The Fifth Correction

by Robert Wingfield

  THE FIFTH CORRECTION

  Robert Wingfield

  The Fifth Correction

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters and locations are the subject of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locations or objects, existing or existed is purely coincidental.

  It is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the writer’s prior consent, electronically or in any form of binding or cover other than the form in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Replication or distribution of any part is strictly prohibited without the written permission of the

  copyright holder.

  Copyright © 2014-2019 Robert Wingfield

  ISBN: 9780463937365

  All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  To all those friends and relatives who have slipped away too early into alternative universes.

  Acknowledgements

  Cover background

  Quasar: ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser

  Retro Flying Car by Artem Suleymanov

  https://www.deviantart.com/or1s

  and

  Dai Cooper and Tessa Pye

  Contents

  The Dokuvirus

  Mission Orders

  Good Company

  Research

  Inspection

  Experiments

  Profit?

  Tales from a Small Planet

  The Dokumat

  Tour Guides

  Committee

  Piracy

  The Argon-nauts

  Assassination

  Landing

  Inside Job

  The Cure

  Development

  Detention

  Flight of the Pig-Ugly

  Reality TV

  The Tax Interview

  Rescue and Capture

  Centre Court

  Correction Number 5

  The Dokuvirus

  How not to catch it

  Tom sets SMART Objectives

  T

  he virulent Dokuvirus was first seen on Glenforbis, a world renowned for being the centre of organic fertiliser production, and nothing else. Its dung mines have long been celebrated in the Galaxy, as is its atmosphere. Apart from the miners, only a specific type of person was able to survive there, and property in general was large, air-conditioned and cheap. It was from here that the herds of the indigenous and placid doku, a variety of large, hairy four-horned buffalo, spread out and began to transmit the virus, but only to people they liked.

  The actual disease itself is thought to be harmless—it doesn’t kill, debilitate or confuse—but does have a major side-effect of causing extensive hair growth. Some would find this useful and have deliberately infected themselves where the local taxation on clothing is extortionate, but others, perhaps on warmer planets, have suffered major inconvenience, the condition being of benefit only to the deodorant manufacturers—conspiracy theorists have suggested there may be a connection.

  * * *

  Some 20 parsecs away from Glenforbis, as the house flies (a plague of them there), the newly elected CEO of the multi-national corporation, SCT, Tom Two-Dan $mith (sic), is scratching his head... not because he has contracted the virus, of which he is currently blissfully unaware, but rather because nobody knows what his recently acquired company actually does.

  Tom has set himself the SMART (Senseless, Mind-numbing, Abstract, Retrograde and Throwaway) objective of finding out, tracking where all the money has gone after the untimely slaying of the previous CEO, and trying to turn the business around.

  Meanwhile in another universe, possibly at right-angles to his present reality...

  Mission Orders

  Foilside presses the wrong button

  Tay hits the right ones

  C

  hief Overseer Raymond Foilside wheeled his motorised baking-tin into the main office of the Temporal Conduct Authority. Their slogan, ‘Si irrumabo cum Tempus, Nos irrumabimus Te’1 was recognised and feared throughout known space. He regarded the leggy blonde-haired biped bending over the main surveillance pad in the centre of the room, and silently cursed the fact that the String Theory, which suggests that all things are possible somewhere in the multiverse, had left him without any of the necessary appendages to take advantage.

  “Morning Chief,” the girl straightened and swept her lazy grey gaze upon him.

  “G’day Agent Tay,” he replied, a small river of drool leaking out of what he liked to call his mouth. The girl bent towards him and dabbed it out of his tin with a super-absorbent J-Swab, deliberately giving him a tantalising glimpse of her loose complex network of branching ducts and lobules firmly covered in a layer of fat and skin. He was annoyed about his optical processors filtering and reducing his enjoyment of the vision to mere biological data, but he controlled the irritation; he knew that he had to motivate his team; things had not been going swimmingly at the TCA recently.

  He cleared his throat, one of the organs that the String Theory had decided to leave him with. “Morning Team.”

  “Morning Chief,” came the reply from the varied collection of species that constituted his line-up of investigators.

  “Are we floating all the boats today?”

  “Sorry Chief?” The question came from a large hairy creature with the look of a St Bernard dog.

  “Firing on all cylinders, Lazmik; travelling at warp ten; punching every monkey?”

  “Absolutely Chief; everything is running to plan.”

  “Still suffering from the hair then, Agent Lazmik” Foilside raised an eyebrow at his shaggy subordinate.

  “Yes Chief, it appears I can’t get rid of it since I did the job on that planet with the methane problem.”

  “Yes. I remember that abortive mission, where they had failed to curtail illegal Janhard odour eliminator smuggling in the dung mines. You should see Nurse.”

  “I did. Apparently there’s no known cure.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that. What flowers would you like at the funeral? Do we need to have a whip-round?”

  The hairy face split into a grin. “You can, Chief, and I’m sure the Drachmas will come in handy. It’s not actually life-threatening, only a bit hard on the department strimmer.”

