Outrageous Fortune

by Tim Scott

  We had released the viruses from the other phials a few hours earlier in the day, on the rooftop of EasyDreams. The thing was as contagious as bad hair. It could pick out a person’s DNA in a five-mile radius from the faint vibrations it gave off. We named it the DNAura. It was almost like a phone call.

  We knew the diseases were all going to get through to their targets. Everyone in the story was going to play their part.

  There was a risk someone might have got hurt, but we rehearsed many of the situations we knew would happen, so our subconsciouses had something to go on. We rehearsed the shoot-out at Inconvenient, with the planted charges to blow the walls apart, and the fall through the big windows with the parachute; we rehearsed the climb up to Argonaut Logistics. It was like being part of a film and doing your own stunts, but thinking all the time it was all for real. Sure, things could have gone wrong and that’s why I put Caroline on my tail. She was both part of the story and outside of it, just as Habakkuk had guessed.

  Maybe, I had sensed there would only ever be one trial run of the Dream Virus Project, and I wanted to push the limits of the experience. It was a dangerous thing to do but that’s me all over—going the whole way, all or nothing, and too much curiosity for my own good. And that made the success of being back all the sweeter; the success of seeing if who I was was just my things and my job, or whether there was something more.

  Things turned out well, and I wondered if you just hung in there long enough whether things always turned out well, as long as you kept believing.

  In the morning we’ll go for a dawny. In the morning, me, Mat, Caroline, and Jamie will paddle out the back at Thor’s Hammer, just as it’s getting light, and sit on our boards and watch the sun rise over the beaches on Isla Todos Santos.

  We can all ask ourselves if we really know who we are, and sometimes it’s hard to find an answer amid the clutter of life. I feel I found an answer by taking away who I thought I was, putting everything I cherished on the line, then somehow holding things together and coming through it all.

  Perhaps that’s why I did it.

  I have always believed heroes are not born in the moment of victory but in the lonely hour when everyone has abandoned them; in the hour when there is nothing but dying hope, in the hour when they must stand alone against the rising tide of defeat. In that moment, even they may doubt, but they fight on anyway, because a memory of something lives deeply in their souls. In their selves. They put their trust in a belief they cannot see, or touch, or always explain, and while others plead with them to flee, so filled with fear their real selves cannot be heard, those who have this belief stand firm. This is the lesson life wants us to learn and tell our children.

  Listen to your true self and trust it.

  The mind is a distraction that should not be allowed to control our lives, or we die in a holocaust of meaninglessness, in a foray of paperwork, in a mountain of councils and neatness and nothingness.

  Passion. Art. Nature. Love. These are the things that can lead us to who we are.

  We are shaped by our experiences. We test the mettle of love under the heat of confrontation, but none of this means anything if we don’t know our true selves. The true self that doesn’t know fear, or jealousy, or hatred, but only deep love. So when things are lost and you are left to face the world alone, trust deeply in who you are; trust in its supple strength and strive, with every sinew, simply to be. Hamlet asked, “To be, or not to be?” There’s a fucking simple answer, Hamlet:

  Be.

  Be with a passion.

  Be.

  About the Author

  TIM SCOTT lives in England and writes for television. In 2003, he won a BAFTA. This is his first novel.

  If you have enjoyed

  Outrageous Fortune,

  be sure not to miss

  LOVE IN THE

  TIME OF

  FRIDGES

  the next madcap novel from

  the twisted mind of

  Tim Scott.

  Coming in Summer 2008

  Turn the page for a special preview…

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF FRIDGES

  Coming in 2008

  Trust me on this; common sense was regarded with suspicion by the Seattle police. If they ever came across it, they tended to stay well back and call for assistance. And common sense said that I had been in Attila’s Diner eating chop suey that tasted like it contained more MSG than actual food.

  But the summons was routine.

  They had thrown up some roadblocks and snagged me on one as I headed back to the motel the night before. And now they wanted to print out all the images stored in my memory from the last thirty-six hours, because some hoods had pulled off a robbery in the area. The downtown police were trawling for evidence from anyone who came close to being a witness.

  I guess they were pretty desperate.

  Or maybe it was the kind of wild sweep they did all the time in Seattle. I didn’t know the place well, and I’d never wanted to come here anyway. As far as I was concerned, we should be in Florida. At least the cheap hotels there didn’t have mattresses that were as malleable as wet toast, or fittings that a paleontologist could have dated.

  And anyway, I had a very bad feeling about this summons for reasons of my own. I really did not want some police cadet poking around in my head.

  Frankly, I was nervous.

  In fact, I was probably scared. But over the years, I had forgotten how to be properly scared, so all I was getting now was a rush of feelings that didn’t know where to settle. Or how to form themselves into a simple, easy-to-grasp emotion.

  I was in a four-person Pod on my way to Head Hack Central. The Seattle police had a reputation for being a pain in the ass when it came to doing stuff by the book, and I knew if I ignored this summons or faked ill health, they’d be on my case until they got bored.

