exertion, are needs dating back to the primal chaos in which our ancestors existed.

“Are you ready Mister Denna? To take one giant leap away from the primitive?”

Yes, Denna nodded. I suppose so.

“Good man,” Randak boomed and clapped a too-smooth, AntiBac- dampened, webbed hand on the drab shoulder of Denna’s tunic. “Rest assured Mister Denna, that I will not turn you into a machine as the ignorant would have you believe. The SyntheticRespirator is controlled by the greatest micro-processor known to man - the human brain. In that, it is no different from your existing respiratory system. It is part of you. Is you. Plastic and silicone, blended into muscle and flesh.” He became solemn. “The first few months may be difficult. The first few days, traumatic. But if you fight through, you’ll win through.”

Oh, I intend to fight, Denna answered silently. My marriage depends on it. I love Karryann you see. Despite her moods, the screaming and the emotional - his fingers went instinctively to a freshly wrought bruise on his forehead - and physical violence. Without her, life is nothing. Grey, Breather Zone nothing.

Randak clapped him on the shoulder once more, then summoned his personal HypnoAnaesthetist. The last thing Denna remembered, was her SynthiResp-enhanced voice, pouring like metal-flavoured honey into his ear.

He awoke three days later.

Clawing his way out of a sleeping nightmare of premature burial into a waking nightmare of suffocation.

He screamed, the sound issuing from his throat an eternity after his brain had unleashed it. He writhed against the bed restraints. Jaws locked open. neck muscles taut.

Help me…I can’t breathe…

A HypnoCounsellor hurried in. Denna waved him away with a violent jerk of his head and forced himself to lie still and concentrate on the gentle vibration of the SynthiResp, newly installed in his motionless, dead chest. On the oxygen it was drawing in through the inhalation grid inserted in his raw, swollen throat. On getting out of the MainHosp. On re-grading. On moving with Karryann out of Breather squalor into the pastel-shaded, architectural beauty of the FullPerson Zone.

It was all right. He wasn’t going to suffocate. He didn’t need to inflate his lungs…to breathe…couldn’t breathe in fact…another scream erupted from his mind…

He crushed it down. He must lie still. Concentrate on the gentle vibration of the SynthiResp…Must fight this foolish urge to breathe…Breathe…God, how he wanted to BREATHE…

When he boarded the SwiftTube home, two weeks later, he entered a Breather compartment by mistake. They threw him out. Couldn’t he read? Was he blind? Or was he a Deviant, hoping to get off on their breathing?

He spent the rest of the journey in the corridor. Too ashamed of his old Breather tunic to venture into a FullPerson compartment. Too frightened that a panic attack, a breathing attack, fewer now but still lurking at the borders of his self-control, would send him screaming and gibbering from their presence.

He gripped the handrail, white-knuckled. Forehead against the curved outer wall, sweat misting the glass. The SwiftTube was small. It was hard to breathe in here. In fact, he couldn’t breathe at all…

The walk home from the TubeNode helped. Physical activity battering his body, still frail from surgery and diverting his mind from its overwhelming obsession with sucking air down his throat.

On either side, the sheer cliff-like walls of Breather Zone domicile blocks reared over him. Identical, blank-faced and oppressive. Refuse swirled about his feet, agitated by the dank return air exhaust funnelled through the cavernous Breather streets on its way back to the ReCyc Plant which brooded, titanic and ugly at the heart of the Zone.

He could see the Plant now as he walked. An irregular, asymmetrical mass from which a writhing tangle of supply and return ducts twisted upwards to reach out across the shadowed vastness of the dome roof. There were times when Denna wondered if it was alive. A gigantic, bloated, HardPlas spider that lived on human waste. Gorging itself on effluence and discharge. Then spewing it out again. Its vomit the stuff of human lives.

Denna had worked in the Plant since leaving TechTrain. Graded as a Level Four, Section Controller, but employed as a Level Two Hygiene Labourer because Breather segregation had come into force immediately prior to his posting. There was very little money in Hygiene. There was very little money in any Breather job.

The city’s giant FloaterLights were fading, denoting nightfall. Denna increased his pace. It was not good to be out on a Breather street after dark. The night shadows were home to too many gangs - fuelled by drugs, hating everything and everyone, especially FullPersons.

And that’s what I am now isn’t it, Denna mused with a bitterness he could not fully understand. He had done it. Reached it. He had surely become what all people wanted to be. Had worked for it. Sold body and soul for it. So why this anger, this sense of loss?

