by Toby Weston
“Oh, right, the Nuremburg defence. ‘I was just following orders,’ right?” said Nick.
“Oh, fuck you!” Keith rocked to his feet. “I don't need this shit. Look, when I was a kid, maybe I thought I could change the world, but nobody gives a shit. To get anything done, you need to change all the selfish ignorant people first. It didn't take a genius to work out that that one was never gonna fucking fly. But you’ve got to eat, so you get a job. I don’t want to burst your bubble, Nick, but it’s not all beaches and sexy secretaries out there.”
The secretary started to protest, but was silenced by a wave from Nick as Keith continued.
“It’s shit. Blood and shit and that’s the way it always was and always will be. So FUCK YOU. Fuck you all. I'm going to fucking bed.”
“Easy tiger,” said Nick, standing and grabbing Keith’s arm as he turned to leave.
Keith was pissed, stoned, and filled with a powerful self-loathing. Enraged by the goading, he reacted wildly to Nick’s fingers on his arm. He lashed out, scything his fist around in a huge swinging arc. More by luck than design, he landed the punch in the middle of Nick’s big, smiling face—roughly in the nose area, judging by the little explosion of blood.
Keith was not exactly sure what happened next. Most of the others were rushing up to encircle their captain, but he noticed the secretary again, still in the one-piece swimming costume, but now with a khaki denim jacket framing her flat stomach and curvaceous upper body. She wedged herself between Keith and Nick, then pirouetted around, dragging Keith to the ground, while doing something complex with his arm, which resulted in her sitting on his back, crushing his face in the sand with her legs scissoring his neck. It was all fast and calm. He couldn’t breathe. He could barely move. One arm was trapped under him. The other was drawn behind his back. Without fuss, she was choking him gently into unconsciousness with her thighs.
It was quite intimate. He hoped she wouldn’t kill him.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw stars and the moon. He was lying in the warm sand, with khaki one-piece sitting on a log a couple of metres away on the other side of the fire. She was looking away from him and out towards the surf, but presumably she was still watching him out of the corner of her eye, vigilant for any sudden moves. He decided to lie there for a while and sort his head. She didn't seem to be in any hurry, either.
Eventually, he propped himself up onto his elbows. “Sexy secretary and scary assassin, isn't it?”
She looked around. “You’re confused. I’m just the life guard. You’re the corporate fascist bully boy.”
“Oh Jesus, here we go again. I am a dogsbody, underpaid and overworked. Crap benefits. No job security. No executive capacity. It’s a shit job.”
Nick wandered into Keith’s field of vision with a bottle of beer pressed to the side of his nose. He must have been sitting or standing somewhere behind Keith.
“Still is and not was though?” he asked.
“Sorry about the nose, Nick. I think you touched a nerve with your little character assassination. Why are you so interested in what I do? Thinking about offering me a new job or something?”
“Nope, we don't have any opportunities at the moment, but I’m always on the lookout for talent; you never know. I could tone down the lectures if I knew for sure you were an ex, rather than operational, corporate goon and spy.”
“Spy? Is that what all this is about? I’m not a fucking spy! I got up this morning and pulled a sicky, because I couldn’t handle another day of bullshit from my boss. I came down to the beach to chill, met a couple of nice people.” Keith’s eyes, unbidden, glanced over to khaki one-piece. “I had a beer and then seem to have been ambushed by a crack deep cover left-wing political debating squad.”
“Ha!” Nick laughed. “Okay bud, sorry. No more politics. You can hang with us if you want, but forget the sucker punches or I'll let Dee really fuck you up next time.”
“Fair enough. How long was I out?”
Dee looked down to him from the other side of the fire. “Five minutes or so. I hardly had to touch you, though. Mostly it was the drugs and booze and general fatigue that took you under. Not been sleeping too well lately?”
“How'd you guess? And before you ask: Yes, it is my guilty conscience keeping me awake at night. Got another cold one there, Nick? I seem to have dropped my last one somehow.”
He struggled up and joined the circle around the fire. The guy sitting next to him on the log passed along a new beer and said, “A lot of people react to him like that. He likes to pick at scabs. Don't worry about it. You’re not the first bloke to smack him one. That’s mostly what he keeps Dee around for.”
***
Keith stood a little back from the edge of the precipice. He felt like a painful union between a bat and a penguin. He reached his arm around to the back of his suit. He flapped his elbows to shake the folds of cloth out of the way, and his fingers found the tennis ball-sized lozenge snuggling between his shoulder blades. For good measure, he gave it a tug to make sure it was still firmly attached to his harness.
Over the past few hours, what had already seemed like a dubious idea when they discussed it the night before had acquired all the characteristics of a fever dream. Head still groggy, he had been dragged away from his half-drunk breakfast coffee and cajoled up onto an antique coach with scuffed faux leather seats and a wood-patterned linoleum aisle. The justification for the excessive good luck paraphernalia dangling from the mirror and festooned across the dash became clear as soon as the old coach juddered forward and began the long precarious climb up the slow motion landslide comically masquerading as a road. Forty minutes after stepping off the coach, having left behind the smelly, overheated engine, he saw the spectacular jungle-fringed valley dropping away into the mist before them and finally grasped the magnitude of his situation.
