by Steve Perry
Stonewall came over and stood next to Psy–4, and the two of them stared at Itazura.
After a few moments of silence while he regained his composure, Itazura spread his arms in front of him in a gesture of acquiescence, then said, “Okay, I was wrong, you do listen.”
Psy–4 laughed. “Humility becomes you.”
“Am I really such a fool sometimes?”
Silence.
“Well?”
“Which one of us are you talking to?” asked Stonewall.
“Let’s start with you,” replied Itazura. “Am I really such a fool?”
After a moment, Stonewall said, “At times.”
“Had to think about it for a moment, didn’t you?” ,
“You asked an absolute question. An absolute question requires an absolute answer if confusion is to be avoided.”
Itazura grinned. “You’ve been reading Thoreau again, haven’t you?”
“Emerson, actually.”
“Emerson? As in Lake and Palmer?”
“As in Ralph Waldo.”
“As in Ralph Waldo. Jeez, Stonewall, don’t you ever lighten up? Read a comic book once in a while, why don’t you? I’ll loan you my Primortals collection!”
“No, thank you.”
“Then how about a hot romance paperback? Mysterious heroes and breathy, satisfied heroines? Good stuff—no social significance whatsoever, but—whew!—the dreams they’ll give you!”
“He’s feeling better,” whispered Psy–4.
“Ladies ’Home Journal! There’s the ticket! You could take one of those personality tests they publish every month and have proof-positive that you don’t possess one!”
“Much better,” whispered Stonewall to Psy–4.
“Or you could—hey, hold the phone.” Itazura came over to Psy–4. “Exactly why did you come down here in the first place?”
“Because I need the two of you to help me with something.”
“Like . . .?”
“A bit of detective work.”
Itazura clapped his hands together. “Detective work? How utterly noirish. Just let me find my snap-brimmed fedora and trenchcoat and I’ll be right—”
Psy–4 put a hand on Itazura’s shoulder. “Walk your labyrinth first. I really need for you to be focused for this.”
Itazura’s face became serious. “It’s that important?”
“I think it could be, yes.”
“Then you got it.” He walked to the Wheels of Confusion and bowed his head.
Psy–4 and Stonewall took the hint and headed upstairs to the Control Room.
Suddenly, Itazura turned back around and parted his arms wide. “I can’t stand it, fellahs. I mean, there’s just so much love in this room right now and I feel so warm and fuzzy that I . . . well, I don’t see there’s any getting around it. Come back down here, you goombahs, and let’s have a group hug! C’mon! Squeezie time! Group hug—I MUST HAVE MY GROUP HUG OR I’LL GO MAD, MAD I TELL YOU!”
At the top of the stairs, Stonewall leaned over to Psy–4 and said, “I worry about him sometimes.”
Psy–4 couldn’t tell if Stonewall was joking or not.
26
* * *
Seven blocks from the I-Bots’ warehouse stood a section of Cemetery Ridge where the junkies and street predators were afraid to go, even during the day. The buildings that lined the streets here squatted like diseased animals waiting for someone to come along and blast them out of their misery. The few stores that remained in the area sold mostly liquor and had bars on their doors and windows; the clerks who worked these stores were armed well beyond even the most lenient definition of “legally.” It was a cancer growth, this area, a breeding ground for violence and anger and despair where the inhabitants accepted degradation as a way of life, where brutality was second nature, and where rape, murder, and robbery were looked upon the same way most people look upon rush hour traffic: You put up with it and try to get yourself home in one piece.
It was a place where the spirit would have to rally in order to reach hopeless, where the odd and the damaged, the despondent and the discarded, the lost and the shabby came when they reached the end of their rope and life offered no alternative but to crawl into the shadows of poverty and just give up.
And in the center of this place stood the gutted remains of an old hotel.
It was here that the Silver Metal Stompers made their home base.
Inside the building, along the rickety balconies, dozens of Stompers looked down upon the once-grandiose main lobby where a figure clad in black leather sat in a large, lush, ornamental chair that was placed atop a dais.
At the foot of the dais knelt a young man, bruised and bleeding, clutching his stomach.
His face was a tightly pinched mask of pain.
The leather-clad figure stuck out its left leg and brought a steel-toed boot down hard on the back of the kneeling boy’s neck.
“Tell me again,” it said.
“I’m . . . I’m so sorry, Gash. I had ’im, y’know? I had ’im dead-bang with the electron gun and then this drunk comes out from behind these trash cans and knocks the gun out of my hand . . .”
“Go on.”
“. . . then this red-haired bitch comes outta nowhere, right, and she, like, she tae kwon dos my ass and knocks me back into this heap, then she picks me up and starts slammin’ me against a wall and . . . and that’s all I remember.”
“I see,” said Gash, lifting his foot from the back of the initiate’s neck.
After a moment, Gash stood up and reached to his side, pulling an ancient samurai sword from the sheath attached to his belt.