He was shaking. Cold despite the City’s carefully controlled environmental systems. Feeling faint from the exertion of walking. Wishing that he had realised before it was too late, how good it was to pant for breath.

He reached his domicile and entered the battered, graffiti scrawled LiftScoop, growing more and more apprehensive as he neared his own apartment. Nerves shredded by life in the Breather Zone, Karryann’s moods were becoming increasingly erratic. He did not hesitate when he came to the door bearing the dimmed, flickering, half burned out holoplate marked DENNA M & K, but walked straight in.

Karryann was sitting at the table. Dressed in her shortest, tightest, most provocative - though much repaired - tunic. The table was set out with two ReadyMeals, a candle and a bottle of WineSub.

She looked up and Denna was shocked to a halt in the open doorway.

Bald. Karryann was bald. Every strand of her lush tumble of rich dark hair, gone.

“Marko,” she whispered. Her mouth seemed huge. A red gash in a sphere of pale flesh. It shouldn’t matter. She was Karryann, the person he loved, not an ornament. Yet…

She got to her feet. Pouting coyly. Holding out her hands. Denna shrank back. Her sensual posturing turned instantly to angry sulking. “You don’t love me anymore.” Tears glistened in her eye. “I hate you.”

“No…It’s just…” He shrugged.

“My hair.”

“Yes. But…”

“Don’t you know anything you ignorant FoulBreath bastard? You can’t get into the FullPerson Zone if you don’t FullShave. It’s a new rule. Hair is dirty. Disgusting. All that filth. crawling around on your head. I couldn’t bear it any longer. It made me feel sick.”

It made you feel sick because they told you it should, Denna thought bitterly.

She began to cry. Choking out loud, wet sounding sobs into her hands. Denna went across to her. Tentatively put an arm about her shoulder. She buried her face against him. Began clawing at him, her crying instantly transformed into the desperate, almost violent passion that always followed such outbursts.

Tonight, however, Denna was more irritated than aroused. Karryann’s tongue brushed painfully against the taste sensors newly implanted in his own. Her busy hands snagged the exhalation reservoir, tugging sharply at the valve emerging from its raw wound in his side. He winced and pulled away.

“You don’t seem very pleased to see me,” Karryann pouted.

“I’m sorry. Everything hurts.”

“My poor darling,” she purred mechanically, lips out of synch with her voice, further smothering Denna’s wavering, feeble desires. “Let me make it better.”

“As long as you’re gentle with me.”

“I’m always gentle with my dear little Marko,” Karryann chuckled. “First of all you bad bad boy, I’m going to cut your hair. Then we’ll eat. And then…”

“My hair? No Karry - “

She pushed him away, violently. He stumbled against the door frame, the impact relatively light, but enough to jar painfully through his battered, aching body. He fought down a desire to vomit onto the threadbare carpet.

“You’ve got to,” Karryann was screeching. “We’ll never leave this stinking hole if you don’t. Or are you going to be as selfish about this as you were about Conversion?”

“It’s not that. I’m tired…”

“Selfish FoulBreath bastard. I hate you.”

There was a dangerous edge to her voice. Denna sighed. He was feeling too weak to fight. He wanted only to sit and be left alone. And breathe. That would be good. To gulp down great mouthfuls of air. Even the stale, recycled barely-breathable version pumped into the domicile blocks. He heard himself acquiesce to Karryann’s demands. Sitting down at last. At the table. Staring at the cheap. flickering candle, wishing he could smell its smoky scent. The SynthiResp, however, could not cope with any odour other than the crass.

He became aware of the buzz of a power razor, jarring through his aching head. A lock of hair fell into his lap. Karryann stood close, brushing against him, obviously trying to make the whole performance an adventure in eroticism. Denna merely felt humiliated and angry with himself for giving in so easily. He didn’t want her touch. Wanted nothing other than to be left alone. But he said nothing. The razor buzzed. More hair fell.

Afterwards, Denna lay sleepless in the DormaNiche. The darkness crushed his motionless chest, pressed into his eyes. Cold sweat sheened his skin. He needed to move, to divert his mind. If only to get up and walk through the dangerous night to empty his half-full, personal BreatheOut reservoir into the nearest public exhalation point.

Karryann stirred in his arms. He felt her denuded scalp move in his hand. It was cold, raw. It was flesh. Instinctively he touched his own head. More flesh.

