by Tim Waggoner
Beads of nervous sweat clung to Charles’s brow, but his voice was steady as he answered in an English accent. “I would not have brought him all this way to see you, if I did not, Ms Poppy.”
“Hmm. Okay, gentlemen. I have questions. Do you understand that in the Golden Circle, my authority is never to be questioned?”
They nodded again.
“And do you understand the importance of following orders?”
Again, they nodded.
“And… the value of loyalty? Is that something you understand too?”
One last pair of nods.
She looked at the men for a long moment, then said, “Easy to nod, isn’t it?”
Charles and Angel exchanged uncertain looks. Then, evidently unable to decide on a different reply, they simply nodded one more time. Poppy considered herself an extremely patient person, but the needle on her patience tank was beginning to dip dangerously close to E, and when she next spoke, her voice had a hint of steel in it.
“Unfortunately, I don’t like easy. I like proof.”
She turned away from the men and flipped the switch that turned on the mincer. The machine came to life instantly, blades whirring loudly. She turned back around in time to see Charles and Angel exchange concerned glances, but neither man spoke.
Poppy looked at Charles’s friend. “You. What’s your name?”
“Angel, ma’am.”
“Okay, Angel. Listen carefully: your old pal Charles here has screwed up. That’s all I’m gonna say, because that’s all you need to know.” She paused, then added, her voice cold as ice, “Put him in the mincer, please.”
Charles hadn’t really screwed up—not as far as Poppy knew, anyway. Although given how hard it was to find good help, the possibility was always there. But as someone who enjoyed cooking, she knew that sometimes you had to crack a few eggs—or hurl them to the ground and stomp on them repeatedly—if you wanted to make an omelet.
For an instant, neither man reacted, both too stunned by Poppy’s command. But then Poppy laughed, and Charles and Angel followed suit, although their laughter held a nervous edge. But when the laughter died away Poppy fixed Charles with a cold, level gaze. Charles realized he was in deep shit, and he jumped up from his seat and ran like hell for the diner’s entrance. Poppy sighed, then put two fingers in her mouth and blew a loud, high-pitched whistle. In a hidden corner of the diner, two kennels sprang open, and a pair of large dogs—or at least, what at first glance looked like dogs—ran toward Charles at amazing speed. The creatures bounded over tables and knocked down chairs in their rush to reach him, and Charles shrieked in terror and froze, knowing he couldn’t possibly hope to outrun these things. They were robots, constructs of metal, plastic, and programming, and while outwardly they possessed the basic shape of dogs—like oversized Dobermans—they were faster, stronger, and deadlier than any flesh-and-blood canine could be. Poppy loved her doggies, and she was especially fond of their wickedly curved steel claws and their razor-sharp steel teeth. She liked the way the light glinted off the metal as they tore someone to shreds.
The dogs made no move to attack Charles, though. The whistle Poppy had used to summon them had also been a specific command: herd, not kill. The two robots stopped in front of Charles, and then began closing in on him slowly, optical scanners glowing an eerie red, speech synthesizers producing tinny barking sounds, metallic claws clicking on the tiled floor. As they approached, Charles backed up until he was standing next to Angel once more. Charles, trembling and covered with sweat, didn’t take his gaze off the robot dogs. Now that Charles was back where Poppy wanted him, the dogs stopped advancing, but they continued keeping watch on the man, optical scanners fixed on him in case he tried to bolt again.
Poppy ignored Charles and spoke to Angel. “So, you want to join the Circle? Or follow your friend into the mincer?”
Angel didn’t hesitate. He stood, and punched Charles twice in rapid succession. Charles went limp, but he didn’t fully lose consciousness. Angel caught him before he could fall to the floor, and tossed him over his shoulder. He carried Charles behind the counter, lifted him up, and without so much as an instant of hesitation, fed him head-first into the whirring mincer.
