by Tim Scott
The woman sighed. “We’ve got a reputation for being too serious, and our image consultants said it would lighten up our profile if prisoners and witnesses wore these around the building. So put them on.”
“You’re actually serious?”
“Yeah. Put the fucking shoes on, will you? What’s the matter with you?”
“Right.”
“You can pick yours up when you leave. Just take this form to Footwear Claims, and then they’ll give you a chit you take to Footwear Return.”
As I said, common sense was not a big player with these people.
I took the shoes stoically.
The drunken man watched me as I struggled to put them on. “Cheer up,” he said. “It might never happen. And if it does,” he added conspiratorially, invading my personal space with a massive waft of gin, “there’s bound to be a cop nearby with a big stick to hit the fucker.”
I looked at him. He smiled a thin smile and, just for a moment, I wondered how his life had led him to this. To be here now, drunkenly lost, washed up in this terrible building. It was as though this place was the unacknowledged end of something, the place where people collected when their lives had gone irretrievably wrong.
I plonked my own shoes on the desk.
“Follow the HEAD HACK signs,” said the woman. “And don’t forget your album. And I’ll bet they find something in your head you never expected!”
I flapped off down the corridor in the long red shoes, carrying the album and wondering what I had let myself in for. There was nothing in my head that I wouldn’t expect, but I still felt a weight of anxiety. A cold mass of dread was ballooning up in my mind. So much so that the space for other thoughts was getting crushed.
I tried not to think about my father, dying from someone doing something like this, but all I could see was the photograph I had of him on my desk at work. He was about my age, all slicked-back hair and a wide, generous smile. He looked happy to engage with whatever life had to offer. So why, exactly, had he died? What had been so important to him that he had let someone fool about in his head? I knew practically nothing about it.
The walls of this corridor were virtually alive with anticrime posters. I even saw one that was framed. It was some kind of certificate. “Seattle Police are proud to have won the national award for the ‘Best Stakeout,’” it said. They were also runners-up in the category “Best Riot Shields.” Next to these was a small trophy of a policeman inscribed with the epigraph: “Most Imaginative Use of a Riot Shield on Duty—Officer Lenny Gretchen—Interstate Police Awards—Second Place.”
I kept following the signs for “HEAD HACK CENTRAL,” and all I saw were cops wandering about or slouching in offices. It was clear these cops could slouch with the best. They’d already put in rigorous hours of training.
Eventually, I came to a huge sign that read: WITNESS HEAD HACK PROGRAM. PLEASE RING THE BELL.
I reached for it when a girl in a white coat appeared and smiled pleasantly.
“Mr. Runner?” she said.
“Yes?” I replied.
“Your Head Hack is next.”
At hologram control in Porlock Inc., they were having problems. Holograms were going AWOL all over the place.
Somehow they had been hacked into. And whoever had done the hacking had created a major meltdown.
Most were just dying in a froth of electronics, but a few were singing a rather catchy, bizarre children’s song about a puffin that started: Every puffin has a dream. Every penguin has a spleen.
The reputation of the people from Porlock Inc. (Seattle) was being shredded. The future of the whole business was collapsing, spectacularly, before their eyes.
It was calculated that Porlock Inc. saved the country two billion dollars a year by preventing all kinds of people from doing stupid things. Doing Stupid Things, or DTS, as it was known, had been proven to be one of the biggest waste areas of the country’s economy. And cracking down on the whole DTS problem had been made a priority.
They still couldn’t do much about people doing fairly insignificant stupid things, of course, like calling the zoo and trying to sell them a locust, or taking a golf cart and driving it as fast as it would go into a lake.
But they could do something about the Big Stuff.
They could detect the abnormal brainwaves that were generated when people went into DST mode, and then instantly dispatch a hologram.
Normally.
But not today.
Nigel had called in everyone who worked at Porlock. Everyone. He’d even called up people who didn’t work there. He’d basically called up everyone he knew.
