Velocity

by V. B. Larson

  (The couple kiss heatedly, but before events can take their natural course the comatose patient jerks awake like a puppet pulled erect by its strings. The patient is a black woman of surpassing ugliness. She makes gross slurping sounds with puckered lips, mocking the kiss.)

  COMATOSE PATIENT: Whew! Sure is getting hot in here! How about a refresher? (While the two lovers watch dumbfounded, the black woman rips loose her I.V. and aims the needle-tipped tube at them. Screaming laughter, she sprays them with an amazing amount of liquid. Quickly, the I.V. tube and needle grow into a fire hose with a brass nozzle. Liquid floods the room knocking the lovers to the floor and soaking them.)

  COMATOSE PATIENT: (Shudders, spasms, then looks around the room in shock). That was, ah-to teach you two cheaters a lesson!

  (While RAY WAZER and NURSE TAI pick themselves up, dripping wet, COMATOSE PATIENT reaches up and rips off her face. Beneath the ugly exterior is the mirror image of NURSE TAI.)

  COMATOSE PATIENT: (Voice raises an octave to match NURSE TAI’s). That’s right, I’m your sister, and before I’m done I’ll kill you both!

  SYSTEM CLOSE:*Curtain Close, cue Theme Song* (short sound-bite version) cut away to commercial.

  SYSTEM WARNING:*Commercial cut-away occurred 55 seconds early. Auto-readjust of schedule completed*

  When the ordeal of Orbital Hospital was over, Zundra awoke with a nasty, morning-breath taste in her mouth. She realized vaguely that her mouth must have gone slack and hung open during the broadcast.

  “How are the ratings?” she croaked, tapping the button for a shot of glucose. She pursed her lips over the plastic feeding tube that rose up from her life-support module and drank a few swallows. The fluid smelled faintly of lemons.

  “They wavered terribly during your little hose-job, but somehow you pulled it all off. We made target by a three-point-eight percent margin. You didn’t plan all that wacky stuff, did you? That was just your alter-ego coming out for an encore, wasn’t it?”

  She ignored him for a moment, forcing her blurry vision to focus on the wall-trend. It was indeed in the green by the end, with a few precious kilo-dollars to spare.

  “Of course, the network won’t put up with this goofing around at their expense for long. Even if you claim that you’re not nuts, that you’re just ad-libbing-artistic license and all-they’ll pull you quick for all these deviations from the script. All the old ninnies back in the writer’s shop must be chewing the walls by now,” Andy said, rocking himself and chuckling at the thought.

  “What about the trace? Did you get anything?”

  Andy made a flippant gesture of annoyance. “I told you, there’s nothing to trace.”

  “Did you get anything?” pressed Zundra. “Did you run a full systems-level diagnostics?”

  “There were some low-level anomalies, but nothing worth commenting on.”

  “Get me the file. Net it over to my workstation. Now.”

  With a supple shrug and a pinched look of irritation, Andy netted her the file. Fifteen minutes later she had analyzed the trace, and soon after that she had a handle to what had to be the return code.

  “When does Cyborg Command run next?” she demanded suddenly.

  “It’s on right after the Killer Kitty Show, say forty-two minutes. Why?”

  “Vector me to this port address in forty-two minutes,” she said, then fell back into her chair with her eyes closed.

  After a minute or two of trying to resume the conversation, Andy shrugged again, snorted disgustedly and punched the port address into his hand terminal.

  CYBORG WARLORD: The enemy are in our grippers, we’ll crush them like ruptured egg-casings!

  (Shot switch to the stylized war map. The tunnel complex of Deeth Kar flashes up, tactical decisions are transmitted in from all the junior rebel leaders via mind-modem. Once the votes are tallied those that came closest to predicting the computers tactical plan are awarded game points. Advertisements for Cyborg Command Collectibles hum down the mind-modem lines, Action figures and T-shirts are purchasable with game points and a nominal fee of real money from the accounts of your parent or guardian.)

  MR. SQUIBBS: (The cybernetic parrot squawks and ruffles its metallic scale-like feathers before speaking). Looks like the rebels are getting away again.

  CYBORG WARLORD: Shut up you tin-plated cockatiel. Building you in the first place was a mistake.

