Re: The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round Three: The Epigen Center]
06-19-2012, 12:40 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Of the fast-acting reforms deployed by VII as an anti-Convolution method among the general populace, perhaps the most immediately irksome was a crippling tax on the sale of all alcohol and narcotics. Temporarily altered states of consciousness were judged to be a potential gateway to permanently altered states of consciousness. As outright prohibition was risky on a number of levels, the authorities had settled on a financial deterrent and a public plea for addicts to avoid congregating in large groups and get high in the comfort of their own homes.
It helped. A bit. Still, those of Lucky’s citizens who had unknowingly been Convoluted since the point of initial contact moved in droves to the worldships many sports bars to watch the networked broadcast of the Glorious Championship together on the big screen. They just had to suffer the indignity of sipping on root beer while they did so.
In one such bar, a friendly-looking five-armed insect clacked his pincers together and scooped a hodgepodge pile of bills, coins and credit cards to his chest. <Sorry, fellas,> he signed. <It’s looking like my pot.>
“They’re not dead yet, K’r’r’r’r,” groaned a four-eyed humanoid, intently watching Cailean and Gaurinn flail under a pile of parasitized office workers. “Don’t be so jumpy. These guys survived getting sewn together. And then Gaurinn survived having a time machine branded to his arm, and then Cailean actually died, and he’s fine now. Plus, it looks like the Convolution’s going to get fired. Twice.”
<It is? Where? I haven’t see it.>
“They’re with Elli in the lobby. Stupid thing can’t even—“
<That’s not the Convolution, Shoj! That’s just a bunch of guys! The Convolution’s in the break room.>
“I… what? K’r’r’r’r, you cannot be watching the same round I’m watching. The break room’s just some dumb conspiracy. Convolution’s all the ones with the dark skin. See? They’re a second-class race in this society. A lot of them are wearing purple.”
Sitting to the left of them, the right head of a two-headed armadillo-thing snorted smugly. “Still going on about this Convolution thing, guys? I mean, come on.”
A clamor of jeers filled the bar in objection to this. K’r’r’r’r signed several obscenities at once. Meanwhile, on the screen, Cailean’s disembodied leg kicked the alien attempting to mate with it several dozen feet in the air. “Shut the fuck up, THAM,” called Shoj. “If you’re so confident about your there-is-no-Convolution theory, put some money on it.”
“We’re all staking our lives on the Admiral’s ability to lead us through this battle, what’s the point of taking more risks? Look,” said the head. “It’s a classic psych experiment. Or a cheap prank. You put everyone in a battle to the death, and then you tell them that the most dangerous contestant is this invisible force that makes everybody do crazy shit, and then, surprise surprise, everybody does crazy—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” interrupted THAM’s left head. “THAM, you’re embarrassing me. We’ve been over this. There is no battle. The whole thing was just invented by Itzel so she could put in place all these fascist-ass ‘stop-the-Convolution’ reforms. Then she keeps us docile with a high-concept televised apocalypse.”
THAM’s tail slapped his left head in the left eye His right head winked at Shoj and K’r’r’r’r. “You’ll have to forgive THAM, he’s a conspiracy theorist.”
“You’re both conspiracy theorists,” declared a grey-skinned, anemic-looking primate from the corner, “And you’ll be sorry to have ever doubted the Convolution once it wins this Championship.”
Shoj manifested two new eyes with eyebrows to match, and gave the grey thing a disapproving look with them. “Cut that morbid shit, man. If the Convolution wins this thing, we’ll all be dead.”
The grey ape narrowed its eyes and smirked obscenely. “Dead, eh? Dead like Elli and Quantos are dead?”
The bar exploded into raucous argument. Everybody stopped paying attention to the TV, less because of the compelling discourse than because Gabe was on.
The repairman had found a large bag of ball bearings, and was eating them by the handful.
Here’s something the Gabe had never told anyone: wood was sweet. He took his coffee with milk and two spoons of sawdust. Chalk, gravel, minerals like that were roughly analogous to fresh homemade bread. But metal… metal was meat. Gabe felt manlier for eating metal, the same primal hunter’s glee one feels upon digging into a satisfactorily undercooked steak. He liked to squeeze the mercury out of old thermometers and slather it on his potatoes. Gabe had shared the knowledge of his powers, and even the basics of his strange eating habits, with some close friends and a couple girlfriends, but he had never fully explained his own personal food pyramid. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, but now he saw that it was the thing that really separated him from other people. That, and his gift for fixing things.
This “championship” situation, for instance. The initial experience of being torn from his home and his perceptions of reality had mangled things so badly that for a while that, like something found in a junkyard, it was difficult to tell what he had been used for in the first place. But, after working on the problem through breakfast, putting his thoughts down on his trusty typewriter, fighting a pirate, killing a man who had already died and stealing a mysterious red orb on behalf of a shadowy non-productivity cabal, the problem was starting to seem a little more manageable. He had hit that magical “I-can-do-this” point that all handymen strive for, the point where he felt comfortable rewarding himself with a good long break.
Gabe called the elevator. He wasn’t precisely sure what floor he was on right now but was pretty sure he was headed downward. The door slid open with a satisfying “ding” and Gabe was surprised to see Etiyr and AMP waiting inside.
”Hello, Mr. Ferrell!” called AMP. Gabe grunted back noncommittally. ”Thank you for coming to get us! The elevator operator seems to have disappeared due to a spatial anomaly, and neither Etiyr nor I have the manual dexterity to activate the lever. I guess it goes to show you the value of teamwork!”
”Oh, thank God you’re here,” clacked Etiyr. ”This guy will not shut up.”
”Etiyr still has a lot to learn about teamwork,” explained AMP. ”Will you help me teach him?”
”No,” intoned Gabe. “Get out.” He pointed out the elevator. “Don’t try and follow me.”
”Now that’s not team spirit!” droned AMP, his enthusiasm waning.
”Please,” italicized Etiyr. ”Just take me with you. Pretend I’m just your typewriter. Or your hostage. Just get me away from him.”
Gabe considered this. He sympathized with Etiyr, who had never been nice to him, but hadn’t ignored him either. He looked around to make sure no cultists were watching, then snatched the typewriter from AMP’s orbit, tore off his paper, crumpled it up and tossed it out the elevator. “Fine,” he said, “But keep quiet. AMP, you need to leave.”
”But—“
”Now.”
”…Okay, Mr. Ferrell. If that’s what you really want. I’ll go.” AMP whirred sadly and hovered out of the elevator.
Gabe pulled open the panel next to the lever and entered the code Brother Flynn had shown him.
The elevator began to descend.
One of Shoj’s eyes let loose a tear. “Poor AMP. He’s so huggable.”
<I find him annoying,> signed K’r’r’r’r. The footage on the screen devolved into a long, eerily melancholy sequence of AMP gliding through the halls alone. The barflies quickly gave up their hopes that anything would happen and turned their attention to an argument between tentacle-armed local secondary school teacher Bjoris Thirrin and his date, an aggressively bearded woman whose name nobody could remember.
“Look, I’m not arguing that we never saw him die in Denny’s,” Bjoris was saying. “I’m arguing that we just saw him die in Epigen. Gabe killed him. That’s it, he’s dead. Whatever time shit he got up to in the meantime, that’s the end.”
“Why don’t we just ask him?” replied his date. “I know Quantos Xodarap. We went on a date once, I have his number. He lives four or five levels up.”
Bjoris was silent for a moment, then slapped his thigh gleefully. “And you’re only mentioning this now? I mean, that means we’re gonna make it, right? If Quantos is aboard VII, that means the ship must have lived through the battle so he could travel back in time and get entered by himself, right?”