“Oh my God!” Charles said, and then shrieked again as the mincer went to work. The machine was huge and powerful, and it reduced Charles to tiny pieces of meat quickly and efficiently. Poppy watched Angel’s face throughout the process to gauge the man’s reaction, but his expression remained stony the entire time. She nodded with approval.
When Angel was finished and Charles—with the exception of his legs protruding from the mincer—had been transformed into a substantial pile of fresh meat sitting on the mincer’s large metal tray, she placed her hand on Angel’s back, just for a few seconds. She knew that, strictly speaking, she shouldn’t touch him. The last thing she wanted to do was create a sexually threatening atmosphere in the workplace, but she believed that a literal pat on the back could go a long way to making an employee feel appreciated. And since she had no human resources department to get on her ass about it, she figured: what the hell?
“Good job!” she said, then pointed toward one of the windows. “See my salon across the way?”
Angel nodded.
“Head over there.”
Angel left, and Poppy stepped over to the robo-dogs and patted them on the head, first one, then the other. Their names were Bennie and Jet. She actually couldn’t tell them apart, but that was okay. They never seemed to mind. Maybe she could paint the first letter of their names on their sides or something. That would help, but the letters would mar their sleek futuristic design. No, she decided. They were fine the way they were, interchangeable names or not.
She went behind the counter, picked up a handful of minced Charles, and began cheerfully shaping it into a patty.
Chapter Two
Despite the mask of indifference Angel had worn for Poppy, he was shaken by killing Charles. Charles had overstated the case when he said the two of them were friends. More like casual acquaintances who’d worked for some of the same drug lords in the past. The work paid well, it was easy enough, and it was far less hazardous than most people would’ve believed, especially when you were one among a cadre of henchmen and guards. Most of the time, all you had to do was stand around holding a gun and scowling, and that—plus the presence of so many others who were doing the same—was enough to deter most people from trying to start trouble. And on those occasions when trouble did come, a few well-placed bullets usually took care of the situation.
But just as Poppy had said, during V-Day most of the drug lords and their employees had slaughtered each other, not just in Cambodia, but all around the world. Angel had been lucky. When Valentine triggered his aggression-causing signal, Angel had been nursing a truly epic hangover from the night before, and he’d remained in bed, head pounding, room spinning, blissfully unaware of the chaos taking place across the Earth. When he recovered, he learned the man he worked for was dead, which meant he no longer had a job. He looked for another, but all the drug lords were dead—all, that is, except for Poppy Adams. At first Angel had considered trying another line of work, but he knew he was kidding himself. Working as hired muscle was all he knew, and he was good at it. He didn’t want another job. And so when he’d learned that his good “buddy” Charles was working for Poppy, he managed to convince him to introduce Angel to his employer.
That didn’t work out so good for you. Did it, amigo?
So now he had a job. That was good. But it appeared his new employer was a crazy woman who didn’t mind sacrificing one of her workers during the course of a job interview. That wasn’t so good. He’d worked for sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, sadists—people who were, not to put too fine a point on it, bad to the fucking bone. But Poppy was unpredictable. Volatile. And, from what he had seen so far, absolutely ruthless and merciless. But the job came with decent benefits—both health and dental—so Angel figured he could put up wi
th the rest of it.
One thing that was going to take him some time to get used to was Poppy’s compound. That it was located so far away from even the merest hint of civilization was no surprise. You could hardly conduct her sort of business in a corner shop somewhere. But her architectural tastes were… well, eclectic was a kind way to put it. Batshit crazy was more accurate. She had constructed it using ancient ruins as a base, but the main gate was a large metal wall with the word POPPYLAND emblazoned at the top in cursive neon letters. And behind that gate was a bizarre collection of buildings that were miniaturized versions of the world’s most famous structures and tourist attractions: the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Great Wall of China, Mount Rushmore, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House, Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Seattle’s Space Needle, the Shanghai Tower, Disney World’s Cinderella Castle, and more. Angel had never been to Las Vegas, but he had seen pictures and video, and he knew that the casinos were lavish, overdone replicas of real-world places built on a smaller scale. That’s what Poppyland reminded him of: the Vegas Strip somehow stolen from its home in America and plonked down here in the middle of the jungle.
