Superblast
I am a woman with glass in my head.
I did something stupid. I'm a cop. I opened fire on an armed suspect while in a warehouse. Bullets struck pressurised gas canisters. There was an explosion. The explosion took out crates of all kinds of things. A shard of mirror glass, of all things, hit me. You ever hear those stories about hurricane-force winds casting a piece of straw through a wall? I took a shard of glass through the side of my head. It's stuck tight in my brain -- so tight that it's holding closed the capillaries it severed on the way in. If they take it out, I'll probably die. But the paint from the mirror's tain is
very slowly poisoning my brain.
It took two days for me to realise my brain was seeing through the glass.
The nurse was bothering me. I was trying to get up and get out of the hospital -- I have a full caseload, things you never want to know about, and there are people who need to be off the streets. She tried to push me back into the room, and I looked at her. Just looked at her. And it was like a hurricane blasted my vision through the bone of her head and into her brain.
Like breaking and entering. Kicking in the door of her memory. I mean, it wasn't television. There was the definite perception of shattering something, of bulling my way in, of doing violence. There was a constant screaming sound. Standing inside a cyclone of memory. Of injecting her mother with something. Of hitting her father with something smooth and cold. Of crushing a pill under the butt of a gun and mixing it into ice-cream slopped into a bowl decorated with Winnie-The-Pooh figures.
When I came back to myself, the nurse was slumped in the doorway, blood streaming from her nose, over her thin pale lips.
I went back to work, despite everyone's protestations. I was questioning a suspect a day later. I knew he'd done it. Everyone knew he'd done it. But we had nothing to hang it on him. And I tried for the blast. I just thought, hell, maybe I hallucinated it, but if I could just see inside the bastard's head...
Superblast. I heard him scream dimly, as if through the howl of a windstorm. And then I was in the middle of the stream of smashcuts, the cut-up movie trailer of his immediate past. And I could see the hooker choking as the detergent was forced into her mouth, see her lips blistering, smell the yellow foam boiling out from the corners of her mouth.
His lawyer ended the interview, in the face of his client having some kind of fit that left him half-conscious. I put together what I had from the visions and went after locations and evidence.
But there was nothing forensic left.
It went on like this for the rest of the week. Until I was asked to stay out of interrogations because I was somehow freaking out the suspects. One, two, sometimes three suspects a day.
And not one of them leading to a prosecution. All of them with airtight stories. None of them leaving a trace of useful evidence.
Except for what I can see in their heads. Which isn't remotely admissible in court.
I've tried it out on other people. All I can see are their crimes. I've never yet seen anything that says people are good.
Right now, I'm trapped in a world where I can see everyone's crimes and have no way to do anything about them.
The only thing that's changed is the doctors' report. Which says that I'll be dead in a month from the tain on the glass unless I have the thing removed. Which procedure has a better than 90% chance of killing me.
I'm going to have it removed.
And I'm hoping it kills me.
(C) Warren Ellis 2004
(SCREAM TALKING. Fifty three-minute singles. A complete work. This one's rough as hell, I know -- I just wanted to get the idea down. Ten minutes in the pub, in between something else.)
I did something stupid. I'm a cop. I opened fire on an armed suspect while in a warehouse. Bullets struck pressurised gas canisters. There was an explosion. The explosion took out crates of all kinds of things. A shard of mirror glass, of all things, hit me. You ever hear those stories about hurricane-force winds casting a piece of straw through a wall? I took a shard of glass through the side of my head. It's stuck tight in my brain -- so tight that it's holding closed the capillaries it severed on the way in. If they take it out, I'll probably die. But the paint from the mirror's tain is
very slowly poisoning my brain.
It took two days for me to realise my brain was seeing through the glass.
The nurse was bothering me. I was trying to get up and get out of the hospital -- I have a full caseload, things you never want to know about, and there are people who need to be off the streets. She tried to push me back into the room, and I looked at her. Just looked at her. And it was like a hurricane blasted my vision through the bone of her head and into her brain.
Like breaking and entering. Kicking in the door of her memory. I mean, it wasn't television. There was the definite perception of shattering something, of bulling my way in, of doing violence. There was a constant screaming sound. Standing inside a cyclone of memory. Of injecting her mother with something. Of hitting her father with something smooth and cold. Of crushing a pill under the butt of a gun and mixing it into ice-cream slopped into a bowl decorated with Winnie-The-Pooh figures.
When I came back to myself, the nurse was slumped in the doorway, blood streaming from her nose, over her thin pale lips.
I went back to work, despite everyone's protestations. I was questioning a suspect a day later. I knew he'd done it. Everyone knew he'd done it. But we had nothing to hang it on him. And I tried for the blast. I just thought, hell, maybe I hallucinated it, but if I could just see inside the bastard's head...
Superblast. I heard him scream dimly, as if through the howl of a windstorm. And then I was in the middle of the stream of smashcuts, the cut-up movie trailer of his immediate past. And I could see the hooker choking as the detergent was forced into her mouth, see her lips blistering, smell the yellow foam boiling out from the corners of her mouth.
His lawyer ended the interview, in the face of his client having some kind of fit that left him half-conscious. I put together what I had from the visions and went after locations and evidence.
But there was nothing forensic left.
It went on like this for the rest of the week. Until I was asked to stay out of interrogations because I was somehow freaking out the suspects. One, two, sometimes three suspects a day.
And not one of them leading to a prosecution. All of them with airtight stories. None of them leaving a trace of useful evidence.
Except for what I can see in their heads. Which isn't remotely admissible in court.
I've tried it out on other people. All I can see are their crimes. I've never yet seen anything that says people are good.
Right now, I'm trapped in a world where I can see everyone's crimes and have no way to do anything about them.
The only thing that's changed is the doctors' report. Which says that I'll be dead in a month from the tain on the glass unless I have the thing removed. Which procedure has a better than 90% chance of killing me.
I'm going to have it removed.
And I'm hoping it kills me.
(C) Warren Ellis 2004
(SCREAM TALKING. Fifty three-minute singles. A complete work. This one's rough as hell, I know -- I just wanted to get the idea down. Ten minutes in the pub, in between something else.)