K’r’r’r’r pounded the bar to get the teacher’s attention before signing, <How do you figure that? He could have gone to live aboard VII after escaping the battle in round one, and before leaving to work at Epigen. Makes sense, right?>
“None off hyou are accounthing for hElimine,” interjected Tarresst from the aquatic section. “She’s not a thyme travheller, and hyet she is at hEpigen as hwell.”
“Well, we’re clearly here before she joined the battle and got Elimine-ated,” Shoj shouted over a clamor of dissent, inviting a chorus of boos for the hackneyed pun. “She’s not even a superhero, or whatever she was, yet. That’ll probably happen as a result of her contact with the Convolution.” THAM cleared his throats disapprovingly. “Shut up, THAM.”
“Shoj has a point,” agreed Bjoris. “Convy spent all last round, like, torturing Elimine, right? Maybe it’s because she sensed on some level that Elli had already fired her.”
“Is the Convolution a girl now?” asked Bjoris’ date. “And since when is she ‘Convy?’
“What, are you jealous? Of course Convy’s a girl.”
<What’s going on with that, by the way?> asked K’r’r’r’r. <Bartender, can you switch to the lobby feed, circa a couple minutes ago? I don’t think Elli can fire a whole culture, can she?>
“For one thing, that’d be unfair discrimination,” pointed out the bearded woman. The bartender looked up from his pornographic magazine and fumbled with the TV.
Click
Hanging suspended in midair above the lobby of the Epigen office complex is a giant metallic representation of Epigen’s logo. The logo cannot be described. It is a shape that has no name, designed perfectly by marketing scientists to stick in the part of the brain that handles discretionary spending. Like the organization it represents, it is both fantastic and grotesque, progressive and regressive, more of an immutable fact of the universe it inhabits than a consequence of anything specific.
Elimine Fraze tore her eyes away from the logo. She understood very little of what was going on.
“Oh, come on,” she told the assembly of skilled laborers who appeared to be bowing to her. “I don’t have the authority to fire anybody.”
”No one would go against you,” said Brom. ”Get your dad to sign off on it, maybe. No one cares about us. You can just… set us free.”
”Free? Out on the streets with the Hobots?” Elimine sighed. “Guys, you’re not thinking straight. And I’m the one who’s coming down off of acid.”
”Kiss me.”
”No. Look, I know the feeling. Sometimes I feel like doing anything to get Dad to fire me, or just quitting outright, or… I don’t know. Just getting out of the system entirely. Not because it’ll fix anything, but because it’ll make me feel better. I used to want to be a magician, or a superhero… But this is what we get,” she concluded, glancing up at the giant logo. “A job. Food on the table. A life.”
”But—“
”No. No but. Epigen controls everything about our lives, but out there, there is no control. Aren’t you afraid of what would happen, living without that security, that structure?”
Brom looked past Elli, out through the revolving door to the street. “No,” he concluded uncertainly.
“Well, then, you’re an idiot. It’s not good for people out there. You’ll starve. It’s not good for people in here either—for most people anyway—but in here, I dunno, maybe we can change things. That’s why I stay. And you should stay with me.”
A collective groan rippled through the crowd. An unspoken, unanimous decision was reached. At that moment the intercom blared to life with a moment of obstinant feedback. ”Attention all employees in the lobby! This is Lucky VII! Return to your posts immediately or risk losing your jobs! We technically lack the power to prevent your firings! We apologize for the inconvenience! Thank you for your time! This is Lucky VII, signing off!”
Elli stuck her tongue out at the ceiling. “Well,” she said. “Looks like I’m missing lunch today. Are you coming, or what?”
”Why do all of our public announcements always make us sound like such tools?” asked Shoj.
“Bah!” spat Terrasst. “hIt’s Bechause Itzel is a thool.”
<Seriously,> replied K’r’r’r’r. <I’ve never verbally communicated before, but I’m pretty sure it is not that hard to speak into a microphone without sounding like you’re warning your six-year-old not to cross the road.>
“It’s ‘cause they know they’re dealing with the Convolution,” posited Bjoris. “The ruder and more authoritative you sound with them, the lesser the chance of infection.”
“So hwhat do we think happened there?” rasped Tarresst. “Did the Chonvolhution hwish thoo die?”
“Have you ever heard the word ‘apophenia?’” asked THAM’s right head. “It’s a psychosis where you seek patterns amidst chaos.”
“Come on, THAM, they were breathing in synch,” said Shoj.
“Whatever you thought you saw, it’s over now. See? They’re going back to their jobs. Because they’re just people.”
<No, it’s because Elli convinced the Convolution not to commit suicide or auto-genocide or whatever.>
The grey-skinned ape harrumphed. “You’re assuming that Elimine isn’t part of the Convolution herself. What you saw was… a ritual. The Convolution is purifying itself for its conquest to come.”
“Oh, who the fuck are you anyway?” complained Bjoris’ date.
“Oh, just another cog in the machine. But unlike you, one with faith in a higher power. I have invited the Convolution into my heart. One day soon I believe it will take root. Perhaps it already has.”
“If you’re one of those Convolutions,” grumbled the bartender, “You can get the fuck out of my bar. Brainplagues are bad for business.”
“He’s not ‘Convoluted,’” insisted THAM’s left head. “He’s just delusional and wishes he could be Convoluted. Seriously, guys, you need to stop letting this ‘Glorious Championship’ shit get into your heads.”
“You see,” continued the grey thing heedlessly, “The Hedonist clearly failed to inform us of the Convolution’s true powers. Or by putting it in the battle, he has given it a power he never intended. Consider this: each round, the Convolution dies, in a sense, and is reborn to inhabit new bodies, new minds, new souls. And we have seen that those who have died are also reborn, in a new context. The Convolution has saved them, can’t you see?”
“I don’t know why we’re still talking about this,” said Bjoris. “It’s obvious that Elli’s still alive ‘cause of Quantos time magic. You guys aren’t paying attention to the fluxes, that’s all.”
“But realistically,” countered Shoj, “The Hedonist just threw them in everywhere ‘cause Quantos is kind of hilarious and Elli’s the hot one.”
“Time will prove me correct,” growled the grey thing. “One by one, the contestants’ physical forms will die and be reborn as archetypes—as repeating cultural patterns. The Convolution will use multiple iterations of these patterns to grow in power each round. Last of all, the ship will burn—all of us will pass on from our hopeless, caged existence and be reborn as part of the Convolution. And, as we are all the victors, the Hedonist will grant us a universe to live in. A violet utopia, where ‘Convolution’ is just another word for ‘we’. It was the Hedonist’s plan all along. You’ll see.”
The barflies considered this for a moment. “That’s it, I’m calling Quantos,” decided Bjoris’ date, pulling out her comm-widget. “He’ll settle this.”
“Do you really have to call your ex right now?” asked Bjoris.
“You, mister, have no right to be jealous, going on about your ‘Convy’ all day. Huh.” She held up the widget for all to see. “It’s an automated response saying that he thanks me for remembering him and he’s explaining everything on VII in the Morning on channel Q-1-X-0 right now. Bartender?”
“Q-1-X-0,” assenteded the bartender, turning back to the TV. The image of Gaurinn trying to extricate himself from a web of Cailean’s intestines was substituted by that of a green-tusked cetacean talking to a photogenic talk show host. “—Four quadrillion more in donations,” he was saying, “Until I can afford to power my time machine aga—“
Click. The screen returned to Gaurinn, who was curled up in a ball and seemed to be silently praying as the alien host swarmed all around. “Darling,” chided the bartender, “You ought have mentioned your Quantos was a sea mammal.”