“It’s easy as falling off a log,” Dee said, grinning at him before leaping after the others, who had already taken leave of their senses and parted company with the ground. Keith stayed rooted to the big, solid, safely grounded boulder the others had just left. He looked down past the overhang; Dee, arms and legs spread like a flying squirrel, was hurtling past jagged rocks towards the tops of the jungle trees seven hundred metres below. Way in front, Nick—or Nate-O, as some of the others called him—was levelling out of his dive. He and a couple of the others had suits with big overlapping carbon fibre scales attached to an elegant arrangement of levers across their backs. Nick partially unfurled his black, death-angel wing extensions and, scrubbing speed, climbed up from the treetops.
The previous evening, following the tussle on the beach, they had been talking about their plans for the next day. Nick and the others would be guiding a group of business men on an unforgettable adventure, demoing a new product—namely, the twelve-square metres of graphene nano-cloth that Keith was wearing packed into the tiny cylinder on his back. A small, but capable, flight computer controlled the electroactive risers and, when required, tiny rockets would rip the chute from its protective bubble. Feeling slightly left out and intending to try to boost his cred a little, Keith had mentioned that, while at school, he had done a parachute jump once. Nick had immediately perked up, spearing him with his feverish will. He insisted Keith come with them on the base-jumping escapade. Conscious of Dee sitting across the table watching, Keith had agreed.
“The auto-chute will open if there is any danger, and it will guide you in. It’s perfectly safe,” they had told him ten minutes earlier during a terrifyingly informal safety presentation.
The chute was small enough to be worn by the paranoid on commercial flights or to provide a modicum of safety to the suicidal adventurist when engaged in extreme sports. Nick had gone to great lengths to explain its features. Thinking back to the conversation, Keith thought it had sounded very technical and complicated, when perhaps, if he had been choosing a parachute for himself, simple and reliable might be the features he would prioritise.
His pro
crastinating reverie was broken by an enthusiastic exclamation: “Fucking hell! Looks like you are feeling better, hey Keith?”
He turned towards the familiar voice and saw Ben and his entourage disembarking from a much nicer white coach. It must have pulled silently into the clearing behind them. Its sleek form was streaked with reddish mud from the climb up from the coast. Keith’s stomach lurched as he realised these must be the corporate customers Nick had meant.
“Busted!” mentioned one of Ben’s drones, helpfully raising his hand for a high five from Ben that never arrived.
Experimental parachutes, reckless instructors, and the real possibility he would be bounced and abraded from the rocks on the way down, until he was merely a sinewy collection of organs and shattered limbs slapping and sliding towards the jungle far below, were all mere irritations, compared to this new source of ultimate ironic misery.
“Fuck,” Keith muttered under his breath.
The prospect of leaping off the edge was looking like the lesser of two evils. Before Ben could say anything else, with a massive surge of will, he insisted to himself there was the calm surface of a swimming pool just over the edge. Willing himself to believe in the water a few metres below, against the advice of all his instincts, he performed a clumsy dive.
He is tumbling. The wall of the cliff is a blur, indifferent to the screaming human hurtling past it.
‘Why isn't the FUCKING chute opening?’ he thinks, yelling incoherently.
Some primal mammalian instincts assert themselves. He extends an arm. The tumbling slows, but then reverses. He opens his legs and the webbing between them catches the air and pitches him into a headfirst dive. Three eternal seconds of experimentation later and Keith has managed to stop spinning about his axis. His fall can now be generously described as a very steep and suicidal glide. The flight computer has been optimistically plotting scenarios that do not end with his mashed body, but it can no longer see any branches of its simulation tree that do not involve bits of bone and pints of blood splashed around the boulders of the riverbed a hundred metres below.
The chute deploys perfectly and then, apparently without transition, Keith is standing in a small stream, his translucent black parachute collapsing around him.
He briefly wonders why it smells of shit here, thinking it improbable and ironic that, given the large expanse of riverbed, the computer should land him on a large pile of fresh turd. Then, a more likely explanation occurs to him and he begins to struggle out of his soiled suit before the others arrive.
“Fucking ACE!” yelled Ben twenty minutes later. He had crashed into the stream a dozen metres away.
Keith emerged from behind the boulder where he had been rinsing stubborn chunks from the seams of his suit. Ben had already unzipped his leg flap in the middle and wrapped the two sections around his legs, so he didn't have to hobble like a convict.
“Ah, shat yourself I see.”
“Fuck off Ben,” Keith suggested.
“Easy Keith. Don’t forget you work for me. So let me guess; you felt a bit better and thought that a spot of base jumping might be just the thing to help you convalesce?”
Keith saw Nick and Dee trudging back up the stream. Dee was holding the scrunched-up ball of her chute. Nick was empty-handed. Keith would later watch the video of him using his huge strap-on wings to scrub most of his speed and then barefoot water ski to a halt across a calm pool in the river, effortlessly jogging up onto the sandy beach in one final heroic flourish.
