Re: THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELED [S!1][ROUND TWO: ETA CARINA]
09-16-2012, 06:50 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-21-2015, 01:26 AM by AgentBlue.)
Originally posted on MSPA by Agent1022.
Aaron stood in front of a window. The plate glass was stock, the frame plain and unadorned, the surface here and there smudged by careless workers. It was an austere, unopulent and above all ordinary window - except in one detail. It occupied an entire wall.
Eta Carina lay splayed before him, a glittering cancer that clung to its floating rock like a gangrenous golden limpet. The sandy shores that girted its infrastructure swept down from the neon casinos into a nebulaic ocean, half vapor and half stardust. The effect was as beautiful as it was impossible, and therefore it was as impossible as it was expensive.
From his new office, the proprietor of the Feedback Loop watched Eta Carina slip by underneath the building's superstructure. Every so often, a muffled crash would punctuate the hum of the inertial compensators as modular propulsion units interlocked into a new pattern on the bottom of the building. It was percussion to the symphony that played in his veins, the thrill of taking everyone for everything they’d got.
And of freedom! He could taste it!
It would have been a smoother ride if he hadn’t specifically chosen for the Loop to be relocated by quantum chambers: little Casimir actuators that drew borrowed energy from vacuum to raise the place, then flew like hell to get it there before they had to give it back. He found the poetic justice fitting enough to override Harrison’s protest of the cost - “Time is everything, Harrison; we need to get uptown as fast as possible,” - and of the stability concerns - “Throw up some inertial compensation rigs around the busiest areas. No one’s going to drop into the maintenance hallways anyway.”
Blonde hair flew this way and that, accompanied with a myriad of unladylike curses. It glittered like gold in the harsh fluorescent lights swinging from the ceiling, as the passage containing them creaked and quivered under the competing forces of travel. The curses intensified as the dented metal floor did its best earthquake impersonation, while the quantum engines shat energy lurch by lurch into the Loop’s superstructure.
She’d been taken by surprise. Lady Vohuna, the best freelance espionage agent money could buy here on Eta Carina, taken by surprise! What would they say in the circles she frequented? That perhaps she was losing her edge? That she wasn’t quite right for the next job? She knew where that led - a contract and a desk job, or maybe just termination in a dark alley, to be safe. Rich people accumulated such juicy secrets. Which made it doubly odd that this new one on the scene didn’t seem to have any. No history, no records - the most concrete thing anyone knew was that he was a guest of some bigwig entertainment system out near the fringe of broadcasting space, and no one was watching that mass media crap here in the cultured quarter of the galaxy, thank you.
So what would they say in those smoky poker rooms, where jobs and agents were traded with the playing cards across a round table? They’d say:
Everyone knows this Abstract is a canny one. He appears from nowhere, lays out this blitzkrieg of money, throws out the security firms from his new place, and gets Guido protection without even blinking! He’s a mystery all right, someone we got to look into.
Well, then, guess who we got? Only the foremost expert on him! She was actually there when it got out that he was ‘looooooaded’. She saw him before he got the boot straight up the arse to where he is now.
Oh, really? Tell me more...
Eyes were turned to the sky, looking downtown; a clattering spark danced on the horizon, approaching from the less-prosperous corner of the resort. A pair of these belonged to that spark’s most recent winner, in that money from its vaults had made its way to hers.
"Huh."
Another gaze directed its energies skyward. What is that?
"That's where we just came from, moneybags - and your friend is driving it."
The Transaction fluttered above the heads of the crowd, to get a better view. Driving? He - he must be coming for me! He did it before, he crossed whole universes to rescue me - I have value! I have value to him! He turned smugly towards his compatriot, a nasty tone in his voice - Oh, I wouldn't like to be you. The last people who captured me were massacred, quite horribly...
“First of all, moneybags - I haven’t captured you, you’re here because as a Transaction you’re naturally attracted to large volumes of liquid assets. Secondly, weren’t you just condemning this massacre?”
You can’t float your dotcom. You were laughing at the murder of half a city!
“Because it was funny!”
That’s hardly-
“And finally,” she cut him off, “what do you mean, crossing whole universes?”