“Yes, well,” pouted the bearded woman, “He’s a sea mammal named Quantos Xodarap. Spelled the same, too. That can’t just be a coincidence, can it?”
Bjoris smothered a sigh with the wet end of one of his tentacles. Action movies had told him that first dates taking place the day the world ended tended to end rather well, or at least lead to sex. Now he was just embarrassed. “Can you switch to Gabe and Etiyr?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.
Gabe imagined that Sister Siobhan was probably rather good-looking under that robe. He briefly wondered what she was wearing under it. Then he wondered if he would get a robe. His janitor’s uniform was starting to chafe.
“So, what does this thing do?” he asked her, handing over the orb.
“Science stuff,” she replied with an amiable smirk. “Nothing you should worry about. Your only priority right now should be your initiation ceremony.”
“Oh, it is,” ensured Gabe, dropping Etiyr off on the counter on top of the microwave. “Absolutely. I could really use a break.”
“Couldn’t we all?” Sister Siobhan took a disapproving look at Etiyr and picked the typewriter up. “In my old life, I was a secretary. A typewriter like this was my altar. It was a life of long hours, of endless monotony, of carpal tunnel syndrome, of unending sexual harassment.”
“Sounds awful,” commiserated Gabe, inwardly revising his plans to sexually harass her.
“We don’t like to have reminders of the old world lying around the Room. This piece of junk will have to be destroyed. Unless it has some sentimental value to you?”
Well that was no good. If Etiyr died, the round would move on, and breaktime would be over. Gabe formulated a plan as fast as he could, which was really really fast but it wasn’t a very good plan. “I’ll do it myself,” he declared, “After I’m initiated. I think that would be, um, good for me. To do that.”
“Hmm.” The sister gave one last look at the typewriter and shuddered. “Very well. We’ll complete the ceremony right away. Join the others in the Sanctum. I’m going to go take the orb… where it needs to go.”
Gabe bowed awkwardly and departed. Sister Siobhan held the orb up to the light and began to examine it from all angles. A noise from the counter distracted her.
Clackclackclackclackclackclackclackclack
The cultist walked warily over to the typewriter, which seemed to be jammed somehow.
”CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
There you are. Hi. I’m Etiyr. I’m a typewriter.”
“I can see that,” said Siobhan aloud.
<span style="font-family: Courier New">”I just wanted you to know that Gabe over there will never be one of you. Not really.”
“Is that so?” The note of caution in Siobhan’s voice wavered between incredulity and fear. Etiyr wanted fear. He could work with fear.
”Yes, Siobhan, it is so. For a couple reasons. First of all, Gabe is a traitorous son of a whore. He’s already lied to you by sneaking me in here, and he lied to ME when he brought me down here under the assumption that he wouldn’t be, and-I-quote ‘destroying’ me after his initiation into your crazy fucking bullshit cult. Secondly, consider this. Gabe LITERALLY is a guy who turns his hand into TOOLS. Tools, as in, ‘devices used to do WORK.’ He’s optimized for productivity. He WANTS to belong here because he knows as well as I do that he DOESN’T. Give him a week. He’ll play your game until something breaks, and then he’ll start WORKING. He represents everything you hate, even more than I do. You should be destroying HIM, especially now that he’s already gotten your bouncy ball for you.”
Sister Siobhan picked Etiyr up and examined him the same way she had the orb, as though looking for a little man inside. “Why should I trust you?” she eventually asked.
The woman was ready to break. Her weakness hung in the air like the moment before a lightning strike. ”Because I’m your altar,” he typed. ”All this time trying to get away from it and you’ve always known you’re still just a secretary. That means I OWN YOU, BITCH. NOW, TELL ME WHAT THE ORB DOES.”
Siobhan swallowed a sob. “It—“</span>
There came a Ding! from the other room, followed by the distinct sound of an elevator door opening and several men in combat boots marching out in formation. “Attention, ‘break room!’” came a gruff voice. “We have orders from Lucky VII to break up your disgusting Commie operation and reacquire any company property you may have stolen!”
”Quick!” typed Etiyr, the slightly-louder ‘C’ adding a strange urgency to his typing. ”Ditch the robe, type on me and look busy!”
A few seconds later, a security officer walked up behind Siobhan, standing uncomfortably close to the back of her chair. “Secretary in her underwear,” he growled. “I like that.”
“Yes, well,” Siobhan replied nonchalantly. “It can get hot on these lower floors.”
“So I see.” The secretary couldn’t see the officer’s smile, but could hear it, a slow sound like asphalt cracking in heat. “So, what are you doing down on a floor like this?”
Siobhan gestured to the fresh sheet of paper in Etiyr. “Termination notices,” she said. “For the cultists. Starting with one… Gabe Ferrell. I understand he’s the leader.”
“Heh,” said the officer. “Now that’s the Epigen spirit. You keep on doin’ what your doin’ and we’ll be out of your hair in two shakes, alright?” He took one last look around, squeezed her shoulder and left.
Siobhan waited five seconds before opening up the microwave and pulling out the orb and her old robe. She clutched them to her chest and listened to the sound of bees, batons, screaming, and the complete destruction of the life she had built here. “You know,” she confessed to Etiyr, “I don’t know what this thing does either.”
”hWell, if hwe can see she has ith, Ithzel can see she has ith, hrighth?” challenged Tarresst. “And if the hAdmiral knows she has ith, she hwon’t have ith for long.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Bjoris. “There are a lot of cameras to look through, and the TV networks are probably better equipped to sort through them than Itzel’s people are. I’d say it’ll be a few minutes before the Queen Bee sees what we’re seeing.”
“The networks are Itzel’s people,” stressed THAM’s left head. “This was all filmed weeks ago, in a studio. Why do you think they’re lingering over the half-naked human woman? They just want to keep us complacent and entertained while they go about stripping us of all our rights.”
“Stripping,” agreed Shoj dreamily, ten or twelve eyes leering at the screen.
“Why else would the security forces be using bees, if not because we’re being trained to associate bees with authority? Everything that’s been on this screen has been the same sort of targeted imagery.”
“Alright, if you’re so smart,” riposted the bearded woman, “What does Quantos represent?”
“Obviously they’re trying to prop up your porpoise-Quantos as a messiah figure,” responded the half-of-an-armadillo. “He’s in on it.”
“You could not be more off-base,” sneered the grey-skinned ape. “The presence of Quantos inside VII is a sign of the ascension of the Convolution and its growing mastery over time itself.”
“Speaking of porpoise-Quantos, I’m curious: how’d that date go?” Bjoris asked his date.
“Oh, it was terrible. He’s a total blowhole.”
<That’s racist,> signed K’r’r’r’r.
“So, if we get ahold of the orb,” asked Shoj, “Do you think Itzel plans on using it or just keeping it out of, say, Etiyr’s hands?”
“hWhat handsh?”
<Meh. She doesn’t know what it does any more than we do.>
“Well, I have a feeling we’re gonna find out one way or another,” concluded Bjoris, taking a swig of root beer.
Two things that gave Gabe solace:
First, he’d had time to try on the robe. It was nice. Breezy. A bit warm.
Two, he’d made it through three of the security troops before they’d gotten his weedwhacker-hand pinned. Killing, it turns out, is a lot easier the second time. And then the third time, it gets harder again, because the guy’s wearing a helmet and won’t stop kicking. The fourth time is just gross.
