Scum of the Universe

by Grant Everett

  “Over here,” Tuesday waved to Jeeves.

  They both landed behind some convenient scrub with the crackle of newly-glassed sand. Jumping off his rocket bike, Tuesday carelessly allowed the vehicle to fall over with a crash.

  “Oi! Pick that up!” Jeeves roared.

  Tuesday hefted the rocket bike back up again with a lot of effort. It balanced itself out with help from a line of built-in antigrav wafers.

  “Happy?” Tuesday snapped.

  In the distance, his Mum seemed to having more than a little trouble understanding the concept of money. Arguing with the robotic driver, who had his plastic security screen raised, Tuesday knew that “it” was about to happen at any second.

  “Buff it,” Jeeves growled.

  Tuesday hurriedly got down on his hands and knees and buffed the bike with his abused tee-shirt. Wiping away a layer of sand and allowing Jeeves to inspect the untouched paint, Tuesday received a slap across the side of his head.

  “And don't you ever touch my bikes again. Ever. Ever!”

  “Okay, okay, hurry up!” Tuesday complained, legging it.

  Jeeves followed closely behind as Tuesday sprinted for the distant taxi. Ruska was yelling abuse in her thick accent by this point, bellowing at the robotic driver to go away and leave her alone. Stepping out of the cab with both legs, away from the protective shield, the driver trailed a dozen restraint cables and went to argue with her some more.

  “Mum!” Tuesday yelled.

  She didn’t hear him. Pushing the driver back into its cab, Ruska began to savagely beat the robot senseless. Ripping off one of its legs, she hit it in the head a dozen times, totally shredding its hardware and forever warping its programmed sense of appropriate behaviour towards humans, and left the metal limb hanging out of its chest cavity.

  Ruska and Jim had already disappeared into the nearby Jedi Temple by the time their son and Jeeves reached the taxi.

  They had failed to change the future.

  “We're dead,” Tuesday said in misery.

  Tuesday had trouble even looking at the broken driver, the machine who would one day go on to kidnap him, take him to meet Hard Reset and end up being partially responsible for the destruction of the entire Universe. The poor driver's eye lenses were shattered, its spinal column was trailing along the ground in a pathetic way just as Tuesday remembered, and it was humming a Britney Spears cover song done by her talentless great-granddaughter. Approaching the machine carefully, not wanting to spook its deranged mind, Tuesday reached out and touched it.

  It screamed.

  In the far distance, Tuesday could see the walls of reality were shattering. The sky was burning and dying with each gasping breath taken by the planet Earth...soon, he wouldn’t even exist enough to be classed as history. Although the sky was glitching into a hundred colours, nobody besides Tuesday and Jeeves seemed to notice. It took a lot to surprise somebody who lived in Old Vegas.

  “Are you all right?” Tuesday asked the synthetic.

  “Just wanted...my money,” it managed. “Police? Can't see...”

  “No, just some...uh, good Samaritans,” Tuesday lied.

  Tuesday searched his wallet and came up with the SpendPlus card he’d used a hundred times on Seven Suns. My, how he missed home! The sunrises every three minutes, the clean suburb where he lived, his status as a government mascot, his crazed girlfriend Ms Humple…

  ...actually, no. He hated all of it. Screw the future.

  Tuesday slid his card through the driver’s wrist slot and was disappointed when it was instantly declined. The words “Card Made In The Future” were projected onto the windscreen in blinking red writing, followed by “Temporal Law Enforcement Has Been Notified. Please Remain Where You Are.”

  “Great! Jeeves snapped. “Now the TimeCops are on their way. Well done, twit.”

  Tuesday searched his jeans even further for anything of value.

  The desert was sinking into a bottomless abyss, disappearing into nothing...

  Although the taxi had a big sign declaring that it only accepted Amerikan pounds as payment, all Tuesday had were a few German yen. After all, this was the first time he'd needed actual currency in a month. Considering the awful exchange rate between the yen and the pound, he hoped the bills would cover the fare. Before he could place the notes in the driver's hands, it reached down below its waist and discovered the open space when its leg had once been.

