I poured another drink and took a sip, looking at him across the table. I know I cut a nice figure in my zoot suit, the colour of midnight. I’m young, strong, and healthy. The ladies love me and I’m making bank. I paid the most expensive interior designer I could find outside Lagoon to Feng Shui this room. It’s got a micro-climate designed to keep me calm and alert including subliminal sound-waves that replay a mantra reminding my sub-conscious that Julian Elegance is the greatest Caesar of them all. Thames Pond ain’t got nothing on me.
“I am only here to remind you, Mr Elegance, of our agreement. We have paid you a lot of money already and we will pay you a lot more. We have fulfilled our end of the bargain. Now it is up to you to deliver. Give us the device. There are no other options.trick.23.”
“Don’t worry, Mr Fin. You’ll get your device.”
I turned round to face him but he was gone. Motherfucker! I froze. There was no way. There were only two ways out of here. One was the door which I was standing next to. The other was the window which was rigged to shatter at the push of a button. Sure a few niggas might get a few cuts but let’s just say, that’s the price I’m willing to pay. I was also wearing a lightweight bulletproof vest and an exoskeleton beneath my zoot suit, the latest slim line model upgraded by my guys at the chop shop. Ready to rock and roll at any moment.
If I went out, it would be with a bang Freaktown wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Boom! Bye bye baby blues... I won’t miss you so fly away. Children will sing dark nursery rhymes about me for generations to come.
I went over to check the cameras. On one of the old tapes, you can see something flicker like a shadow, as if the screen had briefly caught in its invisible net some fleeting imprint, the edges of a trail of a man who moved so fast the rest of us were like statues. I couldn’t understand it. If Mr Fin could do that, why come to me?
Mayor Obvious Beastedy
He looked into his exhausted bloodshot eyes; his whole face was haggard and falling apart, losing cohesion. Goddamn, he was weary of life. He was still young, forty two at his last birthday but he looked and felt twenty and a deuce years older. God, he was tired of dealing with the filth and scum of society.
He came from a prominent family. Old money from the days of the Empire. The Beastedy fortune could be traced to a certain Olmon Beastedy who had been a minor bureaucrat in the empire, a position that allowed him to embezzle a small fortune for his descendants.
It was true that Obvious had come further than any other Beastedy. He was, at least in theory, ruler of the world or at least what was left of it. The city state of Paradise was his personal kingdom. He was the most powerful public figure on the planet. He should have been luxuriating not staring into the mirror wondering what it was all for. Like the old song said, I’ve reached the top but I had to stop and that’s what’s bothering me...
He was tired of waiting for the true reward. At the rate he was going, he’d be dead of a heart attack before he retired.
“The reporter might be a problem,” Adam was saying, “she exposed the chemical dumping that affected the city’s water supply last year and now she’s investigating VIBRA.”
VIBRA was new tech from TerraCorp being secretly tested on the population. It was early days but the old boys in white claimed it could be used to implant subliminal suggestions in people’s minds.
“Hmmm, let’s put a scare into her. If that doesn’t work...”
“Understood. Now about the poster. Now is the time. The people are enamoured with such gunslingers and ghetto superstars as Babylove Brown and Silly the Kid. We need to show them your tough side. The Sheriff, riding into town to clean out the trash, vigilante justice, that kind of thing.”
Obvious looked at the poster. It was done in the style of street art. His face, half in shadow painted in dark colours overlooking a stencilled city of bright lights seen from some mystery location in the hills, a revolver in his hand.
Was Adam being serious? They’d laugh him out of town. He looked at Adam’s bright shiny teeth grinning with an enthusiasm Obvious did not feel. He looked back at the poster. “I don’t know.”
Sometimes Obvious felt like a painted skeleton on marionette strings, controlled by little more than instinct. He had a sharp intellect but right now what he needed could only be found in a purple pill. He turned his back on Adam and popped one. The moment the gel sac touched saliva it began to dissolve into liquid intuition. This was one of his secrets. A drug from the old boys at TerraCorp. You couldn’t buy this stuff with money.
It didn’t even have a name, just a long string of numbers. He carefully placed the little vial containing the pills back in the leather pouch around his neck next to his little gold cross and tucked them back under his shirt. A few seconds later...
..
.
.:.
;. [his body accepted the virus]..
[for a second he felt as if something threw up in his guts then it passed in a wave of chemical sensations]
..
Tic toc
The King of the Clock
...
..
.
He sat down in his ergonomically grown semi-organic chair and relaxed. One of the pleasant side effects of the purple pills was colours. Their vibrations now spoke to him on a deeper level. It was like everything was suddenly alive. Vivid images jumped out at him, accidental confluences of light and shadow creating a sort of meta-landscape.
It was like being in a sumptuously designed film and his office was suddenly revealed to be much more. Everything in his field of vision was an extension of his true self. Everything seemed to dissolve into everything else. His office was the whole world and it was made of nothing but light and air.
He knelt down and threw up. Great globules of ground up meat and vegetables from his exquisite lunch earlier in the day, now converted by his stomach acids and enzymes working with the various bacteria and other life-forms that inhabited his guts, the throne of intuition, into a homogeneous slop.