  (Shot flips over to the War Map again, where the kid- icons in blue are devouring the metallic cyborg icons in a steady get-away path toward the top of the volcano and the distance escape chute.)

  MR. SQUIBBS: At least they didn’t manage to penetrate to our headquarters.

  CYBORG WARLORD: You’re right there, Mr Squibbs. They will never manage to stop me completely!

  (Suddenly, a third figure bursts into the cavern in an explosion of rock and debris. It is a large red-haired kid with a toy rocket-launcher in his hands. With a whoop of delight, he fires a blue rubber ball into CYBORG WARLORD’s chest, pressing the big red off-switch that has materialized there.)

  MR. SQUIBBS screeches in protest.

  RED-HAIRED KID: Cyborg Command’s tyranny is at an end! Next week we’ll have a new show in this time-slot kids, so don’t go away!

  Steve jerked upright, the keyboard and joysticks in his hands clattering to the studio floor. His red curls surrounded his face, framing the boiled-egg whites of his wide staring eyes. Operators shuffled back, stirring their coffee cups nervously with thin red shoots of plastic.

  A roar of rage bubbled up from the depths of his chest. The roar died into almost a pitiful sound as Steve focused on the wall-trend, which had bottomed out in the red. The network cancellation notice was already up on his e-mail screen, making a soft beeping sound.

  Zundra came awake slowly, smiling. She tapped at the keyboard mounted in front of her and brought up the network e-mail system.

  “Andy,” she called. “I’m considering a bid for a new show to replace Cyborg Command. I need your technical appraisal.”

  Andy sidled up and slumped on her desk. He quietly studied his thin fingers and awaited her orders.

  Pinball

  Chuck Mather had built the watchdog robot in his room, but he always let it out at night to roam around downstairs. Pinball couldn’t climb stairs or open doors, so its job was limited to patrolling the kitchen, the living areas and the study. Pinball wasn’t much like what most people thought of as a robot, it was just a personal computer really, slung between two ten-speed bike wheels. The wheels gave it mobility, the optical-liquid CPU gave it brains and a little IO board with an array of sensors gave it input. It didn’t have a video input unit, that was expensive and too hard to program, but it did have several motion detectors and infrared heat-detectors, not to mention a highly accurate sound-directional guidance system.

  “You want to let it loose again, Chuck? Couldn’t you just keep the thing in your room tonight?” Sylvia Mather asked, with a faint note of hopelessness in her voice.

  “Pinball is good protection Mom, especially since Dad died.”

  “Alright,” she sighed in defeat, cinching her housecoat tighter. She disappeared down the dark tunnel of the upstairs hall.

  Chuck was fifteen years old, overweight, had a lot of zits and had been sentenced to a wheelchair two summers ago in a boating accident. The same accident had cost his father his life.

  Maneuvering himself out of his wheelchair and into bed was an effort. First he threw his weight forward, landing his face on his pillow, then sat upright with a practiced roll. He settled into the large double-sized sleeping bag that he liked to use during the summer nights, whether he was camping or not. Grunting a bit, he stuffed his numb, useless legs into the bag and wiggled his way down into it.

  First checking to make sure his mother had really gone to bed and was not fooling around in the hall closet or the bathroom, he vertically set a ruler in the middle of the sleeping bag so it would hold up the center like a tent post. From beneath the sleeping
bag he unearthed a wireless netbook. He then ducked down into his make-shift tent and zipped up the sides. Using a flashlight, he surfed to his favorite sites: a mix of porn, gaming news, pirated movies and social-networking. In some ways, this was the best part of the day.

  He fell asleep in the early morning hours. When he finally awoke, mother was in his room and fooling around as usual, checking the batteries on his wheelchair, even though they had spent the night charging up. He shoved the netbook down deep into the sleeping bag before popping his head out of the top.

  “Good morning,” she greeted him. Like Chuck, her hair was very straight, fine and blonde. It resembled fragile cobwebs and tended to wisp about on windy days.

  “Mourning is right,” Chuck groaned. Bright July sunshine streamed in slices through the miniblinds making him squint and blink.

