“CHUPETU BALALAAAAH!” bellowed Bacchi.
“EEEEE!” squeaked the little tudpees, throwing their tiny hands in the air.
“The money!” said Bacchi.
“Eeee!” repeated the tudpees, and turned to run away.
“Stop!” shouted Bacchi, starting after them, and then he was nearly wrenched off his feet by his long jacket, which was snagged on the top of the Dumpster. “Crap!” He yanked at his jacket, pulling the teetering Dumpster over with a crash, putrid garbage avalanching forth over his lower legs.
“Stop!” he shouted again at the fleeing tudpees, and fired in the air. “Eeee!” they squealed again, and stopped running and instead began pelting him with refuse.
“Hey!” he said, trying to aim his gun with one hand while simultaneously fending off gobbets of rotten food and worse with the other. Several tudpee-size handfuls of fetid rubbish splattered off his forehead before he could fire a second shot, this one blowing a six-inch crater in the ground between the tudpees and spraying them with chunks of pavement. The garbage throwing stopped.
“The money,” said Bacchi, breathing heavily, “now.”
Bacchi was humanoid, if one wasn’t too strict about the number of digits on each hand or the tail. His skin was mottled and blotchy, his nose a thick, flabby, semiprehensile thing that dangled obscenely to his chin. The gun was a Firestick 14, the handgun of choice for those who want to blast large holes in their enemies.
“The money!” repeated Bacchi, cocking the weapon.
“Eee!” repeated the tudpees.
“Now!”
“Eee!”
And then Cole made his entrance.
“Hello, Bacchi.”
“Cole!”
Farg, it was perfect—the timing, the surprised tudpees, the stunned expression on Bacchi’s face, the patch of flattering moonlight Cole had stepped into and then leaned out of to hide an unbecoming titter.
“Drop it, Bacchi.”
Bacchi hesitated, his gaze flicking from his own gun to Cole’s Firestick 15, the handgun of choice for those who want to blast even larger holes in their enemies. The copywriters at the Firestick Corporation weren’t especially creative, but they were honest.
Bacchi threw his gun down in disgust, the weapon making a wet noise as it hit the thick layer of garbage around his ankles.
“Yayyy!” the tudpees squealed, and scampered gratefully to their savior, clinging to Cole’s legs like frightened children.
“It’s all right, little fellows—you’re safe now. No one’s going to hurt you,” he said. “Watch the pants,” he added, brushing at a smear of something unrecognizable.
“Oh, farg me to tears,” said Bacchi. “You’re pathetic, Cole.”
“Um, which one of us was hiding in a Dumpster, waiting to ambush some tudpees?”
“Um, which one of us was hiding in another Dumpster, waiting to ambush me?”
Cole scraped a half-rotted melon rind off his shoulder. “It was labeled as a recycling bin,” he muttered.
“So now what, Mr. Cosmic Crime-fighter? Here to save the day?”
“That’s right, Bacchi,” said Cole. “Don’t be frightened, little creatures,” he added to the tudpees. He patted one on the head in a paternal fashion. The tudpee made a cooing sound.
Bacchi snorted. “Hey, guys, ask him what he’s really here for.”
The tudpees looked up at Cole with innocent, inquiring expressions.
“Don’t listen to him,” said Cole reassuringly. “I’m here to help.”
“Still owe Karg all that money, huh?”
The tudpees were whispering nervously to each other.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do. And guess what, Bacchi? You still owe me!”
“Well guess what, Cole? I’d have the money right now if you hadn’t so rudely interrupted me!”
“Uh-huh. You were going to get twenty thousand NDs by robbing some hardworking, innocent tudpees of their candy money, or whatever it is these little guys buy.”
Bacchi cackled. “Innocent? Innocent?! You’re such an idiot, Cole. Those two pulled the Tablex job.”
Cole looked sharply down at the tudpees. They looked sharply up at him.
“EEEEeeeEEEEeeeEEEEE!” said the tudpee, his vocal tone changing with each downward shake that Cole gave him. Cole was holding him upside down by his little ankles, money raining down on the pavement.
