RE: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round Two: Interplanetary Circus
05-07-2013, 08:55 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-08-2013, 02:20 PM by Elpie.)
The menagerie-man did something with his teeth as though he was turning a screw. “None as I can think of,” he confessed. “You’ve seen yourselves. Anyone seeking access to Hwael’ll need a good quarter hour to suit up. Not easy to sneak in.”
“Are there any circus employees with the morphology to abide deep-space conditions?” asked Trisha.
“Hmmmmm. Mayhap, mayhap. She-Boom goes spacewalking in her spare time, to be sure. Absence is brisk against her skin. Now there’s a woman.”
“Only her?”
“If you’re thinking biosabotage—“ menagerie-man’s many fingers played against each other like piano keys— “You’re not necessarily looking at an external job. Not all of D’Étoiles’ custom’s honest as I am.” He saluted, flashed a black-toothed, white-tongued smile.
Trisha considered this. “That raises a question of motive. Hwael is beautiful, harmless, and valuable. Who would want to harm him? A rival circus?”
“Pah! Rivals is two dogs to a femur. D’Étoiles has the whole skeleton tucked away in our closet; we make the dry bones dance. We have no rivals.”
Trisha had been having issues with extradimensional social cues lately, but she was pretty sure the menagerie-man’s increasingly whimsical language indicated a mounting frustration and desire for this conversation to end. She stood from her chair. “I’ll try and track down She-Boom,” she said. “Talk to her. Thanks for the help.”
“Might as well talk to the hull,” warned the menagerie-man. “Eloquence isn’t our suspect’s strong suit.”
* * * * *
Patricia could only find two masks in the closet—Big Smiley Face and Big Frowny Face, the classic opera set. She weighed them in each hand.
“What do you think?” she asked She-Boom.
She-Boom raised an eyebrow. Her throat didn’t work too well anymore, but she had very expressive eyebrows. Here she was saying, “Why would you want to hide a pretty face like yours on your big day?”
Or, maybe, “Do I look like I give a shit?” Patricia was many things, and non-verbal communications expert was only one of them.
She strapped on the frowny mask and looked in the mirror. It made her look utterly pathetic. “I can’t show my face in front of this crowd,” she said. “There are people trying to kill me.”
She-Boom made a fist and a palm and clapped them together with a thud and a rumble. Patricia switched to the smiling mask, then back again.
“Powerful people. People you can’t protect me from.” Big smile, big frown. Were these masks meant to reveal, or conceal? Much longer at the circus and she was worried she would find out.
That rabbit-thing had called her “Trisha.” An old name, a childhood name. She tried the smiling mask on one more time. Someone here knew her name. Someone was talking. Someone was looking for her.
Her hand was shaking. Pre-show jitters. The mask was doing something far more complicated than displaying joy or hiding fear; she was communicating the desire to appear to be smiling, drawing attention to the sham, the act. It forces the audience member to imagine, underneath the mask, something even more melodramatic—a gaping wound, a river of tears, a mirror, a whole universe, nothing at all.
She affixed the frowning mask over the smiling mask, took off both, put the frowning mask on first, then the smiling mask over it. Then she started rummaging for something with which to tie back her hair.
* * * * *
Many of the cars on The Lot had over a hundred thousand miles on them, but there were fewer that had the mental capacity to remember each one, and fewer still that could feel something about it. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to circle around your average Earth four times and change, or to cover over two point five percent of your average Estadounidense highway system.
Now, at thirty miles a gallon (and most of these cars got less than that, even without deploying the flamethrowers), that’s over three thousand gallons of gas, and, here’s the real shocking number, that’s over fifty thousand pounds of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. Those few cars in the Lot with the cognizant wherewithal to ponder their fates had by and large been thinking about their legacies.
Cat Six held no illusions. Gussied up with a new coat of paint, mobile crime lab replaced with a shag rug, stripped of Laws of Robotics compliance, she could no longer hold onto the pretense that she had been a good police car, a good partner, something she could be proud of. It was all the same. She was a tool at best, an accessory at worst; a masculinity prosthetic, born of the midlife crises of lonely scientists. Vroom, vroom. Hey, I’m Cat. Wanna go for a ride?
