The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  The waiting room crowd went ‘Ooh!’ in chorus-unity, their eyes collectively on the white-gowned gent. They swung their gaze to the poster on the far wall that read ‘Be Sure To Floss, or You’ll Make Your Dentist Cross!’ As one, they looked back at the white-smocked gent. They looked at Nemo. He could feel the assembled gaze almost as a palpable pressure on his inflamed gums. They went ‘Ooh!’ again and drew back further into their chairs.

  The gent stepped over to Nemo and pressed the gun into his belly. He brought his face close to Nemo’s. ‘Mr Everyman,’ he said. ‘I represent the force of inevitability. Surrender is now your only option.’ He smiled, evilly. ‘Let us say, there are a few questions I should like to ask.’

  Nemo drew a deep breath into his lungs. There was nothing for it.

  He exhaled as fully as he could, breathing right into the face of the gent. The foul stench of (simulated) years of accumulated gum decay and dental unhygiene reeked out. The gent, unprepared, could not stop himself flinching. ‘It’s the smell,’ he barked, dismayed, averting his face and trying to muffle his nose with his free hand.

  Nemo seized the chance. It was time for the cancan.

  Nemo lashed out with his right leg, and caught his adversary exactly between his thighs, at the lowest point of his torso. The force of the kick was enough to raise the gent off the ground. Nemo dropped his right leg and swung high and strong with his left, smacking the gent in his solar plexus and propelling him spectacularly across the room.

  He collided with the nurse, and swept her off her feet. Together the two figures flew clear over the reception desk, crashed through the window and plummeted the single storey to the street outside.

  Nemo was breathing hard. His wrist was still very sore, but a sense of victory was taking some of the edge off the pain. He glanced behind him, where the half-dozen people waiting were staring at him.

  Spontaneously they began to clap.

  But there was no time to delay. The smattering applause sounded behind him as he rushed back to the corridor.

  .0+I)=::

  Running, he grabbed at the door frame of the room in which Thinity was fighting the two gents, and swung inside.

  It was mayhem. The gents, perhaps through inefficient time-management, were attacking Thinity one after the other instead of both at the same time. Accordingly she was fighting off first one gent and then the second with her rapid-slapping hand-flapping fighting style, both her elbows tucked in at her sides and her hands moving in a blur in front of her chest. As one gent staggered back under this, the other recovered himself and leapt forward.

  Nemo stepped into the room. Various dental accessories were arranged on a work surface at the side of the room; from this collection Nemo selected a broad, shallow metal pan. He hefted it in his good hand.

  As the second gent staggered back and the first collected himself and launched into the fight, Nemo moved forward. He tapped the second gent on his shoulder. He looked round. With all his might Nemo swung the metal pan flat against his face.

  There was a noise like a tin car colliding with a bone wall.

  When Nemo pulled the pan away, the agent’s face behind it was a rictus of surprise: grinning with pain, his eyes wide. As Nemo watched, his teeth peeled away from his grin one by one and fell to the floor. They dropped like unusually regular Tetris blocks, and piled irregularly on the floor.

  When his mouth was wholly empty of teeth he leaned back a little way, then toppled forward. He hit the ground with a wampum noise and did not move.

  The first gent, interrupted in the middle of his flappy-hand fighting with Thinity, looked behind him. His face contracted into a snarl, and he fished a gun from inside his jacket. Nemo could only manage a frightened smile as the gun was brought up, aimed at his head and – crash—

  Thinity had leapt high, kicked the back of his head, and his face smashed into the little metal bowl on a stalk in which pink-tinted water gurgled continually beside the dentist’s chair. ‘And,’ said Nemo, sagging with relief, ‘rinse.’

  There was no time to waste. Together they ran into the corridor, and shouldered the door of the adjacent room open. Once, twice, thrice they collided with it before it snapped off its lock and swayed open.

  Inside Smurpheus was strapped to a dental chair. Standing over him was a white-coated elderly man with strong, handsome features. He wore a round mirror strapped to his forehead, the sort of thing dentists used to wear in the old days. There was a fat elasticated band holding this mirror in place, and above this his snow-coloured hair was abundant and white as virgin cotton, as white and pure as the advertising for low-tar cigarettes. Nemo recognised him at once, and couldn’t contain himself. ‘Olivier! Olivier!’ he cried out. ‘Never before have I asked life for more, just Olivier.’ He stepped forward. ‘Can I have your au’ograph? I’m a big fan.’

