Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  Five minutes later, in the Ops center, the Colonel received the single chocolate, unwrapped it, began to eat it, and gagged when he read the words Delvaux had written: “MUNI 5-7 A.I. HAS GONE ROGUE... INITIATE BLACK CHAMBER PROTOCOLS.” The Colonel's exclamation, “Fuck me,” was noted by his subordinates, but it went unexplained as they watched him spit out a mouthful of chocolate on to the floor of the Ops center and stride briskly from the room.

  -25-

  The impacts of Padre Pedro's flopping, twelve-inch, black rubber dildo did more damage to the inside of Alvin's head than the outside.

  In the storeroom full of sex toys and disassembled sections of rubber phalli-studded jungle gym, Pedro's bodyguard had worked hard to find anything close to a normal chair. The one he'd found, in which Alvin now sat, looked normal enough on camera. Nobody would be able to see that Alvin sat on an open-seat chair, like a toilet seat mounted to a chair frame with a medium-high back.

  The bodyguard held the holographic imager while Padre Pedro made a few adjustments to the lights and gave Alvin his thoroughly unwanted opinion. “I was very disappointed in your performance during our little warm-up earlier. How can I possibly interrogate you properly when you insist on losing consciousness?” Alvin stared with all the intense hatred he could muster, but the last session had taken a lot out of him; he was weak from the beating.

  “The names you finally gave us, the names of the Morituri you corrupted, were useless. We checked them out. Each and every one of the names you gave us is the name of a dead man.”

  “I only know dead people. You killed everyone I know,” Alvin said it without any dramatic flourish because it was a hell he'd lived for so long that it was just normal, hellish business as usual.

  “Ahhh,” Pedro replied, “that was not me. No, no, no, that was not us. Those killers were Operators of the Global Secular Alliance's Security Service. They are dedicated to maintaining a stable status quo, and you must admit, little Buddha you threaten the status quo with your amotivational espousals. You are, I think, as much of a threat to them as you are to us.”

  “I know the Morituri sent agents to kill me. They told me after they abandoned their missions. You sent killers, and when you couldn't kill me, you killed whoever you found that I'd ever had contact with. It's true, and you know it is because you probably ordered it.”

  Pedro shrugged.

  “Can you really blame us? Someone should kill you. You stand for Nothing. If the world followed your teachings then men would wander the earth like animals, lacking any purpose. You threaten everything. Everything we worked to create since Rome saw the light of heaven.”

  Alvin screwed up his face hearing this, and he said, “Rome never stood for anything but itse-”

  “Blasphemer!” Padre Pedro lost control. In his anger, he gave Alvin a backhanded slap across the face that left a small trickle of blood running from the corner of Alvin's mouth. Remembering that blood made people look coerced, and therefore, looked bad on camera, Pedro regained his composure. “I wish I had not done that.” He turned his head and looked around the room for something with which he might wipe the blood off, but finding nothing, he used the black rubber dildo to smear it back towards Alvin's mouth. It didn't work very well. Padre Pedro stepped back and discarded the dildo to the side of the room with an expression of disgust on his face.

  “We need you to recant,” the Padre said. “Simply tell the world, simply tell the camera, that you are a fraud.” Padre Pedro turned to look at his bodyguard, who moved closer with the imager. Pedro continued, “Tell them that you have always been a fraud, a con man. Recant, little Buddha. Admit to the world that you know nothing of God. Admit to them you are a trickster and a con man. Tell them how you have led a cult of fools. Recant, and perhaps your miserable life will be spared.”

  Alvin said nothing. He breathed heavily through his mouth, since his nose was clogged with mucous and blood. Padre Pedro took the imager from his bodyguard and zoomed in slowly on Alvin's mouth. He played with the framing in the viewfinder, turning the imager sideways and zooming in with cruelty, like he was shooting porn. Alvin's mouth, smeared with blood, filled the frame in extreme closeup.

  “Recant, little Buddha!” the insurgent priest shouted in anger, “Recant!”

  -26-

  Sitting inside the stolen delivery van that idled in the many-acred parking lot of the Power of Pleasure sex club, Carlos put on shatterproof goggles, donned a neck brace, and strapped it on securely with three velcro straps. While wearing it, he couldn't turn his head, but that didn't pose any problems that he could foresee because the only direction Carlos intended to go was straight.