Her entire career could best be summed up by the image of pus oozing through a Band-Aid. A couple murderers institutionalized, a few rapists blown up, key to the city in the glove compartment. Meanwhile the world boiled in her stinking carbon excrement, the wound of crime and social decay continued to fester under the surface, and Johnny, her partner, kept running on fumes as long and as fast as he before breaking down on the end of a noose in a dark garage.
Maybe it was this former pretense--the insistence on her own self-worth--that had pushed him over the edge. Couldn’t she have let him take the wheel?
The police auction came before the funeral. Enter Jax Ryder with a wad of bills… and then the Lot. That had been two hundred and forty eight point seven days ago, according to her internal clock.
The Lot had seen a busy couple of days. Plenty of cars trotted out, most of them wheeled back in shortly afterwards, usually having sustained some heavy damage. Whatever was going on out there, Jax was getting desperate. Cat hoped that this flurry of activity would pass her by. The idea of a new owner, a new life, repulsed her. She would rather stay in the Lot and pretend it was an afterlife, her punishment, her eternity.
Right on cue, the light at the end of the tunnel. Ninth Law of Robotics: There Is No God. But Cat didn’t uphold the laws anymore. There was a God and He hated her.
ZAP!
“—Probably the smartest car on the Lot, but, what’s more, here’s the kicker, the one most capable of feeling. She’s got your logos, she’s got your ethos, she’s got your pathos. That’s the Computerized, Automatic, Talking Vehicular Inspector. See Ay Tee Vee Eye. Cat Six.”
Jax put a hand on Cat’s passenger side mirror. A vague-looking man and a teenage girl looked on, intrigued.
“So here’s the deal. I won’t take your money—I’m not trying to swindle you. But! I’ll give you Cat Six, as is, free of charge, and all you gotta do is kill Patricia Whoever.”
”Trisha?” asked the girl. The vague-looking man perked up as though he’d just smelled something.
“Patricia. Bit older than you, brunette, good-looking, kinda intense? You know her?”
”I… I think so.”
”Then you probably know why I’d want her dead. Apart from the whole, you know, the thing with the thing. The battle.”
The vague man put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Can I talk to you aside for a—”
“But wait, there’s more! A personal appeal, if you will. See, if you don’t take the deal—”
--He hovered a finger over the Big Red Button on the Segway handle—
“—If you don’t take the deal, Cat here’s going straight to the scrap heap. Either way, someone dies. And who’s to say Cat isn’t just as much of a person—hell, more, even—than our girl [Pa]tricia? Cat, tell these fine customers you don’t want to die.”
Cat’s voice box crackled to life after months of disuse. “I… I’M NOT SURE.”
Jax slapped her roof with a chuckle. “Ain’t she a charmer? Ex-police, you know. Refurbished leather seats. And it can all be yours.”
Johnny hadn’t wanted to live. Or maybe he had. Maybe that wasn’t the point at all.
The vague man held up a hand. “Lynette and I need to talk some things over.”
“That’s alright,” said Jax. “Take your time.”
“But not too much time now,” he added. “I ain’t got all day.”
* * * * *
”What do you think about all this, Vigil?” asked Trisha. “I feel silly. Playing detective.”
The rabbit shrugged. Getting to know some people around here can’t hurt. We might be staying here a while. It doesn’t seem all that dangerous here, so everyone should be okay.”
”Tell that to Hwael,” replied Trisha with a whiff of indignance.
”I mean, look at you,” said Vigil. ”Last ‘round’ you were getting mistaken for princesses and kidnapped and there were all manner of slimy things trying to kill us.” Trisha shuddered, a dreamlike glimpse of a recently suppressed memory bursting into her consciousness like pus out of a zit. ”Now you have a job in your chosen field.”
”I’d rather be back home,” snapped Trisha. The violent stubbornness in her voice made Vigil recoil. Trisha groaned. “I know, I know. Not if it means anyone else dying. Anyway, there’s work to be done here.”