  ‘Get a grip, Nemo,’ said Thinity. ‘He’s not the real Olivier. Nobody here is real – haven’ you fi’ured that out? He’s just one more ava’ar of the enemy.’ She seemed to be speaking more clearly, as if her gum disease were going into spontaneous remission.

  Nemo looked over to Smurpheus, tied into the chair. His mouth was full of chrome. His eyes were full of pleading.

  ‘Vat?’ screeched the Olivier figure. ‘Vat are you doink? How dare you interrupt me in ze middle of my vurk?’ He stood up, brandishing the dental instruments he had been using on Smurpheus. They resembled cutlery, but it was not a close resemblance. No conventional food could ever be so tough or intractable as to need eating implements of such multi-pronged sharpness.

  ‘Guarts!’ screeched the snow-haired old gent. ‘Guarts! In here at vonce!’

  Thinity grabbed the circular mirror strapped to his forehead, pulled it forward and allowed it to snap back against the old man’s face.

  ‘Gott in Himmel!’ he cried, flinching backwards and dropping his dental tools. He stumbled against a surface upon which was a tray of chrome picks, forks, spikes and suchlike surgical knives, knocking it on to the floor. It fell with a sustained and ear-paining series of clatters. ‘Argh!’ cried the dentist, hopping furiously. A short-bladed surgical device, something that looked like a chrome razor fixed to a chrome stick, had landed pointy end down on his foot, embedding itself through the material of his shoe. ‘Aieee!’ he shrieked, hopping and dancing on his other foot.

  Thinity and Nemo stood motionless, wholly absorbed in his performance.

  The evil dentist lurched across the room and smacked his face vehemently into a perspex light-box hung on the far wall; a device designed for the display of dental X-ray images. The perspex cracked and the box juddered, leaping off its hook. As the dentist reeled coltishly away, holding his nose and making mmrf! mmrf! noises, expressive of the pain caused by this abrupt compression of his nasal region, the light-box fell down hard on to his good foot. From the sound it made as it landed, several bones in the dentist’s foot cracked with the impact, like the top of a crème brûlée under the pressure of a spoon.

  Nemo wondered if the old man had exhausted his vocabulary of words with which to convey his discomfort, but at this new indignity he yelped like a puppy. He said, ‘Wooah! Ow-who!’ He added, ‘Oo-oo-oo!’ He saint-vitus-danced through a half-circle. He said, ‘Pnargh! Pnurgh! Pnurgh!’, let go of his nose and tried to lift his broken foot to his right hand. This left him, naturally, with no feet on which to stand; which in turn resulted in him falling over.

  His back knocked open the room’s only window, and he tumbled through, outside and down. There was a thud.

  The silence in the dentist’s surgery that followed had a soothing quality to it.

  ‘Come on,’ said Thinity, breaking the spell. She starting unbuckling Smurpheus from the chair.

  Chapter 12

  Some Peugeot 308s

  One result of the interrogation that Smurpheus had endured was that he was not as coherent as he had been before. ‘Let’s go, Smurpheus,’ said Thinity. ‘We came in at the public phone across the road
. We have to get you back to that node.’

  ‘Ashle washle, murgle hooshi wooshi,’ replied Smurpheus with an earnest expression on his face.

  ‘My Goh,’ Thinity breathed, in outrage. ‘What di’ they do to you?’

  ‘Frassantossle,’ replied Smurpheus.

  But it was obvious what they had done. Smurpheus had had his mouth pricked, pirked, spiked, ground, jabbed, drilled, scraped, rubbed, drubbed, jellied, pumped, gnarled, puckered, cartooned, careened, zinged, duffed and carcrashed. His gums were bright red and enormously swollen. It was horrible to look upon.

  Between them they lifted him from the chair and carried him out of the room, down the corridor and into the waiting room. The half-dozen patients were still sitting there, looking slightly more nervous than they had done when Nemo had first seen them. ‘The den’ist,’ he declared, ‘will be wiv you soon.’ Then Thinity and he hauled Smurpheus down the stairs and on to the street.

