“True, but on the other hand, I’m not dripping with a fat lad’s shoite,” Artur said. “So, swings and roundabouts, eh?”
He was perched on Dan’s shoulder, holding onto an ear for support. “Now, since we’ve, ye know, probably saved the entire universe from whatever that bastard of a thing was, I think we should all go to the pub. I reckon we earned ourselves a day on the lash after all that. And that kid squeezing me has worked up a terrible thirst, so it has. Sure, I’ve a mouth like yer granny’s vagina.”
He patted Dan’s ear. “No offence, like, I’m sure she was a fine woman.”
“We’ll go later,” Dan said, much to Artur’s dismay.
“Later, he says. Always with the later. What’s so important that we have to put off valuable drinking time?” he asked.
Dan took the datapad from his coat and swiped a hand above the screen. He looked up at the buildings around them, then compared them to the map that appeared on the pad. “Tressingham. The cheating husband? He was last seen near here. Some kind of warehouse or factory or something.”
“Was it an alcohol factory, Deadman? Hmm? Because if not, I can’t say that I’m all that interested.”
Dan started walking, checking the map as he went. “It’s just a couple of blocks away. We’ll go check it out, swing by the office so you can get changed and I can pick up a coat that doesn’t have a gunshot hole in the pocket, and then we’ll go to the pub.”
Artur sighed. “Fine. But the first round’s on you,” he said. “And all subsequent rounds, also.”
* * *
Even before the whole death and reanimation thing, Dan seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time snooping around in warehouses. There were a lot of warehouses Down Here – huge swathes of the city were nothing but hangar-sized industrial storage units and smoke-spewing factories – and a lot of untoward stuff went down in and around them.
The warehouse Noops had given him the location of was, like the bathroom they’d encountered earlier, better than most. From the outside, it looked almost clean. Its windows were mostly unbroken, probably on account of them being too high and small for the average wandering thug to be able to hurl a brick through.
The whole place was protected by a ten feet tall electrified fence, topped by coils of laser wire. Dan’s central nervous system had deteriorated well beyond the point of being troubled by a few thousand volts, though, and he’d managed to widen a gap in the fence enough for Artur to squeeze through. By the time he and Ollie had walked around to the gate, it was already sliding open.
There were two little guard huts by the gate, one outside the compound, the other inside. Neither one had any guards stationed in them, and the pristine sparseness of the insides suggested there never had been.
Artur hopped on the button to close the gate behind Dan and Ollie, then jumped from the hut’s window onto the top of Dan’s hat.
“Oh, wow,” he said, sitting propped up in the folds of the fedora’s fabric. “I can see for miles up here!”
“Can you?” asked Ollie. She stood on her tiptoes, trying to imagine what it was like to be sitting on the head of the much taller Dan. “Can I have a go next?”
“No,” said Dan, marching in the direction of the warehouse’s front entrance. “You cannot.”
“So, what’s the plan?” Artur asked. “Shoot first, ask questions if the opportunity arises?”
Dan shook his head, forcing the little guy to hold on. “Sorry, forgot,” he mumbled. “But no, it’s a cheating husband thing. I won’t be shooting anyone.”
“Ye say that now. I’m pretty sure ye said the same thing last month about that old woman’s missing cat.”
“That was different,” Dan said. “It was very different. It was a very big cat.”
“And it could fly, mind?” Artur said. “And spat acid out of its eyes.” He frowned and shook his head. “Sure, now I think about it, I’m not convinced it was even a cat at all.”
They found the door closed and locked, which came as no great surprise. Dan knew there were any number of clever ways to get inside. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what any of them were, so he kicked it twice, drove a shoulder against it once, then blew the lock off in a moment of angry frustration.
“What’d I say? Shoot first…” said Artur, and Dan could picture the smug look on his face.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, easing open the door and stepping inside. “I’ll pay for the damage.”
“Well, ye’ll pay for it out of yer own share,” Artur said.