“Another missed target!” shouted an operative at a bank of screens. “In Souk twenty-three. That’s thirty-three major DST alerts today, including a massive one an hour ago at Head Hack Central.”
“Jesus,” said Nigel. “This can’t go on. What’s going to happen? If all these people don’t get interrupted, they’ll be DST without any kind of control. What’s going to happen?”
No one could give him an answer.
Not even his gardener.
“What on earth are you doing here?” he said to the man, as he stood hopelessly holding a flowerpot. “This is supposed to be a secret establishment.”
“You called me.”
“Did I? Yeah…Yeah, I probably did.”
Nigel went into his office and closed the door. If they didn’t get this situation under control soon, they’d take apart his career and spread the pieces to the four corners of the earth.
He poured himself a drink.
“To Kublai Khan,” he said quietly, raising his glass.
And drank it without noticing its taste.
The woman took me through a small operating theater that was unexpectedly clean.
“I’m Francine, your nurse today. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Or a glass of wonker?” She smiled, but her eyes were not a part of it.
“Wonker?” I repeated. “What’s that?”
“Wonker? It’s like water. But not as good.”
“Okay. No, thanks.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but this wasn’t the time to ask. The room had no windows, but one of the walls was glazed and looked into a small viewing room. In front of me was a massive padded chair that looked like it would recline, and there were various clinical bits of machinery in the room. It was like being at the dentist.
Only worse.
“So, sit yourself down and pop on the bib,” said this girl, bringing out the same smile again. “And pop the safety goggles on for me as well.”
A balding man hit the room at speed. I sensed his mind was not entirely here, and that he was wallowing in his position of responsibility. Maybe it gave him a reason to feel he had a valid role in life.
“I’m Dr. Phillips, and this will only take a few seconds. We’re just going to get a few images out of your head. Have you done this before, Mr. Runner?” He sat perched on the desk, clipboard in hand, staring at me.
“No,” I said.
“Are you on any medication?”
“No.”
“Any problems with headaches?”
“No.”
“Any allergic reactions ever to Alf-Alfa?”
“No.”
“You’re certain? No swelling? No sneezing? Anything like that?”
“No.” The questions rattled out so quickly, they trod on my answers. It was as though this man felt that by cutting out all the pauses from his life, he might gain an extra half-hour in the day.
“Good. Look forward and hold your head nice and still for me. That’s it. And fire the Head Torsion, please, Francine.”
Two flat boards on the end of some kind of hydraulic arms squeezed onto my cheeks, clamping my head in a tight vise. My mouth was forced open until I was doing a bad impression of a fish.
“That’s fine. Francine is going to put some gel on your head. It may feel a tiny bit cold. Gel type
3-B, please, Francine.”
And I felt the cold slop of gunge all over my hair. The girl swept it around with her rubber gloves until I could feel it dripping down the sides of my head.
“Good. Well done. So, this will take only a second or two. All you will feel is a slight tingle, and then we’ll download the images from your short-term memory. Francine has a card of safety instructions in case there is a fire. Prepare the Vault for the images, please, Francine.”
They exchanged a few other words behind me, and Francine gave me a card. It was a map with various emergency exits and corridors on it. It would have been impossible to go anywhere while I was trapped by this machine, so it was a pretty pointless exercise.
Then the doctor’s voice was much louder. “Head hack in five—four—nice and relaxed for me—two—one. Fire!”
My throat tightened, and the lights dimmed and then flashed, and I felt a faint tingling at the top of my head, but the sensation was only fleeting. A deep unsettling darkness swept from one side of my mind to the other. It seemed to echo and tumble. Then the image of the whole room writhed and elongated. Images from my past pinballed about my head in splintering colors. And it felt like my brain was being drawn out through my nose with a pair of chopsticks.
I opened my eyes and saw a strobing white light, and I was swamped with the sensation that it was burning away the essence of who I was and leaving nothing but blank emptiness behind. I began to snap in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of more people gathering in front me.