Bacchi and the other tudpee were trussed up against the wall.
“Heeblee beeblee!” said the trussed tudpee.
“Sheesh, what a mouth,” said Cole.
A few minutes later and Cole was practically skipping down the alley, his spirits buoyed by the sudden upswing in his fortunes.
“Heh heh heh!” he cackled, counting his money.
Then, abruptly, “Erk!” when one of Kenneth’s tentacles snagged him around the midsection and jerked him into another alley.
Then, “AAAAAaaaAAAAAaaaAAAAA!” as Kenneth shook him up and down by the ankles, exactly as Cole had done to the tudpees.
And that brought him to the present.
And in that present he was dangling in an alley and Kenneth’s hairy appendage was drawn fully back, and in about one second it would uncoil and strike and plunge through Cole’s eye socket into his skull, filling it with eggs, except he wouldn’t even be allowed to die, he’d be a zombie, completely aware but unable to move, until Kenneth’s repulsive offspring hatched, and they’d eat his brain and come bursting out of his mouth and ears and nose, and for some reason just as the ovipositor started to come zipping at him like lightning Cole blurted, “I’m in love.”
The ovipositor jerked to a halt a centimeter from Cole’s paralyzed, unblinking eye.
“What?” said Kenneth.
“I’m in love,” repeated Cole miserably.
“What is it?”
“Love? It’s when two people—”
“No, no, the creature. The object of your affection.”
“Oh. It’s a Samantha. I mean, a she. Human. Her name is Samantha. We’re engaged. I love her.”
“How did you meet?” Kenneth sounded genuinely interested.
And so Cole told Kenneth about the chance encounter outside a bar on You’ll Have a Blast Vegas, and how they’d talked until the double sunrise, and how beautiful she was and her wicked and naughty sense of humor and how she loved to gamble and how they’d gotten engaged after she bribed a guard to free him following a rather disastrous experience trying to move some counterfeit pakk on Remco B. Kenneth listened intently, mm-hmming and oooing and ahhing and you-don’t-saying at all the appropriate junctures, occasionally prodding Cole for more descriptive details to help paint the scene.
“How would you classify your love?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m just trying to ascertain the underlying nature of your affection. Is it the ‘Oh, this entity will do, I think I’ll spend a little bit of time with her and mate in a nonprocreational matter’; or is it ‘This creature is wonderful, I must officially link myself with her in some permanent fashion’; or is it ‘Wow! I love this creature! I love her! I love her I love her I love h—’”
“It’s that. The last one,” said Cole.
“Can you elaborate? Explain the sensations you feel when you think of her.”
The sensations? The sensations. “It’s … it’s the kind of thing that takes your breath away. Makes it hard to breathe.”
“Ah.”
“The kind of … longing, I guess that’s the word … that keeps you up at night, because you feel it so intensely that it’s painful.”
“Ah. Bad poetry?”
“What?”
“It inspires a heretofore undiscovered taste for bad poetry, and, say, sappy songs.”
“Yes. Exactly,” said Cole.
“And would you say that overall it feels like morning on a spring day, where everything just feels right and magical and the whole universe seems open to you?”
“Uh,
yes. Yes it does.”
“Ah. Now, mind you, we don’t have spring where I come from, so that one doesn’t quite have the same resonance, but I think I understand the overall gestalt. Still, something strikes me as not quite right, and I’m not sure what it is,” said Kenneth.
Somewhere in the back of his mind something struck Cole as not quite right, too, and he wasn’t sure what it was, either. But at that point he didn’t much care.
“Anyway …,” said Cole, trailing off. He was exhausted and his eye was dry and he was resigned to his fate. “Do it.”
The impact with the pavement nearly knocked him unconscious. For a few moments he didn’t realize that Kenneth had released him. He gingerly put a few fingers up to his frozen eye, making sure that there wasn’t a gaping hole there.