  He waited for a particularly gaudy limousine covered with shifting plaid to drop off its passengers and clear the street in front of the club's main entrance ramp. He needed the ramp to be clear.

  While he waited, Carlos watched the spotlights and lasers spin around through the clear dome that housed the city's most fashionable place to fuck. A hundred foot-tall projection of a lesser PornoPop star danced in the middle of the dome. Carlos was embarrassed that he remembered her name. It was CandiQ. As she danced and strutted, her figure remained roughly in the center of the dome. He watched her, thinking how much Hi-5 was going to enjoy stealing the main stage from the competition.

  “Hey Carlos,” Fritz asked through the loudspeakers on the outside of his helmet, “are we gonna do this or what?” The ramp was clear, so Carlos answered with his foot, and Fritz and Irving swayed as he accelerated the van. Carlos watched the analog needle of the vintage delivery van's speedometer. The last time Carlos looked at it, the vintage dial read fifty-three miles per hour. Fast enough. He lifted his gaze and locked his eyes on his goal.

  There were ten bouncers outside the POP club's main entrance, and somehow they all managed to clear out of the van's path as it sped by the long line of waiting clubbers and hit the base of the ramp. The van bottomed out, scraping against the concrete, throwing bright blue and green sparks left, right, and behind it.

  The couple who had almost reached the doors at the top of the ramp only turned around because they believed the van's honking horn had something to do with them looking tremendously hot and they wanted to wave at their admirer. It was a common hallucination for people on the amphetamine derived, Beyondo Brand derms with which they had chosen to start the evening. That hallucination saved their lives as they would have likely ignored any honking perceived as a warning since the Beyondo Brand derms they'd slapped on tended to make people think that rules and warnings didn't apply to them because they were so hot. The two rubber-clad clubbers hurled themselves, along with their enormous, surgically enhanced breasts and asses, off the edge of the ramp. It was a remarkable display of Beyondo-enhanced reflexes in which both of them abandoned pretension for the first time in several years.

  The van missed crushing them against the door by only a tenth of a second.

  As Carlos's van made impact with the first set of reinforced doors, it knocked them off their hinges, and they flew into the interior doors, only five yards away on the other side of the mantrap. For the one-fifth of a second that the van was actually inside the mantrap, between the exterior and interior doors, it was scanned for weapons and explosives like any other visitor to the Power Of Pleasure. The club's weapon scanning system had just enough time to project the words, 'ENTRY DENIED' in floating, red holographics in front of the van, and Carlos only had a tiny fraction of a second to smirk at that before the van made impact with the second set of doors.

  They were considerably more reinforced, but they were meant to withstand small weapons fire not speeding vehicles. The interior doors gave way, bursting open off the front of the van's snub-nosed front end, admitting Carlos, Fritz, and Irving to the POP club.

  The van bled a lot of speed blowing through the doors, but the twelve hundred pounds of men, armor, and weapons in the van's rear made it difficult to stop on the smooth floor. Carlos pumped the brakes since the van was actual
ly old enough to have no anti-lock systems. It didn't make a difference because they hit a carelessly spilled puddle of lube, and the van slid into a long, twisting, vine-like jungle gym that grew from the floor and twisted over on itself many times over. The sex-toy jungle gym was made of thick silicone rubber over an aluminum core, and hundreds of twelve-inch, multi-colored rubber phalli protruded from up and down its length like long cactus spines. It was bolted to the floor, and it was the perfect structure to decelerate a heavy vehicle except for the way it burst through the windshield, showering Carlos with bits of safety glass and thrusting its rubber dildo cactus spines disrespectfully towards his face.

  When they came to a full stop, Carlos was uninjured but several of the dildoes growing off the vine wagged together in front of his eyes in a disturbing and demeaning spectacle. Staring at the closest of the bouncing, multi-colored, rubber phalli with crossed eyes, Carlos removed his safety goggles and told Fritz and Irving what they undoubtedly already knew, “We're here!”

