Standing precariously on the top, I remembered that I didn’t have any tools. I tried to peer over my toes to get a look at the screw I had to remove. No dice; I couldn’t see it at this angle. I used one of my handy vines to wrap the crossbar of the gong’s frame and lower myself down. At this point, I was hanging level with it. I had eyeballed the size of the thing correctly—it really was as big as my fist…so big that it would have been hard to budge it even with an enormous screwdriver.
Giant Gild looked like he was only about a block away. It was time to improvise. I tore the metal POGO logo from the sleeve of my uniform. It wasn’t the ideal size, but the thickness was pretty close. I jammed it in the slot of the screw and tried to turn. It wouldn’t budge. I strained every muscle, pushing up on one end and down on the other, struggling to turn it even a little. Gods on a rowboat! Was this really how it would all end? After this odyssey of strangeness, after all the bridges I’d burned and drugs I’d abused, to fail because I couldn’t turn a screw. And what a failure! Everyone would burn because of me. The bombs would crisscross over Provisian and Kargivian skies like colonies of polyamorous insects. We would die in droves. The world was ending, and it was my fault.
The screw turned the tiniest bit. I was shaking, but I strengthened my grip and kept turning. I got one rotation, two, three… Gild was plainly in sight now. He raised his scepter to the heavens, and gripped it like a bat. How many more times did I have to turn it? How many more would I be able to? My hands were burning, the toughness of my bark notwithstanding. My vine harness snapped, dropping me to the base of the gong in a heap, knocking the wind out of me. “No…” I tried to gasp, but my lungs were empty. My bent POGO screwdriver rolled on its edge past the frame of the gong, over the side of the building.
All was lost. Impact was coming. I desperately pushed myself away from the gong, so I wouldn’t be near it when it got hammered. I braced myself for a terrible sound that would herald the end of the world as I knew it. There was a forceful gust as the scepter swung towards its target. No sound. I opened my eyes, got to my feet by bracing myself on the building’s railing. The gong was sailing through the air. I hadn’t removed the screw, but I had loosened it. It had become a target, a tin can that went flying after being hit by a bullet. It was heading for the poisonous purple sea.
Giant Gild rested the scepter over one shoulder and surveyed the progress of the gong as it travelled through the sky, as if he had intended to send it airborne and was admiring the force of his drive. The man had a good instinct for P.R.; you had to give him that.
“I have banished the gong! There will be no war with Kargivia! I will put Provisia first and protect us all!” Far below, the crowd of automatons began their pre-recorded cheering, and then dispersed. My wind was coming back to me, and I was breathing relief. My blood felt as if it had turned to some magical elixir in my veins. I could not remember the last time I had felt such happiness and relief.
Then I felt something tug at the fabric of my suit. I thought that it had to be a cramp from the stress and exertion, but I was lifted off the top of the building. My heart climbed into my throat, as if preparing to jump and put an end to it all. The Giant Gild had grabbed me.
7
The fingers of his gauntlet pinched the back of my egonaut suit with distaste, and he regarded me like a loathsome bug, scorching me with his countenance. I closed my eyes against the brightness and heat. I didn’t feel any fear, only hatred for this tiny man that thought he was so big, this phony colossus with a gaping void instead of a soul. There was a pitch and yaw as if he had stumbled. I got the feeling that he had sensed my hatred.
He was running now, through the streets of his toy city. He hurled me through the air, and I flipped over and over in a freefall. At last, the skyline stopped spinning, and I got my bearings as I fell toward the earth. I was heading straight for the pus-filled crater where the casino had disappeared into the memory sinkhole. I hit the surface before my life had time to flash before my eyes. It rippled with the impact, and then tore under my weight. It wasn’t a liquid at all, but a greasy solid surface like a boil. I was falling in, the skin breaking off as I tried to cling to it.