The maintenance hallways had not been maintained, Vohuna noted, as she stumbled down increasingly decrepit corridors. The irony stemmed from the head mechanic’s absence; the Feedback Loop had never been able to afford proper-wearing metal for those parts of the casino unfrequented by paying customers. Now as the Loop lurched across the sky, pieces of flooring were shaken loose and sent spinning into the air like square shurikens, denting the metal where they hit even further and loosening even more plates.
One whizzed by her head and impacted the wall behind her, exposing a corner of blackness regularly interspersed with silver - an alcove for unsightly yet necessary machinery, walled off from the world out of the hands of careless cleaning staff. But - Vohuna looked closer - something was odd. Every instinct told her that was something wrong with this picture; she pulled at the cheap sheet of metal that served as a cover, peering in-
“Thank you for using the Eta Carina Banking and Mercantile Exchange!”
Artemis stepped from the building as the 527th richest person in Eta Carina. Behind her floated a shaking, swaying bundle of banknotes. But Change was different; the notes were purple rather than green, and on them were marked the seal of Monotone Entertainment, the financial power that permeated the resort. They were also absurdly high denominations. “Thanks for the help, moneybags.”
No...no...Aaron...
“You see, routing funds from an offshore account back into a local one would normally be difficult as fuck-” She took the bundle by the band, and dragged it down to her eye level. “But a Transaction... a Transaction is a local bank account; an unregulated, self-guarding vault! It’s genius!”
Change lurched sickeningly, some monetary dry-retch wracking his notes. Aaron...Aaron will save me...I have value...I am an investment...
The Loop took this cue to fly deafeningly overhead, conspiciously not stopping. Craning her head upwards, Artemis took in the Loop’s new lines, the new machineries attached to the increasingly fuselage-like walls, the ever-building mechanisms that scuttled about on the underside.
“Interesting.” She got a firmer grip on Change and began to walk further uptown, pulling him behind her. “Very interesting. Come on, moneybags. We need to go see someone.”
-everything was absolutely normal. Gleaming gears whirred as their teeth meshed with each another, lubricated flanges of metal sliding across naked silver with nary a sound; camshafts thrusting pistons back and forth, back and forth. It was perfection. To an engineer, it was ecstasy. To Vohuna, it was simply mechanisms; odd mechanisms to find in a casino, though. They seemed more characteristic of a clock tower’s escapements and cogs, ticking away in hidden spaces, untended and ignored. And then it hit her.
All of it was new.
“Tell me again.”
This office was extravagant. Here, too, a plate-glass window dominated a wall, but the glass here was mined from rare sandy asteroids and etched with a nearly-invisible decal, depicting the Eta Carina skyline as seen from its half-panoramic view. Everything in the room was constructed from materials rare, unbelievably rare, and nonexistent (one bookshelf in the corner was constructed from absolutely nothing. What the books were actually standing on was an unsolved mystery).
Artemis sat across from Montcorbier’s gargantuan spaceteak desk, her booted feet propped up on the extinct-wood surface. Behind her, Change lounged miserably in a corner, making agonized circles in the air. “Don’t play dumb, Corbie. Everyone knows you’re the one running the heist. Buster’s gone straight to ground, your film crews are all over the place...you’re planning something, Corbie, and knowing you...”
Montcorbier leaned back in his leather-upholstered chair. “Knowing me...?” He prompted.
The mechanic leaned back in her chair as well, not falling for the trap. “You tell me.” (A prominent theory circulating among Eta Carina’s financial analysts: by the laws of sociological economics, becoming rich instilled an instinctive social maneuvering skill in people, if they were not to stop being rich very quickly).
“You don’t know anything. All you’ve heard is a mass of rumors and misinformation - I have many enemies, as you should know if you seem so acquainted with Eta Carina society. I don’t think I’ve even seen you before, miss...”
“I don’t have a name, Corbie; I’m just someone with information you need.”
“Ah, I need it now?”