  “I was thinking that I don’t really need to go to the wedding, Chuck,” she told him with a pursed-lip frown. She was already made-up and ready to go, wearing a green silk dress, a French braid and a heavy layer of lavender lip-gloss.

  “Yes you do, Mom,” he said, rubbing his eyes and waiting for the blood to make it up to his brain.

  “Aunt Marron has been married before, and you don’t need to be alone.”

  “Go to the wedding, Mom.”

  “If you’re sure you can take care of yourself…”

  “I’m fifteen years old, I can spend one night on my own. Give me a break.”

  Sylvia nodded and left the room, her hands behind her head, tugging and tucking loose hairs. Soon afterwards Chuck heard a short yell of surprise as Pinball caught her at the door. Pinball let out an alarm chime, and he couldn’t help smiling. The sound of servos whining and his mother making shooing sounds floated up the stairs.

  “Chuck, your pet is ramming itself into my legs. If it runs my nylons again, I’ll have your tail son!” she shouted. Chuck grabbed up the garage controller that he used as an override switch and stabbed the button. It took five or six tries, but Pinball finally got the message and quit attacking Sylvia.

  “Battery must be going dead,” Chuck muttered to himself, fiddling with the garage door controller. Pinball should have stopped right away.

  His mother finally got away and slammed the front door behind herself.

  The rest of the day was wonderful. For breakfast he had a bowl of mixed cereals, all different brands of sugar-fluff, and drank a root beer float on top of it all. Feeling only slightly queasy, he rolled to the escalator arm and let it carry him up the stairs like a giant, whining electric hand. He placed Pinball on top of a card table with his wheels off and hooked his serial port to another PC with a light blue cable.

  Its numerous infrared sensors stared at nothing: the numerous eyes of a dead spider. Chuck spent several hours tapping the keys on his PC, downloading additional software onto Pinball’s ultralite 600 petabyte disk. Then he pulled the bottom drawer of his dresser completely out, almost dumping over his wheelchair in the process. Hidden underneath the drawer, down in the open space most dressers have between the last drawer and the carpet was a large rumpled shopping bag. Chuck pulled out the bag then glanced around and listened for a moment. Somewhere, Sylvia’s cat Peter was meowing, and outside someone was mowing their yard. Otherwise the house was silent.

  He opened the bag and pulled out two objects. The first was a cattle prod with a long plastic handle, a red rubber grip and two copper prongs at the end. Next was the new purse he was hiding for his mother’s birthday, two weekends away. He had gone to great lengths to purchase the thing through friends at school and even greater lengths to hide both the cattle prod and the purse from his mother. He affixed this device to Pinball’s housing, strapping it with plastic snap-on ties to the frame underneath the motherboard. He wired the switch up to one of the screw terminals on the IO board. He tightened down the first the green wire, then the blue, and leaned back.

  “There you go,” Chuck muttered, patting Pinball’s battery case.

  “Now you can do more than just bark. Now you’re armed and dangerous.”

  That night Chuck sat in his room and ate two microwave dinners and watched all the Friday night net shows. Once the credits had finally scrolled up the screen on Bleak Justice, he climbed back into his wheelchair and rolled into the dark hall. Little thrills ran through his intestines as he rode the escalator arm downstairs. Hugged tightly to his chest was Pinball, the aluminum rims of its wheels cold against his belly where his sweatshirt had ridden up. He reached the bottom and set the machine down gently, making sure that the cattle prod didn’t overbalance it. With a grunt of pride, he sat back and activated the machine with a touch on the warm-reboot button. Pinball came to life slowly, its disk light flashing as the operating system took control and megabytes of programming began to execute. After a few moments it rolled and tilted back six inches, like an animal sitting on its haunches. It held the cattle prod high, a knight saluting a king with his lance. Each of the forked prongs glinted, like two metallic eyes winking. With a sense of purpose, the machine rolled away into the kitchen.

  “Goodnight, Pinball,” said Chuck with fatherly pride. Pinball did a sharp about face by spinning its wheels in opposite directions and followed the source of his voice, but Chuck was already riding up the stairs again to his room where the TV and a pile of magazines awaited him. Soon after he had let Pinball loose, Peter, the cat, came running up the stairs, looking for refuge. He found it on top of Chuck’s monitor shelf, and lazily let his tail drift in front of the screen. Peter was a fairly big tomcat with dark gray fur and a cream-colored underbelly. He normally spent summer nights outside, but tonight Chuck had forgotten about him.

