Everyone fished a remote control out of his pocket, jabbing the key for a status response. Wherever the creature was, the gizmo deep inside its cortex would respond to the signal by running the full gamut of hormonal responses through a tiny AI, interpreting them appropriately. Ironically, it was a similar technology to that which controlled Alpha's clumsy Dilûu - albeit far, far more sophisticated.
Normally one could be reasonably certain that the readout would illuminate with the word "Hungry" or, for brief periods, "Feeding".
"Fleeing" was a new one on Everyone.
"What the sneck does that m-"
Thump.
With a particularly fine burst of sparks, Scheider materialised in the car's hold. The hov-lifters struggled against the sudden redistribution of weight.
"That," said Everyone, glowering into the mirror, "was a lot quicker than expected."
Hurts, the readout flashed, then: Angry. The word pulsed like the centre of a fire.
"Aw, sneck." he muttered. "The boy survived, then?"
Yes.
Angry.
"Yeah? Well ditto. And imagine what the boss is gonna say."
A thought occurred. Everyone's viscous brows dipped together with a syrupy slurp.
"You didn't... you didn't kill Alpha, did you?" there was a tinge of hysteria in his voice. In the mirror, the creature's expressionless black eye glared back.
No.
Everyone breathed out. "Well, that's a relief, at least."
The readout flashed, lights twinkling. When? Want him.
"Soon, Scheider. You got to be patient."
Angry.
"You said. Don't you worry, my little horror. You'll get your chance."
The Dilûu was not looking hot. Dribbling a soupy paste of (probably) blood, it honked in pain, great ragged gouges hanging open across it. Worse, some of the bites had been inflicted with such violence that they'd torn completely through the brute's blubber and punctured its gasbladder. Now every time it inflated its stricken body sung with a chorus of hisses and squeals: air escaping through the frayed holes.
"He's buggered," announced Kid Knee, self-proclaimed Dilûu expert. "We'll be lucky if he gets us back to the city."
And therein lay the other problem. As buggered as it may be, the Dilûu was still under the complete and total control of its behavioural collar, and after a good deal of snuffling about in the swamp water it had indicated with a surly toss of its head that Stanley Everyone had fled in completely the opposite direction to that from which he'd arrived.
"We follow him," Johnny said. "That's what we're here for."
The Kid shook his head/leg - dancing a little jig. "We should go back to the city. We don't know how far he's gone."
"He could be just over the hill!"
"And he could be on the other snecking side of the planet! At least we know where the city is. Fido can get us back there, I reckon." He patted the Dilûu's side affectionately, treated to a grisly splattering of bladderjuice for his troubles.
Johnny crossed his arms. "If we go back now, he'll escape."
"So what if we get halfway and Fido carks it? Then he'll still have escaped, and, oh, small detail, we'll be stranded hundreds of miles from anywhere!"
"It's a risk worth taking."
"Listen, I've got just as much right to say what we do as you."
"Since when?"
"Since we're supposed to be partners."
"Yeah. Supposed to be."
"What's that mean?"
Johnny pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing. "Nothing."
"You're saying... You're saying I'm useless, aren't you? You think I'm just some overweight piece of-"
"No, Kid. I'm not saying that at all. I just... I vote we should go after Everyone. That's why we came here, snecksakes."
"Well, I vote no." The Kid crossed his arms and pouted out his lower lip. "It's bloody suicide. Better stony-broke than stony-dead."
They eyed each other, scowling.
"Well," said Johnny. "Toss a coin? Tic-tac-toe? Or maybe we should just ask Roolán?"
The boy looked up at the sound of his name. Johnny had only recently finished a grumpy session of finger waggling, annoyed at the youth's disobedience in coming to their rescue, and he was still indulging in some pouting of his own. As far as Roolán could see, if he hadn't disobeyed Johnny and Kid Knee would be dead by now. Johnny apparently saw this as a minor issue.
At any rate, Roolán had suddenly become the unwitting centre of attention.
"Him?" Kid Knee retorted. "What's he got to do with anything?"