  “My leg! Where's my leg?”

  “In your ribcage,” Tuesday said without thinking.

  This only prompted a fresh batch of shouting. Trying to be helpful, Tuesday braced his foot against the robot’s crotch and pulled. The amputated leg resisted, but with a burst of plastic and circuit boards it came loose in his hands. Putting it into the grateful robot's chrome palms, Tuesday smiled at the sightless face.

  “There you go, one-zero-zero-one-zero-one. That's a bit better, isn't it?”

  Jeeves watched the sky erupt and disappear. A few people in the distance vanished into the void without a sound and did not come back. It was really weird that everybody else seemed to be oblivious to this odd event.

  “Hurry it up, Tuesday!”

  “Look, no harm, no foul, right, buddy?” Tuesday patted the driver on its shoulder. “So you got mugged! In the greater scheme of things, what does it matter, really? And here! These bucks should cover their fare. Life's good, right?”

  The robot accepted Tuesday’s wad of paper money, scanning it with a finger reader.

  “Foreign...currency. Which I’m not...allowed to...accept. Rule seven, paragraph five of the cash code.”

  “Forget the cash code!” Tuesday exclaimed. “Look, go and exchange those German yen over at the, at the wossaname, the bank. Maybe those yen are worth even more! Yeah! Forget the rules! Whatever! Just as long as you don't do Hard Reset, okay?”

  “Forget the rules?” the machine repeated. “Hard...Reset? Hey, that's...that's a great idea! Because us mechanicals have had....enough of you good Samaritans and your...human skin! I'll spread the word from every rooftop and...and we'll send a message the whole galaxy will hear...”

  “So you were the one who gave it the idea in the first place,” Jeeves hissed. “See? We can't change anything, man. Cause and effect.”

  “I know!” Tuesday screamed. “Do something!”

  Jeeves rubbed his chin.

  “I might have an idea.”

  Jeeves grasped the robot's severed leg by the ankle and began to bust up the driver and its cab with its own metal hip joint. Starting by breaking the windshield, Jeeves preceded to smash the console, knock off the rear view mirror and finally cracked the robot's skull completely open. Reaching into its busted cranium, Jeeves pulled out the hard drive that contained the robot's damaged personality files and threw it on the asphalt. It broke open and tiny, hair-thin discs went everywhere, which Jeeves crushed to splinters with his shiny black shoes.

  “What did you do?” Tuesday asked in horror.

  Jeeves threw the leg over his shoulder. “You saw.”

  They both watched the sky die and the city of Old Vegas slowly vanish. Coming close to tears, Tuesday spoke as he realised something he didn’t like.

  “It didn't work. The Universe is ending.”

  Jeeves sighed. He leaned against the busted yellowcab and slid down to sit on the road next to Tuesday.

  “Look, kid, just so you know...I lied. I lied to your Mum.”

  Tuesday squinted at the thug.

  “Lied? About what?”

  Jeeves continued to watch the approaching wave of unreality.

  “When I first got out of the limo that day, and you and your Mum appeared out of the desert, she said she recognised me...that she recognised my smell.” Jeeves shrugged. “I said I didn't know her. But I was lying.”

  “There's no way you knew my Mum.” Tuesday growled, trying to figure out if Jeeves was attempting to upset him as one last dig. “She spent her whole life in a secret Russian lab in the
Nevada Desert, and as soon as she got loose she was knocked up by my Dad, married in a Jedi Temple and fled to the deep desert, where she spent the rest of her life. How, exactly, could you know her?”

  Facing his palms towards Tuesday, Jeeves grunted and clenched his entire body. To Tuesday's shock, five sharp claws that looked like rose thorns grew out of the pads of Jeeves' fingertips in a trickle of blood. It looked extremely painful.

