Shuteye for the Timebroker

by Paul Di Filippo

  The main floor was lit with an eerie golden light emanating from many complex machines. Three exotic beings with bulging naked brains and skeletal visages, dressed in high-collared robes, hovered around the unconscious form of a human woman.

  “My brain hurts,” said one of the Martians.

  “Of course it does, you idiot,” said a second alien. “Your collar’s too tight!”

  “Will you two shut up and help me position this quantum scalpel?” urged the third.

  The alluring meat scent was coming from the Martians! They smelled better than a dozen pork-chop-stuffed chickens! When Pooja dived at the closest Martian, knocking the alien over into delicate equipment that smashed and caused a cascade of chaotic destruction, it was not because she cared one whit about the fate of the unconscious woman (who actually perished in the resulting conflagration). All she had in mind was chomping down on a mouthful of Martian flesh.

  A week later she was still gnawing with immense satisfaction on the extra-sturdy Martian neck bone of the victim she had dragged away.

  7.

  ROBOT MAINTENANCE AT THE PARKERIAN MINING COMPANY

  As soon as the snotty foreman approached, Charlie knew he was gonna hand Charlie the shitty end of one stick or another.

  The first words out of the foreman’s mouth confirmed his intuition.

  “Scarpetto! You’re detailed to the Lavender Shaft immediately. We just got an order for ten thousand kilos from the empress of Saturn. And you know her perfumed majesty don’t like to be kept waiting. Last time a shipment was just one stinking day late, she executed a dozen diplomats.”

  “But boss,” Charlie complained, though he knew his squawk would make no difference, “the Lavender Shaft is ripe for a blowout!”

  “Then you’d better make sure it don’t happen till you harvest your quota. Check out a GSA robo and get busy.”

  The foreman left before Charlie could even whine about being assigned a GSA. Those lousy robos broke down if you even looked crosswise at ’em. With a resigned sigh, Charlie moved to follow instructions.

  Work on Sachet IX was hell. The bath-bead mines offered only hot, perfumed, dangerous labor. Why, just last month a blowout in the Honeysuckle Pits had slaughtered a score of workers.

  Charlie and the GSA had been at work in the Lavender Shaft for six hours when Charlie heard the first ominous burblings that signaled a blowout. Hastening up the shaft ladder, Charlie knew he wasn’t gonna make it.

  But then he felt the claw hands of the GSA shoving him to safety, just as the beads erupted.

  Damn that robo! Why’d he have to go and screw up Charlie’s anti-cyber prejudices?

  8.

  THE SAILOR MAN

  When the doctors put Vestry Asquith back together after his death, they exercised all the creativity they could summon.

  It was Vestry’s bad luck that the doctors were aliens who knew nothing about human anatomy.

  The Dripps had found Vestrys corpse floating in space in the holed-out remnants of his pirate ship, the Betelgeuse Bandit. Vestry had lost a run-in with the Galactic Posse after trying to attack a cargo liner and been left floating, quite dead, in interstellar space. But his extinction posed nothing but a challenge to the Dripps.

  Enormous nose-shaped beings on squirming snail-like footings, continually exuding sinus fluid from their various orifices, the Dripps were master biologists and cyberneticians. But they reasoned in a manner completely unlike human beings.

  Thus they employed the DNA of the plants in Vestry’s oxygen-generation unit to rebuild Vestry’s nose. The fused a portion of the casing of one of his ship’s photon-mines to his skull. They endowed him with radar ears and a testicle chin. One eye was sutured shut while the other was replaced with the Panopticon scanner off the Bandit. The keys of his mood-Moog substituted for his teeth. His brain was hybridized with circuitry.

  Vestry awoke at last, saw himself in a mirror, and screamed.

  The Dripps stuck a panacea pipe in his mouth and he calmed down a tad. Finally he was able to reconcile himself to his new appearance. Hadn’t he been given, after all, a second chance at life?

  But then one of the Dripps said the most frightening words possible, and all his tentative calm was shattered.

  “Now we will build you a mate.”

  9.

  PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

  Sharon Tudge looked past her twitched-aside window curtain and across her wide, immaculate lawn at her neighbor’s house.

