Scum of the Universe

by Grant Everett

  As the one-shot acid gland in Jeeves' throat wouldn't reload for another couple of hours, he had to employ another, much less elegant tactic: Jeeves head-butted the machine as hard as possible. While this was a good tactic to use at the pub, it didn't do much against two-inches of armour plating. The first slam only served to give Jeeves a splitting headache, but a second blow left a splatter of blood all over the bot's face. The machine simply laughed at the futility. The thing was, Jeeves was aiming for the only two glass eyes that had missed out on his acid loogie. As the robot chuckled at this pathetic display, Jeeves repeatedly slammed his face into the droid until his skin was split wide, then until his face was nothing but raw mincemeat and blood. The siege bot's face was now covered in crimson vein-juice.

  The soldier stopped and tilted its head in confusion.

  “Oh,” it rumbled.

  “What?” the taxi driver yelled from across the room, still wrestling the elderly form of Ernest Fell into submission.

  “I'm...I'm blind!” the siege bot roared.

  Jeeves took advantage of the soldier's moment of surprise by sliding out of its grip like a greased noodle. Climbing the soldier's arm in his very best Spiderman impersonation, being sure to step around the razorwire bundles and spikes, Jeeves literally held on for life as the soldier bucked and thrashed, and gradually moved hand-over-hand towards the back of the siege bot's soccer-ball-sized head.

  Jeeves laughed like a madman the whole time. He'd missed this so, so much.

  *

  While World War XII was breaking out in all directions, Tuesday decided this was a good time to crawl for the closed roller door. Clawing hand over hand, Tuesday yelped as his fingers got all cut up on what remained of the terminated microwave, and he quietly swore in a manner that would make any speaker of Guttertongue proud. Quite a few of the still-active members of Hard Reset heard his curses, and began to advance for him in a wave of plastic and metal.

  Tuesday just kept on crawling.

  *

  Ernest had his hands full. Ripping at the taxi driver's black and yellow uniform in a panic, all Ernest managed to do was detach a name tag (which said DRIVER 100101 in block letters) before realising that this was kind of stupid. Kicking the driver firmly in its spinal column, Ernest gripped it by the shoulders and both of them spun across the mesh in a tandem barrel-roll cuddle. As they went over Ernest's lost gun he snatched it up, jammed it into the taxi driver's face and fired at zero range. The driver's badly-soldered head burst like a swollen can of Spam, and the ringleader of Hard Reset curled up pathetically and remained still.

  Ernest got to his feet. He was bruised, bloody, and very, very annoyed.

  “Tuesday!” the crimelord yelled, swooning dizzily. His ears were ringing and he could taste copper. “Come on out!”

  “Spug off!” Tuesday yelped from behind an advancing horde of metal and plastic. “I've got bigger problems than you right now!”

  Ernest turned on the spot at the sound of Tuesday's voice. Ignoring Jeeves and the out-of-control siege robot at they blundered about in the background, Ernest repeatedly fired at the group that was blocking Tuesday from view until they were nothing but piles of burning components. Using the burning mound of robot corpses to shield him from Ernest's sharp eyes, Tuesday did a low roadie run and rolled underneath the smoking husk of a small family car, shaking and muttering violently. He didn't notice that flames were beginning to spread from its engine to the front right tire. By the time Ernest had blasted apart the remains of the mechanicals and synthetics that had been blocking his line of sight, Tuesday was nowhere to be seen.

  “Tuesday! Get out here!” Ernest demanded, turning on the spot and flicking his eyes around the room for movement. “For whom the bell tolls, you bastard! It tolls for you! It tolls for you!”

  Tuesday stayed low. He was planning on staying exactly where he was until everything was dead. Unfortunately, this plan lost most of its appeal the moment Tuesday realised his entire head was on fire. Jumping to his feet, screaming in panic and running around as a white streak, Ernest was so surprised by Tuesday's sudden appearance that he almost fell over backwards. Recovering instantly, Ernest angled for a clear shot at Tuesday's left ankle (which would be then be followed up by three dozen shots into his skull at point blank range in true gangster style), but Ernest was somewhat interrupted by an angry robotic siege bot crashing into him like an express train full of coal. Ernest yelped something that had once gotten him kicked out of Sunday School in his distant youth, and his gun went skidding across the concrete until it stopped against a pile of droid chunks.