  “Don’t like Pinball, do you?” Chuck laughed. “Well, you had better steer clear of him tonight, boy, or you’ll be one unhappy kitty.”

  “Merrooow…” commented Peter. He eyed Chuck with a mixture of deep thought and mild contempt. His tail slid further down the screen, blotting out the upper half of a comedian doing his monologue. As a precaution, Chuck pushed his door shut, so the cat wouldn’t get zapped during the night. Settling down on his bed, Chuck noisily pulled open a king-sized bag of cheesepuffs and ate until his hands and tongue were dyed orange. After the net programs got old, he got out his netbook again and enjoyed surfing his favorite pages in the open. Some hours later he flipped shut his computer and worked himself into bed.

  He awoke when a dreadful yowl came from downstairs. At first he rolled over and pulled his pillow over his head, trying to get back into his interrupted dreams. Then he thought he heard a bang followed by a crash, and reluctantly opened one eye. He saw the door was ajar and knew instantly what was going on. It had happened before. Peter and Pinball were having a fight.

  He almost yelled Mom before he remembered and sat up, cursing. He was going to have to handle this himself. He was vaguely worried for Peter, as Pinball was armed tonight. Climbing into his chair, he fumbled with the junk strewn over his workbench and finally came up with the garage door opener. He stabbed the button about ten times for good measure, then rolled his chair toward the door. As an afterthought, he put the controller in the wheelchair’s basket, taking it with him. The house was dark, hot and still. The walls were still radiating the heat of the summer day, and although the upstairs windows were open, there was no breath of wind to cool the house.

  Trying to be quiet, Chuck rolled his chair to the top of the stairs using arm-power. He paused there for a moment, listening. He could hear nothing but the crickets outside and the vague sound of cars on the interstate, five miles east. He rode the escalator arm downward.

  At the bottom of the stairs he hit the hall light, and nothing happened. He flipped the switch several more times, then remembered that he had left it on in the first place. A fuse must have blown down here, because the upstairs lights were still working. The downstairs was on a separate circuit, and the fuse box was located outside the house. Frowning, he unstrapped his chair from the grip of the escalator and then paused. H
e heard the whine of an electric motor, coming from the back of the house. Pinball was coming.

  “Damn,” he muttered, pulling out the garage door opener again and pressing the button with unnecessary force. His thumb sunk deep into the plastic box, but still the high-pitched sound continued. There was a thump from the archway at the end of the hall that led into the family room, Pinball had miscalculated and run into the wall with one wheel. The sounds shifted as it reversed directions and corrected its course. For the first time, Chuck felt a sliver of fear run through his heart. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe, and for no apparent reason, his limp legs started to ache, dead nerves sending ghost-impulses up his spine. He looked back up the stairway, and realized that he didn’t have time to strap himself in and ride up to the top, especially in the dark. If he tried to make it without the harness, he could slip off the metal platform quite easily.

  His tongue darted out and he chewed his lip. Down the hall, the tiny red glow-lights on Pinball’s motherboard could be seen, coming out of the gloom. Chuck wondered what the cattle prod would feel like it if touched his legs. Would they jump of their own accord, like frog legs in a skillet?

  Pinball was closing fast. Chuck made his decision and rolled into the kitchen. Pinball followed the sounds with the guidance of its motion detectors, swinging through the opening without a hitch. As Chuck rounded the kitchen island he pulled the trashcan out from underneath it and dumped it behind him, directly in Pinball’s path. He caught a brief whiff of orange peels and moldy meat, then he rolled out into the living room. He glanced back and saw a snapshot of Pinball as it rolled through a pool of light coming in from the streetlamp outside. The cattle prod was lowered and leveled, ready for action. The two wheels spun together with smooth precision and the spokes flashed silvery lines of reflected light that seemed to hang in the air for a moment as it passed. Then Pinball ran into the dumped garbage and began trying to get past it, trying to negotiate a path over a loose mess of eggshells and cereal boxes.