  Which might take years.

  It might even take until after I was dead. They might visit my grave just to heckle me.

  I had been on the run before, and it was tiring. It was a bad way to go through life. And it had confused things between me and Anna. In moments when my mind drove back into my past, I still regretted that.

  So I was going to the summons, however much the idea grated on my nerves or wound up my heart until the beats just sounded like one continuous drone.

  After all, it was only routine. And I would be out of there within the hour.

  I’d found space in a Pod with an alarming crack running through the roof. In fact, the whole car was going to split in two at some stage, and I was gambling that it wouldn’t be in the next few minutes. The odds were just about in my favor.

  But not by as much as I would have liked.

  The thing had been programmed to cut corners so aggressively that it slewed and screeched like a cat in a fight, and I saw people on the sidewalk cover their ears as we peeled past.

  The suspension was fucked, and that meant that my head hit the roof with pretty much every pothole. And these downtown streets had so many potholes, it was as though Maintenance saw them as a feature they should encourage. As though in the future, they might be able to close the highway and open some sort of sanctuary.

  The only other person in the Pod was an old lady who sat opposite, clinging firmly to a small umbrella. She had a smile resolutely frozen onto her face and seemed to be taking this journey in stride. The crack in the domed roof grated alarmingly as bits of Perspex showered down between us.

  We both ignored it. She did a pretty convincing job.

  I braced myself into one corner and scrolled through my phone book. It was stored on a data-fingernail, which threw up a tiny heads-up display of my numbers. Some people had features on all their nails. I just had a phone and a phone book on two fingernails of my left hand. The numbers glowed a faint, blurred blue as they hung in the air above my hand, and after a certain amount of messing about I selected Miranda’s and dialed just as we hit a particularly deep pothole. My head cracked the roof like
I had been hit with a sledgehammer.

  “Fuck!”

  Miranda had already picked up. “Is this a sales call?” she replied.

  “No. It’s me.”

  “Oh, Huck. What’s up?”

  “Did you find her?”

  “No. They said she’d moved on.”

  “Great. Look, I’ll be back at the motel within an hour, and then I suggest we get out of town. We never should have come. This police Head Hack thing terrifies me.”

  “What’s the big deal with this, Huck? It’s routine.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just scared of someone poking around in my head. It’s a thing with me. Arrgghh!” I cried as we hit another pothole and my head smashed the roof.

  “Huck? You okay?”

  “Yes…no…This is getting to me.”

  “Well, just think of it like a new experience. When I was in Paraguay, I met this shaman who was always saying that you should search out new experiences.”

  Yeah, well, shamans say a lot of things. Most of them utter crap.

  “Huck, you’ve fallen into a really dull rut. You need to get out of your comfort zone.”

  “But that’s just it. I’m happy with being dull. I’m good at being dull. I could get a degree in it.”

  “Don’t think like that! That’s not why I hooked up with you.”

  “It’s not just that, Miranda. I have this innate fear of my head getting damaged…Ah!” We hit another dip that threw me against the roof, and a scream of pain forked down my neck.

  “Huck?”

  “Why don’t they make these Pods bigger? And better. Jesus.”

  “Huck, I can really feel your negative karma. I’m going to have to do some random act of kindness to balance things out. Accept what life throws your way. Who knows where it might lead? Talk to you later.”

  “Miranda, listen. Did I ever tell you my father died when I was two, from some people who were…Miranda? Who were messing around inside his head…Miranda? Miranda?” I ended lamely, realizing the line was dead.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” the old lady said, her voice vibrating as the Pod rattled furiously over the bumpy road. Or maybe that was just how she always spoke.

  Perhaps age had put a crease in her voice.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I said, but I was touched she had taken an interest. She was one of those people it was easy to like straight off. It was a quality I had never mastered.

  Not even slightly.

  “My father died before I was born,” she said, “when he tried to swallow a stoat. They say it was for a bet.”

  “A stoat? Is that so?” I tried to take this in. Was she joking?

  “Yes. At the autopsy, the cause of death was just recorded as ‘stoat blockage,’” she added. “Amazing, isn’t it? Don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I said. And then I looked at her. “You don’t think it said ‘throat blockage’ on the report, do you, and someone misread it?”

  She stared at me and her eyes grew larger, but the moment was broken as the Pod slowed to a halt and I smashed my head one final time on the roof.

  “This is the office of Police Head Hack Central,” said the Pod voice.

  “It’s actually one more block,” I said. “It’s down there. And you really do need to get this suspension fixed.”

  “This is the office of the Police Head Hack Central,” repeated the tinny voice. “Please leave the cab now, or you will be arrested under section forty-three of the Seattle penal code.”

  “It’s one more block. There! It’s down there.”

  “Your lucky number today is seven. Your lucky color is blue with some green. This is the office of Police Head Hack Central. Get out of the cab, or you will be arrested. Your receipt is being printed.”

  “I don’t want a receipt.”