Boots swung off the table (much to Montcorbier’s relief), landing on the floorboards with a muffled crack (much to his chagrin). “Let’s assume for the time being that you have a heist in the works. How about that?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Now why don’t we break down a heist?” She raised a hand, five fingers extended, and drew in her thumb. “You gotta prepare. Bribe people, rub shoulders in the nitty-gritty of high society, make those deals with cash in back alleys and get bags of uniforms in the morning.” Her pinky finger withdrew, leaving only three standing. “Then you gotta get into the place. Run the job, put all that planning into motion.” Ring finger met thumb and pinky, leaving only the victory sign in place. “Then you steal the money. Easy as pie - so far.” She folded her index finger over. “So now you got to get out. Getting out of the casino is simple if you got this far. But now what?” She gestured at the study window with her other hand, keeping her present single digit facing Montcorbier. “As I understand it, it’s a little hard to leave here at the moment.”
Irritably, Montcorbier swatted the profane hand away, and rose from his seat. “That’s of no consequence, even if such a ‘plan’ were going to happen. I’ve got concerns more important than handling the logistics of such shenanigans. Now, if you’ll excuse me-”
“Oh, I’ve heard, Corbie. Who hasn’t heard? The Feedback Loop, on the ass end of the resort, suddenly explodes into prominence as the richest, gaudiest, shiniest tourist trap of all Eta Carina, finds a place all the way uptown...” A resounding thud came from outside, in tandem with another set of lights brightening amongst the rest. “Oh, that’d be them now. Who’d have expected it? Funnily enough, what you need to know relates to that phoenix from the ashes...”
The study door opened just a crack; the silhouette of a butler appeared behind it. “Master Montcorbier, sir, Vohuna is here to see you.”
Artemis rose before Montcorbier could. “I won’t take up any more of your time. Two words. That’s all you need to know.” The butler opened the door fully, ducking into the room as Artemis stepped out. In the doorway, she turned to face the desk again, plucking Change out of the air and tossing him out over her shoulder. “Two words, Corbie: engine clock.”
The butler shut the door.
“Thank you.” Slowly, Montcorbier tried to regain his composure. An engine clock! Impossible! Those things couldn’t be constructed! He’d heard talk of them, hulking machines that dominated horizons and moved planets across universes. As asteroidal Eta Carina was, such a machine would be noticeable. She was just another crackpot then, albeit a rich one. And rich people almost always had crackpot tendencies.
Everything was just fine. Back to business.
“Send Vohuna in.”
Whereupon the butler pulled a device from a coat pocket and pushed a few buttons; combed black hair turned blonde, tumbling to Vohuna’s shoulders with the swift removal of a few strategic bobby pins. She stepped out of the suit, which crumpled to the floor, and was dressed for a cocktail party in the time it took to blink.
“Did she say ‘engine clock’?”
Pages were strewn over the conference table. Harrison paged through the dross with his good hand: detritus remaining once he had contracted and handled every last schematic, design document and blueprint Aaron had handed him, searching for clues as to what his new employer was planning, and whether he needed to go ahead and learn how to shoot left-handed. He leaned over to examine a particular diagram, and whimpered when his bandaged right hand bumped against the table. “I don’t understand...”
“Of course you don’t, Harrison.” Aaron cut an imposing figure in the light flooding from the conference room door: the menacing Alistair was nowhere to be seen. Almost unconsciously, Harrison thought of the tiny pistol in his pocket. He could kill him now, and make good his escape before everyone realized that the man with the magic cash was dead...
“Harrison. I can see you’re trying to figure this out.” Aaron’s voice was soft, soothing, but not patronizing. Almost involuntarily, Harrison began to relax, and he realized he’d been tensing. “I know what I’m doing, Harrison. I hope you do too.”
“But, but Mr. Abstract, sir...”
“Are we finished with all those contracts and things?”
“Everything’s been requisitioned, sir. They’re building right now, down in the new sub-basements, sir.”
“All right.” Silk glided on mahogany as Aaron took a seat on the table, legs dangling. He pulled over a tea set from the side counter, poured tea into two expensive-looking teacups, and pushed one towards the assistant. It sent a signal: this is informal, there’s no need for ‘sirs’, we’re just having a talk, man to man.
Gingerly, Harrison picked up the cup and balanced the handle in his bandaged hand. And then he burst into tears. “Mr. Abstract, I don’t understand!”
Aaron raised a finger to the handicapped assistant’s lips, shushing him. “I think you deserve some answers.”
Hope swelled in Harrison’s heart, pushing all the questions ahead of it. “What are we doing? What is all this? How are we going to make money? Why?! And what the hell is-” he grabbed a random schematic from the table, “-the, the...gravity escapement?”
