“TRIPP.HAZARD” by Arden Jaeger

Bristol sky at night so humid it was like breathing through plastic, but Ronan had to get Tripp alone, had to get these people out of his van. Too hot now, in-out and in-out for a cigarette. Smoke, blown out towards the twitching matrix of light that was the city skyline, and a neon pulse at his periphery. His eyes aching. 

Too much gear; too many variations in uppers and downers and psychedelic compounds and there was more to take yet these people… they had to fuck off, get out of his van, needed to leave him alone with Tripp so he could get even higher and forget the night. Take Tripp to himself, forget the night. 

Earlier, in the rave, Ronan had buried himself in gear, made every effort to avoid eye contact and conversation or anything that might’ve reminded him that the sounds and lights and people were real. Yet, being able to watch Tripp, bleached blonde and tattooed face, dance in a crowd rather than up on the stages of all those creepy sex clubs… Tonight, Tripp had become an anchor compacted in the sprawl of nightmare bodies. He had danced for himself, embodying a freedom neither he or Ronan were entitled to.

Smoking on the hood of his van, he continues to think of Tripp, hearing the gunshot crack of his voice resound over tinny subsurface bass coming from the portable speaker, the group of queers probably crowding Ronan’s bed and laughing and fixed on the blonde man as if he was the centre of the universe.

     Squeezing his eyes against the crushing pain in his brain, Ronan thinks of the score, a way of distracting himself. It was Tripp’s game plan, devised on the back of a month-long dive into Bristol’s psychotic free parties, sussed out through talk with other dolls who, like Tripp, had been fitted with brain chips that turned them into the perfect sex toys: an inability to remember, a body that could speed-run healing after being brutalised, all for the depraved thrills of the men or ‘users’ they serviced. He’d told him his intel before they headed to the rave, sitting in a dirty cafe.

-Yeah, complex in Birmingham, Tripp had said, leaning forward in the booth, lips slow motion breaking against stuttering red fluorescents, the combined smell of their sweat acute. -Got this like, doll club spread up across three floors with the top being all locked up for big users.

-Don’t be stupid, Ronan had spat, -You wanna get fucked up?

-Well, I mean? That laugh, Tripp didn’t give a fuck about anything and it was this that made Ronan sometimes really frightened. Tripp had taken a hit of a GHB-laced vape and started drooling. His face, scrawled in black tattoos, changing colour in time with the pulse of an LED rig in the ceiling.  -Think of the score though, man?

-What’s the score? 

-This dickhead runs the place, goes by Damien. Huge connections with the markets up North. 

-So you just wanna get high? Ronan leaned in, grease film from the table grasping for his arm, bit Tripp’s ear. And Tripp pushed him back, sank into the mirrored wall of the booth. 

-Yeah sure, don’t you? 

In the mirror, Ronan saw his exhausted mask drop, kicked up from the table and left Tripp burning in sickly fluorescence. 

Always getting high. Tonight, both of them had taken it way too far but Ronan couldn’t handle being at a queer rave otherwise. Would’ve felt like he was drowning, trapped in a fever dream so far from his frame of reference. 

Ronan feels him coming up beside him -What’s your problem? Tripp says, words all blunt and guilt-charging. 

-Tell these guys to fuck off, man. Seriously, why do you always do this? You know I don’t want strangers in the van?

-Relax, yeah? Christ, you don’t have to be so negative all the time. 

Ronan is struck down, feeling terrible cos it was these moments where Tripp’s rage filled him with so much shame. Narrowed eyes searching and bleached hair catching traces of red light flickering from the skyline.  Made him feel like a knife.

Bristol drones, an ancient beast paralyzed in the belly of schizophrenic technology. Voices in the van becoming cackles of witches. And Ronan leans on the hood, desperate to disappear and sweating in the four-am heat. 

After a long silence, Tripp finally says -Man, if you wanna shoot up do it in front of them, they don’t care? 

But Ronan hated that. Withdrawing from Tripp’s hands that had begun to massage his back, throwing his cigarette and spitting on the ground.  -GET THEM OUT OF HERE! YOU’VE FUCKED ME OFF TONIGHT, BIG TIME! Ronan doesn’t care that the sound of laughter in the van has died. Doesn’t give a shit that the group from the rave, all decked in freaky cyber-fetish wear, were probably now getting sketched out cos Ronan was an Irish nomad and no one knew if he was queer, so by default he was now just an insane straight guy on a fuck ton of gear. 

Tripp’s eyes shooting back inside of himself, that fear smell Ronan hated on him cos it meant guilt, meant shame. But he couldn’t give in, he needed the freaks gone. Needed Tripp on his own so he could start to feel alright again, safe –JUST GET THEM OUT MAN! YOU NEVER ASK! 