Dan stopped just inside the doorway. “What do you mean, my own share?”
“Yer share of the proceeds,” Artur said. “Fifteen thousand credits, split three ways. Plus expenses. Forty, forty, twenty, on account of herself not really doing much that’s actually useful. No offense, peaches.”
Ollie, who hadn’t really been listening all that closely, shrugged and smiled. It was nice just not being endlessly tortured in a Hell-dimension, really. Anything else was a bonus.
“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Dan said, stepping all the way into the room. As he did, a series of motion-activated lights lit the place up, revealing a mostly empty space with just three or four tables gathered together in a corner like space cows standing in a field.
On the wall closest to the tables were several large pieces of paper, each one covered in inch-high letters, symbols and numbers. Dan recognized it right away as ‘science shizz’, which instinctively made him pull a grimace. He didn’t have a great track record when it came to science types. Then again, he didn’t have a great track record when it came to most people, so he probably shouldn’t single scientists out unfairly.
“What’s all that on the table?” Artur asked. He leaned forwards in the dip of Dan’s hat, as if he was steering him. “Over there.”
Dan crossed to the group of tables and stopped at the first one he came to. As he looked down at the tools and random bits of junk that were spread out on it, Artur slid off the hat, waved his arms for a few panicky seconds, then thudded onto the tabletop.
“My bad,” said Dan.
“Ye did that on purpose, ye big stook!” Artur complained, but his grumbling stopped when he spotted something two tables over. He pointed. “Over there. Take me over there, quick.”
Dan showed no sign of moving, so Ollie picked Artur up and carried him across to the other table. She set him down beside some kind of child’s doll or action figure that was roughly his size, but maybe ten to fifteen per cent scaled up.
Where the figure’s face should have been was just a series of neatly-printed circuits and a couple of eyes on metal stalks. Despite the lack of facial features, its curves, long legs and perky plastic breasts clearly marked it as female.
It was dressed in a crudely sewn dress that looked more like a medical gown and stopped just above her knees. Its hair was long and blue, and made Artur think fondly of a dream he’d once had about mermaids.
He drew himself up to his full height. “Well now, what do we have here?” he said, eyeing the figure admiringly. He wasted no time in groping one of the doll’s breasts, which promptly made her fall over. She landed flat on her back with her legs sticking in the air. Artur’s expression took on a note of disapproval.
“Sure, ye shouldn’t go making yerself so available, sweetheart,” he said. “Ye think anyone’s going to respect ye if ye just throw yer legs open like that at the first opportunity?”
He turned and beckoned Dan over. “Stick that in yer pocket,” he whispered. “I’m going to do a number of unspeakable things to it when we get back home.”
“It doesn’t have a face,” Dan pointed out.
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Deadman,” Artur said. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
A door swished open. A gasp caught in a throat. Both sounds echoed around the cavernous warehouse.
Dan turned to see a charcoal-skinned older man standing frozen in a doorway, his ice-white eyes darting between all three intruders
as confusion and terror both wrestled for control of his face.
He looked identical to his picture, other than a couple of additions. The pristine lab coat that probably cost more than Dan’s last three cars was one. The fragile domed helmet that covered his head down to just above the eyebrows was new, too. It was a delicate, mesh thing, like someone had enlarged a snowflake and bent it to fit the wearer’s head.
“Tressingham?” said Dan. This seemed to briefly tip the balance of power in confusion’s direction, but terror rallied quickly and managed to take control of the old man’s eyes.
“Please, don’t hurt me,” he pleaded.
“You are Tressingham, right?” Dan asked. “And we’re not here to hurt you.”
Something in the empty space behind them caught Ollie’s eye. “Um…” she said.
“You want money? I can get you money,” Tressingham croaked. “How much do you want? Name it.”
“Um…”
Dan was growing impatient. “Look, we don’t want anything. We were just snooping around, and… You are Tressingham. You’re from Up There.”