Aaron smiled, warmly. “Now, Harrison...I’m very glad you asked about that one.”
“The what?”
“The gravity escapement, Monty.” At the impatient look in Montcorbier’s eyes, Vohuna gave up. “The machinery was all new, see? But it was hidden behind old plates, so that no one would know. So I began following the gears, all the way back to the-”
“The...gravity escapement.”
“Yes.” Vohuna sighed. “I’m not an expert myself. But it definitely looks like the beginnings of, well, an engine clock; and yes, Monty, I know it’s impossible, but bear with me here. Remember the old saying? Something’s only as impossible...”
“...as it is expensive.” Montcorbier steepled his fingers and leaned forward. Little balances were being made in his head, payoffs and plans circling one another to form the completed jigsaw puzzle of the Final Plan. And a new piece had just fallen into his reach. A slow, tiny smile began to play around the corners of his face, going nowhere near his mouth but showing brightly in his eyes... “Let’s - let’s assume for the time being, that there is an engine clock at the Feedback Loop...”
“Holy fuck. Moneybags. Holy shitting fuck.”
Mechanic and Transaction stood on a walkway overlooking the chronochasm. By the rules of technicality, it was actually several sub-basements of the Feedback Loop that had been built in midair and driven into the ground when it had landed, but chronochasm was the only fitting word for its size and contents. A pendulum, its bob the size of a car, descended from the ceiling to dangle only centimeters from the steel floor. Massive metal bars curved gracefully down towards the pendulum’s cable, and upwards to the ceiling where they stopped a gargantuan cog from turning. More gears and pinions coiled away from the large cog, spilling down the walls and pillars into the black boxes that covered the floor of the chronochasm and turned its topology into a static sea of high and low square faces.
“That’s the gravity escapement right there, see, does away with the old gravity drill design so it doesn’t need stabilizers, the whole thing turns gravity in on itself and uses it to drive the pendulum through different cosmological spaces...”
Change heard nearly none of this. Everything hurt. He barely knew where he was. He was comprised of a rapidly fluctuating currency - a ridiculous amount of a rapidly fluctuating currency, and Aaron wasn’t going to save him, Aaron didn’t even know he was in trouble, and they had been together forever but he, Change, loyal familiar, was going to die alone, worthless, dropped like a dotcom stock.
“...so the escapement is the driving force behind the project. By utilizing the gravity of the circumstances to power itself, it deforms the fabric of spacetime in the same way a gravity drill would have before, rotating conic Minkowski spaces...”
Harrison tried to fight through the slog of words assaulting him, but it was like attacking an oncoming wave of syrup with a shovel. “Mr. Abstract - Mr. Abstract, sir, how do you know so much...”
“How do I know so much about this sort of thing? Well, that’s a yarn and a half.”
A yarn and a half? “All due respect, sir-Mr. Abstract..but I don’t think...I could survive even half a yarn...” Where had all the light gone? It was awfully dim in the room. “Could you...could you turn up the lights, Mr. Abstract...”
Aaron slid off the table, and reached for the dimmer control...and stopped. “It won’t help. Half a yarn? You couldn’t survive a reel of thread, Harrison.” In one swift moment, he upended his teacup into a nearby pot plant. “And you certainly couldn’t survive metaethylene glycol poisoning.”
The unbandaged hand tried to reach into a pocket, but froze halfway there, fingers locked in mid-spasm.
“Don’t worry. I’ve taken care of the worst symptoms. Can’t have muscle spasms if you have a nice paralytic inside of you. In this case, bloodborne curare extract.” He flicked off the lights, leaving only the glow from the open door.
Accusing, unseeing eyes, frozen open, glowing in reflected light they could not see.
“Harrison-”
Nothing. Only the liquid sounds of laboring lungs to suck in life for a dying man.
“-I bid you adieu.”
There wasn’t anything but the pain. There was too much change to Change for Change to handle, and there was too much Change to change into anything less; Change was changeless, and that wasn’t about to change.
Aaron! Aaron, Aaron, Aaron...
Aaron.
Aaron and Change.
Together.
“Change! Oh, seven hells, Change!”