“I can’t sleep,” Karryann murmured.

“Nor can I.”

“I can’t hear you breathing anymore Marko. I don’t like it. It’s like lying beside a corpse.”

He went to the Plant in the morning. The hood of his tunic covering his head as he walked through the square-cornered maze of Breather streets. Joining the shuffling, silent army streaming into the open, red-lit mouth of the ReCyc Plant. The night shift, ashen, gaunt-faced, equally silent, shambled out towards them.

He was going straight to Admin, to re-grade. He knew he ought to wait a few days. He was still physically weak, still prone to those damned panic attacks. But he needed to get Karryann out of the Breather zone.

They had both been irritable that morning. The atmosphere, electric with the threat of coming storm as another explosion of emotional violence gathered in the taut space between them.

Once inside, Denna could not help but see the Plant Floor as a hellish negative of the MainHosp Reception. A high, vaulted ceiling, supported on pillars of filthy, rusting steel, lost in the shadowed blackness above the harsh glare of undiffused FloaterLamps. An ugly, latticework of metal steps sweeping from the grime-darkened concrete to zigzag up the flanks of titanic, featureless machinery which dwarfed men to ant-like insignificance. And the noise. The cacophony. The infernal, relentless, deafening white roar. The noise engulfed, smothered, pressed in and crushed. It could be tasted. Felt. Breathed.

Keeping his head down, Denna walked straight to the nearest LiftScoop. The doors hissed shut and there was a silence every bit as deafening as the Plant Floor.

The ReGrade Supervisor, bored, perfunctory and also nude-headed, sat him at a vacant terminal. After requesting personal details, the screen immediately presented him with a column of simple mathematical progressions. Denna found that his mouth was dry.

The calculations quickly became more complex.

He couldn’t concentrate. Was still on edge, angry.

He fumbled a straightforward formula transposition.

Cursing, he raised his hand to slam the touch pad, caught the supervisor’s malevolent stare and forced himself to lower it once more. He concentrated, instead, on the SynthiResp’s gentle vibration - a solid, aching lump in his chest. And on the oxygen flowing through the inhalation grid in his throat - which was sore and throbbing.

He sat back. Instinctively opening his mouth for a calming intake of breath.

Nothing, but choking deadness.

Panic gnawed at him. He wanted air. Just one lung full. The re-grade timer was running down quickly. Eating at his chance to escape from the Breather Zone. To save his faltering marriage. He remembered Karryann as she was. The first time they had met. The euphoria when she, Level Six Personal Secretary and beautiful daughter of a beautiful FullPerson family had accepted his mumbled invitation for a date. The sense of renewed purpose, drawing him back from the brink of black depression when she told she would marry him as a stand, against her family’s constrictive respectability. Her delicate, elf-like face. The electric shock of her touch. That tumble of lush black hair…

He loved her. Couldn’t live without her.

Complete this test then, he snapped at himself. Do it…Do it…

Abruptly he turned his attention back to the screen. Holding himself rigidly under control, he re-answered the failed question and moved on.

Up to Level Two, Three, Four,. The questions, quick-fire and progressively more complex. The need to breathe, urgent. He clamped his jaw shut. The SynthiResp hummed perceptibly louder, responding to his brain’s desperate pleas for more oxygen.

Level Five. Three more questions.

His hands shook. Sweat-sheened, his fingers slithered over the touch pad. The SynthiResp thrummed at maximum speed. Still not sucking in enough oxygen. Still leaving him gasping for more - except that he could no longer gasp for anything. And if it failed, he would suffocate, sliding off the chair, writhing on the floor. Would the supervisor even bother to come to his aid? Or would she simply carry on reading her holo-mag, glancing at the chrono and sighing, while he fell into choking, airless darkness, unable even to scream…

Three more questions. Time running out.

The screen blurred. The SynthiResp was failing. Definitely failing. Literally shaking itself to pieces in his chest. He could feel its violent vibration, buzzing against his ribs. Up into his FullShaved head…

He rammed his concentration through the panic. Clenched his jaws. focused grimly on the screen. Answered the next question.

All he could hear was that damned SynthiResp. And everything hurt again. Sore, aching, throbbing.

Two more questions.

Once more he gripped his concentration, focused on the problem with hellfire intensity.

One more question. Almost there. Almost…Less than one minute left. The supervisor had switched off her holomag and was getting to her feet, yawning hugely.

