Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  The seven golden robes and one orange bedsheet lifted gently, from two sides, with one hand each. The plate was inches thick, and they lifted it effortlessly, holding it for a moment, two feet in the air in front of them. It was more a levitation than an act of athletic prowess, as if the seventeen-hundred-pound plate no longer possessed weight as a property of its being. Casper didn't understand, but it was beautiful, and he wondered if he'd just been fooled all along by some illusion of weight, and the plate hadn't really weighed anything at all.

  Casper couldn't keep the metal plate in focus. It seemed to be vibrating, waving in his vision ever so slightly, and the dull reflections off its unpainted, leaden surface turned soft. Its edges appeared blurry. In one smooth, unified motion, they tossed the plate to the side, and in defiance of all that Casper Knew, he swore it floated for a moment before crashing, clanging, and bouncing to the metal floor with a deafening cacophony of hostile, sharp, and painful noise.

  Bonnie took her arm off Casper's shoulder, and clapped with delight using one hand, grinning. Carlos and Otis stood with mouths agape. Hi-5 was too stunned to do anything but stare, and Catherine looked almost sad. It was incomprehensible and undeniable. Casper said the only word he had for things like this, “Awesome!”

  The Eight rose, bowed to the center, and withdrew, leaving a six by four-foot hole in the floor, and a seventeen hundred pound metal plate cast to the side of the hole like a sheet of cardboard.

  The area below was the space between levels, and it was a shallow yard deep. A shiny, metal, ovoid capsule, less than a yard long and two feet in diameter at its maximum width sat in the hole like a huge horse pill made from gleaming metal. A single shielded metal cable ran from it off into the darkness under the floor. MUNI 5-Alvin said, “Ten minutes and thirty-four seconds remaining.”

  “Why do they call it a Big Baby Bomb?” Casper asked.

  Otis told him, “'Cause if you hurt its feelings, it can just go off, man. Just kidding. It only goes off if you ask dumb questions.”

  It was a neat and contained, polished capsule without any exposed elements of any sort, and Carlos admired the packaging, but he had no idea how to defuse it. He assumed MUNI 5-7 must know how and asked, “Okay, what now? How do we defuse it?”

  “There is no way to access the primary trigger mechanism and defuse the Big Baby device in the time remaining,” MUNI 5-7 said with Alvin's mouth. Carlos gagged.

  He coughed, forced calm into his voice, and asked, “Well, what the fuck are we going to do with it?” MUNI 5-7 said nothing. Carlos gave up his pretensions of calm and yelled in frustration, “What are we supposed to do with it?”

  “I'm thinking,” was MUNI 5-7's response. Otis had heard that phrase recently, and he wished he wasn't too shit-scared to laugh.

  Ten seconds later, MUNI 5-7 said, “The device must be removed from the reactor area prior to detonation or the resulting nuclear core materials sucked up into the mushroom cloud will become radioactive fallout widespread and powerful enough to kill a third of the city.”

  “Shit. Where? Where the frickity-fuck do you want it?” Carlos was almost screaming. It was Alvin's voice that spoke, Carlos was quite sure, when he heard the words that made him laugh with an appreciation for absurdity that he'd never known until that moment.

  Alvin said, “We're taking it with us.”

  Carlos stopped asking questions, and he, Otis, Caine, and Caine began to lift the three hundred pound pill from the space beneath the floor. The shielded wire that connected to it was attached like an inch-thick umbilical cord. Catherine knelt and examined the fitting, and when she saw that it was something plugged in rather that actually extending into the silver ovoid, she didn't bother to ask anybody what to do. She gripped it where it met the curved surface of the bomb casing, and twisted it in the direction of the arrows engraved in the metal that curved around the junction in a counter-clockwise direction. She hoped that this was a military constructed device, not the work of a mad, booby-trap-loving bomber, who'd engraved the arrows just to trick her. She gripped with white knuckles and twisted until the fitting rotated a quarter turn and abruptly stopped. Then, it came off in her hands before she'd had a chance to withdraw it gently with the care most people quite sensibly display around a Big Baby device. She stared at it in a millisecond of horror as it came free, but that feeling changed to relief as she realized they were all still there.