Aaron stood in front of a window. The plate glass was stock, the frame plain and unadorned, the surface here and there smudged by careless workers. It was an austere, unopulent and above all ordinary window - except in one detail. It occupied an entire wall.
Eta Carina lay splayed before him, a glittering cancer that clung to its floating rock like a gangrenous golden limpet. The sandy shores that girted its infrastructure swept down from the neon casinos into a nebulaic ocean, half vapor and half stardust. The effect was as beautiful as it was impossible, and therefore it was as impossible as it was expensive.
From his new office, the proprietor of the Feedback Loop watched Eta Carina slip by underneath the building's superstructure. Every so often, a muffled crash would punctuate the hum of the inertial compensators as modular propulsion units interlocked into a new pattern on the bottom of the building. It was percussion to the symphony that played in his veins, the thrill of taking everyone for everything they’d got.
And of freedom! He could taste it!
It would have been a smoother ride if he hadn’t specifically chosen for the Loop to be relocated by quantum chambers: little Casimir actuators that drew borrowed energy from vacuum to raise the place, then flew like hell to get it there before they had to give it back. He found the poetic justice fitting enough to override Harrison’s protest of the cost - “Time is everything, Harrison; we need to get uptown as fast as possible,” - and of the stability concerns - “Throw up some inertial compensation rigs around the busiest areas. No one’s going to drop into the maintenance hallways anyway.”
Blonde hair flew this way and that, accompanied with a myriad of unladylike curses. It glittered like gold in the harsh fluorescent lights swinging from the ceiling, as the passage containing them creaked and quivered under the competing forces of travel. The curses intensified as the dented metal floor did its best earthquake impersonation, while the quantum engines shat energy lurch by lurch into the Loop’s superstructure.
She’d been taken by surprise. Lady Vohuna, the best freelance espionage agent money could buy here on Eta Carina, taken by surprise! What would they say in the circles she frequented? That perhaps she was losing her edge? That she wasn’t quite right for the next job? She knew where that led - a contract and a desk job, or maybe just termination in a dark alley, to be safe. Rich people accumulated such juicy secrets. Which made it doubly odd that this new one on the scene didn’t seem to have any. No history, no records - the most concrete thing anyone knew was that he was a guest of some bigwig entertainment system out near the fringe of broadcasting space, and no one was watching that mass media crap here in the cultured quarter of the galaxy, thank you.
So what would they say in those smoky poker rooms, where jobs and agents were traded with the playing cards across a round table? They’d say:
Everyone knows this Abstract is a canny one. He appears from nowhere, lays out this blitzkrieg of money, throws out the security firms from his new place, and gets Guido protection without even blinking! He’s a mystery all right, someone we got to look into.
Well, then, guess who we got? Only the foremost expert on him! She was actually there when it got out that he was ‘looooooaded’. She saw him before he got the boot straight up the arse to where he is now.
Oh, really? Tell me more...
Eyes were turned to the sky, looking downtown; a clattering spark danced on the horizon, approaching from the less-prosperous corner of the resort. A pair of these belonged to that spark’s most recent winner, in that money from its vaults had made its way to hers.
"Huh."
Another gaze directed its energies skyward. What is that?
"That's where we just came from, moneybags - and your friend is driving it."
The Transaction fluttered above the heads of the crowd, to get a better view. Driving? He - he must be coming for me! He did it before, he crossed whole universes to rescue me - I have value! I have value to him! He turned smugly towards his compatriot, a nasty tone in his voice - Oh, I wouldn't like to be you. The last people who captured me were massacred, quite horribly...
“First of all, moneybags - I haven’t captured you, you’re here because as a Transaction you’re naturally attracted to large volumes of liquid assets. Secondly, weren’t you just condemning this massacre?”
You can’t float your dotcom. You were laughing at the murder of half a city!
“Because it was funny!”
That’s hardly-
“And finally,” she cut him off, “what do you mean, crossing whole universes?”
The maintenance hallways had not been maintained, Vohuna noted, as she stumbled down increasingly decrepit corridors. The irony stemmed from the head mechanic’s absence; the Feedback Loop had never been able to afford proper-wearing metal for those parts of the casino unfrequented by paying customers. Now as the Loop lurched across the sky, pieces of flooring were shaken loose and sent spinning into the air like square shurikens, denting the metal where they hit even further and loosening even more plates.