The other cultists, to their credit, hadn’t gone quietly either. One had rushed over to the hydroponics facility and come back with an omega-flower that disabled the security forces’ bees. Brother Flynn had swallowed a pill that lit all his skin on fire, and didn’t go down until VII remotely activated the sprinklers. The Record Keeper had jumped out a window, disappeared for five seconds, and then reappeared in the pilot’s seat of a Russian-ordinance helicopter and begun shooting everything in sight. She should have just flown away, Gabe thought sadly, remembering the sound of a woman drowning in cockroaches.
The officer who finally got to Gabe injected a local anaesthetic into his arm, numbing and neutralizing his utility hand. The former-repairman and almost-cultist was led to the room where he’d been talking to Sister Siobhan. Etiyr was gone. Nothing was there except for a precisely worded termination notice, standard in every way except for the strange letterhead Quick! Ditch the robe, type on me and look busy! The pink slip was neatly folded on a table and held in place by a nondescript red paperweight. The security officer took the form; Gabe snatched the orb up and hid it in the folds of his robe.
The elevator operator was back in position, looking glum. “All the way up, Brom,” the officer instructed.
Brom turned towards Gabe. He looked familiar somehow. “Going straight to the top, are you?”
“That’s right,” said the officer. “Gonna have words with Mr. Clemens himself.”
Brom shrugged and pulled the lever upwards. “Guess everybody’s got to have a dream.”
The elevator began to ascend.
”Puth Chailean and Ghaurinn back on,” demanded Tarresst.
“No, don’t,” begged Bjoris. “It’s gross. Plus, Gabe’s gonna use the orb any second now.”
Ding!
”Nowhere to go but down from here,” remarked Brom. The officer led Gabe out roughly onto the top floor, which was a single ring of spacious offices circling around an austerely-lit board room.
Gabe fidgeted with the orb as he was led into the corner office. If he was going down, he wasn’t going alone.
“Here’s the one, Mr. Clemens,” said the officer, putting Gabe down in a chair. “We found him wearing a robe and leading some kind of sick ceremony. We confiscated this.” He put the red stapler down in front of Mr. Clemens. “We think it may be some sort of… reference.”
“I see,” said Mr. Clemens. Gabe considered the man before him. Everything about Mr. Clemens said “boss.” He was clearly the kind of guy who wanted you to know that he could afford to spill coffee on a jacket that cost more than you made in a year. He held a cigarette and a glass of scotch to keep his hands and his heart busy while he spent all day not using them for anything. Purple veins crisscrossed his forehead were like a flowchart, constantly shifting around as though looking for a way to make you redundant. “Well, Mr…” –he glanced at some papers on his desk—“Mr. Ferrell, it looks like your little ‘break room’ scheme is over. And incidentally, so is your career.”
Gabe gripped the orb under the desk and thought back to a time when he didn’t have to deal with people like this. Before he could do anything rash, Clemens’ secretary poked her head in. “Sir? Lucky VII’s on line one.”
“Ugh, this guy again,” growled Clemens. “I’m putting him on speakerphone, officer, so if Ferrell says anything, hit him on the head.”
“Yes, sir.”
Clemens tapped a button on his phone. “Yes, Lucky, I’m in the middle of something, what is it?”
An unfamiliar voice buzzed out of the speaker. ”Mr. Clemens, remember we made a deal. We have full control over firing and hiring for the rest of our twenty-four hour—“
”Lucky, we’re very grateful for your work in exposing this conspiracy, but, let’s be honest, it’s not worth anything if I can’t fire the ringleaders, is it now?”
”Mr. Clemens, I beg you to hold off for just a few hours. Lives are at stake.”
”You think I don’t know that? Of course lives are at stake. Hell, that’s our company slogan. Epigen Corporation: Lives Are At Stake. It’s right there on the door. We make weapons, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’d appreciate an opportunity to speak on my own behalf,” blurted Gabe. “Ow!” he added, when the security guard predictably him on the head.
”Yes, let him speak,” said VII enthusiastically. ”We can sort this out without anybody losing their jobs.”
Mr. Clemens sighed. “Lucky, this man killed three security guards today. Alright, fine, fine, you win. Mr. Ferrell, I’ll hear what you have to say, if only because this alien incursion has slowed new business down to a crawl and I’m sort of bored.”
Gabe took a deep breath. He wasn’t very good at speeches. He was more of a man of action, but seeing as there was only one action left to him and it involved a mysterious weird-science artifact that he didn’t know what it would do, he figured he ought to try words first, just to see. “Well the thing is, Mr. Clemens,” he began. “Yesterday—I think it must have been yesterday—a genie called the Hedonist put me and a bunch of other people and things into a battle to the death. And this is the third place he put us and I don’t really work here technically and I was just looking for something to do instead of just following one of the others around and doing what they said. So owing to the fact that I was really in a lot of danger and hadn’t slept for a while and don’t even like Denny’s, and I think I’m the only human one left, I thought that I deserved a break. So you can see that it’s not really my fault that I killed all those people, and also, if you fire me I die, so please don’t. Sir.”
There was silence on both ends of the deck, and both ends of the phone line. Mr. Clemens considered recent events. “Yes, well,” he said. “Obviously we knew something like that was going on. We aren’t fools here at Epigen, no matter what your Arab genie friends would have you believe. Still… I don’t see how that excuses your behavior. If anything, all it shows is that you’ve been going around killing the wrong people. Officer, give me that termination notice.” The officer handed over the pink slip. “Hmm. This all seems to be in order. Mr. Ferrell, you’re—“
“Wait!” shouted Gabe. Under the desk, he was clutching the orb like it was a live preserver, or Mr. Clemens’ neck. “You forgot about one thing.”
Mr. Clemens rolled his eyes. “Always one more thing. And what would that be?”
”Gabe, listen to me. We know what you have. Don’t even think about—“
Gabe revealed the orb with a grin, as though he were pulling a rabbit out of his hat. “This,” he said.
Gabe threw the orb at Mr. Clemens’ face.
It hit against his jowls with a wet smack and fell to the ground ineffectively.
Mr. Clemens looked at the orb as one looks at a dead bird that has been dropped in one’s lap by an overeager cat. “Yes, well,” he said. “We’ve been looking for that, I think. Officer, my understanding is that Mr. Ferrell is about to die, but if that proves not to be the case, escort him out of the building.” Mr. Clemens signed the termination notice with the lit end of his cigarette. “Mr. Ferrell, you’re fired.”
The screen went black.
“What the fuck?” shouted Shoj. “We didn’t get to see what the orb did!”
“You should be happy,” consoled THAM’s right head. “Gabe died. You win the pot.”
“We didn’t see him die,” retorted Shoj. He shrugged. “Whatever, I’ll take your money.”
“Seriously, talk about an anticlimax,” moaned Bjoris. “I bet the next round is just five minutes of Cailean bleeding out. I’m going home.”
“Split a cab?” offered his date, squeezing his tentacle affectionately.
Shoj sprouted eyes all over his body and scanned the bar. “Who hasn’t paid up?” he demanded. “K’r’r’r’r, you’re still holding that money from when we thought Cail was dead… K’r’r’r’r? You okay, man?”
K’r’r’r’r had two arms clutching his chest and two arms leaning on the bar and holding his root beer as though praying for it to turn into alcohol. With a fifth arm he signed, <I don’t know, man. What happened to Gabe…>
“Hey,” said Shoj in a low voice. “Don’t sweat it, man. Just think of it as a TV show.”