  This day was proving to be far too cinematic for Ernest’s tastes.

  Tuesday put out his burning locks, and scrabbled for the weapon.

  *

  Sidestepping the last clump of electrified razorwire, Jeeves finally finished climbing to where he wanted to be: the back of the siege bot's neck, directly behind its head. To win this fight, Jeeves was going to have to do something he hated, something that could easily result in him fatally bleeding out in a matter of seconds if he wasn't extremely careful.

  Wrapping his legs around the siege droid's neck and grasping the back of its skull with one hand, Jeeves reached up to carefully remove the two thin retainers he always wore over his rows of large, white teeth. Placing the horseshoe-shaped caps in a breast pocket for safekeeping, Jeeves opened his mouth as wide as it would go and lunged down to chew into the back of the armoured head with a mighty chomp.

  Logically, Jeeves should have smashed out every single tooth on impact and bled like an imbecile. After all, this was bone against metal, and metal always won. However, Jeeves teeth sheared through the armoured skull as easily as a scythe through grain, and all without so much as chipping a single incisor. See, unlike the average Joe on the street, Jeeves' teeth had all been specially treated with the same kind of chemical the military used to put monomolecular edging onto combat knives and mining equipment. Without his protective retainers, there was a serious risk Jeeves would slice off his own tongue if he wasn't careful, so he took the utmost care.

  For the second bite, Jeeves latched onto what was left of the skullcap and pulled away a mouthful of armour plating like ripping a weed from a garden bed. This exposed the shock-resistant innards of the combat bot's skull. Jeeves hammered through the rows of reinforced circuit boards, tore out bunches of wires with his bare hands, and got shoulder-deep into the bot's cranial cavity. Hoping he'd get lucky, Jeeves jammed sparking handfuls of live wires against each other and managed a short circuit. A kickback of electricity flooded through what was left of the siege bot's half-crazed circuits, and clouds of black smoke poured out of every vent and mould line. The soldier juddered violently, making a high pitched error noise, then stopped in total shock. Slowly, gradually, the siege bot began to tip sideways, gathered speed, and fell like a redwood. Hitting the ground with a mighty crash, a cloud of red corrosion, grey dust and black smoke filled the room from end to end, and the siege bot remained very, very still.

  Then again, the robot was military technology, and those sorts of machines were built to survive just about anything. Its arrays of damaged hard-drives repeatedly attempted to recover from the shock, rebooting again and again and again without any luck, but a series of error messages informed the soldier that it would need to do a hard-restart without any BOOT cards installed, completely wipe its operating system, reinstall Linux and try not to void its warranty in the process. This was too much bother at the moment, so the soldier decided that dying might be much more efficient. Its operating system agreed. So, once it had clicked on the I ACCEPT buttons, the siege bot finally died.

  After a dozen still seconds in the choking cloud, Jeeves stirred up the smog by getting back to his feet. Covered in his own blood and black oil, Jeeves waved both arms through the blinding dust to try and clear the air, but he still couldn't see any further than his elbows. His eyes were useless for now. Relying on his exceptional spatial awareness, Jeeves head
ed for the last place he'd seen the one remaining accelerator pistol. Jeeves was immediately distracted by the sound of Ernest making an annoyed noise from the other side of the room, which Jeeves correctly assumed was an order to come and help him to his feet. Although this sort of thing was his job, Jeeves currently saw recovering their only weapon as a more important objective.

  “One minute, Mister Fell,” Jeeves grumbled.

  Reaching the last place he'd seen the gun, Jeeves reached down through the cloud to tap the ground with his slashed-up fingertips.

  It wasn’t there.

  Growling his displeasure, Jeeves wiped the flood of crimson from his eyes, fetched his retainers from his pocket and capped his sharp teeth before marching back for Ernest. The crimelord was back on his feet in a moment, and had no time to give any more orders before Jeeves interrupted him.