  “Nine minutes and seventeen seconds remaining,” MUNI 5-7 warned, as Carlos and Otis laid the metal horse pill on the rolling service table. It creaked, straining under the weight. Alvin stepped forward. He began to examine the exposed port where Catherine had removed the umbilical cable. MUNI 5-7's voice said, “This data port will allow use of the neural-interface unit with only minor modification. Please connect me to the Big Baby Bomb via this data port.”

  “What? No,” Carlos protested, “we've barely got enough time to get out of here with this thing as it is.”

  “That, is incorrect,” MUNI 5-7 stated. Carlos looked confused.

  “Which part? I mean, do we have plenty of time, or we won't make it?” Carlos knew the answer, but he asked anyway, hoping he was wrong.

  “Egress of the Ziggurat with the Big Baby device will require a full ten minutes without allowances for any possible resistance from insurgent forces who may be holding the garage.”

  Otis said, “Fuck! Why don't you ever tell us this stuff?”

  Bonnie laughed and offered, “Maybe it picked up some G.S.A. Security compartmentalization habits.”

  MUNI 5-7 ignored her and said, “Hardware modifications to connect the neural-interface to the Big Baby device's data port will require less than two minutes. Please begin by stripping connector labeled A71 and splicing into E71.”

  “Fuckity, man; it never ends,” Carlos said. “Otis, gimme tools.”

  Nearly three minutes later, Carlos had stripped and crudely spliced six wires and removed four prongs from the end of the pink, shrink-wrapped bundle of data cables attached to the neuro-interface's studded metal, stretch skullcap. He'd never worked that fast before, and he hoped he'd got it right.

  After Alvin put it on, Carlos plugged the end into the Big Baby's socket and MUNI 5-7 told him, “Modification successful; all lines are properly configured for interface. Please proceed to the elevators.”

  “So, does this mean you can disarm it?” Casper asked. “Can you stop the Big Baby Bomb from detonating?”

  “I will explain en route. Please proceed to the elevators,” Alvin said as he walked in front of the service table, while Caine, Caine, and Caine held the Big Baby device in place and pushed the table along. Bonnie limped along on her good leg, supported by Casper.

  She asked, “So can he defuse it? Can he stop us from being vaporized and the city from being irradiated in, like, the next six minutes?”

  “No,” MUNI 5-7 and Alvin said, speaking without turning around, “and Yes.”

  “Well, which is it?” Carlos asked from up front, “Can you stop it or not?”

  MUNI 5-7 said, “I can delay it. The Big Baby device has its own computers used for its detonation mechanism. Defusal is impossible. The program is sequential and hardware encoded. Change in program is not possible without over-volting a programmed chip and burning it out. This will trigger one of several parallel chips and circuits to skip the timing sequence and detonate immediately. It is possible to feed into the main firing chip after the timing sequence has been bypassed and spoof the mechanism by feeding input that mimics the timer input, as if it were still active.”

  “So if you spoof the timer you can pause the detonator?” Carlos thought he got it. There's always a catch. “What's the catch?”

  “Prevention of primary detonation is only possible for an unspecified period. The computer controlling primary detonation has a primitive adaptive neural net, and every time the timer chip is imitated the probability increases that the neural net being fooled will decide that the timer data it is being fed is false
and constitutes evidence of tampering. Then it will initiate detonation through its own compartmentalized circuit.”

  “How long?” Carlos asked, “What kind of probabilities?”

  “The timer functions in discrete seconds, so after time elapses it must be spoofed every second. Every time the Big Baby's firing controller is fooled, the chances it will decide a malfunction has occurred and detonate increase by roughly 1/50th of one percent. After ten extra seconds, there will be a 1/10th percent chance of detonation. After one minute and forty seconds of extra time, there will be a 1 percent chance of detonation every second. After Sixteen minutes and forty seconds, there will be a 10 percent chance of detonation every second.”

  “So we've only got an extra five or six minutes before every second there's, like a new one in twenty chance of BOOOM?” Casper was surprised he got it but he did.

  “That is correct,” MUNI 5-7 and Alvin confirmed, adding, “Six minutes, twenty seven seconds until the timer counts down to nihil.”