<I don’t know,> gestured K’r’r’r’r. <Makes you think. Hey Shoj, if I quit the factory and started writing full-time, do you think I’d do alright?>
Of the fast-acting reforms deployed by VII as an anti-Convolution method among the general populace, perhaps the most immediately irksome was a crippling tax on the sale of all alcohol and narcotics. Temporarily altered states of consciousness were judged to be a potential gateway to permanently altered states of consciousness. As outright prohibition was risky on a number of levels, the authorities had settled on a financial deterrent and a public plea for addicts to avoid congregating in large groups and get high in the comfort of their own homes.
It helped. A bit. Still, those of Lucky’s citizens who had unknowingly been Convoluted since the point of initial contact moved in droves to the worldships many sports bars to watch the networked broadcast of the Glorious Championship together on the big screen. They just had to suffer the indignity of sipping on root beer while they did so.
In one such bar, a friendly-looking five-armed insect clacked his pincers together and scooped a hodgepodge pile of bills, coins and credit cards to his chest. <Sorry, fellas,> he signed. <It’s looking like my pot.>
“They’re not dead yet, K’r’r’r’r,” groaned a four-eyed humanoid, intently watching Cailean and Gaurinn flail under a pile of parasitized office workers. “Don’t be so jumpy. These guys survived getting sewn together. And then Gaurinn survived having a time machine branded to his arm, and then Cailean actually died, and he’s fine now. Plus, it looks like the Convolution’s going to get fired. Twice.”
<It is? Where? I haven’t see it.>
“They’re with Elli in the lobby. Stupid thing can’t even—“
<That’s not the Convolution, Shoj! That’s just a bunch of guys! The Convolution’s in the break room.>
“I… what? K’r’r’r’r, you cannot be watching the same round I’m watching. The break room’s just some dumb conspiracy. Convolution’s all the ones with the dark skin. See? They’re a second-class race in this society. A lot of them are wearing purple.”
Sitting to the left of them, the right head of a two-headed armadillo-thing snorted smugly. “Still going on about this Convolution thing, guys? I mean, come on.”
A clamor of jeers filled the bar in objection to this. K’r’r’r’r signed several obscenities at once. Meanwhile, on the screen, Cailean’s disembodied leg kicked the alien attempting to mate with it several dozen feet in the air. “Shut the fuck up, THAM,” called Shoj. “If you’re so confident about your there-is-no-Convolution theory, put some money on it.”
“We’re all staking our lives on the Admiral’s ability to lead us through this battle, what’s the point of taking more risks? Look,” said the head. “It’s a classic psych experiment. Or a cheap prank. You put everyone in a battle to the death, and then you tell them that the most dangerous contestant is this invisible force that makes everybody do crazy shit, and then, surprise surprise, everybody does crazy—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” interrupted THAM’s left head. “THAM, you’re embarrassing me. We’ve been over this. There is no battle. The whole thing was just invented by Itzel so she could put in place all these fascist-ass ‘stop-the-Convolution’ reforms. Then she keeps us docile with a high-concept televised apocalypse.”
THAM’s tail slapped his left head in the left eye His right head winked at Shoj and K’r’r’r’r. “You’ll have to forgive THAM, he’s a conspiracy theorist.”
“You’re both conspiracy theorists,” declared a grey-skinned, anemic-looking primate from the corner, “And you’ll be sorry to have ever doubted the Convolution once it wins this Championship.”
Shoj manifested two new eyes with eyebrows to match, and gave the grey thing a disapproving look with them. “Cut that morbid shit, man. If the Convolution wins this thing, we’ll all be dead.”
The grey ape narrowed its eyes and smirked obscenely. “Dead, eh? Dead like Elli and Quantos are dead?”
The bar exploded into raucous argument. Everybody stopped paying attention to the TV, less because of the compelling discourse than because Gabe was on.
The repairman had found a large bag of ball bearings, and was eating them by the handful.
Here’s something the Gabe had never told anyone: wood was sweet. He took his coffee with milk and two spoons of sawdust. Chalk, gravel, minerals like that were roughly analogous to fresh homemade bread. But metal… metal was meat. Gabe felt manlier for eating metal, the same primal hunter’s glee one feels upon digging into a satisfactorily undercooked steak. He liked to squeeze the mercury out of old thermometers and slather it on his potatoes. Gabe had shared the knowledge of his powers, and even the basics of his strange eating habits, with some close friends and a couple girlfriends, but he had never fully explained his own personal food pyramid. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, but now he saw that it was the thing that really separated him from other people. That, and his gift for fixing things.
This “championship” situation, for instance. The initial experience of being torn from his home and his perceptions of reality had mangled things so badly that for a while that, like something found in a junkyard, it was difficult to tell what he had been used for in the first place. But, after working on the problem through breakfast, putting his thoughts down on his trusty typewriter, fighting a pirate, killing a man who had already died and stealing a mysterious red orb on behalf of a shadowy non-productivity cabal, the problem was starting to seem a little more manageable. He had hit that magical “I-can-do-this” point that all handymen strive for, the point where he felt comfortable rewarding himself with a good long break.
Gabe called the elevator. He wasn’t precisely sure what floor he was on right now but was pretty sure he was headed downward. The door slid open with a satisfying “ding” and Gabe was surprised to see Etiyr and AMP waiting inside.
”Hello, Mr. Ferrell!” called AMP. Gabe grunted back noncommittally. ”Thank you for coming to get us! The elevator operator seems to have disappeared due to a spatial anomaly, and neither Etiyr nor I have the manual dexterity to activate the lever. I guess it goes to show you the value of teamwork!”
”Oh, thank God you’re here,” clacked Etiyr. ”This guy will not shut up.”
”Etiyr still has a lot to learn about teamwork,” explained AMP. ”Will you help me teach him?”
”No,” intoned Gabe. “Get out.” He pointed out the elevator. “Don’t try and follow me.”
”Now that’s not team spirit!” droned AMP, his enthusiasm waning.
”Please,” italicized Etiyr. ”Just take me with you. Pretend I’m just your typewriter. Or your hostage. Just get me away from him.”
Gabe considered this. He sympathized with Etiyr, who had never been nice to him, but hadn’t ignored him either. He looked around to make sure no cultists were watching, then snatched the typewriter from AMP’s orbit, tore off his paper, crumpled it up and tossed it out the elevator. “Fine,” he said, “But keep quiet. AMP, you need to leave.”
”But—“
”Now.”
”…Okay, Mr. Ferrell. If that’s what you really want. I’ll go.” AMP whirred sadly and hovered out of the elevator.
Gabe pulled open the panel next to the lever and entered the code Brother Flynn had shown him.
The elevator began to descend.
One of Shoj’s eyes let loose a tear. “Poor AMP. He’s so huggable.”
<I find him annoying,> signed K’r’r’r’r. The footage on the screen devolved into a long, eerily melancholy sequence of AMP gliding through the halls alone. The barflies quickly gave up their hopes that anything would happen and turned their attention to an argument between tentacle-armed local secondary school teacher Bjoris Thirrin and his date, an aggressively bearded woman whose name nobody could remember.
“Look, I’m not arguing that we never saw him die in Denny’s,” Bjoris was saying. “I’m arguing that we just saw him die in Epigen. Gabe killed him. That’s it, he’s dead. Whatever time shit he got up to in the meantime, that’s the end.”
“Why don’t we just ask him?” replied his date. “I know Quantos Xodarap. We went on a date once, I have his number. He lives four or five levels up.”
Bjoris was silent for a moment, then slapped his thigh gleefully. “And you’re only mentioning this now? I mean, that means we’re gonna make it, right? If Quantos is aboard VII, that means the ship must have lived through the battle so he could travel back in time and get entered by himself, right?”
