Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  He wished he could bury the guy so he wouldn't have to look at what he'd done. Casper stared at the body, and the more he stared the more sick he felt. Otis appeared beside him, grabbed the front of Casper's vest and pulled him down the corridor. “Man, I know you know Tripper Rule Number One,” Otis said when they were a few yards away. “If something is freaking your shit then Don't Stare At It.”

  When Bonnie led them to the middle of the Zig and the wall of the Central Shaft, she pointed at the wall and said, “Here.” Otis removed the wall panel, and they stood before a curtain of hanging vines that glowed and pulsed with light. The vines were all about two inches wide and covered with a smooth, matte-finish plastic skin that felt slightly obscene to the touch. Their pulses were rhythmic, but the rhythm kept changing every few seconds, and the vines were all pulsing differently, like luminous veins pumped by a thousand different hearts.

  Otis withdrew a homemade monofillament cutting tool. It looked like a classic slingshot made from the Y shape of a sapling, but the stem was stuffed with batteries and far longer than the two pieces that formed the V at the business end where it held a single, almost invisible thread of monofillament. Otis flipped a switch, and the thread that stretched across the V electrified and super-heated to the point where it burned the air, ionizing just enough gas to sheathe the thread in plasma. Otis worked fast because he was pretty sure he had enough juice in the battery pack for thirty seconds of cutting, but there were plenty of vines to cut through. The super-heated monofillament sliced through them easily. There was almost no resistance, and the cut vines darkened and fell straight down. The batteries in the monofillament cutting tool held out, and Otis managed to sever enough vines to cut a sizable hole through them to the Ziggurat's Central Shaft.

  Inside, it was nearly fifteen yards wide and lined on all sides with the glowing, pulsing vines. At the top of the hole Otis made the light pulses continued to travel down from above and burst out where the vines had been cut. Tiny strobing flashes bled from each cut vine and they made motion in front of the hole appear to jerk and jump like a cheap projection or video without enough frames.

  Otis stepped back to let Carlos inspect the hole and the shaft. It was lit with only the bluish pulsing light from the vines lining its sides and it went down, apparently forever, since nobody could see the bottom. Otis fished in his bag of tricks and started pulling out nylon webbing and what Casper thought looked like double-wheeled pulleys with a battery pack and a side-mounted motor on each wheel. Otis squatted on the ground over the pulleys, and his eyes pointed up and to the right as he did mental arithmetic. There were seven pulleys and thirteen people. “Yeah,” he said mostly to himself, “Maybe not.”

  “We only brought seven of those,” Carlos noted, “how strong are they?”

  “Strong enough to double-up,” Otis ventured. “Rated for five hundred pounds.”

  “Yeah, but what about the cables?”

  “I'm more worried about the weight on this shit holding 'em.” Otis withdrew an ultralight rig that unfolded from a foot-and-a-half long to resemble a mini-construction crane. “This rig came out of an auto shop that does electric cars, the little ones. I'd guess eighteen hundred pounds max. That's okay for fourteen people if they're all under one-thirty. It's kinda risky, and it's a long way down, ya know?” He bolted the crane's base and support arms into the floor and walls outside the access hatch in twelve spots with steel bolts he fired into place with a pistol-shaped driver gun using modded rifle-cartridges. He extended it out over the shaft and clipped thin, woven cables to it that he extended from the seven pulleys on the floor. Otis knew his stuff, but Casper wished he had a thick rope instead of this ultralight climbing gear. Otis saw Casper's worried face and said, “Trust me, man, it's cool. I've used this shit before. Yer' gonna' love it.”

  “Okay,” Carlos said to Alvin, “Your personal protection detail just shrank. We've got gear for two of 'em. The rest are gonna have to stay here or take the elevator.”

  “Why can't we all take the elevator?” Casper asked.

  “It won't open to the Sanctum for anybody except Delvaux.” Bonnie explained, “But we can take the Central Shaft down to the Sanctum and open the elevator doors from the inside.”

  “Where's the elevator?” Caine asked.