One whizzed by her head and impacted the wall behind her, exposing a corner of blackness regularly interspersed with silver - an alcove for unsightly yet necessary machinery, walled off from the world out of the hands of careless cleaning staff. But - Vohuna looked closer - something was odd. Every instinct told her that was something wrong with this picture; she pulled at the cheap sheet of metal that served as a cover, peering in-
“Thank you for using the Eta Carina Banking and Mercantile Exchange!”
Artemis stepped from the building as the 527th richest person in Eta Carina. Behind her floated a shaking, swaying bundle of banknotes. But Change was different; the notes were purple rather than green, and on them were marked the seal of Monotone Entertainment, the financial power that permeated the resort. They were also absurdly high denominations. “Thanks for the help, moneybags.”
No...no...Aaron...
“You see, routing funds from an offshore account back into a local one would normally be difficult as fuck-” She took the bundle by the band, and dragged it down to her eye level. “But a Transaction... a Transaction is a local bank account; an unregulated, self-guarding vault! It’s genius!”
Change lurched sickeningly, some monetary dry-retch wracking his notes. Aaron...Aaron will save me...I have value...I am an investment...
The Loop took this cue to fly deafeningly overhead, conspiciously not stopping. Craning her head upwards, Artemis took in the Loop’s new lines, the new machineries attached to the increasingly fuselage-like walls, the ever-building mechanisms that scuttled about on the underside.
“Interesting.” She got a firmer grip on Change and began to walk further uptown, pulling him behind her. “Very interesting. Come on, moneybags. We need to go see someone.”
-everything was absolutely normal. Gleaming gears whirred as their teeth meshed with each another, lubricated flanges of metal sliding across naked silver with nary a sound; camshafts thrusting pistons back and forth, back and forth. It was perfection. To an engineer, it was ecstasy. To Vohuna, it was simply mechanisms; odd mechanisms to find in a casino, though. They seemed more characteristic of a clock tower’s escapements and cogs, ticking away in hidden spaces, untended and ignored. And then it hit her.
All of it was new.
“Tell me again.”
This office was extravagant. Here, too, a plate-glass window dominated a wall, but the glass here was mined from rare sandy asteroids and etched with a nearly-invisible decal, depicting the Eta Carina skyline as seen from its half-panoramic view. Everything in the room was constructed from materials rare, unbelievably rare, and nonexistent (one bookshelf in the corner was constructed from absolutely nothing. What the books were actually standing on was an unsolved mystery).
Artemis sat across from Montcorbier’s gargantuan spaceteak desk, her booted feet propped up on the extinct-wood surface. Behind her, Change lounged miserably in a corner, making agonized circles in the air. “Don’t play dumb, Corbie. Everyone knows you’re the one running the heist. Buster’s gone straight to ground, your film crews are all over the place...you’re planning something, Corbie, and knowing you...”
Montcorbier leaned back in his leather-upholstered chair. “Knowing me...?” He prompted.
The mechanic leaned back in her chair as well, not falling for the trap. “You tell me.” (A prominent theory circulating among Eta Carina’s financial analysts: by the laws of sociological economics, becoming rich instilled an instinctive social maneuvering skill in people, if they were not to stop being rich very quickly).
“You don’t know anything. All you’ve heard is a mass of rumors and misinformation - I have many enemies, as you should know if you seem so acquainted with Eta Carina society. I don’t think I’ve even seen you before, miss...”
“I don’t have a name, Corbie; I’m just someone with information you need.”
“Ah, I need it now?”
Boots swung off the table (much to Montcorbier’s relief), landing on the floorboards with a muffled crack (much to his chagrin). “Let’s assume for the time being that you have a heist in the works. How about that?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Now why don’t we break down a heist?” She raised a hand, five fingers extended, and drew in her thumb. “You gotta prepare. Bribe people, rub shoulders in the nitty-gritty of high society, make those deals with cash in back alleys and get bags of uniforms in the morning.” Her pinky finger withdrew, leaving only three standing. “Then you gotta get into the place. Run the job, put all that planning into motion.” Ring finger met thumb and pinky, leaving only the victory sign in place. “Then you steal the money. Easy as pie - so far.” She folded her index finger over. “So now you got to get out. Getting out of the casino is simple if you got this far. But now what?” She gestured at the study window with her other hand, keeping her present single digit facing Montcorbier. “As I understand it, it’s a little hard to leave here at the moment.”