  “Please take your receipt,” insisted the Pod as reams of paper spewed out.

  “All right, all right. I’m sorry about your father, however he died,” I said to the old lady, heaving open the curved glass door and grappling with the receipt.

  “Oh, that’s all right. Death is just an opening to another place, isn’t it?”

  “Is that right?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “And I get the feeling there’ll be bluebells there.”

  I nodded and slammed the Pod door shut, and the whole thing rocked like a life raft on a swell.

  Bluebells, I thought. Was it going to be like that? Was death a door to someplace else?

  Or just a door to oblivion?

  Then I was involuntarily sucked into the crowd. The sidewalks of Seattle writhed with such a wild cross-section of fashion statements, anthropologists might have struggled to classify the people wearing all this stuff as a single race.

  I squeezed past a heavily manicured woman with a small dog encased in her hat—and then I noticed she was with a man who had an identical dog in his hat. And then a group of nuns went by, clad neatly in pristine wimples but carrying clear plastic riot shields, so they could keep the crowds away from the mother superior.

  You didn’t get this kind of stuff in Florida. People just wore normal clothes and hung out. It was as though the population here was trying to distract themselves and everyone else from the terrible weather.

  “Hail Mary, Mother of Grace,” said one overly large nun, whacking a businessman out of the way with her shield on the word “grace.”

  It took about fifteen minutes of being pummeled by this annoying shamble of people until I was outside the massive offices where they based Police Head Hack Central. I walked partially up the massive flight of steps and stopped.

  The place was built of cheap stone and was meant to look like it came from ancient times, but it probably more closely resembled something from a very bad film set about ancient Rome.

  I unscrunched the summons from my pocket, looked at it one more time, then walked up the remaining steps.

  Police officers were flooding down in knots of twos and threes. They were conspicuously carrying small red truncheons and red guns. The use of the color red was restricted in this city, and the police must have had the franchise on it.

  I walked through the doors and noticed that the huge Hessian doormat was printed with the words HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM, BUDDY!

  The front desk was dead ahead and was split into various areas by signs that flashed behind them. There were long lines at some of the windows. I tracked down the “Witness” one, and found the line consisted of just a huge man with a long, pointed beard and a drunkard in a cheap suit who was trying to flatten out a filthy piece of paper he had just removed from his pocket.

  Someone had made a sign and stuck it up farther along, over one of the closed windows. It said: TRAMPS WHO JUST WANT TO COME AND SHOUT AT US. I was guessing this was a joke. But all the same, a couple of people were waiting patiently in line behind it.

  Just being in this place trawled up a host of bad memories. There was some kind of palpable heaviness in the atmosphere, as though the echo from the frustration, pain, and anger of all the people who had passed through was almost too much weight for the air to bear. And at some stage, the air would give up and the place would become a vacuum.

  The man with the beard seemed to have brought an actual filing cabinet with him on a dolly, and he was delving into various drawers again and again for papers. I guess he wanted to have all the bases covered.

  A woman appeared slightly to my left, as if she had materialized out of thin air.

  She had black hair wound tightly into a bun, and an unblinking expression. She pointed at me and mouthed something. It was unsettling, and my heart began buffeting my rib cage like it had a point to make. This woman had the words “Porlock Inc.” printed across her top pocket, and as I stared at her she flickered and faded away.

  She had been a hologram.

  I stood for a moment, trying to take this in. You didn’t see holograms anymore—not since they were banned by the military many years before. No advertiser
in their right mind would mess about with them.

  And this one had been really sharp. I had a bad feeling about this. There was something about her that had struck something deep inside me, and my thoughts sucked me away from the present. I rerolled her appearance in my mind, trying to recall her face, and what it was about her. I tried to reconstruct her lips and work out the words that should have been there.

  “You, sir!” I vaguely heard the voice, but I was still trying to cling on to the image of the hologram so I could unravel its significance. “Next!” The rotund face of an overweight policewoman prodded at the edge of my consciousness. “Can you hear me, sir? Or is your head just too full of crap like the rest of them?”

  I focused. The policewoman behind the desk had the sort of bad haircut that looked like it had been done on the move. Possibly at high speed. And a set of braces on her teeth that could have raised a passable amount of cash for its scrap value.

  “Sorry…yes.” I handed her the piece of paper with the summons seal and witness number.

  “For a Head Hack, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weird what you can have stored in your memory and not know about, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh, yes. At the Christmas party, they had a look in my head for a laugh, and found an image of a man riding a bear and holding a candelabrum. Now, how did that get into my memory? I would swear I’ve never seen anything like that. You’d remember something like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Then again, we have had some pretty wild parties here. Maybe it was one of those.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So, here’s an album for you to keep the images. The copyright is yours once they’ve got the security clearance.”

  “Is that right?”

  “And put these on, please,” she added, pulling some big red clown shoes down from a shelf behind her and handing them to me.

  “Why?” I wanted to say something more cohesive, but the confusion of the moment had stopped the supply of words from my brain.