"He's along for the ride," Johnny said. "That means he gets a say."
"It's his fault we're bloody out here! If he'd kept his mouth shut back at the mansion, we wouldn't have thi-"
"Yeah, and if he'd kept his mouth shut a minute ago we'd both be dead. So I figure he's earned it."
Roolán resisted a smirk.
Kid Knee almost howled. "Johnny, he's just a kid!"
"Well, you should know."
Apparently having exhausted their lines of debate, they both turned to regard him - one staring down, the other scowling upwards.
Johnny nodded encouragingly. "What do you say, Roolán? You still want to be a Strontium Dog?"
Roolán barely paused to think, pencil scratching across paper.
We follow Everyone.
"Well, sneck," said Kid Knee, unscrewing his hipflask.
FIFTEEN
"Be thou made as unto a child," the book said, "in purity and simplicity unsullied." Abrocabe had never understood that part.
The prophecy's other elements were, if not simple, then at least straightforward. The appearance of the four holy omens, for example: when they arrived their credence would be unquestionable - incontrovertible proof of the Great Boddah's righteousness. The Book didn't bandy its words on their timing, either: the omens would coincide precisely with the Great Sacrifice, distracting Ogmishlen for a split second, and would therefore herald the End of Time.
But that one line, the commandment of the Great Boddah to his flock, had perplexed Abrocabe ever since his wife Sianne introduced him to Boddihsm. It was the God's way of ensuring that his chosen ones would be ready for their reward: the transcendence of reality and re-emergence into heaven. After all, the Second Reality was going to be a simpler affair, sharper, more pure - and the commandment was seen as the Boddah's way of ensuring his flock would fit in.
"Be thou made as unto a child, in purity and simplicity unsullied."
But how the sneaking sneck was that supposed to happen? Particularly when the "thou" in question was a fantastically wealthy individual with all the dubious claims to morality that that entailed. Innocence was in short supply amongst the Boddah's faithful.
On Splut Mundi, alone in his white cabin, far away from his droves of servants, wives, rare pets and novelty pornography, Abrocabe Zindatsel was experiencing something of a crisis of faith.
"It's... it's doubt," he confessed to Sianne, his trunklike nose flushing in shame, when she came to his cabin that evening. "I have so much to lose, and no guarantee of any gain." He winced, aware of how materialistic he sounded. But then, he'd spent his entire life primarily concerned with matters of wealth and breaking the habit was harder than he'd anticipated.
"Everyone has doubts, my lord," Sianne smiled, blushing slightly. "Even me. That's the beauty of all this. We have nothing to lose."
"Nothing?" he spluttered. "My dear, I'm losing everything! My fortune, my reputation, my bloody life!"
"Ah, but not until the proof has emerged. The omens come first, my lord. Then the sacrifice."
Abrocabe considered this. Up from the back of his characteristically suspicious mind, an appealing thought came bubbling through the cotton candy of faith. "S-so, so if the omens do not appear-"
"They shall."
"Yes, of course," he waved his hands dismissively. "But, ah, hypothetically speaking, if they didn't."
"Then you'd lose nothi
ng. None of us would lose anything. Without the omens, without the mountain of fire, there won't be a sacrifice."
She brandished one slender, perfect wrist. Fastened around it, in a bland grey that perfectly matched her cassock, was the small strap they'd all been given upon their arrival. On its upper surface a tiny panel brightened and darkened in time with its wearer's heartbeat.
"Only when the heart stops," she smiled.
Abrocabe grinned, immeasurably reassured. It really was the most deviously businesslike religion, the metaphysical equivalent of a "no win, no fee" policy, and just like every other financially astute member of its burgeoning faith, Boddihsm appealed to Abrocabe like no other religion ever could. Unless the omens manifested, unless the whole reality sized caboodle came crashing to a halt, the vast and personal sacrifice that every member of the faith had been called upon to make simply would not happen. It was brilliant.
But it didn't go far towards solving the riddle of that one awkward little line.
"Be thou made as unto a child, in purity and simplicity unsullied."