Forty seconds.

Denna’s fingers slipped, miss-hit a character. He scrambled about the pad to right his mistake. The numbers blurred, cleared. Twenty seconds. The SynthiResp filled everything. Loud buzzing in his head. Closing in. If only he could breathe. Just once. A single, deep intake of breath. A huge refreshing mouthful of air. To taste, savour, calm… His mind became a tunnel. His fingers became detached. Stiff…groping for the right characters.

There was a bleep.

Marko Denna, successfully re-graded to Level Five. Suitable for technical supervisory posts. A new card was ejected into his hand and he was stumbling towards the exit, brushing past the supervisor, half running through the Plant Floor and out into the cavernous gloom of the Breather Zone. Walking fast. Aimlessly.

From somewhere, a public three-vee commercial was extolling the virtues of full body protection. Beneficial both to wearer and environment. No more effluent from all those anti-social bodily functions. A total, self-contained, personal environment of your own…if you had the money of course.

Denna found himself entering the city’s rotting, rusting, open-sore of a red light area - the Pits. He stumbled to a halt, hesitated, then turned to flee.

A whore called to him from a nearby doorway. “You want me to breathe for you?”

Denna swung back round to watch the woman detach herself from the shadows and move towards him. Any illusion of youth soon dissipated. Her face was haggard, her smile, a leer. She weaved a little as she walked, stumbled slightly. Drink or drugs. Denna couldn’t tell. Not that it mattered. The effect was the same. Yet, he didn’t walk away. He hadn’t tasted air for so long.

Perfume assailed him as she came near. Strong and cheap enough to overwhelm his SynthiResp’s odour receptors. Regardless of her physical state, her breath would smell clear and fresh. It was her trade. The only thing about herself she would care for. After all, this wasn’t about sex was it. It was about having someone clamp their mouth over yours to force air down your throat and into dead lungs.

She was close now. Mouth split into a broad grin. Eyes cold though. Cold and weary. She stopped, cocked her head to one side. “Well?”

Well? He hesitated. To feel air being poured into his mouth, down his throat. To feel his lungs expand…He realised that he had dipped his hand into his tunic pocket. His fingers closing about his PayCard wallet.

A Patrol Groundrunner swept round the corner. Siren loud, strobe blinding as it hissed to a halt. Its hatches crashed open. A raid.

Denna ran. Tensing for the bite of a stun whip across his back. Hearing the whore screaming obscenities, people shouting their innocence as they were dragged from bar and brothel. Surely they had seen him. They must have…He weakened suddenly, his legs giving way, dropping him to his knees.

Exhausted, SynthiResp whirring and juddering in his chest, mouth open gasping at non-existent air he ventured to turn round. He was out of the Pits. Just. But far enough away to be safe. Passers by spared him only contemptuous glances. No one offered him help. A Non-Breather in this part of the Breather Zone meant only one thing.

He cursed himself for a fool when he realised that his wanderings had not really been so aimless. He struggled to his feet, dusted himself down and made for home.

Which he thought was empty when he stepped through the door.

“Karry. Karry. Are you there?”

He heard a soft whimper. Someone crying, concealed by the shadows infesting the corners of the badly lit domicile.

“Karry? Is that you?”

The whimper became a scream. A dark shape rushed at him. Karryann. Clutching a knife. A kitchen cutter. Her face twisted into a mask of terror and rage. She crashed into him. Squirming and cursing hysterically as Denna held her to himself, one hand locked around her right wrist, trying to keep the knife from slashing his face. He was trying to yell back at her. To make her understand who he was. But his voice wouldn’t work. Panic-stricken words losing their way in the electronic maze inserted between mind and mouth. He was weakening. The blade ripped across his cheek. There was a shocking sting of pain.

Then Karryann slumped in his arms and began to cry.

“You bastard,” she sobbed. “You thoughtless FoulBreath bastard!”

“Give me the knife Karry,” he said as gently as he could.

“No. No, they might still be out there.”

“Who? Out where?”

“The rape gang. They were banging on the door, shouting at me. Threatening me…”

She began to cry. Choking out huge, ugly sobs. Denna made to comfort her, but she wrenched herself out of his weak grip and backed away.

“It’s your fault. Your fault.”

“I’ve been re-graded,” he told her, keeping his eyes on the wavering point of the knife. There was blood on the blade. His blood. His fingers went to his cheek. He tasted warm saltiness as some of it ran over his lips.

