"Here's a couple of the abortive proposals - I make no great claims for 'em, on account of how if they were really any good they'd have been produced"

Dave Stone – August 1999

Armitage: The Janus Spore
By Dave Stone

This is the story about the distinctions between weapons and delivery systems and the triggers thereof. It’s also about the Cascade Effect by which information - be it the automeme encoded into a religion, the data encoded onto a memory chip or the long-chain RNA encoded in a virus - proliferates through the corpus of a culture. With boffo heaps of pervy sex and death thrown in to boot. Natch. One of the major characters in our story is of course the now-legendary sexy leather PVC bitch who kills people from the Culling Crew. For the sake of clarity we’ll refer to her as Suzi, but remember that we’ll never actually learn her actual name...

Our primary story-strand, of course, is that of Armitage and Steel:

It is some while after the events of last time. Neither Armitage nor Steel have the slightest suspicion that Treasure’s head has been tampered with. Treasure occasionally mentions having bad dreams but places no importance on them. We open with Armitage and Steel as they lead a squad of Judges and auxiliary support through a complex bust, bringing down an operation dealing in the extraction of cancer-curing hormones from kidnap victims ... a process which, of course, kills the victims horribly. In conversational passing we learn of some of the pragmatic dealing that has gone on to make this bust possible - slightly suspect negotiations with the representatives of the Overlord running this particular sector, the setting up of processes to counter any subsequent retaliation. The Culling Crew is not mentioned as such, but it will become clear that they are being used to provide these more than somewhat lethal safeguards. Importantly, we follow much of this through the reports to some unnamed and inimical authority by the shadowy figures who are watching Armitage’s every move.

We follow Armitage as he goes after an escaping kidnapper - and realise that this is something of a set-up. Shadowy figures set upon Armitage, he is shot with an anaesthetic dart and dragged off. Treasure, meanwhile, as she deals with the final cleanup of the bust, is wondering where Armitage has got to and is vaguely worried. She has a sense of deja vu. It’s something to do with her dreams. She stops worrying when Armitage returns, slightly groggy and thinking he got cracked on the head when the guy he was chasing escaped.

The shadowy people watching him know different. Armitage has been treated, just like Treasure has been. After rather too many years of planning, they’re finally ready to begin the terminal phase of Project Janus.

(There are a number of subplot-elements interweaving through the story, the initial effects of which should be almost entirely unnoticeable but building ... until they go overt and we suddenly learn the truth of what we’re really dealing with. They’re detailed here for the sake of clarity, but imagine them as interleaved in some substrative manner through the initial stages of the actual plot, accumulating the general level of paranoia and suspense: Our first subplot-strand deals with a man we’ll learn to be Blaine. We see him co-ordinating the infection of Brit-Cit with an artificial virus, the effect of which is to give people a mild and short-lived cold but seemingly does them little other damage. We see characters suffering briefly with a cold, etc. Blaine is also in contact with several renegade Special Branch people, who are trailing Armitage and Steel and occasionally directing them - either subtly, or by storming through their investigations and goading them in a classic demonstration of the old adage about leading a pig.

Additionally, there are the murders which Armitage and Steel will investigate and eventually find the common link. In the sequences concerning these we see the Culling Crew character of Suzi prominently - following the victim, standing in the crowd of onlookers when the victim’s found and so forth. We are led to think that Suzi herself has committed these murders - but there will be little incidental clues, things that you don’t pick up on unless you’re actively looking for them, to show that somebody else entirely has committed them. The common link between the murders, incidentally, is that the victims are concerned with a conspiracy centred on the ZipCo incorporation - a massive consumer-product conglomerate seemingly bent on taking control of the commercial world in a Microsoft-like way. Throughout the story we see lots of little references to ZipCo - their trademark on products, ZipCo ads, jokes about how they’re trying to patent oxygen or copyright the letter E and so forth. Importantly, we are aware of a ZipCo electronic product of some or other sort amongst the scenery of each murder. Anyhow ...)

There are several murders, all connected with the ZipCo conglomerate, the head man of whom, Blaine, is a reclusive presence at the top of the ZipCo building. When we first meet him, we see him as a kind of comedic Brunel-type industrialist and harmless eccentric in a stovepipe hat. Armitage and Steel investigate and learn that the murders are concerned with something called the Janus project. This name rings alarm bells throughout the New Old Bailey. First Warner and then the Special Branch people warn our heroes off, slimily and menacingly respectively.

Treasure, however, finds herself falling increasingly apart. Her nightmares are getting worse and are full of blood and violence - it is as though she is connected to the killings on some level that she is refusing to let herself recognise. Armitage, meanwhile, is acting a little strangely too. He has become obsessed with these killings and is absolutely determined to pin them on someone, no matter what lengths are involved. When we recollect this later, we’ll recognise an hysterical attempt to transfer subconscious blame, but for the moment, we see strange lapses of character like brutally beating a suspect or a witness to within an inch of his life.