Irritably, Montcorbier swatted the profane hand away, and rose from his seat. “That’s of no consequence, even if such a ‘plan’ were going to happen. I’ve got concerns more important than handling the logistics of such shenanigans. Now, if you’ll excuse me-”
“Oh, I’ve heard, Corbie. Who hasn’t heard? The Feedback Loop, on the ass end of the resort, suddenly explodes into prominence as the richest, gaudiest, shiniest tourist trap of all Eta Carina, finds a place all the way uptown...” A resounding thud came from outside, in tandem with another set of lights brightening amongst the rest. “Oh, that’d be them now. Who’d have expected it? Funnily enough, what you need to know relates to that phoenix from the ashes...”
The study door opened just a crack; the silhouette of a butler appeared behind it. “Master Montcorbier, sir, Vohuna is here to see you.”
Artemis rose before Montcorbier could. “I won’t take up any more of your time. Two words. That’s all you need to know.” The butler opened the door fully, ducking into the room as Artemis stepped out. In the doorway, she turned to face the desk again, plucking Change out of the air and tossing him out over her shoulder. “Two words, Corbie: engine clock.”
The butler shut the door.
“Thank you.” Slowly, Montcorbier tried to regain his composure. An engine clock! Impossible! Those things couldn’t be constructed! He’d heard talk of them, hulking machines that dominated horizons and moved planets across universes. As asteroidal Eta Carina was, such a machine would be noticeable. She was just another crackpot then, albeit a rich one. And rich people almost always had crackpot tendencies.
Everything was just fine. Back to business.
“Send Vohuna in.”
Whereupon the butler pulled a device from a coat pocket and pushed a few buttons; combed black hair turned blonde, tumbling to Vohuna’s shoulders with the swift removal of a few strategic bobby pins. She stepped out of the suit, which crumpled to the floor, and was dressed for a cocktail party in the time it took to blink.
“Did she say ‘engine clock’?”
Pages were strewn over the conference table. Harrison paged through the dross with his good hand: detritus remaining once he had contracted and handled every last schematic, design document and blueprint Aaron had handed him, searching for clues as to what his new employer was planning, and whether he needed to go ahead and learn how to shoot left-handed. He leaned over to examine a particular diagram, and whimpered when his bandaged right hand bumped against the table. “I don’t understand...”
“Of course you don’t, Harrison.” Aaron cut an imposing figure in the light flooding from the conference room door: the menacing Alistair was nowhere to be seen. Almost unconsciously, Harrison thought of the tiny pistol in his pocket. He could kill him now, and make good his escape before everyone realized that the man with the magic cash was dead...
“Harrison. I can see you’re trying to figure this out.” Aaron’s voice was soft, soothing, but not patronizing. Almost involuntarily, Harrison began to relax, and he realized he’d been tensing. “I know what I’m doing, Harrison. I hope you do too.”
“But, but Mr. Abstract, sir...”
“Are we finished with all those contracts and things?”
“Everything’s been requisitioned, sir. They’re building right now, down in the new sub-basements, sir.”
“All right.” Silk glided on mahogany as Aaron took a seat on the table, legs dangling. He pulled over a tea set from the side counter, poured tea into two expensive-looking teacups, and pushed one towards the assistant. It sent a signal: this is informal, there’s no need for ‘sirs’, we’re just having a talk, man to man.
Gingerly, Harrison picked up the cup and balanced the handle in his bandaged hand. And then he burst into tears. “Mr. Abstract, I don’t understand!”
Aaron raised a finger to the handicapped assistant’s lips, shushing him. “I think you deserve some answers.”
Hope swelled in Harrison’s heart, pushing all the questions ahead of it. “What are we doing? What is all this? How are we going to make money? Why?! And what the hell is-” he grabbed a random schematic from the table, “-the, the...gravity escapement?”
Aaron smiled, warmly. “Now, Harrison...I’m very glad you asked about that one.”
“The what?”