He held the sword high, allowing its long, sharp, deadly silver blade to catch the light; its gleam reflected outward in myriad beams.
“Stompers,” he called out, his voice echoing off the rafters. “Our initiate has failed his final test. Do we terminate him or do we give him a second chance? I would like a verdict, please.”
“Terminate!” came the massive call from above.
“No, please!” screamed the initiate.
Gash parted his arms wide, then twirled the sword, signaling silence.
“You have something to say to me, Rudy, before sentence is carried out?”
“The drunk dude, he wasn’t no drunk dude at all.”
“And what was he, Rudy?”
“DocScrap.”
Silence from the balcony.
Gash knelt down and grabbed the collar of Rudy’s shirt, pulling him up to his feet and getting right in his face. “If this is your pitiful way of trying to buy time, it won’t work. You know damned well that we’ve been trying to track down the good doctor for months.”
Rudy’s words spilled out in a rapid, deadly cadence. “It was him, I’m tellin’ you! When I came to, I started to come back here but then I figured, what the hell, y’know, might as well go back to the Scrapper Camp and see if I couldn’t score some metal, ’cause I really want to be one of you. So I’m getting close to the camp and I see all the robots standing around in a circle, right, like they’re all lookin’ down at something, and then one of the robots moved and I see the red-haired bitch standing there holding this lantern, and then I see the drunk dude down on his knees and he’s taking one of the big robots apart and usin’ the spare parts to repair the Scrappers we trashed in the raid, okay? And I see this and I know right away, like, that it’s DocScrap. It looks like he’s just about finished, so I hide back in the shadows, real quiet like you showed me, and I waited until he was done with the last one, then I cut back through the alley and caught up with him and the bitch, stayin’ way back, and I followed them and one of the Scrappers to the sewer drain over there by the old ironworks plant, right? And the bitch—and, man, she is one strong piece—she reached out and pulls away the bars that block the drain, and then the three of them go into the tunnel and she pulls the bars back in place. You see it, don’t you, Gash? That sewer drain, it must be, like, some kinda underground passage th
ey use. It’s gotta come up somewhere nearby ’cause that thing is blocked off once you get past Rapids Road Bridge, and that ain’t all that far from here, so I figure—”
“Enough,” whispered Gash, pushing Rudy back down onto the floor.
“Stompers!” Gash screamed, rising to his feet. “It seems that Rudy here has given us our first clue to DocScrap’s whereabouts. In light of this, I think we should reconsider our verdict. Do you agree with me?”
Silence.
“DO YOU AGREE?”
The Stompers howled their approval.
Gash looked down at Rudy and smiled a lizard grin. “You’ve bought yourself a stay of execution, Rudy. But hear me: The next time, you mustn’t fail us or, well, my hands will be tied. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, Lord Gash.”
“That’s better.” He waited a moment, until he saw Rudy relax, then arched his back and screamed a berserker cry, spun around, raised the sword, and brought it down in a fast, precise, bloodthirsty arc.
The tip of the sword cut a line across Rudy’s face, from the corner of his nose to just below his ear.
Rudy fell to the ground screaming, futilely clutching at his bloody wound.
“You’re marked now, Rudy. From now on, even if you pass the final test, your brother and sister Stompers will know that you’re not on their level, that you are a weakling, a failure.”
Rudy shuddered, whimpering.
“My Stompers!” cried Gash, turning in a full circle so he could see his army.
“Gather your weapons! Take up buzzblades and titanium torches, load your scatterguns and stuff your bags with grenades! Tonight, at long last, we will have DocScrap for dinner!”
The Stompers shrieked their approval, applauding, firing guns into the ceiling, and stamping their feet on the floor of the balcony, shaking it to its very foundation and bringing down dust and plaster.
Below them, Gash jumped down to the lobby floor, kicked Rudy in the ribs, and began his Sword Dance, all the time calling out in his loudest voice: “Hear my plan, Brothers and Sisters, and rejoice!
“What is our battle cry?”
“Wreckage!” they yelled.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Wreckage!”
“LOUDER!”
“WRECKAGE!”
And, soon, they began to lay their plans.
27
* * *
Even under the best of circumstances, no one in their right mind would accuse Samuel Preston of being a morning person. He usually awoke with a headache, stomach cramps, and—when things at PTSI were particularly stressful—a nosebleed.
This morning was no different.
Except that the stomach cramps were iron hooks dragging against the soft, pliant tissue of his innards.
Except that the nosebleed was a lot heavier than usual.
Except that it was damn near noon and he was waking up alone—something he tended to do at least three times a week, and by choice.
Sam Preston, though he’d never admit it to anyone, adhered to Ernest Hemingway’s theory that a man could produce only so much sperm in the course of his lifetime and so had to be careful about choosing the women he shared his sacred gift with.
The first thing Preston did on waking up was to throw his feet over the side of the bed and slap them onto the cold hardwood floor of his penthouse. Once he got the initial shock of that merciless floor, it was difficult for him to get back to sleep.