All their efforts to stop this spate of killings seem to be in vain - they consistently arrive too late and the strain becomes immense. Until, at last, by going through the surveillance records and hacking into restricted files, they spot a recurring face. Suzi from the culling Crew. We have followed a lot of this through entries in Treasure’s journal, and now we follow them as, so she thinks, they track down this killer - and find her standing over her latest victim. Suzi reacts in a blur of motion. She appears to kill Armitage and then advances on Treasure . . .

Treasure wakes up in the subterranean Culling Crew bunker of Suzi and Babe. She has a bandage around her head and has been de-brainwashed and deprogrammed. We learn that the death of Armitage and several other nasty incidents have been the hallucinatory results of Suzi and Babe trying to jam the neural bomb in Treasure’s head - a bomb which, as we’ll learn has been producing some hallucinatory results of its own. Suzi is here, in the bunker, and we learn something of her life after the events of Wetworks.
(Class Note: "Wetworks" an original Judge Dredd novel by Dave Stone. Printed by Virgin books in 1995. ISBN: 0-352-32975-0)

She is now an assassination operative for the new-style Culling Crew - which is basically the reinstatement of the old organisation, as it was before it was taken over and twisted by Harvey Glass in the book. The Culling Crew has total global security access, and only the very upper strata of any country’s Justice Department know they exist. They are a covert force that acts as a final safety-net for the world, taking out the problems that the overt Justice Departments cannot handle alone or when the Judges need to keep their hands utterly clean. The Crew are, for example, the people who assassinate Brit-Cit Overlords when necessary and thus preserve the Brit-Cit balance of power. They also counter conspiracies that infect Justice Departments - not corruption or local oppression and such, of which they couldn’t give a toss, but schemes that would cause a global threat if they were not eradicated. The Culling Crews kill without compunction, or remorse, and they are, quite simply, the last and dirtiest resort. Such a conspiracy as they deal with is now infecting Brit-Cit: a lot of high-ranking Judges and Special Branch people are involved. It involves the spreading of an apparently harmless virus and the man behind it is Blaine, the head of ZipCo. A large number of the people involved in the Janus conspiracy have now been removed - and to do this Blaine needed to provide entirely unsuspected assassins. Several hundred Judges, Armitage and Steel amongst them, have been brainwashed and programmed to be these assassins - fitted with neural bombs which shut down their minds and make their bodies do things by remote control. (As an incidental aside, we learn that some years before a certain Judge Nathan Hand was put through a prototype version of the process which went wrong - and this was why he flipped out and started killing people in Armitage book I.) Before a horrified Treasure’s eyes Suzi shows surveillance footage of the true events of the murders she and Armitage have been investigating - a mindless Armitage, in a fugue-state, committing them.

And then Suzi shows Treasure the footage of Treasure’s own murders. Suzi’s mission was simply to keep tabs on the situation until it was time for action. She’s a cheerfully vicious killer, couldn’t care less about the murders as such and did nothing to prevent them. Now, however, she’s been given the go-signal. It’s time for Blaine to be taken out, and the easiest way to get close to him is to use one of his unsuspecting, programmed assassins for his or her disassembled control-codes to beat Blaine’s security systems. She has abducted Treasure to this purpose, and while having no intention of actually killing her (unless she gets bored and feels like it) she considers her as useless having served her purpose.

A livid and horrified Treasure, of course, has other ideas. Armitage is still out there, programmed as an unwitting assassin - and he must be saved. If Suzi’s going after Blaine then Treasure’s damn well going along. 

After a contest of wills in which Treasure displays a strength of character hitherto undreamt of, Suzi reluctantly acquiesces - with the proviso that if there is any sort of Treasure-based complication, Treasure will instantly die.

And now the Janus programme is finally coming to fruition. Simultaneously, from all over the city, Blaine’s brainwashed assassins are being called in to the ZipCo building, where Blaine is holding a cult-like sales and marketing meeting for his thousands of personnel, of the sort you see run by the motivational pyramid-selling gurus and other con men. And now Blaine has dropped his harmless eccentric act and is finally revealed as the apotheosis of the kind of razor-suited rabid business-shark so justly despised in the 20th century - evolved now into an utter, insane monster. A sort of demagogic cross between Hitler, Branson and Bill Gates on freebase.

In true evil-avatar style, he tells them of his insane plan. The ZipCo employees have been participating all unawares in a two-pronged attack against the city. The first front is a mostly-harmless virus, spread through the Brit-Cit population and then lying dormant until triggered. The trigger is a specific neuroleptic pulse that will be emitted simultaneously by every ZipCo product in the city - and we’ve already seen how many there are of them. A little bit of shit-hot (and as it happens perfectly correct) biomedical jargon about endocrines, RNA-strings and the like makes this plausible and indeed highly likely in the real world, given time.

The virus limitedly emulates the effect of the brainwashing used on his assassins (which were themselves triggered into action by some ZipCo item personalised to them) and the result will be that the entire infected population will collapse in an ultra-violent, mindless feeding frenzy of specified need under Blaine’s personal control. The ultimate market for some incredibly shoddy products he’s been stockpiling - and which we’ve seen advertised throughout and thought were merely jokes. And he’s only telling them this now, of course, because they’ve served their usefulness and the ZipCo business can now be, uh, downsized. The doors of the conference chamber open and Blaine's brainwashed assassins - Judges including Armitage amongst them - burst in and begin slaughtering the ZipCo personnel.