“Guys,” Ollie said. “You might want to see this.”
Tressingham straightened. His hands shook as he balled them into fists. “Who I am is none of your business,” he said, sounding nowhere near as brave as he’d been aiming for. “You made a big mistake coming here. Or, should I say, lots of little ones?”
Artur blinked and looked round at Dan. “What the feck’s that supposed to… Holy shoite, what is that?”
Dan turned in the direction Ollie and Artur were already looking. He was surprised to see that the floor was rising up like a vast ocean wave, rolling and undulating as it stretched higher and higher towards the ceiling.
It moved like a single living organism, and yet reminded Dan of a shoal of fish all swimming tightly together.
Whatever it was, it was getting closer, looming over Dan and the others as if it was about to come crashing down on top of them.
Dan shot it. Twice. The explosive rounds detonated against the thing, punching two man-sized holes in it. The edges of the holes quickly knotted together, until there was no evidence they’d ever even been there.
“You can’t shoot it,” Tressingham scoffed.
“Fine,” said Dan. He turned the gun on the old man. “I’ll shoot you. Call it off.”
Tressingham’s face, which had recently introduced a sense of growing confidence into its range of expressions, surrendered fully to terror. He raised his hands and quickly yanked off his mesh headgear. There was a sound like thunder as the rising floor collapsed in on itself and crashed down. It lay in an inert pile that looked like a hillock in the center of the warehouse floor.
Dan lowered the gun. “Like I said, we’re not here to hurt you. We don’t want anything. We just want to talk,” Dan said.
“And can you tell us what that thing was?” added Ollie.
“And, so you know, I’m taking this doll home with me, and it’s probably best if ye don’t ask me why,” Artur concluded.
Tressingham shuffled further into the room, fiddling with his mesh and wire helmet. “Are you from Up Here? Are you here to shut me down?” he asked. Tears of panic welled up in his eyes as his throat tightened with worry. “I did everything by the book. That’s why I’m here. They don’t have the same regulations. It’s allowed here. I checked, and it’s allowed!”
Dan slid Mindy back into her holster and glanced back at the unmoving mound of floor. It had moved like liquid, but now seemed fully solid. “What’s allowed?” he asked. “And do we look like we’re from Up There?”
Tressingham flitted his eyes across all three of them, as if only seeing them for the first time. “How should I know?” he asked, but he sounded a little less uptight than he had just a few seconds before. His voice started to take on that same brusque, officious tone his wife’s had. It was a tone that suggested he was better than everyone else in the room, that he knew it, and that he was damn sure everyone else was going to know it, too. “Who are you, then? What do you want?”
Dan briefly considered some elaborate lie, but he didn’t have the energy. “Your wife sent me,” he said.
Tressingham blinked. “My wife? I find that very hard to believe.”
“Kooriashian,” Dan said.
“Nice woman,” said Artur. “I mean, bit of a stuck-up cow, maybe, but nice enough.”
“Koori? But… but why? Why would Koori send…?”
His fingers tightened on the headgear and he took a step back. “What do you want? Are you here to hurt me? Is she seeing one of you? All of you? What is this?”
“I’m a detective,” Dan said.
“If ye use the term quite loosely,” Artur added.
“Your wife believes you’re having an affair with someone Down Here. She hired me to find out who with.”
Tressingham spent the next several seconds blinking in surprise. Finally, he let out a high-pitched, ‘Ha!’ that was part relief, and part disbelief.
“An affair?! Me? With someone Down Here?!” He laughed. It was a breathless, sniveling thing, and was almost certainly the same noise he’d make if he were crying. “How preposterous. How utterly, utterly preposterous. What gave her such an idea?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dan, shrugging. “The secret phone calls, the clandestine conversations, the sneaking around Down Here when you said you were working late. To be honest, she has me convinced, but if you want to try me with another explanation, I’m all ears.”
Ollie shot him a sideways look that didn’t go unnoticed.