-DON’T SHOUT AT ME! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Strange, painted faces coming out the back of the van, faces he could barely focus on cos the drugs had made the world all twisted [-Girl, if this is your man-?] Ronan raging, pure raging. Pushing Tripp back and slamming open the van’s back door, making some drag queen jump and another girl dive out of the bed. He lunges for the fridge, the queen and the girl tumbling into the night, figuring Ronan had been trying to make a shot at them. So now the group of strangers is smoking outside while he rips open a beer bottle on the edge of the kitchenette counter and all he can see is the flash of painted faces under lighters but it isn’t enough, a quick shot of beer filling his mouth, it was never enough -ALL OF YOU GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY VAN!

Doesn’t even give them a chance to grab any of their shit, slams the back door shut and locks it and he can hear Tripp shouting out there trying the handle and pummeling the van and Tripp’s fuming now, screaming to all the drugged up queers about what a prick Ronan is and making all these apologies but Ronan doesn’t care. 

More banging on the side of the van, metallic quaking shell enough to make Ronan shudder and the doll yelling like a bomb -YOU’RE BEING A DICK YOU KNOW THAT YEAH? Digging around the ceiling panel safe to find a blister pack and a needle and getting real dizzy through the tears that become actual daggers blinding him while he works his way through his set up, the sound of Tripp’s banging so loud now it feels like he’s in the middle of a volcano, in the middle of a machine grinder–

But Ronan punches the blister pack hard with his teeth, feeling the acrid burn of a drop of cyphocaine shoot up to the roof of his mouth. The drug had been designed to treat the freaks whose cyber-gear sent them psychotic. Numbed them to it all, put them into a trance-like coma where the world and the insanity of their head stopped being real. 

Cyphocaine would help Ronan forget. Forget himself, forget Tripp, forget the night. And when he slams the needle after syncing the pack with the syringe and feels the hot ice run rampage through his veins, he leans back in bed and screams.
Too much noise, the half-familiar voice banging and begging for him to let him in, the sound of the brick thrown against the reinforced glass, this ricochet that shoots through his throat and as another brick rebounds, unable to make any damage to the tank shell of Ronan’s van, he’s over the side of the bed vomiting across piles of clothes and trash bags and all the loose bits of wires and machine parts on the floor, as time drifts, fast, no idea that the queers are long gone and it’s only Tripp standing out there, irate. 

The skylight opening, the nauseating crack of a sick and psychedelic dawn momentarily bringing Ronan back into reality with a flash of hard ultramarine. 

Impossible body dropping in from the ceiling, thrown into the bed next to him. Muscles and tattoos searching for Ronan’s neck, squeezing the back of his hair so tightly…  a new shock of electricity and he’s vomiting again. Dry heaving. Crying into Tripp’s lap. 

He remembers him now, how long had it been since he’d taken the shot? Vomit stench acute and horrifying, as the doll fixes up another needle for the both of them. Not supposed to share but Tripp and Ronan were different, those years on the road, whatever it was they saw in each other. Whatever the damage, deep down beneath almost seven years of manipulation and addiction there was still something. But Ronan hated trying to figure out what it was. 

Sunk into the warmth of Tripp’s naked lap, feeling the dead weight of his penis brushing up against his face (seeing, in the back of his mind, the dagger crudely tattooed along the shaft) and Tripp takes a shot. Like Ronan, cyphocaine allowed him to forget himself, and most importantly, the twisted users that bought him  as a commodity to fuck and destroy under the impression that the chip would make the doll forget. But the chip had stopped working months ago. Now, only the cyphocaine could do that. And for Ronan, what started as an act of solidarity, or chemical voyeurism, or a bad fucking choice, whatever it was, had become his favourite means of escape. 

Three months Tripp and Ronan had been hooked on this virtually unregistered compound and now it was like time was split in two. The moments where they knew themselves and each other, comorbid with the constant hunger to get back onto the cyphocaine, looking for any opportunity to get off. And then there were the moments when they were high and nothing was real or mattered anymore. This Ronan held onto now as he disappeared into the backrooms of his skull, looking into the neon lights seeping through the window, hearing holo-copters and the synths of holographic billboards advertising the thrills of virtual realities. 

Against the crisp, echoing voices, he listens to the rumble of his van, seeking in it a sentience he swears is there after years of working on it, building it up into the tank and home it now was. 

His home.
Tripp’s home. 

He hears Tripp gasp in the midst of his high. Underneath the blinking dim of a green LED, he sees the man’s eyes roll into the back of his head, a fresh bead of blood pooling from a perforated septum. DOLL/CHIP malfunction; the seizure-like glitch where Tripp remembered everything that his users had done to him. He hadn’t taken enough cyphocaine, but it was too late. 

When Tripp starts screaming, Ronan rolls over, takes a swig of beer, and slams the last needle. In the chemical dark, Ronan finally finds a simulacrum of death that doesn’t make him so scared, the screams next to him detached, coming from a body he doesn’t recognise. 