The second thing he did was reach over to the bed stand and pour himself a tall glass of icy water that his manservant had placed there sometime in the last thirty minutes.
The third thing he did was begin the time-consuming ritual of opening the first in a series of seemingly endless prescription medication bottles and start downing the pills.
Several of the prescriptions were for painkillers, so he was careful to start with only the mildest. The stronger ones would have to wait until later in the day . . . unless it got too bad, too intense.
For just a moment he cast a wistful glance over to the large assortment of macrobiotic products that had, until a few months ago, constituted his morning regimen.
Those were the days, when the rest of his life was spread before him like a fine, exquisite feast; endless, bountiful, delicious.
Damn.
Downstairs, locked securely in the lab, Ian Gregory McCarrick sat at a computer console, staring at the experimental equipment on the other side of the window.
To his left, the green ONLINE light shone brightly.
He stared at it a moment longer, then turned on the microphone that was attached to a set of speakers inside the equipment room.
“She messed herself twice yesterday, you know,” he said, his voice echoing around the mass of computer banks beyond the window. “The second time, she didn’t tell anyone about it. ‘I didn’t want to bother you again so soon,’ she said. Then she smiled. And there was such . . . dignity in that smile. I couldn’t help but love her more.
“But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Oh, no, not you. I’ve put more work in on you that I have my own flesh and blood.”
He placed a finger on another button.
“This isn’t anything against you, really. I’ve just been doing this to teach someone close to you a lesson.”
McCarrick hit the DISCONNECT button.
Several lights on the computer banks went dark.
So did the look on McCarrick’s face.
Preston finished the initial series of pills, then rose from the bed, stretched (not too strenuously), and shuffled over to his PC to check his messages.
Only one this morning, from Dr. Segriff.
More test results in, more tests needed to be run, please call him soonest.
Soonest.
There had been a time when Preston would have dismissed that word as simply a physician’s impatience to rack up another batch of hefty fees.
But that was before.
Preston sat back in the reclining office chair, folded his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes.
Diffuse light from the large bay window warmed him, and he wondered why he’d never spent more time funning in the sun.
Too busy, came the answer.
A business to run, money to make, breakthroughs to achieve.
Breakthroughs.
Yeah, right.
Preston knew that, when it came to business savvy, when it came to wheeling and dealing and intimidating his Board of Directors, he was perhaps second only to Annabelle Donohoe, his former employer, for always getting his way.
He could be very persuasive.
Polish, boys; all it takes is a little polish, with a dash of finesse.
That, Preston had in spades.
Yeah, when it came down to corporate politicking, few could stand above Sam Preston.
But when it came to creativity . . . ah, well, um . . .
Preston had always respected Zac Robillard when the two of them had been under Annabelle’s heels at WorldTech, but at the same time he’d been infinitely jealous of the ease with which ideas came to Robillard—and not basic ideas, not foundations, no little bits and pieces of something that might pan out into something bigger, no: When Zac Robillard got an idea, it sprung into being full-blown and flawless.
And dear old Zac—well, he always wrote his ideas down in detail and filed them away, often forgetting about some of the older ones.
Older, but no less brilliant.
And so, one by one, Sam Preston had begun to steal Robillard’s ideas, making a few minor alterations here and there, nothing complicated, nothing major; just enough so that he could convince himself that they were his own concepts.
Those delusions had served him well.
It hadn’t taken long for him to find a team of scientists, salespersons, and technicians to bring those ideas to life and market them to a world ready for even more, more, more modern convenien
ces.
Within sixteen months of its inception, PTSI had become a Major Player.
And Preston was more than happy to take the credit.
And the publicity (he was extremely photogenic).
And, of course, the lion’s share of the profits.
All because Zac Robillard was so busy with his precious “experiments” that he never bothered to catalogue, let alone check on, his files of ideas.
Preston knew there should be some kind of irony in all that, but he hadn’t the inclination, let alone imagination, to figure out what it was.
Suddenly, he doubled forward, bringing up his knees into his chest, and soon found himself on the floor curled into a fetal ball.
He took several deep breaths, just as the doctor had instructed, held them for as long as he could, then let them out slowly, all the time visualizing something that gave—or had given—him pleasure.
—Annabelle Donohoe, standing in this very room, wearing a sheer black body stocking, slowly, teasingly slipping one strap down to reveal the smooth, creamy flesh of her shoulder, whispering, “I like to reward my most loyal employees, Samuel, and you have been very loyal,” and Preston had said, “How many loyal employees do you have?” “So far?” she replied, smiling a seductress’s smile. “Just you.”—
The initial, violent waves of pain passed, giving way to intense throbs and then, at the last, a sort of expanding, severe gassy feeling.
Facts, thought Preston, feeling the blood trickle from his nose. You’re a fact man, so think about some facts.
Fact: Last thing before going to bed at two this morning, he had figured out who—or, more specifically, what—composed Robillard’s incredible team.
Fact: He was still jealous of Robillard.