  When they reached the elevators, MUNI 5-7 said, “I will begin to spoof the timer mechanism once it has run down to 1 second. Please enter the elevator and proceed to the garage.”

  -76-

  The garage was utter chaos on its Eastern side.

  Lady Chatterley's bow was wedged into the East wall, hanging over everything in it like a scarred, metal, cliff face. The area below was full of charred APCs and the bodies of maintenance techs and blue-helmets who'd been slaughtered by insurgents.

  The gold doors of Delvaux's personal elevator opened on the garage, and Casper's dislike for the Ziggurat's elevators was once again justified when the doors parted, and Casper looked out on his eleven o'clock to see Morituri pointing guns. They weren't pointing at the elevator, but at someone against the wall to the left of it. The opening elevator doors had surprised a firing squad preparing to execute a line of the very same Korean Methodist Militants in golfing outfits who'd ferried them to the Lady Chatterley.

  The Morituri were confused and distraught by what they saw in the elevator. Confused, because the first thing they saw was a four-foot-tall man wrapped in a bloody orange sheet wearing a strange wired skullcap connected to a yard long polished egg that several of them recognized as a Big Baby Bomb from documentaries they'd watched in their spare time. They were distraught because they also saw leveled sub-machine guns. Hi-5 and Catherine didn't wait for the firing squad to change targets before blazing bullets on full-auto and spraying the eight man Cleansing detail. None of the Morituri managed to get rounds off before being dropped by fire. When they fell to the ground, a single trembling figure stood revealed behind them – Padre Pedro.

  “Howdy, Padre, did 'ya miss me?” Hi-5 said, patting herself in a mock check for bullet holes. “Oh, whoops, I guess you did.”

  “Abominations!” Padre Pedro spat at them, “All of you together? Here?”

  “One minute and twelve seconds.”

  “Not for long...” Carlos said, “We're just about gone.”

  Hi-5 finally noticed the Koreans as Casper and Otis cut 'em loose. “Well, spank me. If it isn't the prudes who bumped me off the guest list?” The Koreans grabbed the Morituri's guns, finished off their would-be-executioners, and ran into the elevator.

  Hi-5 had wanted to kill Padre Pedro on the spot, but Catherine wanted to trade him for something. There wasn't time to argue, so they agreed to take him along. Padre Pedro spat and cussed while they duct taped his wrists together behind him.

  Bonnie Loopy-Mei picked out a Thumper E-S armored personnel carrier and decided she was driving. “Don't worry,” she said, “Only need one hand.” She pointed to the single control stick on the right side. Casper didn't think it was a good idea, but there wasn't time to argue. He planted the blue action derm on her neck and watched her eyes electrify before he went to the rear compartment.

  Hi-5 leaned through the hatch that led to the rear and asked, “Bitch, do I have to remind you that you've got a magnum load of mucho-psycho painkiller pumping you up higher than a monster truck tire?” Bonnie turned her head and grinned at Hi-5 with crossed eyes. She uncrossed them, but kept the grin when she showed Hi-5 the blue action-derm on her neck.

  “What, are you worried that I might, um, cause an accident in the APC carrying the armed-and-about-to-detonate, giant-ass, Big Baby Bomb... and maybe... hurt someone? Get on that turret and give me some Boom Boom Boom, you surreal PornoPopper Bitch. I'm gonna get you a nice wad to shoot.”

  Nobody was strapped in, and they bounced around the back of the cramped Thumper as Bonnie drove the eight-wheeled APC up a short ramp and on to a platformed arming station under the control room. It looked like a fast food drive-in pickup window, but the window was fifteen feet in the air, above the APC. Bonnie happily requested a high-explosive load-out for the Thumper by depressing the button on her console labeled HE. A roughly two by three foot section of the Thumper's roof lifted and slid to the side to reveal a hole for loading ammunition. A feeding arm that looked like thick steel air-conditioning duct extended from the drive-in pickup window above and curved downwards, connecting to the exposed feed hole in the Thumper's roof. Inside the APC, it sounded like a pachinko machine or a slot machine that was paying out as the feeding station loaded the APC with thousands of high-explosive rounds, pumping them into an armored cache above the heads of the deafened occupants.

  Bonnie pulled off the platform, weaved around explosion-torn wrecks, and drove over smaller maintenance carts with the Thumper's huge, knobby tires.