** ¥ **

-I’m sorry man, slow cruising countryside lulling past, Tripp’s voice fried and exhausted as he struggles over his comedown. -I was fucked, I forget how overwhelmed people make you. 

Ronan doesn’t respond, keeps driving. On the horizon, salmon of a dying sun ricochets across low metal buildings. And endless hazards of machine parts ripping their way through a landscape of cold, agricultural ruin.

 Tripp leans back in the seat and sighs, setting to work on a joint. Neither of them have spoken since last night. Tripp had woken up shortly after they had set off, slid his smooth, shirtless body into the cab and curled into the passenger seat, smoking hash, keeping his eyes fixed on the window for a claustrophobic hour. 

 Ronan had taken that opportunity to let the final wash of last night’s cyphocaine stir holo-fractographic traces, the penumbra of hypnagogia settling somewhere in the chemical matrix of his mind. The effect was subtle. The scratching network of Tripp’s tattoos pulsed. Like claw marks, they ripped their way up the man’s body. Shapes (already subliminally significant, already saturated with sin and voodoo) became glyphs carved into Ronan’s skull. Dying Christmas lights, blinking on and off. Soon, the effect settled. The stuttering skin became the shape of a man Ronan needed more than anyone else. 

Now, Tripp sighed, evidently content with the fact that Ronan would be uncommunicative for most of the evening. At least till their comedowns settled and they got high and fucked in the privacy of a van spot Ronan was familiar with. Till Ronan was certain that, for the next couple of days at least, it would only be them, and the drugs. 

Ronan is forced to pull into a layby as a hulk of automated machinery drives towards them, its carapace fat enough to take up the entire width of the empty motorway. It groans, a sound that travels from his throat to his groin. He watches the shadow of its bulk pass over Tripp’s face as a mask. In that dark, Ronan sees Tripp look in his direction, but the expression on the tattooed face is too painful to try and decipher. When the machine’s behind them (red light bursting into the cab and setting aflame dust rays and grimy glass) Tripp turns his head back to the joint, smooths out the final roll, and seals it.

It’s Ronan that speaks then, all the shock of a bomb over the sound of the engine. -I don’t wanna upset you, I really, really need you, but-

-Yeah I know. 

Smell of hash, Ronan’s heart pounding -But I don’t think you realise how much you mean to me-

-No, I do- 

-Then why don’t you act like you care? 

-I do care, man. You’re just so fucking complex-

-I’m complex? Hands shaking as he grips the wheel, unaware that he has slammed the accelerator and that he’s driving them headfirst into the wreck of a-

Apathy ripping a hole in the doll mask. 

They miss crashing by millimetres, Ronan too overwhelmed to care that both of them nearly died. 

Tripp sighs, passes Ronan the joint. Ronan smokes and blows clouds out of the crack in the window.

** ¥ **

-Sorry did I wake you?

Door slamming open.
Six in the morning sun burst, back of the van. Tripp standing there back lit and beautiful, but with bags under his eyes, like bruises against the tattooed flesh. That glazed look saying, immediately, that the DOLL/CHIP failed when Tripp was with his user. Moments of pain; synapses stimulated enough to override the neuro-link in charge of cutting off the doll’s sensorium. Whatever horrific shit the user had put him through, Tripp was in the room. Conscious. But 

-You manage to score? Ronan pulls the duvet off, doesn’t care that he’s naked, that the van’s parked on the twenty-seventh floor of a lot dead centre of the Manchester Conurbation. Tripp says nothing, reaches into the pocket of his denim vest and pulls out the blister pack. Throws it onto Ronan’s bare chest and slams the door shut.

In the dark, Ronan feels for the opening. Tripp already at the roof latch, pulling out the works, and crying

softly. Though maybe it’s Ronan. Face wet and hot and sweating and the two of them too scared to see how much time has passed, too scared to pull over the curtain and fill the chrome bulkhead with the panoply of city lights at night. And Ronan’s done kissing the stranger’s feet when the sun’s finally down. Done worshipping him; filling his mouth with the precipitation boiling on the strangely familiar man’s skin. Van aflame in the divine sunder of rasping breath and pleasure suppressed. Speaking in tongues. Tongue-tied. Tongue taking in the salt of sultry deposits languid on the stranger’s roman chin. 

A crack in the curtain. That’s what Tripp wants but he can’t move. Limbs stuck beneath him, trapped in his body. Watching the bearded, exhausted-looking man weep. Watching shadows pass over the roof. Sunken place. Black hole quarry squealing, the sound of metal grating in his head. 

No. No. The bearded man above him, saliva plummeting towards his face as a meteor in the dark. -NO!

-Where’s the next score? No. -Come on you said you’d be able to rip two guys tonight. -STOP IT. Bulkhead spinning, remembering the user from earlier, his goatee dribbling with beer. Frothy paste. It was toothpaste, spat into the back of his mouth while the user squeezed Tripp’s balls so hard that the DOLL/CHIP flashed hot and the reality of the room had hit him with the same force as the fist cracking the bones in his face.