He stood up and took a few deep breaths. He walked away from the mess as a droid designed to look like an anthropomorphic puppy came out of her little closet and cleaned up the mess in the most realistic imitation of a naughty French maid. Sometimes when no one was looking, he fucked it. Real nasty like. She was his personal little midget sex toy. She was realistic in that aspect too, physically simulating sensual reactions from her bouncing titties to her moans, her dirty talk to her juices. If she was a touch cold and mechanical, it was little different from making it with the social climbers that he often bedded. As mayor, he was King of the Clock and he enjoyed fucking around. Sad puppy just happened to be his favourite little kink. At least she wouldn’t ask him for favours or connections afterwards. He knew it was technically not normal behaviour but he hadn’t risen to the top by being normal.
The whole world was one big con and the vast majority of people were fools. Only those brave enough to be their true selves, however warped that may seem in the eyes of others, had the stuff it took to make it on this half-dead world.
He looked at the poster again. What was his doppelgänger looking at, off stage and page? What other world? Was it the same world shadows gaze at with no eyes? It did look good, he had to admit. Mayor Obvious Beastedy, avatar of justice, neither young nor old, neither handsome nor ugly, an every-man graced by the gods, doing his duty. He could be your brother, uncle, nephew or cousin. He could be your neighbour or colleague, your best friend. He could be you.
His common appeal had helped him blend in all his life, the ambition that burned within him, brighter than the solar flares that beat down on the city, hidden behind his friendly smile. Quietly, unobtrusively, he had risen up the political ranks.
Then one fine day in his home in Lagoon, he had been invited by an orb of light to meet with certain ladies and gentlemen. Invisible to everyone but himself, the orb had led him to a light-golden sailboat on the lagoon. He sighed in memory. It had been one of those perfect days,
the sky a soft blue, the clouds like wisps of pure imagination.
The orb led him indoors and the hatches sealed themselves. The sails furled and put themselves away and the sailboat transformed itself into a yellow submarine. It had dropped like a slow anchor to the depths of the lagoon past the multi-coloured little and big fish to land on the bottom of the lake.
The submersible attached itself to a portal hidden on the lagoon floor and he was led into some sort of underground station where a silver bullet the size of a car hovered, waiting for him.
The plush interior was made of a luxuriant fabric he’d never seen before. The door sort of melted shut and the bullet shot off at a fantastic speed but inside it was as if nothing was happening. He’d have believed it all to be a giant screen illusion had he not actually arrived at a destination at the end of the improbable journey.
Inertia dampeners: he’d heard of them but wrote them off as an urban legend. Obvious was a keen racer and he’d actually searched for them, going deep with his people into the black markets where mutationists and alphemists dealt in illegal technologies. He’d found some weird stuff, some of it useful, some of it frightening, but no inertia dampeners.
As he remembered, he visualised what his eyes saw back then; thanks to the purples he was able to remix reality. Adam’s face was now swimming faintly behind the window to the tunnel, whizzing by so fast it became something else entirely, a giant underground snake, whose skin was the very skein of life, coloured with the various treasures won in countless battles, and dotted with the dark patches of exits not taken. A great serpent whose slithering caused earthquakes beneath civilisations.
He smiled remembering his shock and awe when he realised he’d travelled far beyond the boundaries of the city, still deep underground. Eventually the bullet slowed down and came to a stop in an underground station made of solid gold interlaid with precious jewels of all shapes, sizes, and colours. He had ascended the golden staircase and entered another life.
They, the mysterious elusive THEY, had given him a glimpse of another world full of sumptuous gardens and fabulous wealth. A glimpse, and nothing more, of a world that made Lagoon look like a trash heap.
Pleasure domes that held the last treasures of the Empire set amidst forests where animals he’d believed extinct were hunted, and incredibly nubile young men and women, sex slaves of great attractiveness and skill, were available for any game he desired to play.
If he played his cards right, one day he too would live among the chosen ones. Of course they were mostly vampires and occasionally engaged in blood sacrifices but hey, no one was perfect. That THEY believed in such superstition was almost endearing in a sick and twisted way, felt Obvious. Their victims were probably unwanted by society anyways or perhaps even bred to be killed. In any case, all he had to do was keep the drones on the surface working the cogs of the complex machine that the unseen and unknown lords and ladies of creation might feast in decadent luxury and one day he’d be one of THEM, and they had access to anti-ageing technology that would extend his lifetime three-fold.
His campaign for mayor had been planned and orchestrated by experts and he had won in a landslide, taking over from the last mayor who portrayed himself as being exceptionally incompetent. Obvious had been the obvious choice, the golden boy, a bright and shiny antithesis to the corruption and muck of the last administration. The people had bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
His campaign logo had been “Yes, We Are!” The people chanted it at his thunderous speeches where he asked, ‘Are we masters of our fate? Are we lords and ladies of our destiny? Are we the chosen people, inheritors of the Earth? Are we guardians of tomorrow? Are we free women and men?’
“Okay, run the poster. Anything else?” Adam’s grin grew even wider as he walked out.
“You won’t regret this sir,” he said.