  The place was an absolute disgrace!

  The hulk of a junk Buick rested on four cinder blocks. A rusting play-set squatted like the burned-out skeleton of a small crashed aircraft. The barrel of a washing machine, resting on its side, served as a doghouse for a yapping mongrel. Whatever grass had once grown around the house was now mostly dead from dog-shit deposits. A week’s worth of unread newspapers littered the walkway. A hand-scrawled sign hanging on the fence read: SALESMEN BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!

  But more shocking than all these degenerate appurtenances was the house’s owner, Harly Daimon, who now sprawled nearly naked on a spavined lawn chair, soaking up the sunshine, a forty-ounce bottle of beer easily to hand, his big hairy gut an offense to nature.

  Retreating from her window, Sharon felt her indignation mounting. She could stand this gross insult no longer.

  She stalked across the street, stood outside Harly’s decaying picket fence, and loudly harrumphed.

  Harly opened one boozy eye but did not get up. “What’s your problem, twat?”

  “Why, I never—!”

  “Good. If you never pissed me off yet, don’t start now.”

  Left speechless, Sharon could only retreat back to the pristine fortress of her home.

  When her husband, Brad Tudge, returned that night from his office in the city, Sharon catalogued all of Harly Daimon’s sins: womanizing, sloppiness, disrespect, casual modes of dress, and a dozen others. Brad nodded reflectively, and then said, “I’ll handle this, dear. But not on an empty stomach. Let’s have dinner first.”

  And as Brad tucked his napkin into his collar, Sharon proudly set down the platter of roasted human fetuses before her perfect husband.

  10.

  THE HAREM DANCER

  Hamid al-Khouri, an Iraqi youth who from childhood on had exhibited uncanny native skills with paint and ink, chalk and clay, had eventually attended the Rhode Island School of Design for two years on an international scholarship. Before he got radicalized.

  Thus was born the art car bomb.

  Upon his terrorist epiphany, al-Khouri had returned to the Middle East to wage jihad.

  With style.

  Disdaining conventional anonymity as the way of the coward, betokening a lack of pride in the terrorist’s calling, Hamid insisted that every explosive-packed vehicle whose production he oversaw left the bomb factory uniquely detailed. Further contravening the Islamic injunction against figurative representation (his semesters at RISD had left a certain Western impression after all), Hamid opted for eye-popping, kandy-flake, Day-Glo montages for his death vehicles.

  The sixty virgins of paradise awarded each martyr undulated sensuously across bumpers and roofs. Devil worms that would torment the infidels in hell spat venom from hoods and trunks. Troops of turban-wearing monkeys representing traitorous imams cavorted across door panels.

  Of course, the authorities at first welcomed such extravagant displays of terrorist art. They felt that their job had been made infinitely simpler: just watch for the al-Khouri specials, and you could preempt any bombing.

  But then Hamid’s art spawned a thousand imitators.

  Pretty soon, every other car in the Middle East was a rolling, gaudy canvas. The cars packed with TNT were indistinguishable from regular cars.

  Everyone braced for an increase in unstoppable bombings.

  But then, against all logic, terrorist attacks began to decrease.

  Hamid’s students had begun to care too much for their art to destroy it.
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br />   Frustrated, Hamid created his masterpiece and took it himself on a one-way mission.

  When he awoke in heaven, Ed Roth first hugged him, then cold-cocked him.

  11.

  THE VENUS OF AUGMENTATION

  Every savvy businessman had to cut corners somewhere. That was just the way the postmodern economy worked.

  So Dr. Manson Sozaboy began dumping his medical waste illegally. What harm could it cause, after all? And those greedy sanctioned haulers charged an arm and a leg (if you’ll pardon the pun).

  Manson specialized in one simple procedure: breast reduction. The only waste he generated was a little innocent gland-threaded fat.

  It seemed a shame, really. All these well-endowed babes coming into his office to get de-boobed while elsewhere their less zaftig sisters were opting for the exact opposite procedure. Too bad, the doctor often thought, that some kind of simple swap couldn’t be arranged.