Falling in the daylight from a great height is bad, but falling into a pit as the light recedes like the opening of a tunnel is worse. You don’t know how far you’ll fall or when you’ll hit the bottom. It was time to see if my vines could save me again—I shot them out and was able to slow my fall, the vines clinging to a series of rocky ledges and finding new purchase when my weight tore them loose. I landed hard at the bottom.
I was in a faint pool of light—apparently my suit had emergency light-emitting piping on the chest that would activate in darkness. Great. Now I was only figuratively in the dark. Was the mission complete? What the hell was I supposed to do now?
Walking along the bottom of the pit, I found that I had entered a vast network of caverns. My best bet would be to hug one of the walls and follow it until I found an exit. No help was on the way. I crept towards the nearest wall, and stopped.
The walls of this place were lined with dead automatons, suspended in the rock like fossils. Their faces were caked with grime, their orbicular eyes without the spark of their programming. Up ahead, I detected movement and crept up to what looked like a stone pile. In the dim light, sightless blue vultures were gnawing the eyeballs out of the discarded dummies, cawing to each other in commiseration.
These weren’t caverns, they were catacombs. I was in a vast necropolis that must stretch under the city in every direction. I shouldn’t have been surprised. For Gild, there were only two types of people, those who adored and admired him and those who refused. In the end, the people he stepped on were just added to the foundations of his empire, as faceless and unimportant as everyone else.
One of the vultures cocked its hideous head, as if considering expanding its horizons from carrion to living prey. Just because it didn’t have eyes didn’t mean it couldn’t sense me. I stepped back. The lights from my suit seemed to get brighter, and I had the terrible feeling that they were just about to fuse out.
8
But they didn’t. For whatever reason, the EgoCone returned me to physical reality at that moment. I was nestled safely inside. Maybe it decided that my work was done after the gong burned up in the sea of purple. I unbuckled my straps and opened the hatch. I closed it again, resting my hand on the surface of the cone and breathing heavily.
I thought back to the last time that my paths had crossed with Gild. It was the story I had been assigned to cover with Robert Wolfram. Gods, how I had blown it. With my lyrical style and investigative skills, and Wolfram’s meticulous reference-checking and willingness to do his homework, we could have broken a story that would have brought down that evil fucker years ago. We could have knocked that cheap conniving bastard down before he could ever hope to mount the presidential throne. And instead I was winning money, getting laid.
I felt a putrid mushroom blooming near my sternum, and I vomited all over the cone. I’ve yakked my share when pounding down meta-human amounts of Elven Vodka and Rumble Rum, but this was the first time I had ever thrown up out of sheer shame.
I wiped my mouth and took off my egonaut suit. It was time to change back into my dorky tourist clothes. My disguise ring was no longer working. I’d have to see if there was anything I could do to boost its capacity and get some more use out of it. Before I left, I had another look at the puke-covered cone. With any luck, the feds would see this as some kind of throw-up coated dunce cap, an artistic statement on the current administration. It didn’t matter. I was leaving this place and never coming back.
I got into the elevator, and started heading away from L wing and towards the exit. I stepped out. “Target spotted. Elevator off floor one. Request backup.” I broke into a run. I had been spotted by Arcane Agents. Shit. I was putting in some good footwork, which adrenaline will do for you, but there was no way I was going to be able to escape. These guys were big, but
they earned their bread chasing down would-be assassins and intruders. I saw the door as I rounded the next turn. I now had a gaggle of spectators, Gild supporters waiting for the next tour.
I was tackled from behind, my arms pinned behind me. “Suspect detained. We’ll escort him to the interrogation room.” Gild’s fans watched as they led me away. For a moment, they looked just like the sad little robots in the President’s mind. They watched and saw. They were glad that a strange man who might be a threat to their savior was being led away. The only purpose and glory they had in their small lives were reflections of Gild’s prestige.
When we were out of earshot, one of the agents started whispering to me. “Good work, Mr. Cromwell. Mission accomplished. A few minutes ago, the President said, quote: ‘No one’s going to war with the Kargivians. OK? No war. War’s not what we need, it’s not what we’re going to have. Rumors of war are fake news spread by the Levellers.’ End quote.”