Obvious Beastedy was impotent. He could get it up but this sheriff was firing blanks. No souls chose to be born through any cosmic portals anywhere near the vicinity of his testicles. Many years ago, he had formed an alliance with an ambitious young lady, a rising bureaucrat named Milo Upyors. She had been disappointed for she found Obvious to be a perfect husband in all but the one respect.
Fortunately THEY had been involved in his life ever since he took his vows as a member of the Furs and Fangs in his first year of college and had stepped in with a surrogate. A man who looked very similar to Obvious in a certain light. The man had made love to his wife once and left.
Obvious had asked the obvious question. “Why not artificial insemination?”
The man had replied, “No trick, it can only be this way.”
Obvious remembered there had been something weird in the man’s accent when he pronounced the word ‘trick’, almost as if it had some other esoteric meaning Obvious could not grasp.
As the course of nature took her turn around the sun, Milo grew large and gave birth to their daughter, Sofia. They’d been happy...for awhile. They would be happy again...he hoped. Right now, his family hated him almost as much as the rest of the city. He hadn’t made love to his wife in several years and as for his daughter, Sofia was lost, utterly lost.
Maybe he should have been more like his own father. Maybe he should have kept his family in constant fear, then at least they wouldn’t constantly embarrass him.
Now Sofia had taken up with that musician, Johnny Toxic. Lord, what a nightmare that was turning out to be. Johnny was an outspoken critic of all politicians and his bad boy devil-may-care attitude won him a lot of admiration. The boy was all front of course, but still Obvious’ PR people were working hard on finding solutions, the latest of which was to hire professional seduction artists to break them up. What a fucked up world he lived in where he was reduced to contemplating such measures. What had happened to his sweet little Sofia? When did his little honeykins grow up into a nineteen year old bitch whose mission in life was to ruin his career?
Obvious turned on the screen and there she was, his beautiful daughter dressed like a prostitute singing about broken hearts. Did she know she was breaking his heart? Actually it was a pretty good song. Sofia had genuine talent; why did she have to expose so much skin?
6: Free Energy
Legs
I was still in the office ten minutes after I wanted to be. I looked impatiently at the seconds ticking by on the watch tattooed on my left wrist. Armand was still talking, going on and on about every little problem under the sun. Was he trying to drive me crazy? I was going to have to give Armand’s knuckles a rapping soon. Armand...Pff! What a gay name.
“Okay, a couple more things. One, we’ve got to do something about them Big Birds,” Armand said.
“What did the Jugglers boys do this time?” We’d been feuding with the Big Birds for awhile now. It all began when they refused to pay their taxes. I run this town but those motherfuckers seem to think they’re above my law. They’d recently hijacked several shipments of ours in a row suggesting they had a mole in my house. We managed to block their planning permissions when they attempted to build some kind of after-school club for kids in a rundown section of Dhoti where I happen to own a lot of property.
Not that I have anything against children, but I needed the area to stay poor a little while longer till I bought out a few more people. Dhoti is strategically placed for redevelopment and the profits will be huge when the time is right. The Big Birds tried to muscle in on us with their fake-ass save the children routine but they failed.
“It’s Johnny Toxic. They’re trying to steal him from under us. One of their guys from Talisman Records is wining and dining him right now.”
“So what? He’s signed to K’Racked Pipe Entertainment, right?”
“It was a five year contract and we signed him four and a half years ago.”
“He hasn’t re-signed yet? Hmmmm. It’s probably nothing. Nigga know he got a good thing with us. Why jump ship? We’re all making bank. He’s killing it on the charts. ‘Ballad of Babylove Brown’ is
at number two; ‘Slo Dance in hell’ is what?”
“Number nine.”
“Yeah, number nine. He’s up for best artist, best album, best song... Just pay him whatever he wants. Is he trying to squeeze us, the little bastard? How much he want?”
“It’s not all about the money Legs.”
“Whachoo talking ’bout Armand?”
“I talked to him a few days ago and that’s what he said to me. He was pissed off about something.”
“What else he say?”
“Just that there was more to life than money and art shouldn’t be caged.”
“Little prick! Okay, forget about it, I’ll deal with it. It is Bad Money’s birthday party on Friday, right? The night before the awards. Johnny and Bad Money go way back so Johnny’ll be there. I’ll talk to him, sort this mess out.” I stepped around him and opened the door.
“Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“Wait. What you want me to do about Bobby?” Armand asked.
“What about him?”
“He vanished. I ran the numbers, Legs. There’s no profit in food stamps.”
“He vanished?”
“Yeah. Your cousin Olive’s been going nuts. She’s saying we killed him.”
“We didn’t, did we?”
“No. The fat fuck just ran. She’s downstairs right now.”
“Who is?”
“Olive, your cousin? Bobby’s wife?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake! You didn’t tell her I was here did you?”
“I said I’d look for you but I reckon she knows you’re here Legs.”
I looked out the window and there she was, sitting at the bar, watching the window to my office like a hawk. I jumped a little. For a moment it looked like she could see me. I went to my desk and laid out some lines of KKK. This shit probably killed more niggas and their communities than Paradise City did when she killed the rest of planet Terra.
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