  There was no traffic, and no passers-by. The Germanic dentist was lying face down on the pavement, not moving, although groaning a little. There was no sign either of the gent or the dental receptionist that Nemo had cancanned out of the waiting room window.

  ‘Come on,’ urged Thinity. ‘Gotta get away. It won’t be long before the gents arrive.’

  They stepped into the road. A black Peugeot 308 sped round the corner, its engine growling angrily. It zoomed directly past them.

  ‘Wo,’ said Nemo, swaying out of the path of the vehicle.

  Immediately behind came another black Peugeot 308.

  It was followed by a third.

  ‘Don’t those cars look sim’lar?’ said Nemo.

  ‘Identical,’ agreed Thinity. ‘It means someth’in’! Déjà vu.’

  The road was now filled with a constant stream of black Peugeot 308s, hurtling round the corner and rushing past them. Nemo counted twenty in as many seconds. They were driving rapidly, with barely five feet between them, and they kept on coming. There was no way Thinity and Nemo, carrying Smurpheus, could cross the road past so relentless a flow of cars. ‘Means something,’ Thinity repeated.

  ‘Means?’ asked Nemo. His shoulder, wedged under Smurpheus’s armpit, was starting to complain at doing its portion of supporting the slack figure of the big man. ‘Can we hurry it up a li’l?’ He noticed that his gums were less inflamed, and his words were coming more easily. The same seemed to be true of Thinity as well.

  ‘Déjà vu means the program’s replicatin’,’ Thinity explained. ‘It’s the vir’ual equivalent of you falling asleep at the keyboar’. Your head slumps and hits the “m” key, and suddenly you’re writing mmmmmmm.’ She gestured at the stream of identical cars with her free hand.

  ‘Snurgle nurgle nurgle,’ confirmed Smurpheus, threading several ccs of drool to the pavement in the process of speaking.

  ‘One of the gents must have returned to the programming central,’ Thinity said angrily, ‘and set this in motion.’

  The cars continued to rush by. Nemo looked nervously about him. There was no sign of any gents, but it could surely only be a matter of time before they turned up.

  ‘We need a pelican crossing,’ he said. ‘Or one of those old ladies in orange with signs saying “Stop: Children”. You know, a lollipop lady. Although,’ he added, ‘I’m not sure these cars would stop for an old woman. Or a lollipop. Or even a pelican.’ After a pause, he said, ‘Hey, I think my gums are wearing off – getting better, you know?’

  Thinity nodded. ‘They weren’t programmed as a permanent addition to your avatar. They were bound to get better.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can’t permanently change our representations in the McAtrix,’ she answered, with a strained and hurried tone as if she resented having to explain everything to Nemo in elementary terms. ‘The machines have set the parameters. The most we can do is tweak it, customise this or that for a brief period. Any change we make usually wears off after a short while.’ The stream of black Peugeots continued rushing past.

  ‘You mean,’ Nemo clarified, ‘any addition we make to the program when we enter the McAtrix will fade away? Any change at all?’

  ‘Just so. Like our gums – you see, they’re all better now. Same with anything.’

  ‘My dancing ability?’

  ‘Not that,’ Thinity said crossly. ‘That was uploaded directly into your brain – your real brain. Don’t you remember? That’s with you for ever. But superficial changes to our McAtrix avatars, they’re different. Any change lasts only about half an hour. It goes away after a while, the McAtrix correcting its operations. Judas,’ she added, with a mournful tone, ‘used to complain most bitterly about that. He’d program his avatar with a good head of hair, only for the hair to fall out half an hour into the mission. Came away like a sheaf of hay bursting its binding. Hair all over the floor. He used to be very peeved by that.’

  Nemo considered this. ‘So, for instance – your clothes?’

  ‘These,’ said Thinity, glancing down. To test her now-normal gums, she made the exaggerated eee-aahh-ohh movements with her lips that somebody makes after the anaesthetic has worn off. Then she sniffed dismissively through her nose, like a racehorse. ‘Do you think I’d choose to wear this poisonous designer gear? This is the EMI’s idea of clothing. And those stupid sunglasses. It’s convinced that everybody should wear sunglasses, regardless of the weather. I keep throwing them away, but every time I re-enter there they are again, on my face.’ She scowled. ‘I tried, once, programming my own, more decent clothes for a mission. But, like Judas’s hair, they simply fell off my body half an hour into the mission.’