  “Someone took the accelerator pistol,” Jeeves snapped. “I couldn't find it.”

  The dust had cleared just enough for Jeeves to be able to see that Ernest had gone pale. “What? Are you sure?”

  Jeeves nodded.

  “I know exactly where it was. It didn't move on its own.”

  Ernest looked back and forth. Everything beyond five metres away was still shrouded.

  “Options?” Jeeves prompted.

  “We get out of here and regroup.” Ernest said, trying to watch for any tell-tale movements in the cloud. “They should be delivering Jim Tuesday to the safehouse any minute now. We'll go back, lure in the son, and finish things. We need to get out of this haze before anyone shoots us in the back...”

  “You have my Dad?”

  Tuesday emerged out of the blur, holding the last remaining accelerator pistol in two shaking hands. Aiming it towards Ernest, Tuesday quickly realised that he was holding it the wrong way around and spun it on his finger. Twisting the dial down to BARBEQUE, he pointed it waveringly at Ernest's crotch.

  “Tell me where my Dad is or your winky is charcoal.”

  Ernest chuckled darkly. “Spug off, Tuesday. Go suck pollution, you slug-chewing penguin biscuit.”

  The word TRANCE appeared in neon red over Ernest's left shoulder. Tuesday swung his pistol towards the shape, but it was already gone. As always, seeing the word TRANCE tickled the back of Tuesday's brain, as though he really, really needed to remember something important, but he didn't know what. As far as he could remember, this was the first time he'd outright hallucinated the word.

  There was a loud clank off to Tuesday's left. Swinging his pistol towards the noise, Tuesday could just barely see that the robotic taxi driver was still operational. It was dragging itself hand over hand, heading for the bank of busted screens and that big, red button. Tuesday swung the gun at Ernest and took a couple of steps backwards to keep a comfortable distance.

  Ernest chuckled.

  “Looks like the toaster is about to do a Hard Reset.” Ernest smiled. “I know you've been associating with the scrap a lot longer than me, so clarify things, would you? Pressing that button will end the world, right? Maybe you might want to do something about that first? We can wait.”

  Tuesday looked unsure. He suddenly aimed at the taxi driver, ready to shoot, but then he noticed that the accelerator pistol's charge count said ONE ROUND. Gaping at the mass driver in total agony, Tuesday realised his situation: with only one shot left, he was dead either way. If he shot the taxi driver, Ernest and Jeeves would tear him to pieces. If he shot Ernest, the taxi driver would end the world, and Jeeves would still have enough time to make fresh haggis out of his internal organs before the robotic uprising wasted humanity. But...

  Tuesday made his choice, and fired.

  Ernest's surprised expression immediately went up in a white curl of flames, followed by his entire face disintegrating into cinders. His ashes violently blew apart in all directions, scattered as a thin powder. Jeeves gaped as the scant remains of his employer slowly settled like light snow. Jeeves looked at Tuesday like he was an imbecile.

  “You chose revenge over billions and billions of lives?” Jeeves asked, aghast.

  “Don't talk to me about lives! He's had it coming for years!” Tuesday yelled, trying to look brave. He decided not to mention that his finger had slipped.

  There was a click as the taxi driver hit the big red button. It collapsed and lay still, its mission completed.

  It was likely dead. It no longer mattered.

  Jeeves grasped his bloodied head with even bloodier hands. Something in his skull had come unhinged.

  “This...this isn't right...heroes don't shoot unarmed bad guys...it goes against the whole concept of good! They're meant to wait until the bad guy draws their weapon, then they turn and shoot them just in time to save the girl…”

  “Girl? What are you talking about?” Tuesday wailed, the gun shaking violently in his hands. “He shot my Mum! You think I forgot? I don't care what you say, I'm going to shoot you! I’m going to kill you!”

  Tuesday fired...but then he remembered that the gun was empty.