Back in the van, he remembers Ronan, sees him lurching above him, pleading, something about cyphocaine. Something about 

Had to have more. High was over. Head exploding with memory, but only Ronan’s name, the traces of his user, and the feeling of hot, smoker’s saliva smacking against the back of his throat. Pleading, cyphocaine -I 

Back of the throat, back of the 

-Vest. Naked, Ronan lurching over the side of the bed. -Denim Vest. In pockets. Back. 

His user’s hands rummaged through the inside of Tripp’s stomach after he had

[-No, other pocket! 

–Where the fuck is it! 

-Please-]

knife slit him open over the bathtub, so cleanly, like watching his body turn into paper. 

[Ronan above him with the needle, contact lenses flashing red in a rhythm not unlike his user’s] 

Labouring masturbation as bloody tendrils wrapped around the shaft of his cock and Tripp had been screaming then, though the chip had shut off all pain. And the user laughed, thinking his screams were only a program feature. 

[Needle flash in the dark, Ronan’s neck first and Tripp is yelling because if Ronan isn’t quick enough then he’ll be too fucked to shoot for him, which means-]
the user had taken a drill, Tripp’s legs in the air 

  [Needlepoint]
Drill buzzing so loudly Tripp could only see white
In his neck and the hot ice burning through his veins with Ronan collapsing over him, the man’s chest beating with enough force that the van’s AI alerts to cardiac arrest. But firm contact. Ronan in his arms. Anchor point. 

Soon, neither of them would know each other. They would see themselves as flesh and flesh only, animals in the comfort of empty minds.

** ¥ **

Bristol was now a bruise. Tripp totally naked in a service station bathroom at three in the morning, staring at his body in the mirror as the DOLL/CHIP worked its magic, smoothing out the remaining traces of his last user. Ronan at the urinal, piss splashing distractedly on his boot, watching Tripp. 

The transformation act; battered rose-bloom lesions and bags under eyes disappearing. Bloody scars and festering wounds closing like vanishing lips. Only tattoos left. Refused to cover them, said that was his edge. What made him more than just another doll. 

-What do you mean, Ronan had asked him one night, years ago, as they sat shivering in the rafters of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, smoking a joint.

-It’s like this – moonlight washing through his skin, carving valleys of dark; an almost Arabic nose becoming a fierce blade of shadow against Bristol’s light show. -Guys fuck dolls, they don’t fuck people. These tattoos make it personal, make it mine, yeah?. Like what you did with the van … took it back from- he had stopped then, took a hit of the joint and blew smoke into the vibrating air, trying to figure out what exactly he was trying to say -They want dolls all smooth and easy to project on. I don’t give them that chance. Fuck all of that. If you want to fuck me, you’re gonna look right in my dead fucking eyes and see someone real, even if I’m not in the room.

A lightbulb dying in the service station bathroom.

Ronan behind him and kissing his neck. The doll’s body becomes taut, pushes Ronan away before entering him from the back. Bearded cheek flush with the piss-wet floor and sweating.  

** ¥ **

Birmingham Megaclusters by day; electric, pulsing through grimy loft windows. 

Damien, Tripp’s contact, watches the doll dance with unmoving eyes. Not even a slow blink. Tattooed body swinging against the rough beats of dark techno and hands searching his tattooed flesh. 

And even Damien’s henchmen are aroused, shuffling about and readjusting. Lust seeping like a cloud despite the anonymous mass of motorcycle helmets. But Damien’s not even blinking,

Ronan had heard the rumours about him. -Chemical implant, Tripp had said, -brain’s permanently flushed with THC and these networks rigged to prevent tolerance build-up. Perma-stoned.

Not even blinking. No slow blink. Ronan sweating against the chemical cocktail ripping through his brain, skin sticking up on the back of his neck, desperate to be back in the van to –

Tripp throws his body to the ground and writhes on his stomach towards Damien like a cobra, tattooed flesh, pulsing lights, Birmingham outside blinking in time with the build up, 

The drop 

Hands on Damien’s knees, pulling his legs apart and Tripp’s eyes hungry with Ronan at the other side of the room desperate to leave. Shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t BE HERE. Why did Tripp insist-? Why did Damien and his men-?

Tripp throws Damien’s neck back, dragging his fingers across the man’s adams apple. Lights explode. Silent. Silence deadly and cruel in the dark with Tripp’s body a serpent wrapping its way around Damien’s throat with the landing of lips fat against his-

** ¥ **

Rain slapping the plexiglass of B0X-404-3/CLUSTER 7, ray traces. High enough now that the noise of the city becomes droning. Could be angelic if Ronan paid attention. But he’s too overwhelmed to pick up on anything except his unbridled rage. Fist inches from Tripp’s skull.

-YOU LIED TO HIM! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?