  ‘Fell off?’ Nemo repeated. Then, to make absolutely sure he’d gotten the concept securely in his head, he said, ‘Fell off? Fell away?’ Then he said, ‘Leaving you – naked? What, just fell off your body? Fell off completely? Off?’

  She nodded sharply.

  ‘But that’s appalling,’ Nemo said energetically. ‘Naked? Not a stitch? That’s just awful.’ His enthusiasm at this news indicated how very deeply he felt the awful appallingness of the contingency. There was a gleam, presumably of outrage at appallingness, in his eye. ‘So they all fell off?’ he said.

  ‘The program rejected them,’ said Thinity. ‘In some senses it’s like an organism, the McAtrix. It takes a little while for its programming logic to apprehend something at odds with its essential logic, but eventually it simply rectifies it.’

  ‘But what,’ Nemo said, sagging further under the weight of Smurpheus, ‘about Smurpheus?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘His, nng, height? I mean, he’s much taller in here than there.’

  ‘We choose not to talk about his height,’ said Thinity crossly. ‘It upsets him.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. If this is a temporary adjustment to his McAtrix avatar, shouldn’t he have reverted to his actual height by now?’

  ‘Smurpheus is an exception,’ Thinity declared.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  This was the straw that broke Thinity’s temper. She exploded. ‘You are not here to understand!’ she cried, her voice cracking with the strain of it all. She was literally bowed down by the weight of Smurpheus. ‘You are supposed to be the No One! You’re supposed to be a zero – but you’re not, are you? You’re just a petty someone like everyone else in this miserable place.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nemo, a little crushed.

  ‘It’s too awful,’ Thinity cried. ‘You’re a weakling! You’re not even supporting your half of Smurpheus’s body properly. He’s dragging on my neck.’ With a half duck down and a heave she hauled Smurpheus’s body from Nemo’s grip and hoisted it into a fireman’s lift across her shoulders.

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ said Nemo, in a small voice.

  But something had broken completely in Thinity’s voice. Whatever internal dam had been holding back her anger had now been breached. ‘There’s no way past these cars!’ she said. ‘They could send a million cars along this stretch
of road for all we know, and they probably will – and the only node out of the McAtrix for us is on the other side of the traffic.’

  ‘Can we,’ Nemo offered, hurt by her tone of voice, ‘you know, go around?’

  ‘No!’ she snapped. ‘No we can’t! OK? Whichever road we come to, the McAtrix will have flooded it with Peugeot 308s.’

  ‘How about getting Tonkatoi to come into the McAtrix through a different node . . . ?’

  ‘There’s no time for it. Gents will be here in seconds. We’re stuck. Do you really think we can outrun gents carrying a semi-conscious Smurpheus? Never. If we could just reach that node there – but we can’t. It’s over. It’s useless. You understand? And do you know why we’re in this pickle? Do you?’

  ‘Is the answer to that,’ Nemo hazarded, ‘ “No I don’t know”?’

  ‘That’s correct, fool-boy,’ she said savagely. ‘I’ll tell you why we’re here. Because you were too much of a somebody to walk past those gents yesterday. It should have been a simple matter to slip past them, a simple matter for the No One. But that’s not you, is it? You’re not the No One. Stupid One, more like. The Idiotic One.’

  Nemo’s head was shrinking vertically down between his shoulders under this barrage. It was crushing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said haltingly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The growl of the cars had set up an almost incantatory repetitive rhythm, a whrr-whrr, whrr-whrr, whrr-whrr. It was an uncomfortable soundtrack to Nemo’s humiliation. The breath of the vehicles’ slipstream stirred his hair. Thinity’s face looked strangely priest-like as her wrath and scorn poured out. The very sky seemed to have gloomed. Birds flew overhead like blown litter in the blustery air.

  The endless stream of cars, the metal chant-like whrr-whrr, whrr-whrr.

  Behind Thinity, Nemo saw a gent appear. Behind the gent was another gent. The two gents, both wearing black frock coats and top hats, were advancing towards them from the main entrance to the dentist’s. Their expressions were grim. ‘Thinity,’ he said. ‘Behind you – gents behind you.’