They looked like terrified carol singers who had been told they were about to be put to the torch. This bizarre thought lodged at the front of my mind for a moment, then was swept away. My whole body began shaking.
It felt like I might shake myself out through the ceiling. More people came into the room, and I realized the doctor was shouting orders, the tired, smug expression gone from his face. Instead, it was replaced with sheer, unfettered panic that stretched his skin taut and gave his eyes a hectic glitter.
Then I screamed and blacked out.
I came around a second later in a shriek of voices and cries. I knew I was going to die in the same way that my father had.
The old lady had said there would be bluebells. I wondered if there would be bluebells. Somehow I didn’t think there would be bluebells for me. She would get bluebells because she had such a kind manner. I would just get pain.
More images ballooned and were crushed. Numbers. Reams of numbers. In walls. In sheets. Cascading through me. As though the universe was breaking down into mathematics and all of it was flowing through me. As though that was all there was—numbers and numbers.
Oceans of fucking numbers.
And then with a jolt I remembered the hologram woman. Her image cut through everything and just sat there in my head.
And I realized instantly what it was about her.
She hadn’t been random.
I knew what she had been saying now.
She had been mouthing my name.
On the hill, three refrigerators huddled together as lightning nibbled at the edges of the darkening sky.
It was impossible to make out what they were saying because they were speaking in their own language, which consisted entirely of humming. They all had a battered, shambolic look to them, like they had seen their fair share of lettuces and mayonnaise. Like they had kept a truckload of milk cold in their time. Like they never wanted to see another remnant of a meal placed carefully in a small bowl, sealed in plastic wrap, positioned on the top shelf, then ceremoniously thrown away a week later.
They had seen that all before.
A thousand times.
More lightning snapped at the trees in the evening gloom, but the rain was still holding off.
A woman in a swirling kaftan made her way toward them. As she approached, all the refrigerators closed their doors so that their lights went out, and they hunkered together, trying to blend in.
As much as large, white objects can blend in against a grassy hill.
Which, actually, is not at all.
She walked over, knelt down, and began talking to them. The refrigerators didn’t bolt. Instead they gradually opened their doors—just a bit—as though she was winning their confidence.
NICKED…
“‘Don’t you hate it when this happens?’” he read. “They left you a card with a phone number? Now, that is handy. If only more criminals could be this obliging. Police work would be so much more straightforward. Have you seen a psychiatrist recently, Mr. X?”
“No.”
“No. Well, we’ll see. Zara, our Health and Safety Executive, will have to put an Odysseus Hat on you while I’m out of the room. I’m required to inform you it’s a routine restriction, after the Hesketh Case, and does not affect your liberty status.” The Zone Traffic Securities cop strutted to the door, opened it, and left us in silence as the noise of his feet clipped down the corridor and faded. I stared at Zara with a sinking feeling of bored dread. Surely she wasn’t going to do what I was thinking.
“Up,” she said. I scraped the chair back across the floor and stood wearily. Zara nodded in approval, then sniffed and approached several shiny seven-foot metal tubes, and I sighed with despair. She bear hugged one, staggered over to me, climbed uncertainly onto the chair, heaved the thing up, and plonked it over my head so that it slid down and hit the floor with a clang. It was wildly dark, and there was barely room to move my arms. I turned my head and, twisting a touch more, found one tiny eyehole. I squinted through it and saw Zara taking up her stoic position by the door again.
“Excuse me,” I shouted, my voice echoing around the cylinder. “Is this really, honestly, necessary?”
“Health and Safety.” I faintly heard her voice filter through.
“Health and Safety? I could die and you’d never know.”
“Well, it is Health and Safety,” came the shrugged, flat reply…
OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE
A Bantam Spectra Book / June 2007
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2007 by Tim Scott
* * *
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Tim, 1962–
Outrageous fortune / Tim Scott.
p. cm.
“Bantam Spectra book.”
I. Title.
PS3619.C6855O98 2007
813'.6—dc22 2006102878
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90380-5
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