-YOU WANT TO SCORE OR NOT? 

-YOU EVEN CLOCKED HOW MUCH OF A PSYCHO THIS GUY IS? 

-WHAT’S IT MATTER? YOU’RE SUICIDAL ANYWAY.
Death rattle surges at the back of Ronan’s throat and he’s scraping through all the clothes on the floor, the suitcases thrown upside down on the temp-accom’s sticky linoleum, pulling up everything to find his jacket, find the coke in his pocket.

A line racked up on metal sink edge and Tripp hammering away at the wetroom door screaming about the score, how Ronan’s fucked it now, how he should have told him-

-YOU HEARING YOURSELF, TRIPP? DELUSIONAL, MAN. YOU SHOULD’VE TOLD ME WHAT YOU SAID TO DAMIEN, ALL THIS BULLSHIT ABOUT MY FUCKING CONNECTIONS? FUCK! Fattest line of his life slams his nostril, the burning chemical slug, bullet to his brain- 

-I’m sorry it was stupid that I lied but I figured- 

-FIGURED WHAT? Ronan ripping off his clothes, too hot in this fucking box and why the fuck did Damien even set them up here? 

Earlier, after Tripp’s laid out his offer to Damien’s, Ronan had stormed out of the complex in a blaze. Tripp stumbled naked after him through the empty shell of the club with the lights on, too bright and weird in a warehouse club with the lights on. Tripp had sold himself, and in exchange – 

And now this room, this box, closing in on him-

 -Figured you’d be mad at me if-

–IF I KNEW YOU HAD LIED TO SOME PIMP SAYING I WANTED TO GET BACK IN THE GAME? AND WHAT WERE YOU PLANNING TO DO WHEN I SAID NO?

And Ronan’s on the edge of the bed with a cyphocaine needle ready to go but hesitating cos Tripp’s crying. Naked, Ronan crawls on the floor, cringing at the feel of sticky linoleum pinching the skin on his thighs, Tripp’s head in his hands and Ronan stops trembling as he recognises something new… a new fear, holding the doll’s eyes. 

Enough time spent together that Ronan can now read Tripp like a sniper -How much cyphocaine for this Tripp? Said slowly, so slowly it nearly kills him.

Tripp’s breaking lips and a bubble of spit, the glazed look overcoming him.

And the cyphocaine shot goes right to Ronan’s head, back flat against the stained temper-foam, the rush of the new deal and the new score the only thing present when he finally falls under. 

** ¥ **

Too many boys in his van and Ronan doesn’t want to guess their ages. It would make him sick. Wished to God there was some screen up, like he had in the old days so he didn’t have to see them crowding his bed and floor and rammed into the bulkhead like livestock.

And there is the itching in his brain as it tries to make sense of the new implants that Damien said were just a formality; new tech to keep his mind sharp, a sensorium upgrade that would allow him to see in the dark, or some shit like that. He feels static feedback, a reminder that Damien was never simply some pimp, that any man with the connections he had to cyphocaine had a sadistic net. Cos these implants are expensive.

But then again, Damien was desperate, needed someone for the long haul. Tripp, in the sea of biz-intel that floated around his net, had sussed out this desperation like a shark. Had figured it for what it was; a vulnerability, a way in. 

The group of boys gasp as the van hits a pothole and Ronan thinks of meat. Bodies tossing against each other and frantic in the collective fear, apprehension. All of them are so skinny, and they had been crying; occasional outbursts during the long drive that made him unsteady. At least twenty of them. Most are unconscious now. Not really sleeping. He’d seen a couple drop off as if someone flicked a switch in their brain. Maybe they are dead. Ronan tries to convince himself that he doesn’t care. Nothing in the contract said they had to make it to Damien’s complex alive. 

  Raindrops becoming phosphenes becoming cold cathode gas-discharge lights as the wipers streak them across the landscape of blinking screens and digital billboards. Another gasp from the back and Ronan winces, squeezing his eyes shut and still seeing traces of light and colour and some of the boy’s faces, so young, so scared. He keeps driving, turning the music up to full volume until violent speed-bass churns through the van like a drum.

Cocaine high hitting its crescendo, Ronan slams the accelerator and watches the whiplash of city outskirts blinding in the speed ripping through his stomach. Sirens, copters, expounding strobe light and the colours make him think of Tripp dancing at that last rave in Bristol, that last bit of freedom before it was back to the hell of frantic biz. 

As he speeds along with a cargo that makes him sick, he wonders what Tripp was doing now. The last he had seen him was a month ago, dancing on the stage of the doll complex’s club space. Gun lights of strobe ecstasy pounding against the writhing silhouette of Tripp’s flesh up there by phallic, neon signs. The crowd had all been men, hungry men in leather and steel boots and this nauseating imitation of corp grooming styles;  all slick hair, Vincent Price moustaches, and suits fitted to emphasise the way sex clung to their bodies like leeches. 