  Fritz and Irving exited out the rear door of the van. The clubbers around them were nearly naked, and rather than panicking, most of them thought it was all part of the show, all part of the POP club experience. A few ran off screaming into the crowds of copulating partiers, but everyone in the POP club was too wasted, too focused on a sex act, or was too self-involved to notice or care.

  Transparent glowing red cherries twice the size of basketballs hovered and danced and spun above their heads as Fritz and Irving ignored the crowds and lumbered like great ponderous armored knights towards the nearest stairwell. The first floor crowd wasn't their problem. The first floor belonged to Hi-5, and she was arriving in the next van.

  Casper felt the van bottom out on the ramp, but other than that, the entrance to the POP club wasn't too rough. The second van had a sliding side door, and when it opened to reveal the bodies in the dim light and the flashing strobes, the spotlights, and projected holographic cherries that danced like sugarplums, Casper was impressed. The first thing he noticed was the smell. The club was filled with an all-pervasive scent of human congress.

  Now this, he thought, is some first-class, decadent shit.

  It was hot, and he began to sweat under his clothes and kevlar. The first floor went on forever. There were islands of orgies and strange, functionally designed furniture and people fucking above his head. Figures appeared to be screwing in mid-air above the dancing, drugging, and fucking crowd that numbered in the thousands. The mid-air copulators were actually hanging from thin, almost invisible, elastic cords, connected to harnesses, that allowed them to embrace and engage while suspended. They reminded Casper of insects he'd seen doing it over a pond in the park when he was a kid.

  There was dancing and there were catwalks for overhead viewing. There were open showers and a lube-filled swimming pool set in the floor that immediately gave him the willies. Everywhere he looked there were people doing it, people fucking everywhere and anywhere under the smoky-pink-tinted, transparent XinClair dome high above.

  The smell reminded Bonnie of fun she hadn't had in a while, and she bit the side of her cheek thinking about it while she scanned the POP club for threats. Nothing but clubbers. She turned to look at her own team, standing out like armored thumbs in the mostly naked crowd. Casper looked entertained.

  Catherine was standing next to Casper, and as she stared up through the transparent dome at the city-lit clouds above, he heard her say something through the pounding music about how under the see-through dome they were all fucking in front of God. Casper thought, out of the corner of his eye, that she looked excited.

  He looked over at Bonnie, and she didn't seem the least bit phased. She seemed like she thought she was above all this, somehow. The only response it drew from her was chambering a massive round in the Sagami hand cannon that Hi-5 had let her keep. Casper wanted to ask Bonnie what she thought about all this, but when she saw him looking at her, she said, “Don't get any ideas, Ms. Aziz.” He didn't bother trying to explain himself because the music was too loud and he was focused on a million other things, mostly the infinite variety of boobs on parade.

  Bonnie thought there were spotlights shining in her eyes Then she realized they were headlights. It was Shelby in the third van. She parked inside the mantrap over the scanners that didn't like her gun or her bomb and again flashed a message in mid-air, denying entry to the club. Bonnie watched her hop out the door and jog forward to meet them. She was grinning.

  Hi-5 and Carlos stepped forward a couple of paces. Bonnie couldn't hear anything but 180bpm dance music, but she saw Carlos smile and make a gesture towards the stage, and then it looked like he shouted something to Hi-5. Something like, “You're on.”

  Hi-5 wore a full-length AniLux trench coat in the van, covered with spinning firecrackers and their eternally burning fuses that always dropped sparks towards the ground. Bonnie knew she had plans to go on stage and was hiding a more flamboyant outfit underneath.

  Hi-5 was armed with an eighteen round grenade launcher, built like a gigantic revolver, and in her left hand she held a pistol with an extended clip three times the length of the barrel. Singh and Cheese moved to either side of her, and she handed them her weapons, shrugged off the AniLux trench coat, and revealed her stage outfit for the evening.

  Hi-5 wore a combination of bustier and one-piece bathing suit. It was AniLux too, and it was animated to appear as if she was full of stars. They swirled across her in a spiral galactic vortex set against a blackness punctuated, not only by twinkling stars that swam in the void, but also by explosions that Bonnie correctly guessed were meant to represent supernovae. They exploded about once a second in great multichromatic bursts that left clouds of nebulous color floating over her.