I suppressed a grin, in case there were any tourists or reporters around. I imagined Gild’s press secretary and chief of staff scrambling to adjust to this new turn of events. No doubt they’d never know that he had changed his mind because a man who looked like a tree hopped into his brain and burned up a gong in some purple acid.
“TRASH JUNCTION SHOWDOWN”
1
I smacked the service bell repeatedly. “Owlish!” I roared. “What’s the use of a gimp-pulley if you’re not going to use it?” I drummed my fingers, then sighed. He would come when he would come, though if the bastard kept me waiting much longer, I would have to worry that the disguise ring was so valuable that he had absconded with it and not even bothered to sell the shop.
I occupied myself by studying the Owl Hutch. It felt like years since I had visited, though it was easily one of my favorite stores. Owlish was a cross between a weapons dealer, a pawnbroker, and an electronics expert. The Owl Hutch also doubled as a headshop when he was off the wagon and living even harder than I did.
Owlish’s disability had led to a very interesting layout. From the street, the Owl Hutch looked like it was only one floor, but it zigzagged down about three levels. All the shelves ran at diagonals, with dividers here and there to keep his gear and gadgets from tumbling into a disheveled heap at the bottom. He would use the pulley to reel himself up along the shelves on his platform, grabbing what he needed.
It was time to hop the counter and find him. The wall space that wasn’t covered with slanting shelves of bugs, signal jammers, shell casings, smoke grenades, and the like was plastered with conspiracy theory paraphernalia and posters. One poster had the logos of about a hundred different secret societies and elite fraternities. “Know your enemies,” read a slogan at the bottom. I was amused to see that while the Dry Men figured prominently, the Ignobles were nowhere to be seen. I squinted at it. Who even were these other people? Were they still active? Did they have actual power or just pretensions of it? Did Owlish and men like him bother to ask these questions?
News clippings and a network of twine and pins featured some of my recent missions, which Owlish seemed eager to misinterpret. The ‘revelations’ about Crystal Crowne spoke to the Dry Men plan to eliminate all gender boundaries, and the destruction of the Adrenochrome shipment was a warning shot to keep the celebrities in check. Without the vampiric power of the chemical, they would lose their looks to age like everyone else. What a load of heepshit. Another poster juxtaposed images of disasters from movies and television shows with actual photos of disasters. “Predictive programming.” The poster read. “Know it when you see it.” I was coming to the bottom of the shop, where Owlish was studying the disguise ring under a high intensity magnifier. I nearly panicked when I saw that he had stripped down the ring to expose its interior, but I tried to remain cool. He didn’t look up to greet me.
Excited as I was about the ring and its capabilities, I couldn’t let on where I had gotten it. He would freak out if he knew I had dealings with one of the secret societies he so fanatically despised. Just behind him, I was surprised to see that he himself was on one of his posters. He was sitting on his gimp pulley, holding an upgraded Bushmaster Assault Rifle. “They took my legs, but they won’t take my arms.” The caption read.
I laughed. “Owlish, where the hell did you get that ridiculous poster?”
“I was invited to do a photoshoot for InfoShock Magazine.” He informed me smugly. Shit—back in the day even I wouldn’t write for them. There has to be a bar somewhere. He was still studying the ring, his already massive eyes as big as saucers through the magnifier.
“I thought you said it was congenital.”
“Birth defects aren’t defects, Forrest. They’re by design.”
I brightened a little. “You mean you’re finally going to sue Elephantine Corporation for dumping all that toxic effluent near where your mom lived when she was pregnant?”
Owlish shoved the magnifier aside and regarded me with frustrated annoyance. “More government regulations are the last thing we need. You’ve got to wake the hell up. They want infant mortality and birth defects so they can depopulate this country.”
“Who’s ‘they?’”
He didn’t answer. “Where in the Gods’ name did you get this ring?”