The big top rose up in the distance. Somewhere in there was a woman who didn’t need air to survive. Or air pressure.
“There’s also the question of delivery,” she added. “There’s the who, the why, but also a how. How do you poison a Hwael?”
”She couldn’t have put something in his food?”
Trisha shook her head. “Hwael photosynthesizes through electromagnetic baleen. Even if someone produced an energy signature that would be toxic to him somehow, he’d filter most of it out. Hi. Staff veterinarian,” she added to the security guard warding the back way into the big top. “We’re here to see She-Boom.” The guard admitted them without question, probably out of an understanding that She-Boom in particular was not in need of his protective services.
”What if she contaminated the tank?” asked Vigil. ”Do we know that vacuum’s a vacuum?”
”I’m pretty sure it’s closely monitored…"
They came to a door. Were they even still in a tent? Spatial relationships here worked a fair sight better than they had in the previous “round,” but there was still something a little off. Trisha knocked. She heard three loud, lurching footsteps and a click, and then the door swung open to reveal a hulking and distinctly unamused woman.
“Hi,” stammered Trisha. “I’m Trisha, the new staff veterinarian. We were looking for your help on—“
She-Boom tapped a finger against the doorframe impatiently, scrutinizing Trisha.
Trisha wilted. “We were wondering if you poisoned the Hwael.”
She-Boom shook her head.
“Okay,” said Trisha, as earnestly as she could muster. “Thanks for your time. We’ll be on our—“
A cold, scratchy hand wrapped around her forearm. She-Boom lumbered into the hallway and began dragging Trisha along with her into the bowels of the big top.
Trisha shot Vigil an angry look. Vigil twitched. Trisha understood that the twitch was supposed to communicate something but didn’t know what. Damn extradimensional social cues.
Trisha emerged in the audience of the big top, lost in an endless crowd of science-knows-whats. She-Boom pointed to the woman in the spotlight, suspended in the midst of an alarmingly dangerous-looking trapeze routine.
“What?” asked Trisha. “Who is that?”
She-Boom pointed again. Trisha stared at the woman. She was wearing a mask. Was this her poisoner?
“She-Boom,” she said, tugging at the freak’s shoulder. “I don’t get it. Who is she?”
“Are there any circus employees with the morphology to abide deep-space conditions?” asked Trisha.
“Hmmmmm. Mayhap, mayhap. She-Boom goes spacewalking in her spare time, to be sure. Absence is brisk against her skin. Now there’s a woman.”
“Only her?”
“If you’re thinking biosabotage—“ menagerie-man’s many fingers played against each other like piano keys— “You’re not necessarily looking at an external job. Not all of D’Étoiles’ custom’s honest as I am.” He saluted, flashed a black-toothed, white-tongued smile.
Trisha considered this. “That raises a question of motive. Hwael is beautiful, harmless, and valuable. Who would want to harm him? A rival circus?”
“Pah! Rivals is two dogs to a femur. D’Étoiles has the whole skeleton tucked away in our closet; we make the dry bones dance. We have no rivals.”
Trisha had been having issues with extradimensional social cues lately, but she was pretty sure the menagerie-man’s increasingly whimsical language indicated a mounting frustration and desire for this conversation to end. She stood from her chair. “I’ll try and track down She-Boom,” she said. “Talk to her. Thanks for the help.”
“Might as well talk to the hull,” warned the menagerie-man. “Eloquence isn’t our suspect’s strong suit.”
* * * * *
Patricia could only find two masks in the closet—Big Smiley Face and Big Frowny Face, the classic opera set. She weighed them in each hand.
“What do you think?” she asked She-Boom.
She-Boom raised an eyebrow. Her throat didn’t work too well anymore, but she had very expressive eyebrows. Here she was saying, “Why would you want to hide a pretty face like yours on your big day?”
Or, maybe, “Do I look like I give a shit?” Patricia was many things, and non-verbal communications expert was only one of them.
She strapped on the frowny mask and looked in the mirror. It made her look utterly pathetic. “I can’t show my face in front of this crowd,” she said. “There are people trying to kill me.”