K’r’r’r’r pounded the bar to get the teacher’s attention before signing, <How do you figure that? He could have gone to live aboard VII after escaping the battle in round one, and before leaving to work at Epigen. Makes sense, right?>
“None off hyou are accounthing for hElimine,” interjected Tarresst from the aquatic section. “She’s not a thyme travheller, and hyet she is at hEpigen as hwell.”
“Well, we’re clearly here before she joined the battle and got Elimine-ated,” Shoj shouted over a clamor of dissent, inviting a chorus of boos for the hackneyed pun. “She’s not even a superhero, or whatever she was, yet. That’ll probably happen as a result of her contact with the Convolution.” THAM cleared his throats disapprovingly. “Shut up, THAM.”
“Shoj has a point,” agreed Bjoris. “Convy spent all last round, like, torturing Elimine, right? Maybe it’s because she sensed on some level that Elli had already fired her.”
“Is the Convolution a girl now?” asked Bjoris’ date. “And since when is she ‘Convy?’
“What, are you jealous? Of course Convy’s a girl.”
<What’s going on with that, by the way?> asked K’r’r’r’r. <Bartender, can you switch to the lobby feed, circa a couple minutes ago? I don’t think Elli can fire a whole culture, can she?>
“For one thing, that’d be unfair discrimination,” pointed out the bearded woman. The bartender looked up from his pornographic magazine and fumbled with the TV.
Click
Hanging suspended in midair above the lobby of the Epigen office complex is a giant metallic representation of Epigen’s logo. The logo cannot be described. It is a shape that has no name, designed perfectly by marketing scientists to stick in the part of the brain that handles discretionary spending. Like the organization it represents, it is both fantastic and grotesque, progressive and regressive, more of an immutable fact of the universe it inhabits than a consequence of anything specific.
Elimine Fraze tore her eyes away from the logo. She understood very little of what was going on.
“Oh, come on,” she told the assembly of skilled laborers who appeared to be bowing to her. “I don’t have the authority to fire anybody.”
”No one would go against you,” said Brom. ”Get your dad to sign off on it, maybe. No one cares about us. You can just… set us free.”
”Free? Out on the streets with the Hobots?” Elimine sighed. “Guys, you’re not thinking straight. And I’m the one who’s coming down off of acid.”
”Kiss me.”
”No. Look, I know the feeling. Sometimes I feel like doing anything to get Dad to fire me, or just quitting outright, or… I don’t know. Just getting out of the system entirely. Not because it’ll fix anything, but because it’ll make me feel better. I used to want to be a magician, or a superhero… But this is what we get,” she concluded, glancing up at the giant logo. “A job. Food on the table. A life.”
”But—“
”No. No but. Epigen controls everything about our lives, but out there, there is no control. Aren’t you afraid of what would happen, living without that security, that structure?”
Brom looked past Elli, out through the revolving door to the street. “No,” he concluded uncertainly.
“Well, then, you’re an idiot. It’s not good for people out there. You’ll starve. It’s not good for people in here either—for most people anyway—but in here, I dunno, maybe we can change things. That’s why I stay. And you should stay with me.”
A collective groan rippled through the crowd. An unspoken, unanimous decision was reached. At that moment the intercom blared to life with a moment of obstinant feedback. ”Attention all employees in the lobby! This is Lucky VII! Return to your posts immediately or risk losing your jobs! We technically lack the power to prevent your firings! We apologize for the inconvenience! Thank you for your time! This is Lucky VII, signing off!”
Elli stuck her tongue out at the ceiling. “Well,” she said. “Looks like I’m missing lunch today. Are you coming, or what?”
”Why do all of our public announcements always make us sound like such tools?” asked Shoj.
“Bah!” spat Terrasst. “hIt’s Bechause Itzel is a thool.”
<Seriously,> replied K’r’r’r’r. <I’ve never verbally communicated before, but I’m pretty sure it is not that hard to speak into a microphone without sounding like you’re warning your six-year-old not to cross the road.>
“It’s ‘cause they know they’re dealing with the Convolution,” posited Bjoris. “The ruder and more authoritative you sound with them, the lesser the chance of infection.”
“So hwhat do we think happened there?” rasped Tarresst. “Did the Chonvolhution hwish thoo die?”
“Have you ever heard the word ‘apophenia?’” asked THAM’s right head. “It’s a psychosis where you seek patterns amidst chaos.”
“Come on, THAM, they were breathing in synch,” said Shoj.
“Whatever you thought you saw, it’s over now. See? They’re going back to their jobs. Because they’re just people.”
<No, it’s because Elli convinced the Convolution not to commit suicide or auto-genocide or whatever.>
The grey-skinned ape harrumphed. “You’re assuming that Elimine isn’t part of the Convolution herself. What you saw was… a ritual. The Convolution is purifying itself for its conquest to come.”
“Oh, who the fuck are you anyway?” complained Bjoris’ date.
“Oh, just another cog in the machine. But unlike you, one with faith in a higher power. I have invited the Convolution into my heart. One day soon I believe it will take root. Perhaps it already has.”
“If you’re one of those Convolutions,” grumbled the bartender, “You can get the fuck out of my bar. Brainplagues are bad for business.”
“He’s not ‘Convoluted,’” insisted THAM’s left head. “He’s just delusional and wishes he could be Convoluted. Seriously, guys, you need to stop letting this ‘Glorious Championship’ shit get into your heads.”
“You see,” continued the grey thing heedlessly, “The Hedonist clearly failed to inform us of the Convolution’s true powers. Or by putting it in the battle, he has given it a power he never intended. Consider this: each round, the Convolution dies, in a sense, and is reborn to inhabit new bodies, new minds, new souls. And we have seen that those who have died are also reborn, in a new context. The Convolution has saved them, can’t you see?”
“I don’t know why we’re still talking about this,” said Bjoris. “It’s obvious that Elli’s still alive ‘cause of Quantos time magic. You guys aren’t paying attention to the fluxes, that’s all.”
“But realistically,” countered Shoj, “The Hedonist just threw them in everywhere ‘cause Quantos is kind of hilarious and Elli’s the hot one.”
“Time will prove me correct,” growled the grey thing. “One by one, the contestants’ physical forms will die and be reborn as archetypes—as repeating cultural patterns. The Convolution will use multiple iterations of these patterns to grow in power each round. Last of all, the ship will burn—all of us will pass on from our hopeless, caged existence and be reborn as part of the Convolution. And, as we are all the victors, the Hedonist will grant us a universe to live in. A violet utopia, where ‘Convolution’ is just another word for ‘we’. It was the Hedonist’s plan all along. You’ll see.”
The barflies considered this for a moment. “That’s it, I’m calling Quantos,” decided Bjoris’ date, pulling out her comm-widget. “He’ll settle this.”
“Do you really have to call your ex right now?” asked Bjoris.
“You, mister, have no right to be jealous, going on about your ‘Convy’ all day. Huh.” She held up the widget for all to see. “It’s an automated response saying that he thanks me for remembering him and he’s explaining everything on VII in the Morning on channel Q-1-X-0 right now. Bartender?”
“Q-1-X-0,” assenteded the bartender, turning back to the TV. The image of Gaurinn trying to extricate himself from a web of Cailean’s intestines was substituted by that of a green-tusked cetacean talking to a photogenic talk show host. “—Four quadrillion more in donations,” he was saying, “Until I can afford to power my time machine aga—“
Click. The screen returned to Gaurinn, who was curled up in a ball and seemed to be silently praying as the alien host swarmed all around. “Darling,” chided the bartender, “You ought have mentioned your Quantos was a sea mammal.”