  “Riiiight.” Foilside rolled into the centre of the office. “Listen up team.” There was a scraping of chairs, sloshing of liquid and whirr of caterpillar tracks. “I have been notified of a major irregularity in the Multiverse.”

  “What, another one?” The blonde biped perched herself on a stool and stretched a tanned portion of lower extremity that runs from the knee to the ankle towards him. He activated the elevator under his tray until he was on eyelevel with her.

  “Yes, another one, Agent Tay. This one however might suit your particular talents. Shall we have a look?” He produced a remote-control unit crammed with small buttons and pressed one. The coffee machine gurgled and spat boiling water on to the office goose, which gave a honk and careered through a house of cards that one of the investigators had nearly completed.

  “Bugger these controls,” said Foilside, “Why don’t they ever make the buttons big enough for a normal person to operate?”

  “Twats and twelve-year-old designers who have no idea about functionality testing,” said Tay. “Somebody brilliant creates the technology, and it then gets passed on to kids for the aesthetics; they’re very cheap, of course.”

  “Make a note to eliminate the supplier,” said Foilside. He inspected the control. “
The Nishant Corporation, it says here. Do we know where to find them?”

  “I’m sure we can track them down,” said Lazmik, “I’m looking for something to kill in my spare time.”

  “Don’t you mean something kill your spare time?”

  Lazmik grinned.

  Foilside nodded. “Good, set that as another of the objectives in your PDP2; you may be able to fit it into Volume 3, between ‘solving galactic poverty’ and ‘making me a cup of cocoa’.” He looked thoughtful. “Then again, perhaps you can leave uncovering the kimono on that one later; put it on the back-burner for the moment. Talking about burning, we actually have a barn-burner here for a change.” He banged the remote on the side of his tray and the holographic viewer on the end wall shuddered into life.

  The image showed a wood-panelled office with a large mahogany desk. Leaning on the desk, a pert girl in a business suit was toying with her wispy blonde hair… and behind her…

  Tay gave a gasp. “Not him again?”

  “Yes, him again.” Foilside grimaced. “I thought we’d ‘eaten the frog’ on that ‘bag of viper’s but it seems that our noble principal, the Cyclic Imperator, has made a ‘Whitehouse Decision’ to give us the action item of bringing the Universes back into sync.”

  “What again?” said Lazmik. “I know we are a bit short of work here, but how many times..?”

  “A non-issue,” said Foilside. “We must do what the empty suits decide, and I’ve decided that Agent Tay is the right operative for the job. We have to fish or cut bait on this one.”

  “I’d rather not.” Tay shook her head.

  “What have you got against fish?” said Lazmik. “I like a nice halibut.”

  “Everything I’m afraid, if you are referring to the slang version of the word3. You see, every time I go near Two-Dan $mith (sic), for reasons I’m not going into at the moment, we end up shagging like bonobos.”

  “What, like Simon Green, the well-known British musician, producer and DJ, or are you citing that talented Paul David Hewson from the band, U2, in universe 2D$1?” Foilside tore his gaze away from her breasts.

  “No Chief.” Tay sighed. “You say this every time I mention my private life with that man. I refer to those creatures called Pan Paniscus, formerly the pygmy or dwarf or gracile chimpanzee.”

  “I knew that.” Foilside grinned. “It’s on my map; I know everything about Two-Dan… apart from why his name has to have ‘sic’ in brackets.”

  “That’s not his real name, but we have to put it in to show the typist it isn’t a spelling mistake,” put in the trainee, a small dark-haired woman, who was studying espionage with them after returning from a twenty-year maternity leave, “Which it was originally, of course.”

  “Okay then, Two-Dan $mith (sic) needs to be returned to his anchor point in Time-space and Universe. The ‘scuttlebutt’ is that he currently resides in Universe 2D$4.”

  “By ‘anchor point’,” Tay fought the programmed feelings rising in her lower regions at the mention of Two-Dan’s name, “I presume you mean that he is requiring termination?”

  “That is the usual interpretation. I know it will be like pegging eels to a wet washing line, but you are the best, er, man for the job.”

  Tay took a breath. “I can’t do it.”

  “You won’t?”

  “No, can’t. You know I’m a gynoid…”

  “Of course, a female android; I keep forgetting, you look so human. That would explain the fact that you have been working for the TCA for…” he counted on his fingers, “…nearly 1500 years now.”

  “That’s right,” said Tay, “I’ve tried to terminate him on several occasions, but my programming always prevents it. You would be wasting our resources sending me.”

  “I skimmed the dossier and saw that you and he went back a long way. That’s why I thought it was right up your drainpipe.”

  “We go further back than you think,” muttered Tay.

  “This means I will have to orienteer the skills ecosystem for replacements,” grumbled Foilside. “I simply thought it would give you pleasure…”

  “It would, but that wouldn’t get the job done.” Tay shuddered.

  “Of course.” The Chief scanned the room. “Who else is job-ready at the moment?”

  “Bott and Scaly,” said Tay, a little too quickly. “They haven’t been in the field for a while now and may be getting rusty.”

  “Bott probably is,” said Lazmik. “After he suffered that last mix of cookie-dough…”

  “Remind me?”