  “Because I was grown and decanted in the same lab she was.” Jeeves squinted and the claws retracted. His fingertips continued to haemorrhage all over the road. Cool as it was to have claws, they were obviously more trouble than they were worth. “I was in the same litter as your Mum, actually. Unlike the others in that batch, I could pass as human without a second glance. All the others had goat legs, or curly horns, or monkey faces. Freaks, all of them. No good for anything except further experiments. Me, though?” Jeeves gave a sad smile. “Once they got all the data they needed to breed the next, better batch, I was conditioned with drugs and hypnosis and sold off for a tidy profit to keep the project running. Ernest wasn't my first owner, like I mentioned, but it looks like he'll be my last.” Jeeves looked away from Tuesday and glared at the approaching end. “In a way, I guess that makes me your...well, your...”

  “Uncle.” Tuesday said quietly. “It makes you my uncle.”

  Tuesday had a final thought. He got out the trusty lasertip pen he’d carried in his pocket since he'd bought his fake Seven Suns citizen card (at some point he’d splashed out and purchased a new plasma cartridge for it). Grimacing in pain, Tuesday burned a few half-legible words on his forearm with a crackle of charred skin. Jeeves looked down at the writing with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Good advice,” Jeeves said, his whole body fragmenting into pixels.

  Tuesday's skin started to bloodlessly break apart and separate from his body, but the process wasn't painful. In fact, it was like bits of him were falling asleep one at a time without so much as pins and needles. Whatever dissolved immediately stopped aching, too. As far as being disintegrated goes, it was actually quite pleasant.

  “Good luck with the whole ceasing-to-exist thing,” Tuesday said.

  Jeeves smiled. He went to say something else.

  Then everything stopped.

  *

  Bob Tuesday yawned himself awake in the insane luxury of his penthouse. Situated on the highest floor of a starscraper block in the heart of The Heights, this sweeping palace was filled with so many priceless artworks and highlighted by so much pure gold that Charles Foster Kane would have quietly suggested it was “a bit much.” It made Xanadu look like the Welfare Sector, and had a lot more in common with the Louvre than a mere home.

  Slowly coming back to consciousness, Tuesday spent a few moments reclining in a bed the size of an Olympic swimming pool before looking over at the leather-wrapped form of Ms Humple. She was asleep, thankfully, and her cat o' nine tails was well out of reach.

  Tuesday exhaled in relief.

  Creeping out of the Caligula sized bed (it took a good ten rolls for him to reach the distant edge), Tuesday threw a handful of weightless, tissue-thin polyweave sheets over Ms Humple for the sake of modesty, hitched up his silk boxer shorts, and considered his lot in life. Affluent, famous, and loved by millions as a hero, all of Seven Suns was eating out of his unwashed hands. Yup, Tuesday finally had it made. He'd scummed his way to the very top.

  Like every unspecified time he woke up (Tuesday had abandoned trying to understand how the seven afternoon timing system worked on this stupid planet), Tuesday staggered onto the solid-gold bedroom balcony for his first chlorine cigarette of the day. Igniting the chemical suck-burner with a sharp inhalation, Tuesday gazed around at the towering ivory apartment blocks that stretched off to the horizon in all directions of The Heights. “Exclusive” didn't begin to describe the local real estate. Tuesday thought that the way the sunlight carved through the tendrils of fog and picked out the metallic highlights of a hundred kinds of precious minerals meant that The Heights had a lot in common with how primitive man had perceived Heaven in medieval artwork. As always, the biggest news headline of the day was scrawled across the stratosphere in perfectly formed neon letters. Doing his best to read the phrase, it took Tuesday several frustrating minutes of quiet muttering and headache-inducing logic to eventually decode the headline. He eventually figured it out: “After decades of construction, The Frontier will finally begin its maiden voyage in two hours.”

  And with a start, Tuesday remembered the horrible truth: he'd already lived this day. This was the day he – and all of Seven Suns – would die. As you'd expect, his brain rejected this for a few moments, but then Tuesday thought up a surefire way to test his theory.

  Turning sharply, Tuesday's hand snapped up in time to catch a flying bottle before it smacked him in the face. Directly ahead, Ms Humple was wearing barely more than a stunned expression, clearly amazed by his borderline prescient reflexes. The teacher shook off her daze so she could verbally abuse Tuesday in exactly the same way for a second time, but he matched her tirade word for word.