“Yes, well,” pouted the bearded woman, “He’s a sea mammal named Quantos Xodarap. Spelled the same, too. That can’t just be a coincidence, can it?”
Bjoris smothered a sigh with the wet end of one of his tentacles. Action movies had told him that first dates taking place the day the world ended tended to end rather well, or at least lead to sex. Now he was just embarrassed. “Can you switch to Gabe and Etiyr?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.
Gabe imagined that Sister Siobhan was probably rather good-looking under that robe. He briefly wondered what she was wearing under it. Then he wondered if he would get a robe. His janitor’s uniform was starting to chafe.
“So, what does this thing do?” he asked her, handing over the orb.
“Science stuff,” she replied with an amiable smirk. “Nothing you should worry about. Your only priority right now should be your initiation ceremony.”
“Oh, it is,” ensured Gabe, dropping Etiyr off on the counter on top of the microwave. “Absolutely. I could really use a break.”
“Couldn’t we all?” Sister Siobhan took a disapproving look at Etiyr and picked the typewriter up. “In my old life, I was a secretary. A typewriter like this was my altar. It was a life of long hours, of endless monotony, of carpal tunnel syndrome, of unending sexual harassment.”
“Sounds awful,” commiserated Gabe, inwardly revising his plans to sexually harass her.
“We don’t like to have reminders of the old world lying around the Room. This piece of junk will have to be destroyed. Unless it has some sentimental value to you?”
Well that was no good. If Etiyr died, the round would move on, and breaktime would be over. Gabe formulated a plan as fast as he could, which was really really fast but it wasn’t a very good plan. “I’ll do it myself,” he declared, “After I’m initiated. I think that would be, um, good for me. To do that.”
“Hmm.” The sister gave one last look at the typewriter and shuddered. “Very well. We’ll complete the ceremony right away. Join the others in the Sanctum. I’m going to go take the orb… where it needs to go.”
Gabe bowed awkwardly and departed. Sister Siobhan held the orb up to the light and began to examine it from all angles. A noise from the counter distracted her.
Clackclackclackclackclackclackclackclack
The cultist walked warily over to the typewriter, which seemed to be jammed somehow.
”CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
There you are. Hi. I’m Etiyr. I’m a typewriter.”
“I can see that,” said Siobhan aloud.
<span style="font-family: Courier New">”I just wanted you to know that Gabe over there will never be one of you. Not really.”
“Is that so?” The note of caution in Siobhan’s voice wavered between incredulity and fear. Etiyr wanted fear. He could work with fear.
”Yes, Siobhan, it is so. For a couple reasons. First of all, Gabe is a traitorous son of a whore. He’s already lied to you by sneaking me in here, and he lied to ME when he brought me down here under the assumption that he wouldn’t be, and-I-quote ‘destroying’ me after his initiation into your crazy fucking bullshit cult. Secondly, consider this. Gabe LITERALLY is a guy who turns his hand into TOOLS. Tools, as in, ‘devices used to do WORK.’ He’s optimized for productivity. He WANTS to belong here because he knows as well as I do that he DOESN’T. Give him a week. He’ll play your game until something breaks, and then he’ll start WORKING. He represents everything you hate, even more than I do. You should be destroying HIM, especially now that he’s already gotten your bouncy ball for you.”
Sister Siobhan picked Etiyr up and examined him the same way she had the orb, as though looking for a little man inside. “Why should I trust you?” she eventually asked.
The woman was ready to break. Her weakness hung in the air like the moment before a lightning strike. ”Because I’m your altar,” he typed. ”All this time trying to get away from it and you’ve always known you’re still just a secretary. That means I OWN YOU, BITCH. NOW, TELL ME WHAT THE ORB DOES.”
Siobhan swallowed a sob. “It—“</span>
There came a Ding! from the other room, followed by the distinct sound of an elevator door opening and several men in combat boots marching out in formation. “Attention, ‘break room!’” came a gruff voice. “We have orders from Lucky VII to break up your disgusting Commie operation and reacquire any company property you may have stolen!”
”Quick!” typed Etiyr, the slightly-louder ‘C’ adding a strange urgency to his typing. ”Ditch the robe, type on me and look busy!”
A few seconds later, a security officer walked up behind Siobhan, standing uncomfortably close to the back of her chair. “Secretary in her underwear,” he growled. “I like that.”
“Yes, well,” Siobhan replied nonchalantly. “It can get hot on these lower floors.”
“So I see.” The secretary couldn’t see the officer’s smile, but could hear it, a slow sound like asphalt cracking in heat. “So, what are you doing down on a floor like this?”
Siobhan gestured to the fresh sheet of paper in Etiyr. “Termination notices,” she said. “For the cultists. Starting with one… Gabe Ferrell. I understand he’s the leader.”
“Heh,” said the officer. “Now that’s the Epigen spirit. You keep on doin’ what your doin’ and we’ll be out of your hair in two shakes, alright?” He took one last look around, squeezed her shoulder and left.
Siobhan waited five seconds before opening up the microwave and pulling out the orb and her old robe. She clutched them to her chest and listened to the sound of bees, batons, screaming, and the complete destruction of the life she had built here. “You know,” she confessed to Etiyr, “I don’t know what this thing does either.”
”hWell, if hwe can see she has ith, Ithzel can see she has ith, hrighth?” challenged Tarresst. “And if the hAdmiral knows she has ith, she hwon’t have ith for long.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Bjoris. “There are a lot of cameras to look through, and the TV networks are probably better equipped to sort through them than Itzel’s people are. I’d say it’ll be a few minutes before the Queen Bee sees what we’re seeing.”
“The networks are Itzel’s people,” stressed THAM’s left head. “This was all filmed weeks ago, in a studio. Why do you think they’re lingering over the half-naked human woman? They just want to keep us complacent and entertained while they go about stripping us of all our rights.”
“Stripping,” agreed Shoj dreamily, ten or twelve eyes leering at the screen.
“Why else would the security forces be using bees, if not because we’re being trained to associate bees with authority? Everything that’s been on this screen has been the same sort of targeted imagery.”
“Alright, if you’re so smart,” riposted the bearded woman, “What does Quantos represent?”
“Obviously they’re trying to prop up your porpoise-Quantos as a messiah figure,” responded the half-of-an-armadillo. “He’s in on it.”
“You could not be more off-base,” sneered the grey-skinned ape. “The presence of Quantos inside VII is a sign of the ascension of the Convolution and its growing mastery over time itself.”
“Speaking of porpoise-Quantos, I’m curious: how’d that date go?” Bjoris asked his date.
“Oh, it was terrible. He’s a total blowhole.”
<That’s racist,> signed K’r’r’r’r.
“So, if we get ahold of the orb,” asked Shoj, “Do you think Itzel plans on using it or just keeping it out of, say, Etiyr’s hands?”
“hWhat handsh?”
<Meh. She doesn’t know what it does any more than we do.>
“Well, I have a feeling we’re gonna find out one way or another,” concluded Bjoris, taking a swig of root beer.
Two things that gave Gabe solace:
First, he’d had time to try on the robe. It was nice. Breezy. A bit warm.
Two, he’d made it through three of the security troops before they’d gotten his weedwhacker-hand pinned. Killing, it turns out, is a lot easier the second time. And then the third time, it gets harder again, because the guy’s wearing a helmet and won’t stop kicking. The fourth time is just gross.