Tripp had danced with a cord that repeatedly flooded his body with increasingly dangerous volts of electricity. As he was struck, he convulsed in time with the music as if being pummelled with bullets, eventually becoming limp and collapsing as the song dropped. 2600 volts. Hologram flooding the club showing that Tripp had entered cardiac arrest. Ronan felt somebody slam into his shoulder, turned and saw a guy mid-orgasm, spilling out over the body of a barely conscious man decked out in a torn suit. 

That same revulsion, fear, and intense nausea, it all came back to him now as one of the boys in the back started crying. 

Ronan’s about to reach a red light. On the virtual dashboard displayed by his sense-lenses: ETA: 01:29.02. But that was only if he played by the rules. Churns the van into overdrive, speed bass repulsively loud in the chrome cab, and runs the light. One of the boys cries out in a foreign language and with sick instinct, Ronan knows he’s screaming STOP.  

** ¥ **

-Let me see them. 

-Mr Swain isn’t in his office. 

-I know they’re in there. Door crashing open to an empty loft space, hot air smashing through plastic sheets billowing through a glassless window, dragged into the tumbling waterfall of city colour below. -Where the fuck is he? Turning around, another door opening up in the concrete facade of wall. Where there was once a fireplace, the panel swings open and out comes Damien with Tripp, the doll, high as hell, dressed in a torn suit. His body, glimpsed through claw marks raked across the fabric, now suggested an emaciated roman bust, a Greek god starved and left for dead. 

-THE FUCK HAVE YOU GIVEN HIM?

-Relax, he’s fine. Damien’s half-laugh and Tripp tumbling over the edge of the sofa as Ronan watches the back panel slide shut. The fireplace disappears and becomes sheer concrete. 

-The fuck’s back there? Suspicion now, Ronan couldn’t explain it, couldn’t explain Damien, the way he seemed to disintegrate in the back of his mind anytime he tried to make sense of the man. 

Storming over to the wall, searching its face and Damien laughing as Tripp, mute, struggles to keep his eyes focused. 

 -What’s going on? 

-Calm, yeah? It’s all okay. We just had a little bit of fun, is all. 

-If you touched him- 

-Is he not mine to touch? 

-You’re a sick freak, you know that? 

-And yet you’re still working for me. Drink. 

Glass thrust in his hand and after drinking, it’s like he’s possessed, drawn in  by the dim lights flickering off the IV bag in Damien’s cold hands. –Pure cyphocaine in here, mate.  Doesn’t take long before Ronan’s gripped, taken in, leaning against Tripp’s body and using the unconscious doll to prop up the IV bag. Damien turning to Ronan and Ronan imagining a fresh pulse of THC ejected into this shark-man’s neural network. 

-How are the implants treating you, Ronan? The voice so disembodied, so far across the room, locked away behind metallic shades, while ghost-like fingers toy with the cyphocaine, taunting him with the promise of a hit that Ronan needs more than anything.

The man, becoming unrecognisable, any fixity in time and place becoming a blur as Ronan starts to forget everything except-

-If you touch Tripp you’re dead. 

-You’ve been stuck in a loop for a while now, Ronan. And the man leans in. –Listen, while we’re here I don’t like you two seeing each other. It’s distracting, for both of you. 

A memory, fighting against the increasing amnesia that he can’t explain because he hasn’t even taken a shot yet – HOW OLD ARE THE KIDS YOU MAKE ME SMUGGLE? 

-Relax, and the man’s fingers fixing the needle strap to Ronan’s neck, unmoving eyes, the cyphocaine straight into his brain. Not that it matters because, he- 

He was fighting it. The black out, fixed on the name ‘Tripp’, begging because he hasn’t seen him for nearly six months and where was he now? And the man laughing, this sick, wheezing stoner laugh, cigar ash tumbling from an ugly mouth and he points to the cracked-out corpse lying on the sofa next to him, something about the tattoos reminding Ronan of someone he couldn’t remember, all dead eyes and fucked up face and tattoos… Who was he? The hell have they done to this guy? And Ronan still sobbing, begging to see Tripp, and still the man laughing pointing to the drugged-up doll sprawled in his lap, stroking his hair, stroking his-

The man runs a command through his sense-lenses and there’s pure chemical bursting through Ronan’s brain and he can’t keep his eyes open. More cyphocaine, but no IV, no needle, doesn’t even have time to process why it suddenly feels like he’s taken a hit despite no works, cos at the back of his brain… back of the room, the back, the doll’s eyes searching for the back of the room. 