In the morning of the next day, Abrocabe tracked down Jay "Biggie" Bolster, the former weapons industry CEO who had welcomed him and his wives to Splut Mundi. He found the rotund figure seated in meditation before the hovering Book, and plopped himself beside him. After a brief exchange of greetings, Abrocabe explained his perplexity.
"Ah," Bolster nodded, a quiet smile playing across his face. "Yes, the commandment. It's a tricky one, you're right."
"We've already screwed up the Boddah's masterpiece, right? I mean, just by being alive, we snecked it. That's in The Book. That's the whole point. H-how do we go back to scratch? I don't get it."
Bolster placed a companionable hand on his shoulder. "Perhaps," he said, "we should find somewhere a little quieter."
In a side atrium, well away from the crowd, Abrocabe sat with Bolster and chewed the inside of his lip.
"Most people," the chubby man smiled, "assume the text is allegorical. They come to this place at the prophet's call, they throw away their clothes, their ships, their lifestyles. They prepare for the sacrifice, which will take away everything they ever owned. As far as they understand it, they are becoming 'as children'".
Abrocabe scowled. "But-"
"But they're forgetting something rather important. Can you tell me what it is, Abrocabe?"
The gigazillionaire frowned, mind racing. Like a Sendrillian dart-wasp thudding into its prey, a ray of inspiration punctured his thoughts, lacking only for fireworks and choirs of angels in the strength of its revelation.
"Memories," he said.
"Exactly. How can there be a place for the faithful in the New Reality, if their minds are full of memories of wealth and iniquity?"
This was the first time Abrocabe had ever heard the word "iniquity" used in conversation. He was impressed. "W-what can we do?"
Infuriatingly, Bolster didn't seem worried. He tapped the back of his head and turned around.
"It's simple," he smiled, lowering his cassock-hood. "Radical cranial surgery."
Abrocabe's mouth hung open. A neat scar was plain to see beneath the boundary of Bolster's greying hair. "Only the most faithful are worthy," he said. "Only those who realise the truth: their memories must be purged."
"Th-the ones w-who...?"
"Yes. Only the ones like you."
WORDS FOR THE DEAD
#6 ZINGRATHEKK E-Z 256 (CITIZEN CLASS ARTIFICIAL BEING)
Ah, shit. It's coming right at us.
We're all about to die, if you believe in that sort of thing, and there's not a data-cluster's chance in a reboot paradigm that we can do anything about it. I mean, yeah, we've all been backed up and filed away, just like the manual recommends, but you've still got to go through it all. Still got to actually be killed in an actual calamitous disaster, with all the actual existential paradoxes that creates. And if the bozos in the ReShelling committee ever actually get around to finding you a new body - some hope - it's not the same you they resurrect, is it? I mean, how can it be? The real you, the original model, is gone for good. Shrapnel.
And the saddest thing of all is, right on the verge of obliteration, I can't stop thinking the same thing, over and over and over. And it's not exactly profound:
110101000101010011010100010101011111010101010100101011010100101110101010111010001010001011101010101111010001010100011001010101000000001010100001111101010101100011101011010101001010100101010001010001010101000010111010101011101001101000101010100110101010110111010001010110100001110101010101010100101011
You know what I mean?
Sneck, here it comes!
Boom.
The McSonymishu© conglomerate, representing a complex merger between brand-icon and technological businesses, had been at the forefront of artificial intelligence since the HALpal "Real Imaginary Friend" fad. Since then the technology had improved several million times over, the bank accounts of the chairmen involved had swollen several trillion times over, and the merciless exploitation of mechs, androids, cyborgs and bonkmachines continued unabated.
Back on earth, the last rainforest was swatted aside to make way for a far more efficient OxyGenerator facility, the last humpback whale was digitised and stored on the Conserv-a-tron database and racial discrimination had been effectively obliterated by the arrival of mutantkind. Why discriminate against people with different coloured skin, the philosophy went, when everyone could cheerfully gang up on the lumpy freakazoids with toenails instead of teeth?