The other cultists, to their credit, hadn’t gone quietly either. One had rushed over to the hydroponics facility and come back with an omega-flower that disabled the security forces’ bees. Brother Flynn had swallowed a pill that lit all his skin on fire, and didn’t go down until VII remotely activated the sprinklers. The Record Keeper had jumped out a window, disappeared for five seconds, and then reappeared in the pilot’s seat of a Russian-ordinance helicopter and begun shooting everything in sight. She should have just flown away, Gabe thought sadly, remembering the sound of a woman drowning in cockroaches.
The officer who finally got to Gabe injected a local anaesthetic into his arm, numbing and neutralizing his utility hand. The former-repairman and almost-cultist was led to the room where he’d been talking to Sister Siobhan. Etiyr was gone. Nothing was there except for a precisely worded termination notice, standard in every way except for the strange letterhead Quick! Ditch the robe, type on me and look busy! The pink slip was neatly folded on a table and held in place by a nondescript red paperweight. The security officer took the form; Gabe snatched the orb up and hid it in the folds of his robe.
The elevator operator was back in position, looking glum. “All the way up, Brom,” the officer instructed.
Brom turned towards Gabe. He looked familiar somehow. “Going straight to the top, are you?”
“That’s right,” said the officer. “Gonna have words with Mr. Clemens himself.”
Brom shrugged and pulled the lever upwards. “Guess everybody’s got to have a dream.”
The elevator began to ascend.
”Puth Chailean and Ghaurinn back on,” demanded Tarresst.
“No, don’t,” begged Bjoris. “It’s gross. Plus, Gabe’s gonna use the orb any second now.”
Ding!
”Nowhere to go but down from here,” remarked Brom. The officer led Gabe out roughly onto the top floor, which was a single ring of spacious offices circling around an austerely-lit board room.
Gabe fidgeted with the orb as he was led into the corner office. If he was going down, he wasn’t going alone.
“Here’s the one, Mr. Clemens,” said the officer, putting Gabe down in a chair. “We found him wearing a robe and leading some kind of sick ceremony. We confiscated this.” He put the red stapler down in front of Mr. Clemens. “We think it may be some sort of… reference.”
“I see,” said Mr. Clemens. Gabe considered the man before him. Everything about Mr. Clemens said “boss.” He was clearly the kind of guy who wanted you to know that he could afford to spill coffee on a jacket that cost more than you made in a year. He held a cigarette and a glass of scotch to keep his hands and his heart busy while he spent all day not using them for anything. Purple veins crisscrossed his forehead were like a flowchart, constantly shifting around as though looking for a way to make you redundant. “Well, Mr…” –he glanced at some papers on his desk—“Mr. Ferrell, it looks like your little ‘break room’ scheme is over. And incidentally, so is your career.”
Gabe gripped the orb under the desk and thought back to a time when he didn’t have to deal with people like this. Before he could do anything rash, Clemens’ secretary poked her head in. “Sir? Lucky VII’s on line one.”
“Ugh, this guy again,” growled Clemens. “I’m putting him on speakerphone, officer, so if Ferrell says anything, hit him on the head.”
“Yes, sir.”
Clemens tapped a button on his phone. “Yes, Lucky, I’m in the middle of something, what is it?”
An unfamiliar voice buzzed out of the speaker. ”Mr. Clemens, remember we made a deal. We have full control over firing and hiring for the rest of our twenty-four hour—“
”Lucky, we’re very grateful for your work in exposing this conspiracy, but, let’s be honest, it’s not worth anything if I can’t fire the ringleaders, is it now?”
”Mr. Clemens, I beg you to hold off for just a few hours. Lives are at stake.”
”You think I don’t know that? Of course lives are at stake. Hell, that’s our company slogan. Epigen Corporation: Lives Are At Stake. It’s right there on the door. We make weapons, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’d appreciate an opportunity to speak on my own behalf,” blurted Gabe. “Ow!” he added, when the security guard predictably him on the head.
”Yes, let him speak,” said VII enthusiastically. ”We can sort this out without anybody losing their jobs.”
Mr. Clemens sighed. “Lucky, this man killed three security guards today. Alright, fine, fine, you win. Mr. Ferrell, I’ll hear what you have to say, if only because this alien incursion has slowed new business down to a crawl and I’m sort of bored.”
Gabe took a deep breath. He wasn’t very good at speeches. He was more of a man of action, but seeing as there was only one action left to him and it involved a mysterious weird-science artifact that he didn’t know what it would do, he figured he ought to try words first, just to see. “Well the thing is, Mr. Clemens,” he began. “Yesterday—I think it must have been yesterday—a genie called the Hedonist put me and a bunch of other people and things into a battle to the death. And this is the third place he put us and I don’t really work here technically and I was just looking for something to do instead of just following one of the others around and doing what they said. So owing to the fact that I was really in a lot of danger and hadn’t slept for a while and don’t even like Denny’s, and I think I’m the only human one left, I thought that I deserved a break. So you can see that it’s not really my fault that I killed all those people, and also, if you fire me I die, so please don’t. Sir.”
There was silence on both ends of the deck, and both ends of the phone line. Mr. Clemens considered recent events. “Yes, well,” he said. “Obviously we knew something like that was going on. We aren’t fools here at Epigen, no matter what your Arab genie friends would have you believe. Still… I don’t see how that excuses your behavior. If anything, all it shows is that you’ve been going around killing the wrong people. Officer, give me that termination notice.” The officer handed over the pink slip. “Hmm. This all seems to be in order. Mr. Ferrell, you’re—“
“Wait!” shouted Gabe. Under the desk, he was clutching the orb like it was a live preserver, or Mr. Clemens’ neck. “You forgot about one thing.”
Mr. Clemens rolled his eyes. “Always one more thing. And what would that be?”
”Gabe, listen to me. We know what you have. Don’t even think about—“
Gabe revealed the orb with a grin, as though he were pulling a rabbit out of his hat. “This,” he said.
Gabe threw the orb at Mr. Clemens’ face.
It hit against his jowls with a wet smack and fell to the ground ineffectively.
Mr. Clemens looked at the orb as one looks at a dead bird that has been dropped in one’s lap by an overeager cat. “Yes, well,” he said. “We’ve been looking for that, I think. Officer, my understanding is that Mr. Ferrell is about to die, but if that proves not to be the case, escort him out of the building.” Mr. Clemens signed the termination notice with the lit end of his cigarette. “Mr. Ferrell, you’re fired.”
The screen went black.
“What the fuck?” shouted Shoj. “We didn’t get to see what the orb did!”
“You should be happy,” consoled THAM’s right head. “Gabe died. You win the pot.”
“We didn’t see him die,” retorted Shoj. He shrugged. “Whatever, I’ll take your money.”
“Seriously, talk about an anticlimax,” moaned Bjoris. “I bet the next round is just five minutes of Cailean bleeding out. I’m going home.”
“Split a cab?” offered his date, squeezing his tentacle affectionately.
Shoj sprouted eyes all over his body and scanned the bar. “Who hasn’t paid up?” he demanded. “K’r’r’r’r, you’re still holding that money from when we thought Cail was dead… K’r’r’r’r? You okay, man?”
K’r’r’r’r had two arms clutching his chest and two arms leaning on the bar and holding his root beer as though praying for it to turn into alcohol. With a fifth arm he signed, <I don’t know, man. What happened to Gabe…>
“Hey,” said Shoj in a low voice. “Don’t sweat it, man. Just think of it as a TV show.”
<I don’t know,> gestured K’r’r’r’r. <Makes you think. Hey Shoj, if I quit the factory and started writing full-time, do you think I’d do alright?>