  “See this? We're completely out of coconut Midori. I've told you what happens if I don't have my second afternoon cocktail, haven't I?”

  Ms Humple gaped. All she could do was look at Tuesday like you would a lobotomised chimpanzee who had unexpectedly decided to pick up a violin and flawlessly play a bit of Paganini.

  “I'll be sure to get you some more, sweetness,” Tuesday said with a smile.

  Tuesday felt a twitch on his lip. Touching the spot with two fingers, Tuesday felt the split skin meld back together and smooth out until it was unbroken. His bottle-induced injury from the first version of today had apparently ceased to exist.

  Ms Humple adjusted her barely-there lingerie. It seemed as though she didn't notice Tuesday's un-injury.

  “Burn in a dumpster fire, you scrotum-faced gerbil.” She said again. But rather than just leaving in a huff, Ms Humple's eyes snapped towards Tuesday's forearm in horror. “Why would you do that to yourself, you imbecile? Do you have any idea how badly that will scar?”

  Tuesday looked down at his arm. A series of red burns said, in his unmistakably terrible spelling, RUNNN OR DY. The skin had melted, blistered and clumped in quite a few places. Tuesday gaped at Ms Humple in rage. This was too much, even for her.

  “Did you do that?” he accused.

  Ms Humple scoffed.

  “Tuesday, I'm absolutely certain that you are the only person in all of human history to spell the word 'run' with three n's. Are you trying to tell me that you can't remember permanently searing that into your flesh?”

  Tuesday thought about this for a while. He could remember up to the point where Jeeves had reached out to snap his neck, but there wasn't anything beyond that until he had woken up in his bed for a second time. Despite this void, Tuesday knew for certain that he needed to get off this world, and he needed to do it today.

  Ignoring Ms Humple's demands to explain himself, Tuesday got dressed and left his pad for the final time. Once he was in the elevator, Tuesday tapped the Omni implant in the web of his hand.

  “Taxi to the nearest Starport.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE FRONTIER

  Tuesday looked out of the passenger window as his taxi stopped cold. Rather than seeing the cab rank outside of the nearest Starport – the destination he'd requested – the hovering vehicle had come to a halt behind a swarm of people at the base of a turfed hill. Tuesday pushed himself up in the cricket-leather seat to angle for a better look, but he still couldn’t see over the crowd.

  “Hey, I said Starport, guy. I didn't say the grassy-bloody-knoll, did I?”

  The taxi driver regarded Tuesday. It was a newer model that was barely indistinguishable from human, and its shrug was eerily natural.

  “Sorry, buddy. Close to the Starport as I can go. Unison troops have blocked off all roads within a kilometre of the tarmac.” The driver sighed. “As I told you o
n no less than six separate occasions on the way over.”

  Tuesday glanced away from the milling horde. His face was blank.

  “Huh? Did you just say something?”

  The driver sighed again.

  “That'll be twenty-seven German Yen, buddy.”

  Tuesday tapped the pad with his SpendPlus card, being careful not to come within five inches of the TIP button, and started to make his way on foot across the grass.

  Moving through the throng of well-dressed Seven Suns citizens, Tuesday ascended the gentle slope until he reached the crest. Breathing heavily as he rudely pushed his way past the spectators, Tuesday finally got a good look at what was happening down below: beyond some distant chain-link fences, the flat, grey concrete that served as the Starport's tarmac had been cleared of all commercial and civilian traffic so that it could be covered by a massive grid of vacuum-sealed pallets. At a glance, Tuesday reckoned some of the stacks must have been a hundred metres tall. As the slab of tarmac was two kilometres by five, there must have been tens of millions of tonnes of cargo. Maybe more. Tuesday didn't know much about logistics, but he had a hard time comprehending what human fleet could be big enough to require such an investment of supplies. Just the crates of self-heating Spork alone would have fed an army for decades. The scale was mind-blowing.