But that wasn’t all. Poppyland was filled with amusements, too. Miniature golf courses, ice cream parlors, ferris wheels, theaters showing the latest films in IMAX 3-D, water parks with wave pools and twisting-turning slippery slides… And as if all that wasn’t strange enough, aside from Poppy’s guards—none of whom partook in the amusements around them—Poppyland was absolutely empty. There were no people at all. It was as if Poppy had built all of this for herself, as if—stuck here in the jungle—she had tried to bring the world, or at least some of the most fun parts of it, to her. It was kind of sad, really, when you thought about it. Poppyland was, in a way, a reflection of a highly unstable mind. But the woman must have a shit-ton of money to have been able to construct such an elaborate patchwork kingdom, and as long as she paid regularly, Angel didn’t care how sane she was.
He had no idea why Poppy wanted him to go to the salon. Maybe new employees got a standard haircut or something, and maybe that was where he would be issued a uniform and weaponry as well. “Salon” might simply be a nickname that Poppy had given to her armory. Then again, it might not. Whichever the case, he was about to find out.
It certainly looked like a salon from the outside, a modern one, all chrome and glass. The sort of place rich women went when they wanted to spend far too much money trying to enhance what nature gave them, conceal it, or both. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
What confronted him was as much hi-tech lab as beauty salon. There were chairs for sitting in while your hair was being worked on, but they looked more like the seats you might find on a spaceship, made of golden plastic, with coils of wires protruding from the back and a series of buttons and dials on the arms. There were sinks for having your hair washed, made from highly polished chrome with black hoses attached to tanks that looked like they’d been designed to dispense rocket fuel instead of soap and water. The massage tables—at least, that’s what Angel assumed they were—looked like cryosleep chambers: clear plastic lids covering white tables on top of rectangular consoles with computer screens on the sides. Mirrored walls lined the interior of the salon, and large glowing globes hung from the ceiling on thin white rods, providing the finishing touches to the salon’s futuristic ambiance.
But odd as all this was, there were two things odder still. The first was a robot designed to resemble a human female standing next to one of the salon chairs. Her pink-and-white metal body had been cast in an exaggerated parody of an old-fashioned feminine ideal—golden hair, large breasts, wasp-thin waist, curving hips. But what was most disturbing about this, this… beautybot was her face. Her features were immobile, white as bone, and her eyes were an inhuman silver. But as weird as the robot was, the large machine on the other side of the salon chair was even stranger. One of the bosses Angel had worked for previously had been hopelessly addicted to chocolate. He never touched the drugs he produced and sold, but he couldn’t keep his hands off any kind of chocolate. Cheap mass-produced bars sold in grocery stores or luxurious hand-made chocolates—a dozen of which cost more than most cars—he didn’t care. If it was chocolate, he devoured it and wanted more. This man had a giant chocolate fountain installed in his home: a metal tower and basin from which liquid chocolate perpetually flowed. The damn thing was so large that the man could actually take a bath in it if he wanted, and Angel had seen him do so on more than one occasion. The machine he was now looking at resembled that fountain in many ways, only instead of chocolate, molten gold flowed through it.
The sight of so much gold stunned Angel, and it caused him to reconsider his estimate of Poppy’s wealth. She wasn’t just rich; she was Rich. As. Fuck. Hell, she was probably worth more than most countries, and if he’d had any doubts about working for the woman, they vanished when he saw that gold. There was money to be made in this place, that was for damn sure, and he intended to get his share of it.
The beautybot had been silent up to this point, but now her head swiveled toward him, and a woman’s voice—high-pitched, chipper, and full of energy—issued from a small round speaker embedded in the base of her throat.
“Appointment confirmed. Welcome. Please take shirt off.”