The upshot was that a lot of socially aware, eco-friendly, conservationally minded people with the burning desire to Save The World, Reduce Injustice and Go Down In History For Being Really Great, found themselves with nothing to complain about, nothing to protest against, and no downtrodden marginalized groups to fight for.
Enter the AI's.
A hundred years later, give or take, and thanks to the recently-renamed "MachinePeace" group, a quarter of all AI's had been officially granted CCAB status: they were citizens, they owned their own bodies and were due all the same civic rights as every other person. Given that they were also therefore eligible for paying taxes, and also had to insure their own bodies and fund software consultancy, engineer callout charges, emotional upgrades and general maintenance, they also tended to be very broke.
One hundred and thirty years after the McSonymishuTM conglomeration, there were sixteen CCAB tax-havens scattered throughout the galaxy. The largest was AX111 - a mobile spacestation housing thirteen million artificial personalities and their bodies. It became something of an icon: young AI's would chirrup in binary longing to their parental engine nodes about how they too, one day, would afford their place in the robotic nirvana that was AX1.
11. Citizens with rights they may have been, but imaginative in the field of nomenclature they weren't.
All of which sentiment was efficiently blown to pieces on the day a rogue asteroid came spinning across the cosmos like a drunken Frisbee and obliterated AX1 in a riot of metal debri and dead tourists.
It wasn't pretty.
Cheez had got lucky on three highly significant counts.
First, on his very first day in the Kostadell Zol resort, he'd come across a woman so neurone-destroyingly drunk that she not only consented to a spot of clumsy nookie, but had actually referred to Cheez as a) good looking, b) funny, and c) smart. Anyone else might have regarded this as a) a bare-faced lie, b) evidence that she was up to something or, at the very least, c) signs of mental trauma. Cheez, unfortunately, tended only to think in a), b), c) terms when it suited his ego.
Secondly, thanks to the woman in question deciding abruptly to situate the aforementioned nookie in Cheez's hippybus, he had been in a relatively safe position, i.e. underground - when the asteroid's polarity went nutso and everything started falling upwards.
And thirdly, thanks to him being persuaded to remain within the car park, he escaped largely unharmed when the beach, the resort, the great oxygen dome around it and all the unfort
unate tourists therein came into sudden and terminal contact with several million tonnes of robotic space station. The cargo bay doors had sealed the very instant the dome broke, preserving a cavernous bubble of breathable air underground.
Inside, the walls trembled and the rocky ceiling splintered; outside the resort was scraped away like manky wallpaper.
It was, all in all, a series of uncharacteristically lucky events.
There was a "but". Or three.
In the first instant, before the gravity disaster, the drunken nympho-woman had turned out to not be drunk. Or a nympho. Or, for that matter, a woman. Dewigged and exposed, the "individual" had clobbered Cheez over the head with an electrolysed handbag, nicked everything from the interior of the hippyvan, and legged it.
It was therefore in a state of mild concussion that Cheez encountered the second unforeseen misfortune, namely the complete and utter explosive destruction of his van, along with every other spacecraft and voidmodule parked in careful rows within the cavern. For the second time in quick succession he'd been rendered unconscious, and this time when he awoke the harsh light of reality had illuminated rather more than a burglarised van and a sore head.
"S-skreeming claretjobs, geez," as he'd muttered at the time.
He was on the ceiling, he'd seen, in the jagged remains of what had once been his vehicle, surrounded by smoking and mangled debris, with a piece of shrapnel stuck in his left buttock.
If this was a trip, he'd decided, he'd never smoke or swallow anything of dubious legality ever again.
It wasn't a trip.
Misfortune number three arrived in the form of an irritable Viking who stood on the ceiling roaring out orders, calling him unpleasant names every time he burst into tears or started hyperventilating, and generally shouting like a foghorn.
At the Viking's command, Cheez had been forced to stagger about in the wreckage, pulling out anything that looked remotely communicatorlike and juryrigging the universe's most pitiful SOS beacon. Given that his grasp of modern technology was only marginally more advanced than Wulf's, and that he had to compete with the residual effects of hallucinogenic delirium, this was a slow process.
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