  “It was the ‘Dung-Blanket Case’. We were set up by those Bit-Coin miners who were working underground. They thought we were investigating them, panicked and poor Bott got flattened when they kicked out the pit props.”

  The Chief grimaced. “We had to plug the dyke with recycled parts to keep him alive, didn’t we?”

  “I’m afraid Nurse had to use a few leftover spare parts to patch him up,” said Tay.

  “She didn’t do a very good job,” said Lazmik.

  “That’s because our component orders never get signed off,” complained the gynoid. “The Imperator insists on doing everything himself these days, and says we are very short of cash; he seems to have a nice car and house, despite the fact we even have to buy our own badges and bus tickets. In Nurse’s defence though, how were we to know that the flexible ferrous material she found so useful would degrade in some environments?”

  “You could have asked Scaly;” said Lazmik, “he’s the scientist.”

  “Aren’t they all,” said Tay, shuddering.

  “I’ll donate them a clarion,” said Foilside. “Hold hard, team.”

  * * *

  A short while later, the two special operatives were standing in front of the Chief, Bott a mishmash of flesh and mechanical components, and Scaly, a multi-legged arthropod, roughly the same height when upright. They were both eyeing Tay lecherously, Bott her body and Scaly her timepiece.4

  “Watch the elephant in the room please, operators.” Foilside slapped a pair of appendages together to attract their wandering gazes.

  The creatures snapped to attention. Bott fished around on the floor, searching for the part that had just snapped off. “Even the plastic is degrading,” he muttered, as he retrieved the broken fragment and tried to fit it back into the gap in his torso.

  “Never mind that,” said Foilside impatiently. “We need to steam into action-city here. Go and see Nurse before you leave. I’m told she has more components, now that the refuse collectors are refusing to take all that waste we thought was recyclable.”

  “Sorry boss.” Bott stuffed the splinter into his pocket.

  “I’ll take him after the briefing,” said Scaly. “Trainee Zeta, would you be so kind as to book an appointment with Nurse for exactly thirty-eight minutes from now?” He clicked his forcipules5 and pressed the timers on five of his main watches.

  “Exactly?” said Zeta

  “Exactly,” replied Scaly, only it is now thirty-seven minutes and fifty seconds. Please pay attention.”

  “Impressive,” said Foilside, “but how do you know precise timings?”

  “Your briefings Chief,” said Scaly tiredly, “last on average fifteen minutes. You flirt with Tay for three minutes, after which you ask us to join you for a coffee. That takes two minutes while we politely decline. We then give in and have eight minutes to drink before you dismiss us. The walk to surgery from the coffee salon takes ten minutes, which we can vary by plus or minus two, depending on our chosen pace; total thirty-eight.”

  “I’ll sleep peacefully in my bed knowing that,” said Foilside sarcastically.

  “I am glad to hear it,” replied Scaly. “Your improved quality of slumber will reinforce the peak of efficiency we are pleased to enjoy each day.” He returned to his more normal prone position and curled up under a table.

  “Are you taking the piss?” said Foilside. He tried to gauge the expression i
n the collection of ocelli forming Scaly’s compound eye but, he reflected, one of the reasons for employing a quadrillipod as investigator was their total inscrutability. They also made excellent interviewers, mainly because criminals were invariably bipeds and were ‘creeped out’ by creatures with more than four appendages; a boon for any modern ‘Temconauterie’, as they had started calling their offices since the administration outsourcing deal with the French.

  Foilside decided to ignore the supposed abuse. “Right,” he repeated, “I need you guys to go to Universe 2D$4. You will find the target on an island at these coordinates.” He indicated the main screen. There was a teeth-tingling scraping from somewhere underneath Scaly as his scribing appendages recorded the information on a writing slate. The rest of the members of the office wailed and covered their ears.

  “Do you really have to write it down?” grimaced Lazmik. “Can’t you simply remember the mission, or get yourself a K-Pad like everybody else?”

  “No,” said Scaly firmly. “You know the adage; ‘I hear, I remember ten percent, I see, I remember thirty percent, I write, I annoy one hundred percent’.”

  “So, write on a K-Pad then!” Lazmik pressed the point. It went through his trousers and made him jump.

  “And what happens if I can’t get within range of a charging outlet?”

  “The power packs are guaranteed to last for three months… unless you play ‘Hyperwars’ on them of course.”

  “Of course,” agreed Scaly, looking slightly guilty, “but my slate never runs out of power.”

  “Gentlemen,” interrupted Foilside, as Lazmik’s foot hovered in the air, about to stamp on the quadrillipod’s head. “Can we move the battalion on, please? The briefing period is running short.”

  “Do continue, Chief,” said Scaly. “We are all ears.”

  “I expect you are.” Foilside grunted, wondering about arthropod anatomy. He brought up a hologram of Two-Dan. “On the island you will find this man.” Tay shuddered and became very interested in her nails. Foilside continued. “I want you to read him his rights and then terminate him, okay? Scaly, you can use your forcipules to immobilise him and take him somewhere quiet. He seems to be quite popular where he is, so we don’t want to ‘shoot the puppy’ for us by advertising his execution.”