She-Boom made a fist and a palm and clapped them together with a thud and a rumble. Patricia switched to the smiling mask, then back again.
“Powerful people. People you can’t protect me from.” Big smile, big frown. Were these masks meant to reveal, or conceal? Much longer at the circus and she was worried she would find out.
That rabbit-thing had called her “Trisha.” An old name, a childhood name. She tried the smiling mask on one more time. Someone here knew her name. Someone was talking. Someone was looking for her.
Her hand was shaking. Pre-show jitters. The mask was doing something far more complicated than displaying joy or hiding fear; she was communicating the desire to appear to be smiling, drawing attention to the sham, the act. It forces the audience member to imagine, underneath the mask, something even more melodramatic—a gaping wound, a river of tears, a mirror, a whole universe, nothing at all.
She affixed the frowning mask over the smiling mask, took off both, put the frowning mask on first, then the smiling mask over it. Then she started rummaging for something with which to tie back her hair.
* * * * *
Many of the cars on The Lot had over a hundred thousand miles on them, but there were fewer that had the mental capacity to remember each one, and fewer still that could feel something about it. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to circle around your average Earth four times and change, or to cover over two point five percent of your average Estadounidense highway system.
Now, at thirty miles a gallon (and most of these cars got less than that, even without deploying the flamethrowers), that’s over three thousand gallons of gas, and, here’s the real shocking number, that’s over fifty thousand pounds of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. Those few cars in the Lot with the cognizant wherewithal to ponder their fates had by and large been thinking about their legacies.
Cat Six held no illusions. Gussied up with a new coat of paint, mobile crime lab replaced with a shag rug, stripped of Laws of Robotics compliance, she could no longer hold onto the pretense that she had been a good police car, a good partner, something she could be proud of. It was all the same. She was a tool at best, an accessory at worst; a masculinity prosthetic, born of the midlife crises of lonely scientists. Vroom, vroom. Hey, I’m Cat. Wanna go for a ride?
Her entire career could best be summed up by the image of pus oozing through a Band-Aid. A couple murderers institutionalized, a few rapists blown up, key to the city in the glove compartment. Meanwhile the world boiled in her stinking carbon excrement, the wound of crime and social decay continued to fester under the surface, and Johnny, her partner, kept running on fumes as long and as fast as he before breaking down on the end of a noose in a dark garage.
Maybe it was this former pretense--the insistence on her own self-worth--that had pushed him over the edge. Couldn’t she have let him take the wheel?
The police auction came before the funeral. Enter Jax Ryder with a wad of bills… and then the Lot. That had been two hundred and forty eight point seven days ago, according to her internal clock.
The Lot had seen a busy couple of days. Plenty of cars trotted out, most of them wheeled back in shortly afterwards, usually having sustained some heavy damage. Whatever was going on out there, Jax was getting desperate. Cat hoped that this flurry of activity would pass her by. The idea of a new owner, a new life, repulsed her. She would rather stay in the Lot and pretend it was an afterlife, her punishment, her eternity.
Right on cue, the light at the end of the tunnel. Ninth Law of Robotics: There Is No God. But Cat didn’t uphold the laws anymore. There was a God and He hated her.
ZAP!
“—Probably the smartest car on the Lot, but, what’s more, here’s the kicker, the one most capable of feeling. She’s got your logos, she’s got your ethos, she’s got your pathos. That’s the Computerized, Automatic, Talking Vehicular Inspector. See Ay Tee Vee Eye. Cat Six.”
Jax put a hand on Cat’s passenger side mirror. A vague-looking man and a teenage girl looked on, intrigued.
“So here’s the deal. I won’t take your money—I’m not trying to swindle you. But! I’ll give you Cat Six, as is, free of charge, and all you gotta do is kill Patricia Whoever.”
”Trisha?” asked the girl. The vague-looking man perked up as though he’d just smelled something.
“Patricia. Bit older than you, brunette, good-looking, kinda intense? You know her?”
”I… I think so.”
”Then you probably know why I’d want her dead. Apart from the whole, you know, the thing with the thing. The battle.”
