A Princess of The Linear Jungle

nameless gal smiled at Merritt and Art without any apparent recognition of either, and invited them inside. Merritt sighed at having dodged that particular bullet.
    Searching for Ransome Pivot became Merritt’s next mission. She wanted to show off Art and see Ransome’s reaction. But not only could she not find her Stagwitz-born peer anywhere—he seemed among the entirely missing, as did Henry Yun and Goodge Adams themselves—but she also got separated from Art in the hullabaloo. The crowd here was louder and more aggressive, fueled by stronger drink than amrita, and Merritt thought to discern a clot of predatory, red-taloned women around her man.
    She was fighting her way to his side when with a tremendous percussive boom a pack of Wharton Constables inexplicably broke down the outer door and swarmed inside, at least a dozen buff-uniformed, strongarm, no-nonsense, ass-kicking name-takers.
    The partygoers shrieked and scattered aimlessly. Glasses crashed. Merritt was carried nearly off her feet and toward the back of the building. She felt her ankle twist in the process, and it instantly began to throb painfully.
    What was this assault all about? Retaliation against some mild, harmless dope-smoking? The raid made no sense….
    Now Merritt regained her feet, surrounded by single-minded Constables, these wordless enforcers ignoring her as they zeroed in on that mysterious door that Yun had steered her away from during her first visit. Two of the Constables carried a lock-puller like a lance. They rammed the barbed diamond tip home, and cranked its powerful gears to extract the door’s security mechanism. Then they rushed inside the private room, leaving Merritt and some other brave souls to follow tentatively behind.
    The cloistered, stagnant, stinking, formerly hidden space struck Merritt as part abbatoir, part hospital room. Several elevated padded tables loomed, stained and forbidding. On two of these sacrificial platforms, naked human bodies lay. The bodies were tethered to IV drips and arcane medical devices.
    And they were flayed open mercilessly, like fleshy wiring diagrams.
    And of course, these sexless, faceless victims still lived, else they’d be gone, transported to The Other Shore or The Wrong Side of the Tracks.
    Yun and Adams wore surgical attire: masks and gloves and rubber aprons. Each man had been interrupted with scalpel in hand.
    Somehow, the presence of familiar student notebooks opened for recording bloody observations made the whole shambles a hundred time more gruesome.
    Her painful ankle receding into the background of her attention, Merritt prayed feverishly and without conscious formulation, to both Manasa and Vasuki: Let Ransome not be here, let Ransome not be here …
    Her prayers were well-received: Ransome Pivot was nowhere to be seen.
    The constables quickly pinioned the two med students. Neither Yunnor Adams struggled. Adams sagged like a wet sack, while Yun ramrodded his spine.
    Only then did one of the enforcers speak, an older fellow with enormous muttonchop whiskers.
    “It’s just as we feared. No use for the ambulance. Pull the plugs, lads.”
    The vivisection victims were disconnected from their life-support apparatus. Within seconds, their labored breathing ceased.
    Despite knowing what was to come, Merritt flinched with everyone else at the noisy, atmosphere-displacing arrival of the Pompatics.
    Cutting down unimpeded through the ceiling and floor and walls of the building more effortlessly than a keel through spume or Trainwheel through smoke, the Pompatics came for the dead. Three ethereal Fisherwives for one victim, two marmoreal Yardbulls for the other. Brine and brimstone mingled into a heady incense.
    Lofting their now-incorporeal cargo, the Pompatics departed as they had come.
    Merritt found herself weeping violently. An arm suddenly draped around her shoulders provided unquestioned comfort. She looked upward through her misty veil to see Arturo Scoria sizing up the scene with dispassionate curiosity.
    “Hmmph! I would’ve sworn this kind of thing couldn’t occur in an ambilineal society with class stratification and distributive justice. Must’ve been the Bentoan influence, I suppose.”

    After the raid on the “Boy Docs’ Slaughterhouse” as the tabloids dubbed it, the biologist’s special and previously little-heard word for a hypothetical object—”corpse”—came to be bandied about in public discourse, printed and spoken both, so much so that