Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  [←48]

  While ships are traditionally referred to with the feminine pronoun, Black Boonie had always been and would always be a man.

  [←49]

  The Synondala virus was nicknamed for Princess, the Friesian Typhoid Annie who spread the synthetic disease to every greater bovine species on the planet and completely eradicated them within a two-year period, radically shifting the planetary food chain and deleting the human beef and cow-leather industries. The Princess had such a severe impact on the biosphere that it not only shattered human fortitude and health, but triggered changes in the already-self-destructing climate that would continue occurring for a hundred years.

  [←50]

  Slang term for the atmospherically-controlled and quasi-sterile storage facility for an assortment of narcotics that, while illegal, were widely-used and generally accepted as a foible of the rich and powerful: specifically snuff variants, Ra, and the GM wonder-eggs that gave the hatchery its nickname. This, of course, was despite the fact that ‘weggs’ did not under any circumstances actually hatch, except according to the evidence of the most hallucinogenically-corrupted senses.

  [←51]

  A series of low, terraced structures built upon the submerged Point Walter sandbar to commemorate the lives tragically lost in the so-called Battle of Bicton, when fighting between residents and the government had broken out during the housing crisis that had accompanied the rising water levels.

  [←52]

  Vitamin-enriched and genetically-modified vegetable matter mixed with ground crickets. One of the few insect-based foods Aunt Agñasta would agree to eat, and as optimally placed on the quality-to-price scales as possible while remaining reasonably humble. The family naturally didn’t go hungry, but they did tend to eschew the more classic excesses and delicacies that came with wealth. Aunt Agñasta, however, insisted on a certain limit to the number of legs her food had generally started with.

  [←53]

  Agñasta tended to get mildly exasperated by what she sometimes called his “butler act”, and sometimes called his “unabashed larpery”, whatever that meant. Although she was by all reasonable measures a modern and no-nonsense woman, she could occasionally be irritated back into the slang of her childhood.

  [←54]

  Also called greensleep gas, the nerve agent was designed by the New Russian Union for use in police actions and quickly became a go-to weapon for all civilian insurgencies. It encouraged lethargy and a deep feeling of admiration and trust, and then made your nose and gums bleed for a couple of hours. This resulted in grotesque images of victims – young children in particular – horrifying the world for a month or so. Then governments went on using the gas anyway, finding it easier to target the images instead.

  [←55]

  The Melbourne-Adelaide Corridor Development was a string of cities, experimental urban complexes and self-sustaining market-towns forming a single sprawling seven-hundred-kilometre megalopolis along Australia’s southeast coast. Hopefuls called it Adelbourne and thought it might one day serve as a capital once Canberra and Sydney finally failed and Australia was folded into the ASEAN; realists called it MacD’s, or Little Mac, and compared it unfavourably to a seven-hundred-kilometre strip of American fast food restaurants.

  [←56]

  Ariel’s chief agent, millionaire socialite and celebrity purely by association. It was said, and barely even in jest, that Jérôme had a shrine to Ariel in his sumptuous Tokyo office, to which he burned incense and gave thanks daily. Of course, it wouldn’t be the only shrine ever dedicated to Ariel – indeed, if anyone on Earth was ready to step into the position of high-ranking theological icon and First Disciple of God, it was Ariel.

  [←57]

  The self-defence unit could be disguised as a bulky handbag and was available for purchase by regular citizens, provided they passed a training course and upheld the licence with regular refresher courses. It lacked the specialised military-grade punch of the prototype, however – Roon was mildly disgruntled that she’d never had to use it, but it certainly messed up the autonomous dummies on the training range.

  [←58]

  The great Synfoss marketing gurus of old had decided that their corporate logo should contain the Earth, and a pair of stylised cradling hands, and a rich, bountiful droplet of Synfoss synthetic oil. When the result had wound up looking like a cartoon archvillain squeezing the world until it bled, the gurus had for some unfathomable reason said, “brilliant, go with it.” And the logo had not changed since. It was something of a helpless little dark joke at this point.

  [←59]

  Although Harlon, having met rather a lot of people in his twenty-nine years, was forced to qualify the concept of their being perfectly innocent with a few disclaimers. Such as the very strong likelihood that well over 50% of them had been selfish, wilfully ignorant, inconsiderate or all of the above; almost 25% of them had been simply titanic cunts; and about 1% of them had been actual violent criminals, either sentenced or unsentenced.

  [←60]

  An interactive comic character beloved by Roon as a child, Biff was a much-maligned but reformed anthropomorphic drop bear† who fixed broken things and solved crimes. The most unbelievable part of the series was how frequently those two pastimes overlapped.

  † A deadly Australian marsupial, similar to the koala but carnivorous. And, despite what Australians liked to insist, mythical. At least since its extinction in the late Twenty-First Century.

  [←61]

  The Vandemar sisters went to a restaurant with Jarvis, Agñasta and Gabriel to allay the Archangel’s suspicions. It most likely didn’t work – in twenty-two centuries the gnarled old being had probably seen everything – but Ariel had to admit he put on a good ‘let’s see where this is heading’ face.

  [←62]

  It was, in Roon’s opinion, open to debate as to whether Great-Grandpappy Berkenshaw had doomed the Earth to further centuries of filthy expenditure, or had in fact saved it from complete annihilation. Admittedly, the former wasn’t really debatable – Earth had definitely been doomed to centuries of contamination – but what the human race might have done with unlimited energy, at the stage of their development in which Gorman Lundell had lived, is simply not worth thinking about. Even calling it a stage of ‘development’ was a stretch, since it was a word which by definition implied a process of improvement.

  Table of Contents

  Notes