Angel did so, folded it, and placed it on the counter behind Beautybot. The robot gestured to the chair, her metal hand moving with a graceful precision that only a highly sophisticated machine could achieve. Angel didn’t know what he was supposed to do here exactly, but the message was clear: sit down and let’s get to work. He walked to the chair and sat, unable to take his gaze off the flowing gold. Once he was in the chair, a headrest rose up to meet the back of his head, and a footrest deployed beneath his feet. Now the chair looked less like something that belonged in a salon and more like something that should’ve been in a doctor’s surgery. As this realization hit him, metal bands snapped into place around his wrists and ankles, trapping him in place. Out of reflex, he struggled against the bands, but they were too strong and didn’t give so much as a millimeter.
“My apologies,” Beautybot said in her too-happy voice. “Everything will go much more smoothly if you remain still.”
And then, before Angel could ask what was going to happen to him, she went to work. Moving with blinding speed, she inserted a metal brace into his mouth to force his jaws apart, and then the tips of her fingers retracted and were replaced with ten metal files.
Angel shook his head and tried to shout “No!” but it came out as “O! O!”
Beautybot jammed her fingers into his mouth and began filing his teeth down—without anesthetic. Angel cried out in pain, but the robot moved so fast that the procedure was over almost as soon as it began. The finger files retracted, and her regular fingertips returned, except for her right index finger. A thin plastic tube now protruded from it. Beautybot removed the metal brace from his mouth with her left hand, then stuck the tube finger between his lips.
“Rinse,” she ordered, and water flowed from her finger tube into Angel’s mouth.
Angel did as she said. Every one of his teeth throbbed like hell, and it almost felt as if she’d extracted them. He ran his tongue across his teeth as he rinsed to reassure himself they were still there. They were, but they had all been flattened.
Now I can’t be identified from dental records, he thought.
She retracted the water tube, and it disappeared into her finger. She then cupped her hands and held them in front of his mouth.
“Spit,” she said, and he did so. Pinprick-sized holes opened in her metal palms, and the water was quickly drained into them.
Angel hoped he was finished, but the metal bands holding him to the chair didn’t release. Beautybot turned to the counter behind her, picked up a small bowl of liquid, moved over to where his left hand was bound against the chair arm, and slipped the tips of his
fingers into the liquid. He screamed as flesh began to dissolve, and when he caught a whiff of the liquid’s acrid tang, he understood what was happening. It’s acid. She’s removing my fingerprints.
The process didn’t take long, only several moments, although it seemed like hours to Angel. When Beautybot removed his fingers from the acid, he let out a shuddering gasp of relief. But then she moved to the other side of the chair and repeated the process with his right hand, and he screamed once more.
Later, he would think that he must’ve blacked out for a few seconds at that point, because he had no memory of Beautybot taking his right-hand fingers from the acid. The next thing he was aware of was Beautybot looking down at him. Her facial features were incapable of expression, but when she spoke her tone was apologetic.
“I am told that this hurts. I am sorry.”
Angel almost laughed. Like everything she’d done to him since he’d walked into this place had been painless? But then she reached toward the fountain of gold and removed a pen-like object hanging from a clip on its side. A metal tube stretched from the end of the pen to the machine, and it reminded Angel of something, but he couldn’t quite… and then it came to him: a tattoo needle.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t—”
Beautybot touched the needle to his chest and began tattooing a circle of molten gold there. Angel had thought he’d screamed before, but when he heard the throat-shredding sound that burst forth from his mouth then, he realized that he hadn’t known shit.
* * *
Angel returned to the diner, unsteady on his feet and lightheaded, but determined not to appear weak in front of Poppy. He had a feeling that displaying weakness before this woman would be a seriously bad career move, and the sight of Charles’s legs jutting upward from the mincer only reinforced that feeling.
While he’d been in the salon, Poppy had been busy working at the fry table behind the counter, and the air was filled with the greasy smell of cooked meat. She turned around to greet him with a broad smile as he approached, and she set a plate holding a freshly made and perfectly garnished burger down on the counter.