“Enchanted artifact fire sale. I traded for it. Good move?”
“How much do you want for it?”
“I showed you what it can do. I don’t want to sell it; I want to make its spell last longer. How much do you want to boost its capacity?”
“Seven thousand nobles.”
I made an insulted scoffing sound. “You would rip me off? I thought we were closer than that. I would have thought the opportunity to study it would be reward enough for a tune up. Give it back.”
He ignored me, but I could see that the rebuttal had registered. “Here, look at this.” He motioned me over, and placed the ring on my finger. My bark vanished. Now that the brass exterior had been removed, I saw that the inside of the ring was made up of three narrow tumblers covered with tiny runes and sigils. He reached for a mirror that was attached to the same apparatus as his magnifier. “Watch.” He turned the ring’s tumblers, and the face of the fake general shifted and changed as he turned, the forehead, nose, and cheekbones moving up and down, reshaping themselves. Even the hair changed.
“Incredible.” I said. “But what I really need is for it to last, to not wear off.”
“If you boost an enchantment like that, it’s going to have a cost. It could affect your IQ, your memory, your sexual potency. It could make you marry a pineapple or become tone deaf.”
“Well, if I need to divorce the pineapple I’ll take the ring off. How long will it take?”
“At least a couple days.” I thanked him and turned to leave.
2
Returning to my loft, I stepped on an envelope with a blood and sand-dripping compass. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” I exploded. “Doesn’t saving civilization entitle me to a break? What in the fuck do I have to do…” I slumped down on my couch and lit a joint, tearing the envelope open.
“Forrest, we regret to demand your services again so quickly,” the opening read. What a sentence. No wonder these people were recruiting writers. “An urgent matter has arisen that requires your skill and finesse. Gear will be provided. Rewards will be great. We will send a car to pick you up at 2:00.” It was signed by Dr. Tower. I looked at my watch and cursed, grinding out the joint in the ashtray.
The car was driven by a sullen and impersonal chauffeur utterly incapable of the most basic conversation. I ordered him to turn on the radio. There’s no better way to get a fast cross-section of Provisian life than through its popular music. A host of new sirens seemed to have replaced Crystal Crowne now that my lies had destroyed her sex appeal. Disposable metallic rap anthems about being a ‘Provisian Badass’ seemed to be back in vogue. Some of the music was conventionally mediocre, some of it so dull that it was no different from listening to silence.
We
finally made it to the POGO complex, apparently the site of this wonderful surprise mission briefing. I thought bitterly about all the things that I would have done if they had given me the time to relax that I so richly deserved. Alcohol and mellow drugs, watching the sun set on the porch of the loft. I had become a terminal introvert. Nothing would have been better than to hole up on my own for days at a time, to forget the sick and perverted world out there, with its nukes and puppets and egos and fascists and fools.
Well, if wishes were pixies, we’d all build labyrinths to catch them and snort them. If the only way to earn a break was to get through this next round of cloak-and-dagger heepshit, so be it. Dr. Tower met me in the lobby. “Forrest, your work on the last mission was outstanding. You’ve done a great service for the Dry Men, Provisia, and the world.” I waved this praise aside, hoping my shades would hide my tired and bloodshot eyes. That was the key—hiding. In a more idealistic time, people like me used to think of rising up, shaking the power structure with drugs and third-party tickets and explosive articles. Those times were gone. I hoped Owlish was making some headway with that ring.
Tower led me into the briefing room and hastily cued up the projector. It displayed an aerial map of the stretch of the Trash Junction Superhighway leading from POGO headquarters all the way to the southernmost tip of Provisia. A red dot was placed on the map, closer to the mountain range to the south than to us. “That red dot,” Dr. Tower began, “Is Mission Creep. We’re concerned that he is defecting to the Ignobles. He stole an important chemical serum from the Plenty Burrows lodge. We need you to apprehend Mission Creep and return the stolen formula.”
Fables of Failure Page 19