  “Hold on,” Bonnie said, “wait one sec.” Bonnie disappeared around the corner and returned fifty seconds later with a wafer thin, slightly blood-smeared, pocket-sized, personal data-display. She'd taken it off a dead G.S.A. administrator whose name, 'Jack Haan', blinked at the top of the screen, over the words, 'Authorized Access'. There was no other way around its biometric recognition system so there was a sticky, rust-red thumb print back lit in the middle of the screen where she'd pressed Jack Haan's thumb to activate the data pad.

  She tapped the screen a few times and brought up a map of the Zig and a path to the Sanctum. “This is where you're going,” She said, handing it to Caine. She wiped the blood on her fingers off on the hips of her jeans. “Oh, yeah,” Bonnie added, handing him something a couple of inches long and wrapped in blue cloth torn from a G.S.A. uniform. “You might need this to activate the elevator.” Caine smiled, pocketed Jack Haan's wrapped thumb, and wiped some of the blood off the device with his golden robes. Caine tapped the display a few times quickly with his finger. His sleeve fell back, exposing the crane scar on his forearm as he held up the dead man's data-display face forward and showed Caine, Caine, and Caine a hand-held, three-dimensional, bare-breasted Hi-5.

  “Look,” Caine said, “I found Jack's porn!”

  -55-

  Hi-5 wasn't having this shit. “Nobody bumps Hi-5 from a gig,” she said, “and no muthafuckin' Goddie knocks Hi-5 off the guest list. That's for goddie-damn sure.” She punctuated her monologue with the roar of internal combustion. Her driver, now camerawoman, wore a 360 degree holo imaging rig like a studded band around her head and carried a messenger bag full of hand held units with three lenses rather than the standard two. The way Hi-5 was driving made her want her chauffeur job back.

  Catherine Whitman was smoking and drinking, splayed across the back seat. Hi-5 eyed her in the rear view mirror and said, “You never used to be this quiet, bitch.” Catherine shrugged and pulled on her bottle of scotch.

  They rode in Hi-5's Camaro, and it was bitchin' like Hi-5. The number 67 was emblazoned on both doors in gold-trimmed black. Old-school gasoline cost so much that the antique muscle car was a status symbol simply because only the mega-rich could afford to fuel it. Only a PornoPop megastar and highly paid mercenary could afford to drive it the way Hi-5 did now. She was burning real, unadulterated, high-octane gasoline at a fantastic and thrilling rate. She weaved through city traffic, waving out the window to fans who knew the car from her chart-busting, pay-per-view orgy-event sequel to '5 tha' Hard Way', filmed live on the freeway and entitled '5 tha' Hi-Way'.

  The Camaro was powerful and seductive, and it growled with consumption, waste, and luxurious ambivalence just like Hi-5. She pushed it in the manner that it was designed to be driven – flexing its muscle. Her Hi-ness tore up a main Baccha Bay City artery like it was a parking lot full of traffic cones.

  In a flash of self-preservation-motivated genius, Coco, Hi-5's driver turned terrified passenger, managed to get Hi-5 out from behind the Camaro's wheel and get her old job back before they were all killed by suggesting that, “Perhaps, just maybe, the holographic imagers might appreciate just a touch more eyeliner.” That got Hi-5's attention. “It would be a shame,” Coco continued, “to have to mar the documentary-style verity of the footage with too much post-production touch-up.” She sealed her airtight argument with, “We'll never be able to shoot it twice.”

  -56-

  Casper thought two minutes was a very long time to fall. Even lowered in his harness by the Hammond auto-descender at fifteen feet per second, the eighteen hundred feet from the top of the Zig's first blocky step to the bottom of the Central Shaft, seemed interminable. The shaft stretch
ed twenty-four hundred feet, from the very top of the Zig's highest step all the way down to its lowest sub-level. Casper was surrounded on all sides by the innumerable, glowing, pulsating, two-inch thick vines. He thought they looked like noodles – two inch thick, luminous, rice noodles. He stuck out his leg and kicked one as he fell, and the tiny push he gave it made it sway, bumping other vines that bumped other vines until the waving, glowing, pulsing walls became disorienting, and he wished he hadn't touched anything.