“The gravity escapement, Monty.” At the impatient look in Montcorbier’s eyes, Vohuna gave up. “The machinery was all new, see? But it was hidden behind old plates, so that no one would know. So I began following the gears, all the way back to the-”
“The...gravity escapement.”
“Yes.” Vohuna sighed. “I’m not an expert myself. But it definitely looks like the beginnings of, well, an engine clock; and yes, Monty, I know it’s impossible, but bear with me here. Remember the old saying? Something’s only as impossible...”
“...as it is expensive.” Montcorbier steepled his fingers and leaned forward. Little balances were being made in his head, payoffs and plans circling one another to form the completed jigsaw puzzle of the Final Plan. And a new piece had just fallen into his reach. A slow, tiny smile began to play around the corners of his face, going nowhere near his mouth but showing brightly in his eyes... “Let’s - let’s assume for the time being, that there is an engine clock at the Feedback Loop...”
“Holy fuck. Moneybags. Holy shitting fuck.”
Mechanic and Transaction stood on a walkway overlooking the chronochasm. By the rules of technicality, it was actually several sub-basements of the Feedback Loop that had been built in midair and driven into the ground when it had landed, but chronochasm was the only fitting word for its size and contents. A pendulum, its bob the size of a car, descended from the ceiling to dangle only centimeters from the steel floor. Massive metal bars curved gracefully down towards the pendulum’s cable, and upwards to the ceiling where they stopped a gargantuan cog from turning. More gears and pinions coiled away from the large cog, spilling down the walls and pillars into the black boxes that covered the floor of the chronochasm and turned its topology into a static sea of high and low square faces.
“That’s the gravity escapement right there, see, does away with the old gravity drill design so it doesn’t need stabilizers, the whole thing turns gravity in on itself and uses it to drive the pendulum through different cosmological spaces...”
Change heard nearly none of this. Everything hurt. He barely knew where he was. He was comprised of a rapidly fluctuating currency - a ridiculous amount of a rapidly fluctuating currency, and Aaron wasn’t going to save him, Aaron didn’t even know he was in trouble, and they had been together forever but he, Change, loyal familiar, was going to die alone, worthless, dropped like a dotcom stock.
“...so the escapement is the driving force behind the project. By utilizing the gravity of the circumstances to power itself, it deforms the fabric of spacetime in the same way a gravity drill would have before, rotating conic Minkowski spaces...”
Harrison tried to fight through the slog of words assaulting him, but it was like attacking an oncoming wave of syrup with a shovel. “Mr. Abstract - Mr. Abstract, sir, how do you know so much...”
“How do I know so much about this sort of thing? Well, that’s a yarn and a half.”
A yarn and a half? “All due respect, sir-Mr. Abstract..but I don’t think...I could survive even half a yarn...” Where had all the light gone? It was awfully dim in the room. “Could you...could you turn up the lights, Mr. Abstract...”
Aaron slid off the table, and reached for the dimmer control...and stopped. “It won’t help. Half a yarn? You couldn’t survive a reel of thread, Harrison.” In one swift moment, he upended his teacup into a nearby pot plant. “And you certainly couldn’t survive metaethylene glycol poisoning.”
The unbandaged hand tried to reach into a pocket, but froze halfway there, fingers locked in mid-spasm.
“Don’t worry. I’ve taken care of the worst symptoms. Can’t have muscle spasms if you have a nice paralytic inside of you. In this case, bloodborne curare extract.” He flicked off the lights, leaving only the glow from the open door.
Accusing, unseeing eyes, frozen open, glowing in reflected light they could not see.
“Harrison-”
Nothing. Only the liquid sounds of laboring lungs to suck in life for a dying man.
“-I bid you adieu.”
There wasn’t anything but the pain. There was too much change to Change for Change to handle, and there was too much Change to change into anything less; Change was changeless, and that wasn’t about to change.
Aaron! Aaron, Aaron, Aaron...
Aaron.
Aaron and Change.
Together.
“Change! Oh, seven hells, Change!”
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So very British / But then again | People are machines Machines are people | Oh hai there | There's no time
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Superhero 1920s noir | Multigenre Half-Life | Changing the future | Command line interface
Tu ventire felix? | Clockwork for eternity | Explosions in spacetime