The man smoking another cigar and asking Ronan about his new temp-implant and Ronan terrified cos he couldn’t remember taking another hit, yet here he was, high as hell and looking at the half-dead doll and suddenly remembering something. Where is Tripp? -Where the fuck is he? I swear to god, you touch him- 

a cry coming from broken, blood bubble lips as the doll stirs and makes a  gesture with his hand like an infant asking for

Ronan remembering the implant, realising it was the reason why he’d got that fresh pulse of cyphocaine. The drug was now terraforming his reality into an ungodly tapestry of code. The man leaning against the window as a glass shatters in his hand, –Whole world out there, he says, -Whole world of endorphin in the lights and for a moment, Ronan thinks he’s gonna jump into the light and colour and noise and code but the doll says something, sounding so much like Tripp, and the man setting the broken glass down on the coffee table, stands back and takes the doll’s head in his hands as Ronan continues to beg,

-THE IMPLANT! WHAT IS IT?

Perma-stoned. Perma-stoned. Keeps telling him about that fucking THC chip he’s got fixed and how similar it is to what he’s given Ronan, –You like cyphocaine huh? No more bags, baby. No more gear. The implants doing it all for you, and guess who gets to press the switch? 

Broken blade of the glass squeezed in Ronan’s fist of swollen bone, cyphocaine bursting in the back of his head, the taste of chemical iron, holds this fat shard of blooded glass to his own temple, threatening 

-THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? 

The back of the room. The back.

-You don’t realise how good you are at what you do. That apathy’s hot. The man’s fingers down the doll’s throat, searching for the source of the gagging and pain erupting in the doll’s eyes –But your profile says you’re suicidal. Gotta stay hooked to the cyphocaine cos otherwise- takes his hands out of the doll’s wet mouth, vomit covered fingers making a gun pointing right at Ronan’s head and laughing laughing laughing 

And Ronan is so aware now of how the blinking, coloured lights of the city have struck a path through the strange, hybrid shark skin suit that makes the man look extraterrestrial, lighting up the matrix of stitches shaped into the patterns of cyberspace and chemical compounds and cyphocaine constantly flushing his skull -I know about you, Tripp’s unimportant. You got skills. Done a good job so far, man. Appreciate it. 

-WHERE IS HE?
And the doll stirring, coming back to himself, wide-eyed panic staring fixed to the ceiling and for a moment Ronan swears he knows who he is as he plunges the shard of glass into his own temple, digging through exposed nerve touching, searching for the implant, searching for a way out of the chemical hell, hearing the screeching becoming a drill as blood sticks to every surface splattered against  the man’s hybrid suit and blood sticking in his greasy silver hair and blood warm running as a gulf-storm down his Ronan’s trembling wrist while Ronan forces the man back with all his weight while still digging inside his temple.

Doll watches, back of the mind, Ronan stumbling towards the back of the room with the thin, plate-like cyphocaine implant sticky in his hands shooting volts of electricity up his arm and the cyphocaine making him forget unreal pain in the centre of his mind but instead at the back

Doll screaming, Ronan returning to the room, recognising Damien who’s tumbled to the floor, writhing through blood like a serpent, speakers full blast to brutal techno as Ronan’s bloody hands streak sigils across the wall searching for the seal. Damien at his ankles, pulling, dragging, Ronan’s boots crunching under bone shattering, Damien gurgling, fluids coming up through his face and Ronan finds the seal, some tiny crack where he can smell chemicals, too many chemicals making his mind drift, standing back watching the panel slide away, all the archaic bloody traces fat and intentional and Aztec sliding apart and the burst of white makes Ronan vomit. 

Stops.
The things here, there, in the tanks… half-human hybrids of ruin with faces of sadists buried beneath impacted flesh. 

Damien, nose bent too far to the left and a face swollen with blood and bruise and intoxicated ecstasy, behind him with Tripp. So calm. Placid, fish tank placid. Human beings floating in tanks of dirty water rigged up with pipes and IVs and cyphocaine and there’s this all this psychotic calm, wires dangling from their skulls.

 -You probably seen a lot of these guys before, Damien wheezes, struggling to smile through broken teeth.   

Ronan chokes, struck dumb as media footage in his mind, blooming as fractals through a mesh of swollen animal faces floating in dirty water, makes connections to the lush explosions of cyberpsychosis.

-The infamous cases. 

These people were notorious child murderers, sexual sadists, sprawl killers, rapists, terrorists…the people who haunted the news with the grim outpourings of violence breaching complete transgression. And now they were here, sucked into Damien’s twisted complex, and for what?

-Cyber Psychos, man. Cyberwear sent them crazy but they want the escape and can’t risk being caught. Got them rigged up to these crazy sense–units so they’re stuck hallucinating. Ronan ripping an IV bag from the wall, bloody ruin sketching out another psychedelic network of sigils, ancient glyphs that make his head scream and the bag is so cold in his hands and he thinks of a head bursting as his boot stamps it down sending liquid exploding through white and red space. 

–Yeah, cyphocaine man. They wanna forget they’re crazy, and you bet at this point they’re happy to forget who they are to get there. But that doesn’t mean they don’t still have cravings. An animal is an animal. Those kids…. Your boy Tripp, he knew what he was getting you both into- 

But Ronan has Tripp by the neck, the doll’s eyes wide like a rabbit, so wide and that fear smell that Ronan hates. 