  He knew they were going to something called the Sanctum. Casper had no idea what that was, but just looking around at the bajillion noodles, all glowing and pulsing like arteries, lining every wall three feet deep, he was sure that the shaft led to Something Important.

  Everything was pulsing with the bluish-white glow from inside the noodles, and traveling at fifteen feet per second, it looked like luminous water rippling in streams flowing up the walls. The light pulses were actually modulated data traveling mostly downwards, but Casper couldn't really tell, and he preferred to think that whatever was glowing inside the two inch thick rice noodles traveled upwards. Years ago he'd sat next to Otis in front of a vid screen in a vapor bar, too stoned to move, and watched a documentary about pyramids. They weren't as blocky as the Zig but they had shafts too. They were tiny, narrow shafts, but shafts, nonetheless. The narrator's voice had told him that the shafts pointed at the sky and to certain spots in the sky for a reason. They were like escape shafts for souls – escaping mummy souls. That's what these lights are like, he thought. They're like escaping souls, mummy souls all flying up the shaft, inside the noodles. They were flying off, he was sure, to somewhere, somewhere in the sky. Escaping mummy souls, baby. Yeah.

  Casper saw something below him coming up fast. It looked like a twisted pile of noodles like the ones lining the shaft, but without the pulsing light inside. He remembered that the noodles Otis had cut to make their entry hole into the shaft had fallen, and here they were, coming up at him at fifteen feet per second. The bottom. They didn't look like a good thing to land in, and Casper wished he'd found the stop button on the Hammond auto-descender before he needed to stop so badly. He looked at the descender in front of him. It had a Big Red Button on the side that was larger than all the rest, and it was marked 'EMERGENCY STOP' in glowing AniLux letters. Shit, that was easy, he thought. The next thing he thought was, Famous Last Words.

  The Hammond auto-descender's emergency stop button demonstrated for Casper exactly why the unread user manual declared that it was only meant for use in emergencies and why the user agreement absolved the Hammond Company of any liability should the user hit the Big Red Button while not properly balanced. The violent abruptness with which it arrested the descent of the improperly balanced, backwards leaning Casper flipped him upside down. He ended up staring at the Hammond between his legs, inverted, unable to right himself, and in a great deal of pain where the twin nylon straps that attached his personal harness to the Hammond had been swung, taut and unforgiving, into his nuts. He groaned and stared up at the large red button on the auto-descender that no longer displayed the words, 'EMERGENCY STOP', but now blinked Hammond's world famous slogan, 'Hang In There', which took a second longer to read, hanging upside down with your nuts mashed.

  Casper hung there, unable to right himself while he stared at the blinking slogan and considered the email he would send to the Hammond Company of Spokane, Washington, thanking them for the efficiency of their emergency stop feature that had prevented a nasty impact with the bottom of the shaft, but had, in the process, significantly impacted both his nuts and his dignity.

  Otis appeared from above, slowed gently next to Casper, grabbed his feet on the way past, and righted him. Casper was grateful, but still had a pair of aching nuts. Otis hung next to Casper like a spider, spinning slowly and grinning. Casper saw Carlos slow to a controlled stop behind and above Otis.

  Casper asked, “Otis... dude. Why the frickity-fuck did you let me go first?”

  “Why the frickity-fuck do you think?” Otis said, laughing unashamedly. “Because everybody does what you did their first time, and when it happens below you, then it's a lot easier to see it and laugh your ass off.” Carlos hung and spun like a spider behind Otis and he was laughing too. Otis decided to change the subject. He asked, “Casper, man, did you get this big, weird trip about mummy souls on the way down like I did?”