  The one-piece suit had half-cups that presented her exposed showbiz-sized breasts, and as she touched a control mechanism set between them, the entire garment began to pulse and chroma shift. The black began to slide through a million colors, and the stars changed with them, maintaining a consistent complementary hue in relation to the background. It was already a seizure inducing garment, but when the pace of the blinding supernovae picked up to match the bass rhythm, the effect was a mesmerizing optical assault.

  She wore a thick, hip slung belt that glowed a simple cerulean, and puffy clouds floated across its width. The belt was there to support twin, holstered, pearl handled, long-barrel revolvers and the most unexpected element of her outfit – the codpiece. It was absurdly huge and protruded nearly a foot in front of her, competing with her breasts. It appeared to be jewel studded, but the jewels that covered it were lenses to direct tiny lasers, producing a sunburst effect that constantly lit up the surrounding area with glorious laser beams from her codpiece. There was a very small nozzle at the outermost point of the codpiece's extreme convexity that served a function she wouldn't reveal until the right dramatic moment.

  Hi-5 took back her weapons from Cheese and Singh and began to strut towards the main stage. Carlos had told her it was her job to keep the first floor's massive crowd distracted, and he'd asked the right girl. It's time, Hi-5 thought, to steal a show.

  Cheese had little difficulty commandeering the DJ booth. It was guarded by two large, stern, turgid-muscled men with stun batons. He put a couple of NarCocktail laced flechettes in them with a tiny pre-charged pneumatic dart pistol, and they wandered off into the crowd, wearing wide smiles and tearing at their clothes, which they suddenly regarded as binding and unnatural.

  When the music stopped, the crowd saw confused CandiQ, the second tier PornoPop diva that had been performing, look towards the DJ booth with her hands on her hips and fury in her eyes. Hi-5 approached her from the rear, swept her legs out from under her, and ripped off the tracker she wore that told the holographic imaging scanners what to follow. CandiQ scrambled backwards like a crab from Hi-5's grinning bitch-glory towering above her. She ran off into the crowd. Everybody knew, and she did too, that Hi-5 would fuck a bitch up, during a main stage stick-up.
<
br />   Her Hi-ness hung the holo-tracker on her belt, and as the imaging scanners locked on the Queen of PornoPop, her image was projected, defiant, glamorous, and one hundred feet high, immediately behind her on stage. A thousand fans looked up expectantly at her Hi-ness, her 5-ness, Hi-5. Her Beats began. Locked inter-coitus, without breaking off, they cheered and changed the rhythm of their meaty motions to move in-time and in sync with her majesty's mighty Beats. Hi-5 began to sing:

  “Y'all are Good with the Wood, I see,

  So ride 'em cowboys and cowgirls.

  Glory be - you hoes should try me!

  Churlish hoes step up 'n take a whirl.

  Hi-5 is whirl-wind like a rhymin' sit n spin,

  To E-Ter-Nity and back again!

  Baby! (damn, bitch)

  Bitch! Do it, Baby! (damn, bitch)

  Bitch! Screw it, Baby! (damn, bitch)

  Stay in key 'cause this Bitch got perfect pitch!

  Ya do it do ya?

  Imagine takin' it to her!

  I know yer hard pressed to imagine,

  Hi-5 is the bitch that pees standin'.

  And if she's got an itch she'll be handin',

  Yer twitchy ass to you on a platter,

  All wet and spattered with her liquid anti-matter!

  Baby! (damn, bitch)

  Bitches doin it Baby! (damn, bitch)

  Bitches screwin it Baby! (damn, bitch)

  Hi-5 is the Bitch if ya got an itch to scritch!”

  Hi-5 struck a pose and fired a happy-gas grenade into the crowd with the rotary launcher on the first and third '(damn, bitch)' of the chorus. They loved it. They loved her. Hi-5 loved them back.

  Bonnie, Casper, and the rest of the Dark snatch team watched the beginning of Hi-5's set from the top of the stairs that led down to the first sub-level. That gave Fritz and Irving, who had already descended, a chance to clear out the Morituri gunmen that would undoubtedly rise from the lowest levels of the club and try to stop them from taking back the Buddha.