“Get me out Marko. Get me out now. It’s your fault I’m here. GET ME OUT!”

“I need to rest Karryann. I’ll go for a job later. Please let me sit down.”

“Do it now you bastard. Or I’ll leave. I’ve already PagePhoned my family.”

PagePhoned? Their CredLim would no longer be straining, it would be in tatters. “They want me back with them. I’ll go Marko. God, if you don’t get me out of here I’ll go myself.” She glanced fearfully around. “Before that gang comes back.”

“Karry - “

“Now damn you. Now now now now NOW!”

She slashed at him with the knife. Denna cringed back, feeling sharp steel slice the air in front of him. Seeing only Karryann’s crazed features. Eyes red from weeping. Teeth bared. FullShaved head making her face skull-like. Repulsing him.

“I hate you” she screamed and lunged at him. “Did you hear me FoulBreath? I HateyouhateyouhateyouHATEYOU!”

He wrenched open the door and fell backwards into the hall, kicking out at Karryann’s dark-shadowed, screeching silhouette as it followed him. There was a dull thud and a definite, physical contact followed by a loud grunt of pain. The knife clattered on to the floor and lay, glinting in the harsh, irregular lighting. On her hands and knees now, Karryann was blindly groping for it.

Denna crab-scuttled away from the doubled-up form. Then up on to this feet, stumbling for the LiftScoop. If he could get that job, everything would be all right. This was how it had been before he had gone for Conversion. Karryann screaming at him as he stumbled out of the domicile block, her curses and threats ringing in his head as he boarded the SwiftTube…It had been all right when he came back though, hadn’t it? Last night?

Now?

The LiftScoop up to ReCyc Plant Level Four was coffin like. Denna slumped against the corner. Trying not to look at his reflection in the mirror wall. Head swimming. The slightest movement made him dizzy. His whole body was aflame. There was no air in the lift. No air anywhere. He couldn’t breathe. He only wanted to breathe.

The SynthiResp whirred in his chest. So loud. So damn loud.

The lift stopped. Doors opened. Denna stepped through.

The shock was physical.

A monster sat at the reception console. A shimmering, vaguely human thing.

“Can I help you?” Its voice, muffled by the transparent membrane stretched over its mouth, was feminine.

Denna recovered slightly. EnviroSuit. Full BodyProtec. A second skin, like the one covering Doctor Randak’s hands. Connected to her nervous system by thousands of micro-surgical implants. Controlling and containing every bodily function likely to cause effluent. And protecting her from the external environment. She had been feeding when Denna came in, IntravenoValve connecting her arm to an overhead nutirent line.

“I’ve been re-graded to Level Four.”

The receptionist sighed regretfully. “I’m so sorry Mister…?”

“Denna. Marko Denna.”

“I’m sorry Mister Denna. You’re the fourth one today. It seems the ReGrade system needs re-grading itself. I’m afraid full body synthetics are required for any grade above Level Four. In fact, it will soon be a requirement for all FullPerson Grades. A new Zone is already being sealed off for us. I thought it was common knowledge…”

“I’ve been away. In the MainHosp…” And news doesn’t filter into the Breather Zone very quickly these days.

“A FullPerson can get a grant quite easily. The operation is very simple and much less onerous than Breather Conversion.” She brushed membrane-clad fingertips over the touch pad of her keyboard. “Ah, here you are; Marko Denna. You did very well in your ReGrade Test. These scores will get you a grant quite easily. We could probably get you into MainHosp in less than a week.”

“Yes…I see…”

“We’ll need some personal details. I have a FormPad - “

He was never sure exactly what made him run. The rejection, talk of a new Zone, the prospect of further surgery, the hopelessness of going back to face Karryann. Perhaps it was the sight of the sperm repository nestled at the receptionist’s waist beside the ColostoBag and BreatheOut reservoir.

Whichever it was, he ran, though not blindly. He was making for the Pits. To taste air, and to wait for the Patrol to make another raid.

---

A technical author by day, Terry’s fiction has been published in such magazines as Midnight Street, Nemonymous, Dark Animus and FutureFire. Terry has received two Ellen Datlow honourable mentions and was once a Peeping Tom 4th placed Scaremonger of the Year. Whispers of Wickedness has recently published a chapbook of his stories called ‘Demons and Demons’.