  “Dude, yeah, I got that too,” was all Casper could manage to say before he was distracted by Caine's fluttering golden robe. Caine passed them, clearly unconscious and hanging forward in his harness. The Hammond auto-descender sensed the mass of tangled, darkened, severed rice noodle vines and its auto-brake kicked-in in time to slow Caine to a stop, slumped forward, bobbing inches above the spaghetti pile. He was out cold. The fluttering sound started again from above, and Casper saw Donnie Caine descending rapidly in the same unconscious state but with his weight back in the harness and his arms hanging limp. He passed Casper, Otis, and Carlos, and he was almost at the same level as the preceding Caine when the Hammond's sensor, confused until that moment by the cut vines piled at the bottom of the shaft, finally registered the noodle-like malformation beneath it as The Ground. Without time for gentle auto-braking, the Hammond Auto-Descender engaged the full emergency stop feature, with which Casper had recently become familiar. The initial jerk of emergency deceleration brought him to wide-eyed consciousness, just in time to flip backwards, upside down and take a pair of taut harness straps across the yabos, exclaiming, “Ow! My junk...” A second later he added, “Grasshopper...” Casper and Otis both got to laugh at Donnie's pain together, and Casper's own nuts suddenly hurt less.

  Carlos wasn't laughing. He was looking up because Alvin had begun his descent right after Carlos and before either Caine. Carlos didn't see Alvin fluttering down in an orange sheet. Otis suddenly remembered the order in which they were supposed to drop, and he was looking up too, but he wasn't laughing anymore. Casper looked up and he realized the shaft looked clearer than it should. Alvin and Bonnie were nowhere to be seen. Where the fuck are they? All Casper could see above him was a bajillion luminous, pulsing, rice noodles lining the sides of the shaft. Almost a half-mile away, there was a tiny point of light, but in between him and that light there were supposed to be two people. Casper thought, Where the fuck are they? Where the fuck is Bonnie?

  As he stared up the shaft's length, Casper wasn't just worried. He had an awful, hollow feeling in his gut, like he'd been ditched.

  -57-

  The Zig's top Level, Delvaux's level, was a fortress within a fortress, and Delvaux and his bodyguards were trapped there. The corridors and stairwells all had sliding steel blast doors, controlled from within, and controlled by only Delvaux. They weren't integrated into the main systems, and Delvaux was glad because he was quite sure that MUNI 5-7 would have opened the doors for the militants below if it could. He'd watched them on the camera feeds until MUNI 5-7 had taken those away and left him blind to everything but what happened outside the gold doors of his personal elevator.

  Delvaux's elevator was another compartmentalized system, and MUNI 5-7 couldn't control it. There were doors on every floor, and there were cameras that only he controlled outside every set of doors. As Delvaux watched, one camera after another showed him the same sequence of unfortunate events. First, his own people ran forward, then less of them fell back, followed by explosions and then advancing groups of Goddie militants.

  Then he saw something completely different. He saw Bonnie Levi-Mei standing in front of his gold elevator doors on the bottom floor of the second level. She was carrying a four-foot-tall prisoner.

  Delvaux needed what she had.

  The battle was going badly, but if he had the Buddha, then that could change everything. If he had the one thing MUNI 5-7 wanted, then maybe he could control his rogue AI, get it to turn on the invaders instead of opening every door in their path. The AI had even unlocked the armories for the militants and locked them when his own troops
needed ammunition.

  Delvaux didn't trust Bonnie Levi-Mei, but he had no choice. He withdrew the steel blast plates from across the elevator shaft and sent the elevator down on its magnetic rails. He watched her enter, closed the doors, and trapped her and the Buddha inside the elevator. He stared at them while he walked around their projections in the dim of his office and decided what the safest way to handle her would be.

  -58-

  Bonnie was locked in an elevator.

  She wondered why the fuck they weren't moving. She wasn't even sure if it was Delvaux up there on the top level. For all she knew, Padre Pedro had his feet up on Delvaux's dining table while he ate lunch over the Director's dead body and stared at the camera feed of her in the elevator. Way to choose the loosing side, she thought. Then she reminded herself, Loyalty is the choice I made, not Self-Interest. That's for mercs. Bonnie did her best to ignore the voice in her head that mocked her and said, 'Loyal Bonnie Levi-Mei will bring Delvaux, her commanding officer, his prize and complete her mission.' She stared at the unconscious Buddha, wrapped in his stupid orange bedsheet, blaming him for all the doubts she now felt. She wished she could blame him for being stuck in Delvaux's elevator, too.