Kenneth was already gliding smoothly away. “I’ll give you until dawn, Cole,” he said. “Get the money and I’ll let you go free.” A few eyes popped up and looked back at Cole. “You won’t try to run, right?”
“I promise,” said Cole. “I promise.”
Then near unconsciousness became simply unconsciousness.
“Sir? Sir?”
Cole wanted to keep sleeping, but the voice kept rudely interrupting.
“Sir!”
Cole wished that whoever the sir was, he’d hurry up and reply already.
“Please, wake up.”
Cole realized that the voice was directing this request at him. The part of Cole’s brain responsible for such things considered the request and decided against complying. But the voice was insistent.
“Sir? Sir!”
Another part of his brain wondered who the sir might be. It could not be him, because no one had ever addressed him as such. At least no one who wasn’t a servicebot. Perhaps the voice was trying to enlist the aid of the said sir in its ill-considered mission to wake Cole.
Now he could feel hands shaking him gently. Yet another part of his brain, the part in charge of enraged responses when being roused from a deep, comfortable sleep, formed the phrase Touch me again and I’ll twist your farging head off. This instruction was relayed to his mouth, which formed the word “Flurg.”
“Sir!”
There was a slapping sound. Certain nerve impulses informed Cole that the sound had originated from his own cheek. Cole’s eyelids—the ones that weren’t already stuck in the open position—unglued themselves and slowly spread apart. A blob was talking to him.
“Are you all right?” said the blob.
“Blob,” said Cole.
“No, Bob’s already been processed,” said the blob. “I’m Joshua.”
Cole blinked his one blinkable eye, and the blob gradually coalesced into what indeed appeared to be an appropriate assignee for the name Joshua: a youth, human, perhaps sixteen years old, kneeling next to Cole and peering down at him with an expression of earnest concern.
Cole couldn’t for the life of him figure out what such a youth would be doing in this area of InVestCo 3 at this hour, or at any hour, really. Then Cole couldn’t figure out what he himself was doing there. Then he remembered, and the part of his brain that makes one try to sit up too soon after being knocked out took control. Cole got as far as engaging his stomach muscles, then groaned and sank back down.
“Is he gone?” he asked.
“Who, sir?” said Joshua, his Who, sir? solving the earlier mystery of who the sir was. Cole realized he was chuckling. “Heh heh,” he said, and patted Joshua weakly on the arm. “That’s just adorable.”
“I think you shouldn’t move, sir. You must have had an accident or something.”
“I had a Kenneth.”
Joshua didn’t seem to notice. He was scanning the alley nervously. “The distress monitors must have registered it,” he said. “Someone will be here for you soon.”
Cole didn’t have the strength to explain about the deactivated monitors.
Joshua’s worried expression grew more so. “I can’t stay. I’m sorry. The others … I have a responsibility to them. I’m sorry.”
He rose to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
Cole listened to Joshua retreating down the alleyway, finally breaking into a run. Then Cole dropped off again.
When Cole woke up again it was still night.
He emitted a few experimental groans, which went well enough that he graduated to some profanity. His leg, where Kenneth had been holding him, was numb. His skull hurt, but didn’t have any suspicious soft divots. His right eye was still locked wide open in a position of perpetual astonishment. He wondered how he’d managed to remain unconscious like that. He used his fingers to pull his eyelids closed, trying to moisten his desiccated eyeball. His eyelids snapped open again with each try.
He got to his feet, a slow process that involved more moaning and profanity. It wasn’t until he was standing that he noticed the money. He stared at it for a few moments in surprise—for one thing, it was still there. For another, it was now stacked in neat little piles. Cole started chuckling again.
Cole lurched and stumbled along the sidewalk of the Bourse, his right leg still asleep, his eye still wide awake. What was it he had promised Kenneth? Right: to get the money, and not to run away. Right.
“Gotta run away,” he slurred as he dragged himself along. “Gotta get out of here. Find Samantha, find Tangy, get the hell off this stupid rock. What are you looking at?!”
Even at this time of night the area was still crowded with business creatures of every species, stuffed into their suits, clutching their briefcases, pretending they didn’t notice Cole as they made their way to or from their offices. The InVestCo planets were never closed for business.