The vague man put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Can I talk to you aside for a—”
“But wait, there’s more! A personal appeal, if you will. See, if you don’t take the deal—”
--He hovered a finger over the Big Red Button on the Segway handle—
“—If you don’t take the deal, Cat here’s going straight to the scrap heap. Either way, someone dies. And who’s to say Cat isn’t just as much of a person—hell, more, even—than our girl [Pa]tricia? Cat, tell these fine customers you don’t want to die.”
Cat’s voice box crackled to life after months of disuse. “I… I’M NOT SURE.”
Jax slapped her roof with a chuckle. “Ain’t she a charmer? Ex-police, you know. Refurbished leather seats. And it can all be yours.”
Johnny hadn’t wanted to live. Or maybe he had. Maybe that wasn’t the point at all.
The vague man held up a hand. “Lynette and I need to talk some things over.”
“That’s alright,” said Jax. “Take your time.”
“But not too much time now,” he added. “I ain’t got all day.”
* * * * *
”What do you think about all this, Vigil?” asked Trisha. “I feel silly. Playing detective.”
The rabbit shrugged. Getting to know some people around here can’t hurt. We might be staying here a while. It doesn’t seem all that dangerous here, so everyone should be okay.”
”Tell that to Hwael,” replied Trisha with a whiff of indignance.
”I mean, look at you,” said Vigil. ”Last ‘round’ you were getting mistaken for princesses and kidnapped and there were all manner of slimy things trying to kill us.” Trisha shuddered, a dreamlike glimpse of a recently suppressed memory bursting into her consciousness like pus out of a zit. ”Now you have a job in your chosen field.”
”I’d rather be back home,” snapped Trisha. The violent stubbornness in her voice made Vigil recoil. Trisha groaned. “I know, I know. Not if it means anyone else dying. Anyway, there’s work to be done here.”
The big top rose up in the distance. Somewhere in there was a woman who didn’t need air to survive. Or air pressure.
“There’s also the question of delivery,” she added. “There’s the who, the why, but also a how. How do you poison a Hwael?”
”She couldn’t have put something in his food?”
Trisha shook her head. “Hwael photosynthesizes through electromagnetic baleen. Even if someone produced an energy signature that would be toxic to him somehow, he’d filter most of it out. Hi. Staff veterinarian,” she added to the security guard warding the back way into the big top. “We’re here to see She-Boom.” The guard admitted them without question, probably out of an understanding that She-Boom in particular was not in need of his protective services.
”What if she contaminated the tank?” asked Vigil. ”Do we know that vacuum’s a vacuum?”
”I’m pretty sure it’s closely monitored…"
They came to a door. Were they even still in a tent? Spatial relationships here worked a fair sight better than they had in the previous “round,” but there was still something a little off. Trisha knocked. She heard three loud, lurching footsteps and a click, and then the door swung open to reveal a hulking and distinctly unamused woman.
“Hi,” stammered Trisha. “I’m Trisha, the new staff veterinarian. We were looking for your help on—“
She-Boom tapped a finger against the doorframe impatiently, scrutinizing Trisha.
Trisha wilted. “We were wondering if you poisoned the Hwael.”
She-Boom shook her head.
“Okay,” said Trisha, as earnestly as she could muster. “Thanks for your time. We’ll be on our—“
A cold, scratchy hand wrapped around her forearm. She-Boom lumbered into the hallway and began dragging Trisha along with her into the bowels of the big top.
Trisha shot Vigil an angry look. Vigil twitched. Trisha understood that the twitch was supposed to communicate something but didn’t know what. Damn extradimensional social cues.
Trisha emerged in the audience of the big top, lost in an endless crowd of science-knows-whats. She-Boom pointed to the woman in the spotlight, suspended in the midst of an alarmingly dangerous-looking trapeze routine.
“What?” asked Trisha. “Who is that?”
She-Boom pointed again. Trisha stared at the woman. She was wearing a mask. Was this her poisoner?
“She-Boom,” she said, tugging at the freak’s shoulder. “I don’t get it. Who is she?”