-I’m sorry, Tripp is spitting through bloody lips as his eyes rip to the back of his head at the first stage of a DOLL/CHIP malfunction-

 but he pulls himself back and the pain is inhuman and evil and so sharp, pushing away from Ronan but then falling back into his arms like he’s the only thing that matters. -I had to make a deal. It was the only way, cyphocaine was the only thing that – I’m sorry. The chip. I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it anymore…

** ¥ **

Driving into a tunnel.

Back of the van, black. More boys. All totally still, stinking of a fear that no longer makes Ronan breach crisis point. Didn’t even bother to use the screen anymore. What did it matter to him? Tonight, he gets to see Tripp. Arrangement from Damien.

His approved nights with Tripp are sterile, the doll barely present and staring up at the ceiling struggling to remember either of their names. Sex devoid of any sympathy, a quick fuck to loosen the pain, and then heads bent dirty in the chemical trance of their own mind prisons. The cyphocaine wearing off and the memory of each other rolling back like languid waves. The temp-acom box would flicker, lights going out one by one until it was only the orange strip-bulb above the bed, the two of them holding each other in a breach against a sea of dark. Then the lamp would die and Tripp would scream, his body reliving the mind-fuck of Damien’s doll complex. Horrors of nights and men half-remembered, bought back with full force and hyperreality. 

Ronan signalling the implant to administer his cyphocaine allowance. 

Yet, despite the blackout, each night with the doll meant hypnagogia simulating the reality of Tripp’s screams in the backrooms of Ronan’s mind. He fell asleep to visions of Tripp’s body brutalized, deconstructed like an anatomical toy. And he’d watch with a total apathy that, if he thought about it long enough, would shake him to his very core. 

One of the boys pleads under his breath. Ronan turns up the music, keeps driving until the tunnel ends and the sun bursts into his windshield like a nuclear bomb.

** ¥ **

The body almost unrecognisable; tattoos winking, suggesting something beyond Ronan’s memory. 

And the doll stirs under the light touch of his fingers as Ronan traces the words scratched into the side of his face; black ink, a child’s handwriting seized by the sudden impulse of an epileptic fit, and soon Ronan is plunged into the depths of a memory that he has kept locked for so long.

Both so young then, nineteen, maybe, and none of the confusion. In that sordid caravan, reeking of piss and the acrid afterburn of ammonia and faeces. Seeing Tripp for the first time and holding the young man’s face in his hands, reading the word tattooed on his cheek, -That your name, mate? And Tripp, urine-soaked hair and a sob, cruel in how much it had been broken. Ronan continued -You called Tripp? The dead eyes of the monster that had tried to destroy the doll flashing in broken light coming from the bathroom. Minutes after Ronan had shot him. 

-I don’t know who I am, the doll had convulsed under Ronan’s touch but retreated into the boy’s safety soon enough –Why don’t I know who I am? 

They had burnt the caravan in the end, watched it smoulder in the abandoned car park; Manchester, Victorian factories folding in on each other and the canal searching mist with tendrils of sewage and chemical slurry. 

And now the body is unrecognisable, until it feels like the cyphocaine has leaned slightly to the left and, with a focus that destroys him, Ronan can make out the scratching letters being born beneath his fingertips. Tripp. That strange lump of ink at the bottom, probably a Y but it didn’t matter. This was-

Drip, drip, drip- 

The IV bag atop the doll’s decrepit body as he’s lowered into the tank and the man in the doorway flicks the switch in Ronan’s brain. 

** ¥ **

Back of the van, plastic sheets, and the absence of anything that says home. Fingers follow the chrome surface of the modified kitchenette counter. Hands in a crack, wires and thin batteries tumbling onto the floor as he searches, finding a postcard. 

Mount Snowdon, fading in vintage gradients of whites, steel blues, blacks. A souvenir.

Remembering the top of the mountain, both of them barely twenty, holding each other and watching the helicopters tear the dark and its stars apart with search lights and ungodly noise. No city that night, just wild winter and the mountains and the warmth of each other. During a storm, Tripp had turned to Ronan and smiled, seconds after that first kiss. 

-BUT WHAT’S YOUR ENDGAME THEN? Tripp shouted over the sound of wind and rain and helicopters -LIKE, WHAT IS IT YOU’RE TRYING TO TAKE FROM LIFE? 

-DON’T KNOW. GET ON WITH THIS, I GUESS- laughed into Tripp’s ear and Ronan was holding ice-cold shaking hands. 

-IS THAT IT?

-NAH, GUESS WHAT I REALLY WANT IS TO LIVE. LIVE FOREVER.

Back of the van. Cyphocaine.

Ronan wakes with a strange pain in his skull and, for a moment, thinks he sees an indent in the empty mattress space beside him.