  One night Manson chucked his latest batch of waste into a local swamp. A swamp favored by all the other cost-cutters in town, such as several advanced bioengineering firms.

  In the darkness, rogue organic and exotic inorganic components churned and recombined.

  By dawn, Breast Thing was born.

  A thousand lush hues of pink and caramel, Breast Thing resembled one of those ancient fertility goddess statues: a faceless humanoid form draped with a hundred tits of all shapes and sizes, some with lactating nipples.

  Clambering out of the swamp, Breast Thing shambled instinctively toward the home of her father.

  The police found Dr. Manson Sozaboy drowned in his bed, a look blending terror and ecstasy on his face. The forensics guy just shook his head and said, “I’ll be damned if I can figure out where the hell any sick bastard gets enough colostrum to drown someone.”

  Breast Thing runs a titty bar in New Orleans now. But all she does is hang in the back office and count the take.

  12.

  THE DEVILED EGG

  The Tockwotton Nursing Home looked out over hundreds of acres of neighboring farmland, all fallow. In the distance the old farmstead itself loomed, a weather-beaten, tumbledown, abandoned structure.

  Everywhere around the globe, farms in similar states of desuetude sprawled: untenanted, unproductive, unneeded.

  All thanks to SuperEggs™.

  Monteverdi Vespers, the elderly inventor of SuperEggs™, sat in his smart wheelchair on the patio at Tockwotton, considering what he had wrought.

  Thirty years ago he had been so idealistic, even as he was approaching retirement. He had been focused on solving what appeared to be the major problem of his era: the lack of enough food for many of Earth’s eight billion people.

  What had inspired him to combine various tailored bacteria and viruses with the rudimentary workings of the new line of legless, wingless, headless chickens, he could not now remember. But his brainstorm had been justified by the results.

  Encasing the limbless egg-layer in a box fed by a hopper and relieved by an outlet duct, Monteverdi had created the first SuperEgg™ factory. Any organic substance, from grass clippings to oak leaves to seaweed (and including the chicken’s own wastes), could be fed into the grinding hopper and directly into the “throat” of the chicken. Controls on the box tweaked the chickens metabolism and hormones and endocrines and proteins, producing eggs of any flavor or nutritional composition.

  In one stroke, world hunger had been beaten.

  Too bad Monteverdi Vespers had signed a contract assigning all his patent rights to the firm that employed him.

  No matter, the old man thought. He had never wanted to get rich. He had done what he had done for all of humanity.

  But how he wished the charity nursing home he had ended up in didn’t recycle its dead residents in his invention!

  13.

  THE CLASH OF HOLIDAYS

  Today was little Jimmy Maynard’s favorite day of the year.

  The one day of the year that wasn’t a stinkin’ holiday.

  Sleepless for most of the night, Jimmy got up extra early because he was so excited. Today he could go to school and do his chores! He could eat the plainest of foods! He could dress in simple clothes! He could skip any kind of holiday craft-making!

  What a glorious prospect!

  His house would be undecorated for a wonderful twenty-four hours, free of any holiday regalia. No Christmas tree, no Easter eggs, no Thanksgiving papier-mache turkeys, no Secretary Day’s steno-pad napkins. No visitors would pop in bearing holiday greetings or traditional gifts, such as the candy pistols of NRA Day. The mail would bring no cards, the television would show no specials.

  What more could a kid want?

  Jimmy took his time dressing, savoring the feel of his non-holiday clothes. He went downstairs, gratified not to smell Kwanzaa cookies or matzo balls. Maybe he’d just have some dry toast for breakfast, or cereal eaten by the handful straight from the box. He anticipated the easy smiles his mother and father would wear as they were spared—for just one uniquely un-special day—churchgoing or shopping or parading.

  Bursting into the kitchen, Jimmy was stunned to see his parent’s crestfallen faces.

  “Mom! Dad! What’s the matter?”

  “Jimmy,” said his dad, “you’d better sit down. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the government has just declared a new holiday—”

  Jimmy screamed, as visions of sugarplums danced in his head.

  14.