Ben saw them coming and did a comical double take. Keith assumed he was just ogling the beautiful Dee, but Ben was suddenly deadly serious and gave Keith a curious look, pressing pause on any conversation.
“Mr Munisai, your highness, what a pleasure. I didn’t expect to be lucky enough to have the honour of meeting you!” Ben said, all traces of cockney rough edges gone from his voice. He extended his hand for a shake. Nick gave it a horizontal double slap surfer style.
“Hey! And no need to be formal. I am just Niato, or Nick,” he said, giving Keith a slightly guilty shrug.
“Okay, cool, well it’s still an honour. Shall we go again?” Ben asked, gesturing towards the harness swinging gently from an invisible filament back at the cliff.
“Sure. Did you enjoy yourself?” Niato asked.
“Yeah! Amazing. I want to try it with those wings of yours next,” said Ben.
“Sorry, no can do. After a couple of hundred hours in a simulator, maybe you can give them a go out of a plane. Way too dangerous close to the ground for a beginner. Trust the chute; it knows best and is an expert pilot.”
“Yea, whatever. Maybe next year, right?”
“It’s a deal,” Niato answered with an apparently genuine smile.
Ben stepped into the harness and clipped himself on. At some invisible signal, the sling accelerated up towards the top of the cliff. A few minutes later, the harness came down again. By then, more of the others were returning and queuing up to ascend the cliff for another hit of adrenaline.
“You going again Keith?” Niato asked.
Keith was running over the previous day and night, scanning his internal narrative for all the times he had embarrassed himself or insulted the world’s most popular Royal. Plenty of drunken goofs arrayed themselves for inspection, but top of the list was definitely punching the King in the face.
“Sure,” he responded with a rictus grin slicing his face in two.
The ‘rope’ was so unfeasibly thin that it was dangerous to touch anywhere other than on the specially padded regions. The ground was quickly a long way away. Keith was lofted up the cliff in a series of massive sickening swings. He decided this was even more terrifying than the way down. Then he remembered the sphincter loosening terror of the descent.
At the top, an instructor fitted him with a new chute. The old one was still lying below, scrunched up into its pouch. It could not be re-folded by hand and would be sent back to the Fab for refurbishment and re-packing. Keith noticed a few of this group were wearing chunky rocket boots. These flyers were so proficient, they didn't need chutes to land; they only wore them for last-ditch safety. Wings and jet boots worked together to create a dynamic that brought their landing speed down below a bone-shattering hurtle. Apparently, only Niato had mastered the water-skiing swoop landing.
Ben and Keith, who were absolute beginners, weren’t trusted with rocket boots or wings. They didn't have the option to try a landing yet, relying instead on the flight computer to pull their chutes fifty metres from the ground.
“How was that then?” asked another of Niato’s crew.
“Yeah, better than I expected. Quite fun actually.” Keith thought he had just managed to keep the terror out of his voice.
“Gonna try not to shit your pants again this time?” enquired Ben.
Keith glanced over at Dee, but thankfully, she didn't seem to have heard.
“Fuck off Ben!” Keith whispered.
They were all piling off the edge again, like a group of lemmings. Keith copied one of the others, leaping away from the cliff with arms out in a T shape. He was actually gliding. The stones whipping by below gave testament to his lateral motion, but before he could really get used to the sensation, his chute exploded away from his back. Ben, who must have been dangerously close behind, flashed by whooping. His chute opened a few metres in front of Keith.
“Beer?” Ben asked a few minutes later.
“You don't think maybe we should stay sober for this?”
“Oh, you’re ill. I forgot. Whatever. I'm having one.”
They walked back to the little camp at the base of the cliff and sat down in a patch of sun. The others were slowly coming back from a series of longer glides.
“Ah, that’s the stuff.” Ben laughed, taking a second chug. “You really are a tosser, Keith. You know that? You get a chance to rub shoulders with a real player, and you don’t even recognise him. Such. A. Tosser!”
“For Christ’s sake, Ben. Can you just give it a
rest for a couple of minutes?”
“You’re not really having a midlife crisis are you?”
“Ben, I’m not sure I can do this anymore.”
“Hey Dee!” Ben shouted. “My boy Keith here needs to sort his head out. How about a bit of sexual healing?”
Dee looked at Keith, whose face was frozen in horror. She tipped her head to the side and gave Ben a bored look.
“He's not really my type,” she replied, making light of the embarrassing question.
Keith knew his ears and cheeks were lighting up, but he tried to keep a lid on the murderous impulses jogging around his body. He felt his hands and jaws clench.
“Ben, what the fuck is wrong with you? We’re not fucking twelve anymore.”
Ben grinned and went over to give him a big cuddle, followed by a knuckle rubbing on the head. Keith tried to fight him off weakly, but this only seemed to encourage him. In the end, Keith stood up, got a hand under Ben’s chin, and forced him away.