  The external doors opened to reveal blinding daylight.

  Outside.

  -77-

  Bonnie accelerated out across the the paved area that surrounded the perimeter of the Ziggurat. She saw sun-warmed green and yellow pavement all fuzzy with reflected UV. Bonnie thought it was strange how inside the Zig, everything had been torn to shit, and outside it looked like everything was normal. Well, normal except for the giant-ass half-melted ship rammed into the side of the Zig.

  There were even cars in the parking lot. She drove over the front end of one for fun and heard complaints and shouts from the rear that she mistook for joyful exclamations. This, she thought, is gonna be fun. She approached the chain link fence that separated the parking area from the field of green, bioengineered Grazzu-B turf they'd cross before they hit the dunes.

  “Zero minutes, one second remaining,” MUNI 5-7 said. Alvin just said, “Ah, shit,” because he knew that he was now living on borrowed time.

  Hi-5 fired six rounds in a left to right, rapid-fire burst, across the middle of the fence in front of the Thumper APC. The laser in the turret read the metal and sinewy plastic fibers of the fence and transmitted ranging data to the shells that exploded for Bonnie as beautiful, blue-white blossoms of heat and color that grew green and yellow near the edges. She was going fast and the flowers barely had a chance to cool to a pthalo blue before the Thumper burst through the remainder of the fence, leaving heavy tracks in the Grazzu-B engineered turf, the phyto-assassin that smothers all others. It was a jealous and vengeful plant that would tolerate none other than itself. It was an expression of the G.S.A., and Bonnie enjoyed crushing it with the Thumper's giant wheels.

  Hi-5 let high-explosive shells fly in the path of the Thumper, clearing out land mines. The explosions sent plumes of Grazzu and dirty root clumps high into the air. The mines threw shrapnel that pecked at the hull of the Thumper.

  Hi-5 was targeting through a video display in front of her with simulated depth and a decent compliment of sensors to augment the data from the stereo cameras mounted on the turret. The explosions she drew in a mine-clearing dotted line were bright purple in her thermal display, and the landscape in front of her was shown in a crisp detail thanks to twin radar systems pulsing high-energy and feeding it to the imaging systems five hundred times every second. She hooted, and from the rear troop compartment they watched the lower half of her body leaning slightly left and right with the turret's view as her body reacted unconsc
iously to the simulated vista in front of her.

  Casper could hear everything and see nothing until he noticed a flat, unriveted area with a single button underneath inscribed with a circle and a vertical line that began at the center of the circle and extended outside it a bit. Power. He pushed it and activated the screen set into the forward bulkhead. The dim of the Thumper's rear compartment became brightly lit with the wild explosions, and they cast deep, disorienting shadows all around the interior. He knew the sound of shrapnel against steel now, but it was less scary when you saw the explosion, too. Hi-5 was ripping up the path in front of them with liberal use of ammunition. Casper had no idea how much the Thumper carried, but he guessed it would be enough. The minefield couldn't go on forever. Then they'd see the dogs again.

  In the bright, flashing orange and yellow of the rear compartment, Catherine watched Padre Pedro swearing with true vehemence. There weren't enough harnesses, and every time Bonnie drove over something that made the Thumper bounce, he'd pop up and hit the back of his head on a low hanging structural reinforcement. She was enjoying that, and she thought Alvin would too, after what she knew Pedro had done to him in the basement of the POP club. That couldn't have been fun, she was sure, but Alvin wasn't even bothering to watch the show. He just bounced next to the three hundred pound Big Baby Bomb that the Sons of Caine held in place with hands everywhere on its polished metal, egg-shaped casing. He only had minutes left, she noted. Catherine had figured out immediately that if MUNI 5-7 started to spoof the timer on the Big Baby at one second, then Alvin would have no time to escape the blast. He had to stay attached, along with the AI that had hitched a ride in his head. Short ride, she thought.

  Bonnie guided the Thumper out of the Ziggurat's Grazzu-B fringe and entered the chromium dunes. Some of the craters looked fresh. She saw plenty of warm yellow, shallow concavities against the orange-yellow sand where exploding mines had exposed darker material that warmed faster in the sun.