My name is Michael Christopher Dorman, and I was born in Whitechapel Maternity Unit in London on 23 March 2124 at eleven forty seven in the morning. My parents are both dead, my mother being Janice Maria Dorman, my father Jack Reynolds Dorman. Every one calls me Mick. This is by way of a confession and explanation rolled into one.
I’m gonna die tomorrow morning. That’s okay, because I don’t have anything left to live for. At least the court ordered a swift death for me, unlike the other [deleted] I’ve sent to hell before me. They got slow vaporisation, and so did the Gov scum they were paying off.
I was born the fifth and last in the family, and we were all boys. My father, rest his soul, was in the forces. The 5th London Regiment. He died in action somewhere in the Far East two weeks before I was born. So my mother had to support us. Since the two-day war wasn’t officially a war, then she didn’t qualify for a war-widow’s pension. Since we weren’t band five citizens, we didn’t qualify for welfare support.
Somehow, mom managed to feed and clothe us, and to keep a roof over our heads. I never wore new clothes - everything I ever had was somebody else’s old stuff. All four of my brothers had worn the stuff before. My clothes were a patchwork of repairs on repairs.
Food was always in short supply, too.
If I’d been a girl, maybe, just maybe, I’d have had new clothes. Or at least newer clothes. And maybe I’d have had a bit extra to eat.
I grew up in Tower. Yes, a particularly nasty part of the London Conurb. One of the local gangs celebrated my sixth birthday by burning a bus with two dozen people on board outside our residency block. (It wasn’t actually personal, but I felt it was in honour of my birthday.)
It was in protest at a Fed sweep of the district for girl-children. Well, you know how’s we don’t have many girls being born any more, the Feds wanted to round up any girls in the district so’s they could foster them to childless band seven families. Kids under eight were being taken. I remember a squad coming into our cube, and my being made to strip to prove that I was a boy.
I rarely went to school. Well, for a streetwise kid, it wasn’t done. Somehow, I managed to get in with one of the local gangs, the Dolly Boys. In case you’re wondering, the gang started in Dolly Sisters, a few kliks north and east of Tower.
I was small and undernourished as a kid, and they used that. I could get into places a normal human couldn’t go.
The DBs taught me stuff. Boy stuff. By the time I was twelve, I could wire explosives. Hell, I could make explosives. I was toting a gun. I was hot stuff. I was tough, and all. I could hold myself in a fist fight, and I could use a knife when it counted. I may be small, but I’m strong, and quick. And I could hack the nets a blue streak. That’s what scared’em, I suppose.
Anyhow, I got used in a warehouse blagging. Hell, nothing big, just food stocks to feed the neighbours. Unknowing, I got set up as the goat. I got pinched and sent down for three on ice. Those pain-amplifiers are the sheer distillation of hell, and they don’t leave a mark on you. Not where it shows.
I came back to life after my time in the deep freeze, and went looking for the [deleted] that set me up. When I got back to Tower, they’d done my mum. The [deleted] had been through and raped her, all seventy three of them. They’d celebrated my defreeze with it, and left her for me to find. I found her in the family cube, barely alive. She died in my arms. My four brothers had been murdered by the gang for trying to protect her.
I went [deleted] ballistic.
The Feds didn’t want to know. The rules had changed while I’d been away, and it was classed as a Corporate Assassination. Who do they think they’re kidding. It was gang rape and murder. Someone was paying the Feds protection money.
I spent the next year setting myself up, and hacking from the cube. I got enough on all the local gangs to vaporise them all. Then I set a trap for the DBs, the [deleted] who’d set me up, and then killed my family.
I lured the lot to Tower Urblock 11231, after making sure that the innocent were out of the block. I set my evidence to broadcast to the Euro Feds, to The European President, and to the Yanks’ Government. The whole of London Conurb was stinking with the rot that the gangs had started.
I detonated the incendiaries and demolition charges in 11231 myself. Only one of the Dolly Boys walked out alive. Me. And that was by accident. The charges in my chair quite failed to go off.
So, now you know about me. I’m sorry for the old lady who got caught in the collapse. I regret that more than anything, but I have no regrets about killing the gang, nor to the fact that over twelve hundred of the scum throughout London Conurb have been nuked for their crimes, gang and Gov alike. They earned it.
I’m going to be woken up in the morning. I’m going to eat a damned good breakfast. The whole works, including a real egg, real bacon and real fruit juice. I never had them before. Then, I’m gonna die like a man with my head high and, for the first time in my life, my belly full.
So help me, I’m not ashamed of my final acts, it’s the wasted years before that I’m ashamed of. I’m sorry Mom and Dad. I’m sorry Jack, Dave, Steve and Pete. I’ll be with you tomorrow. Maybe not, though, ‘cos I’m going to hell.
P’rhaps if we’d all been girls, then it might all have been different. Then we’d have been transferred as a family to band six and moved to Windsor compound.
End of transcript
"Congratulations, Mrs Dorman, you have a little girl. That’s number five, isn’t it? Do you have any idea what you want to call her?"