  MADAME CALIVERA’S CORPORATE IDENTITY PROGRAM

  The spaceship resembled a giant metallic carrot with three legs sprouting from its narrow end. It touched down on the barren plains of the planet designated by humans as Limpdick III, striking a gout of dry dust from the surface. After a short interval the ship disgorged a land-crawler whose front grille mimicked the grimace of the rock-eating lizards of Why the Fuck Are We Here. The crawler set off across the plain, raising clouds of cinders and soil particulates.

  Fifteen minutes of travel brought the crawler to a native village: a collection of mismatched huts flanked by rudimentary benches and fire pits and rubbish heaps. On the benches sat various natives of Limpdick III: repulsive green warty indolent trolls with enormous genitalia. The penises of the males and the labial folds of the females flopped over the edges of the benches and into the dust.

  A door in the crawler gull-winged open, and a human woman emerged. Clad in a black and white skintight business suit, the woman exhibited an imperious air. She stalked confidently over to the nearest native, a male.

  “Where’s Drongo Kaboom?”

  The troll used both hands to shift his dick to avoid a line of creeping insects. “I am Drongo Kaboom.”

  “Did you enroll in the home-study Master of Business Administration program at Harvard University?”

  “Yes, that I did.”

  “And did you realize that your tuition payment was drawn on a non-human bank account that paid Harvard only in the dried skins of puke-cats?”

  “The puke-cat is our global currency.”

  “Furthermore, do you acknowledge that every one of your term papers has been plagiarized off the Interstellar Internet?”

  “Why should I strain my delicate brains when stealing is so much easier?”

  “Lastly, do you admit enticing a female freshman from Brookline, Massachusetts, all the way out to Limpdick III with promises of a ‘monster kegger’ and then leaving her stranded halfway to the Magellanic Clouds, covered in quarts of your jizm?”

  “I have recordings indicating all relations were consensual.”

  The woman glared at the troll for a moment, then broke into a smile and extended her hand. “Mister Kaboom, you’re just the material Harvard Business School is looking for! How’s tenure sound?”

  15.

  THE SPECTER OF CARTOON APPEAL

  Artist Number One Hundred and Fifteen, they called him. A skinny kid in shorts and an outsized Raiders T-shirt, with his glossy black hair in a crude bowl cut, the Hmong boy labored day an
d night in one of the evil Southeast Asian cartoon sweatshops, drawing eel after eel of American animation. So stuffed was his head with the uncouth imagery of his distant employers that he had forgotten all his native rituals and customs, his family, and even his own name. Taken by outlaw recruiters from his village after exhibiting drawing prowess at an early age, he was now and forevermore only Artist Number One Hundred and Fifteen.

  Artist Number One Hundred and Fifteen’s best friend, naturally enough, was Artist Number One Hundred and Sixteen, who occupied the drafting table and rickety, unpadded bamboo stool next to Fifteen. A kidnapped Korean, Sixteen did not even speak the same language as Fifteen. And yet they had managed to form a bond of friendship, helping each other. Some days Fifteen would massage Sixteen’s aching wrists. Other days, Sixteen would share some of his ration of dried cuttlefish and counterfeit Pocari Sweat drink with Fifteen, who, after all, was still a growing boy, while Sixteen was an old man who had been drawing cartoons since the heyday of Tom and Jerry.

  One day the eel-master stomped in, visibly outraged. The brawny, brutal overseer, a former Thai pirate known for his cruel way with the lash, clutched in his hand the printout of an e-mailed communique from the Cartoon Network in America. Artist Number One Hundred and Fifteen recognized the letterhead. The Thai slave driver shouted in pidgin English, the de facto language of the international bullpen.

  “Who the motherfuckin’ funny guy? Who put graffiti slur against Thai king in background of SpongeBob? Big riots all across American Thai communities. Plenty shit now to go around for everyone!”

  None of the artists dared speak. The eel-master whirled on Artist Number One Hundred and Sixteen.

  “Maybe it you, old man! Or maybe you know who! Either way, time for you to get whipped!”

  Artist Number One Hundred and Sixteen’s heart gave out after the tenth lashing. The Thai boss kicked the corpse, had it hauled unceremoniously away, and then said, “You goddamn buggers all think on this! I be back in the morning to find out who really guilty!”