  Jeeves just watched as the walls began to shake and cave in like wet paper. It felt as though a huge earthquake was ripping through Seven Suns. For all they knew, it might have been planetwide. At this point, Jeeves would have had every right to scream abuse at Tuesday, to roar about how he'd just killed an entire world, to hammer home that his selfish actions had just damned all of mankind in this sector. Jeeves chose to express himself in a different way.

  Storming forward, Jeeves smacked the useless gun out of Tuesday's hand so hard it broke his wrist. Jeeves wordlessly grabbed Tuesday by the temples with one meaty paw and twisted his neck so hard that Tuesday was able to see his own broken spine in the fraction of a moment that it took for him to die. It happened so quickly that Tuesday didn't even register the pain of his busted wrist.

  Funnily enough, Jeeves death was just as sudden. The last man standing from this all-out brawl only had enough time to turn halfway around before the concrete ceiling imploded beneath a stream of automated traffic. Ripping through the roof like a pneumatic sledgehammer, a solid column of vehicles slammed Jeeves into the mesh floor one after another, crumpling into an ever-expanding ball of plastic, metal, ceramics, glass, laminated cardboard and fibreglass. Jeeves' hand, a slab the size of a baseball glove, was the only part of him that was still poking out of the smouldering wreckage. It twitched once, twice, three times, and then stopped moving forever. He may have been beyond a mere human, but even Jeeves had his limits.

  The entire room fragmented into screeching white static, thousands of colours flashed nonsensically, and then the entire Universe collapsed in an avalanche of code. The strings glittered and fragmented further, forming into one word that was repeated millions of times until it was all that existed:

  TRANCE TRANCE TRANCE TRANCE TRANCE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

  Alistair silently watched all of this unfold: Ernest dissolving to ashes, Tuesday suffering the worst cricked neck of his life, Jeeves twitching his last beneath a mountain of wrecked cars, all of it. Alastair waited patiently for the game to restore itself from the last checkpoint. Rather than displaying the usual “YOU ARE DEAD! REPLAY?” option, the graphics glitched out into a waterfall of broken code which soon coalesced into a single word: TRANCE. The word multiplied itself a million times over and spread out in a shotgun spray until there was nothing else left.

  Alistair removed the visor with long, elegant fingers, and placed the shimmering white headset on a table made of solid gold. Of course, as with everything in this virtual world, placing a visor over his eyes to play an interactive movie (usually just referred to as “Interactives”) was a matter of choice rather than necessity. In much the same way that Alistair chose to look like a High Elf – a tall, lithe creature of grace, dignity and pointy ears wrapped in perfect white robes and gleaming silver chainmail – he used the visor because he liked it, because it felt right. It would be easy enough to transfer the interactive movie direc
tly into his mind as pure code, but just like all the other residents of this place, Alistair had a soft spot for the cyberpunk genre.

  Alistair looked down the golden table that accommodated his many, many guests in high backed thrones. The gilded surface stretched for a good hundred metres across a cavernous hall of ivory stone and heavy crimson curtains lit by a million or so runny candles. The glittering slab of a table had been painstakingly etched with an exact copy of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but it changed to a new setting a couple of minutes before the master of the keep got too bored with it. The AI in this place knew how to keep its masters happy.

  Alistair was currently entertaining a total of two-hundred-and-fifty-five beings, and no two of them were alike. Compared to his exotic guests, the High Elf was almost mundane. There were creatures and characters from all corners of fantasy and science fiction, including a leather-clad Klingon with a corrugated brow, a berserk-looking green-skinned Ork with an axe in one hand and a beer stein in the other, a looming bull-headed Minotaur, a Cyberdyne Systems Model-101 Terminator (with half his face burnt off, one glowing red eye and armed with a shotgun, naturally), a clicking velociraptor, some English git with a a glittering H stuck to his forehead, the “yellow spandex” version of Wolverine, a robed Professor Dumbledore holding the Elder Wand, the Sean Connery interpretation of James Bond in a sharp tux...it was like an after-party for the winners of Best Dressed at Comic-Con. In fact, the only two things these masters had in common with one another was that they were massively endowed in one certain area, and they all looked extremely worried. If you've never witnessed a concerned velociraptor, it's quite a sight.