“Not literally,” Dan said, not breaking eye contact with Tressingham. “So, if you aren’t banging some ‘commoner’, what brings you Down Here?”
“Tiny robots,” the old man said.
Dan hadn’t been expecting that answer. He’d been prepared for a number of different possible explanations, but ‘tiny robots’ hadn’t made the cut.
“What, like this thing?” asked Artur, hoisting the fallen doll up by one foot.
“Hmm? No! No, of course not that. They built that. I was testing their fine motor control,” Tressingham explained, without really explaining anything. “Or my fine motor control using them, I mean. It’s rather tricky, operating so many for such a complex task. Caused quite the headache.”
“What’s he talking about?” Ollie asked.
“I have no idea,” Dan admitted. “What are you talking about?”
Tressingham glanced around at the doors, and then up to the high windows overhead. The blue glow of the city-sized engines was just visible through the glass. Once he was sure no-one was listening in, he continued.
“We have certain rules and regulations Up There. Safety issues, mainly. The continued health and well-being of all citizens is of paramount importance, and while that is, of course, a good thing, it slows progress, as it prevents those of us with such interests from testing our more radical theories. It’s a small price to pay for Utopia, but a price all the same.”
He gestured to the building around them. “Down Here, you have no such regulations. You treat public safety as something of an afterthought. With a relatively small amount of money, someone from Up There can make great inroads into science Down Here, provided they don’t attract the attention of the Up There authorities, of course.”
As he was speaking, Tressingham’s entire demeanor was gradually changing. He no longer looked terrified, and his words were starting to tumble out of him as his hand gestures became bolder and more animated.
“Down Here affords such freedom, you see? Freedom to… to… to push the boundaries. To try new things which we can’t try Up There. Which we are not allowed to, for the collective good. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, we’re all about freedom Down Here,” he said, but if Tressingham picked up on the sarcasm, he chose to ignore it.
“Precisely!”
Artur raised a hand. “I’m still waiting for the part about the tiny robots,” he said. �
��And also, if ye could maybe throw in an explanation about how the floor rose up like it was going to kill us, I for one would really appreciate it.”
“Not the floor,” Tressingham said. “Tiny robots, each one smaller than the eye can comprehend, all working in unison. Together. Controlled by this.”
He held up the mesh headpiece, presenting it for them all to see. He put such ceremony into raising it aloft that it almost felt as if a shaft of sunlight should come through a window and strike it, and a Heavenly chord should fill the room.
When neither of those things happened, he lowered it again.
“Nanobots,” said Dan. Tressingham’s constantly in-flux expression became one of surprise.
“Yes. Yes, that’s correct,” he said, smiling at Dan like a parent might smile at a child who’d finally stopped eating crayons and started drawing with them instead. “Well done. Nanobots.”
“Wait,” said Artur. “Go back to the tiny robots, I want to hear about them.”
“They are the tiny robots,” Dan said. “Nanobots. They’re… what? Molecular level size?”
“Not quite. Not yet,” said Tressingham. He puffed up his scrawny chest. “But I’m getting closer. Although, at this stage, size isn’t the issue. It’s control. That’s the difficult part.”
His excitement was starting to build again. It was as if he’d been holding the secret in for so long that now he had started talking about it, he couldn’t shut it off.
“I’ve been able to make basic shapes, issue simple commands, but maintaining the concentration required is difficult. It thinks like one entity, but with a trillion individual minds. It’s easier to work with small batches…” He gestured to the lump on the floor. It didn’t look like a particularly small batch. “But even then, it takes its toll.”
Ollie looked from Tressingham to Dan and back again a few times. “So… what’s happening? He isn’t seeing someone else?”
“Of course not!” the old man said. “I love my wife. I’d never do anything to hurt her. I’m doing this for her. Once perfected, the nanobots will earn me great acclaim, and us both more money than we know what to do with. We’ll be able to go anywhere in the galaxy, see anything we like. I can finally give her the life she deserves.”
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