Suzi and Treasure arrive to find a scene of carnage, and in a spectacular climax Suzi goes through Blaine’s personal (and un-brainwashed) Special Branch guards to get to him. 

Treasure, meanwhile, is confronted by the brainwashed Armitage, who goes after her in a killing frenzy. In a knock-down, drag-out fight, she nearly dies before she locates the item triggering his fugue - an ZipCo personal organiser that we’ve seen him using throughout the story - and can shock him back into himself with the realisation of what he’s been made to do. Blaine, meanwhile, who wears a monomolecular virus-protection suit to prevent himself being infected, sprays Suzi with a concentrated form of the virus that disables her with something like pneumonia. He runs for the consoles that control his individual assassins and which will set in motion the collapse of the entire city into chaos. 

Generators roar, the trigger signal builds up - and outside we see some primary effects like a street-crowd devolving into a riot of violent greed. Suzi, coughing and near to pneumonia-death, still goes after Blaine and almost gets her face kicked in before Treasure and a furious Armitage arrive. Armitage is livid at what has been done to him. He launches himself at Blaine, and in the resulting fight rips his protective suit and infects him with the concentrated virus.

Armitage hurls the pneumonia-disabled Blaine from him - and Blaine wonders why, given the absolute and murderous rage of Armitage, Armitage didn’t kill him. And then he realises that the weakened Suzi is still crawling toward him . . . Treasure, meanwhile, has fought her way through to the consoles and wrecked them with an impressive display of sparks. She realises that a pale and shaken Armitage is now there with her. Don’t worry about Blaine, he says, he’s being taken care of.

An epilogue. The danger has been averted - but the virus is still at large, and some extremely draconian measures are going to have to be taken by the New Old Bailey to limit it.

The various brainwashed Judges are going to have to go through extensive deprogramming, Armitage and Steel included. A couple of cynical little touches detailing how the murders they committed while under the influence are going to be covered up. 

The body of Blaine has been found, but there is no sign of Suzi. Armitage and Steel decide not to mention her. It might be safer for both of them. Blaine simply died in the fighting. End of story.

Armitage Revamp
By Dave Stone

The purpose of this (since we all know about the guy anyway) is to briefly detail my thoughts for a reintroduction of Detective Judge Armitage, capitalising on the things that worked and junking the things that quite frankly didn’t.

Format:

The format is a loosely connected series of two- and three-parters, each at 6 pages. Each story details a single adventure or investigation. There will be none of the pretentious, tetralogic foreshadowing of Cataclysmic Events to Come.

Such things will be entirely backgrounded - operating upon the level of a throwaway line like You’d better watch yourself with those expenses, Steel, if you don’t want the bastards from Accounts to turn up’ - and then bugger me if a couple of stories later one of them doesn’t.

The changes:

Armitage is now in his late fifties (still extremely tough and pretty-much unchanged visually), has the rank of Chief Detective, and is the leader of a divisional squad. Treasure, now in her thirties, is his second in command, and has a rank of the equivalent to an Inspector.

Their division consists of a number of plainclothes Judges, with dedicated facilities in Forensics and access as and when to Street Judge forces. They deal with homicides and the cases that arise from them - and the process and the atmosphere are, in fact, rather like the fine TV-show Homicide. Calls come in, they are dealt with by the squad, Treasure takes the hands-on command of the tricky cases. Armitage co-ordinates and guides the investigations with a hard hand, protects his people from the rich and powerful - and is called into an investigation in person only when something big, insoluble and ultimately pestilent occurs. This is not to say, of course, that he does not get involved with the action. Some lowly Plainclothesman can turn round at an time to find Armitage glaring over his shoulder, and casually saving him from a danger of which he had not even been aware. Armitage commonly moves in circles far more dangerous than those under his command. There are people out to get him - with lethal force in most cases. 

Armitage has, quite simply, built up the single best homicide-related squad in the city. He is regarded by his people with a mixture of pride, respect, utter loyalty and outright fear.

Other Changes:

The revamp of the Justice Department - on the plus side - has stripped slimy middle-management little shits like Warner of the right to call themselves Judges, and relegated them to an administorial Accounting infrastructure; they deal with budgeting the Justice Department’s activities. On the minus side, of course, Warner is the liaison between Armitage’s squad and Accounts, and is spitefully attempting to penny-pinch the squad into the ground. Cue the sort of situations where backup fails to arrive because of lack of resources’...

The Stories:

As I’ve said, the stories will either be a rolling serious of two- and three-parters, in total an ensemble-piece, heavy on environmental detail, each 3-part story dealing with and focussing upon a single case. There are several connective subplots in the background: a long-term case that might take months of careful work to complete, the gradual descent of one of the squad into drug-addiction and corruption; a romance that develops between two members of the squad. Each of these will become active for a 3-parter at the end of any putative meta-series and be resolved. Full breakdowns shall occur in the complete developmental package, should any of the above small thoughts hold water.