Jigs & Reels by Joanne Harris

Author:Joanne Harris [Joanne Harris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2011-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

The G-SUS Gene

In Blackberry Wine, a character finds himself unable to live up to the promise of his first novel, and falls back on writing second-rate science-fiction to pay the bills. His pen name is Jonathan Winesap, and he has never quite grown up. Neithe – I’m glad to say – have I.

EVERY LIFEFORM’S DEATH diminishes me, for I am a part of lifekind.

Chant 363 of the InnerSelf LifeCreed, circa 2141. Two thousand repetitions a day for the first twenty years. Do I remember them all? The hell I do.

The Common Good is the Only Good. There’s another one. Twenty-five thousand repetitions so far, and counting. Suffer in My Name, and Ye Shall Enter the Eternal Database of Redemption.

They say no one can get inside your mind.

Bullshit.

They’ve been inside mine so often there’s nothing left that they haven’t scrambled and poached, picked apart, put together, psychescanned and mesc-ed with and rebuilt with cortisynth and hyperthalamus and generally fucked with. I mean, I might even be imagining you altogether. I might finally have gone crazy. They can do that, you know – send you crazy for a while, all part of the great InnerSelf Experience, I guess. Who knows, it might be my turn for that this time. What the hell, there’s been worse.

You don’t believe me? Man, I’ve been a cripple to get in touch with my helplessness, a bondage whore to feed my feminine side, a soldier to rid me of my distrust of authority – and that was just the Normforms. Finforms, zero-dwelling Aquaforms half a mile from tail to snout, methane-breathing Xenforms, I’ve seen ’em, done ’em all. And you know what?

It’s all bullshit.

I guess they were trying to do me a favour. A skycycle, driven at speed at an immovable object at three hundred and twenty an hour, can leave a hell of a hole in a guy. Or was that just another one of the InnerSelf programs? There are days when I can’t even remember that. No, on reflection they’d never have done that to me. Too much fun.

Suffer In Me. Suffer With Me. Through Suffering Alone Shall Ye Find Redemption. The Kingdom of the Mind is the Ladder to the Stars. Post-hippy bullshit of the purest ray serene, piped out at a precisely calculated assimilation rate on a frequency even my brain can’t black out. Sense-enhancers to stop me fighting it. And an authentic InnerLife program – one of thousands – to verify my enlightenment ratio. Get your head round that, sis. Or whatever.

Fact is, brain matter’s in short supply around here. Even such lowgrade matter as mine has to be refined and recycled. Twenty years ago – inasmuch as time still matters nowadays – we did something, don’t ask me what, split the wrong atom, shifted the wrong antigen, pressed the wrong button, screwed with Cosmic Forces and infected the species. Result? Near-total wipeout. I was mostly out of my skull at the time so I wasn’t taking much notice, and nowadays I’m out of my skull all the time.

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