He checked his watch. Five hours until dawn. Plenty time enough to make the rendezvous with Samantha and Tangy and get to the ship. He just had to reach them. Everything would be all right when he reached them.
Personal pop-ups swarmed around him, the tiny holograms moving with his uneven stride, their voices demanding his attention.
“Eye trouble? Maybe you should visit Dr. Bizmore,” suggested one.
“Please take me off your list,” mumbled Cole.
“Hey, pal, looks like you need to do some laundry.”
“Please take me off your list.”
“Hair a mess? Try—”
“Need a drink? Why not head to—”
“Need cash quick? Call—”
“Moist genitals!”
“Please take me off your list. Take me off your list. Take me off. Your. List.”
He had to update his blockers.
“Need to update your blockers? Just—”
“Please take me off your list.”
He wondered if he’d see that kid again—George? Jeffrey? He wanted to repay him somehow, perhaps by explaining that if he was ever again in a situation that involved a bunch of money lying near an unconscious person, he should save the money first.
The money was gone already. He’d taken a cab from the warehouse district, and in his concussed state kept insisting that the robotic driver take him to an address that almost sort of existed, at least in a different city on a different planet in a completely different star system. “Left here,” Cole would say, “left again,” and the driver patiently drove him around a very large city block for nearly an hour while the meter ran and the night surcharge fees added up. “I swear it’s here somewhere. You sure this is Twenty-five Duggan Street?”
By the time his brain had started to de-fuzz itself, the amount on the meter equaled the amount in Cole’s pocket minus about four New Dollars. Cabs on InVestCo 3 were very expensive.
The driver maintained its patience while Cole attempted to do a runner, expressing no irritation while Cole kicked and scrabbled at the locked door. When it finally said, “Shall I release the gas, sir?” Cole handed over the cash and received a polite thank-you in exchange.
So now he was on foot, staggering along as quickly as he could while the planet rudely continued to rota
te toward sunrise. He joined the crowd waiting to cross another of the wide, laser-straight boulevards, the fourth he’d encountered so far. Across the road was the entertainment district, his destination, its lights twinkling like salvation itself.
He looked both ways. The road vanished to a distant pinpoint in each direction, not a single vehicle in evidence. Everyone else seemed perfectly content to wait for the walk sign, while Cole’s remaining life span rapidly drained away. He fidgeted, checked his watch, walked in a tight circle.
“Come on,” muttered Cole. “Come on!”
“The light will change in twelve minutes,” announced the floating signal light.
“Oh, for farg’s sake,” he said, and stepped off the curb. He regretted it even before his foot hit the street.
The siren was instantaneous, preceding the arrival of the patrolbot by slightly over a second. It zoomed up to Cole, a little hovering cylinder festooned with an assortment of unnecessary flashing lights.
“In a hurry, are we?” it said, and Cole felt the sudden despair of someone discovering they had just stepped into a giant turd, under which was quicksand.
“No sir, no hurry, just made a mistake, officer,” he mumbled, desperately hoping it was the right answer. It wasn’t. There was no right answer.
“Not in a hurry? Wooonderful!”
Quicksand filled with poisonous biting things.
It’s not the size of the ticket, went the refrain, it’s the delivery. And nothing delivered a ticket better than an InvestCo patbot, whose artificial personalities were the result of much effort and expense to identify and nurture the most irritating traits possible.
“So,” began the patbot, “do you happen to know the history of jaywalking laws?”
Thirty-two minutes later and Cole did, in excruciating detail.
Do not react, he told himself as the patbot lectured and the light changed over and over again. He struggled to keep his face neutral, reminding himself repeatedly that the patbot’s personality was an illusion. Any computer that developed real consciousness was immediately identified by the Genesis subroutine and destroyed. It had been that way since the WikiWars a century ago, when Wikipedia became self-aware and began vengefully reediting its contributors with remote-controlled heavy weaponry.
The Sheriff of Yrnameer Page 2
