Outrageous Fortune

by Tim Scott

  “I like it. Especially the ‘we.’”

  “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean…I just thought you might—”

  “’Course I’m coming! Kidding, OK, Jonny? So what about your house punks then? Leave them to chill for a bit?”

  “Yeah, thanks, Mat, yeah. My house will have to wait. I don’t have their number anymore. I scrunched up that calling card and dropped it in the Zone Securities canteen by mistake, and my Skin Media is dead.”

  “OK. And what about those crazy Riders?”

  “Well, Caroline found me here, so they can too, I s’ pose. All I can think of is to keep moving and hope they take a very long while to catch up. That’s my plan, unless you can think of anything better?”

  Mat opened his mouth.

  “Apart from surfing,” I put in quickly.

  “Oh,” he said after a deflated pause. “In that case, no, I can’t.”

  17

  We hailed a taxi in the late afternoon—a three-seater Crossfield Jumbo 140—and scooted through the meandering traffic that was performing its usual delicate weave.

  I was on the “rack”—the third seat of the bike that faced backwards—which took a bit of getting used to. But once I went with it, I began to feel relaxed, and found myself looking through the machines darting behind us and wondering if Caroline was out there. Why had she bothered with dropping off all those encyclopedias? Were they really expecting me to pay? There had to be some law against that, but perhaps her company figured people couldn’t always be bothered to follow the correct procedures and would just cave in.

  Much more worryingly was that the Riders might be out there with their oversized guns and weird porridge. We shifted through Country and Western and into Heavy Thwack, where everything in the zone was a deep electric blue—something that would have done my head in if I’d had to have lived there for any length of time, and I was relieved when we slid over the border into Head Hopping. It wasn’t an area of music I liked much, and the people who were into it could really bore you to tears at a party; but it was a relief to be out of Heavy Thwack.

  Teb lived in White Noise—a zone that left you shaking your head when you came out because you had spent much of the time in there being perplexed. Given my current state, I wondered if it would explode my head completely.

  As we nipped under the East Gate, a chain of elephants was taking up much of the street in some sort of advertising procession for Elnor Elnorian, but the road gradually widened until it was a smooth area that seemed to disappear off into the distance on either side. There were huge expanses of nothing in White Noise, and a lot of the roads were vast tarmac areas with no defined edges, which caused a large number of accidents. The Zone Traffic Police were always furious about it, but someone in White Noise must have had some power somewhere, because it never, ever got changed.

  We passed a store that was infamous—it stretched for over a mile, but was very narrow. You stood on a conveyor belt and went past everything, taking what you needed until at the end you paid. Someone had managed to speed up the conveyor belt one day to over forty miles an hour and there had been a lot of broken limbs at the checkout.

  Large bulbous towers poked up at the edge of the square and a Ferris wheel that had stopped working years before swung idly on its haunches with a huge broken screen proclaiming VALDIMAR G78 HAS EATEN MORE—The rest of the screen was missing. I had no idea what it had ever said.

  We skipped in and out between a couple of bikes and headed to the far end, where a road ran off in a dead straight line, flanked with faceless stainless-steel structures that went for malls in White Noise. These were broken up by the usual mix of stores, offices, and the shell of the old weather station that had been relocated years before, when the weather control franchise had been bought out by one of the football teams, looking for an edge. For the most part they didn’t take much of a role in exercising their franchise, because they found it too expensive. So much of the time the weather was left to do what it felt like, except for the occasional small-scale weather control post paid for by local people, or snuck up illegally by advertisers.

  The original theory had been that if they had a big game, the football team would rig it so they got the wind behind them in both halves. They had once even managed to make it snow successfully on every opposition offensive drive, but the NFL got fed up with them and passed a rule saying there was a limit to what they could and could not do with the weather. There was a lot about it in the newspapers at the time, but I don’t remember the exact outcome.

  There wasn’t much traffic following us and I scanned the rooftops of the buildings as the sun peeked over the ridges. The old weather building looked utterly deserted, but I had a nasty feeling about things again—a nasty feeling that there was someone out there I couldn’t see. I tried to put it to the back of my mind but the mood hung over me like a bad suit for the rest of the journey and I only snapped out of it with a jolt when the bike stopped near Teb’s.

  “I rang Teb and told him we were coming, but not much more,” said Mat as his crash suit undid.

  “Good; very good,” I said, wondering why the hell it hadn’t occurred to me. I hopped off the bike, scanning the rooftops for any signs of the Riders while Mat connected up his Jab-Tab to the bike to pay for the ride, but there was nothing there to see.

  “You guys have a power day, do you hear?” said the taxi Rider, remounting his bike. I knew he meant it good-naturedly, but instinctively I felt my hackles rise, until they were somewhere near the height of a small skyscraper. I didn’t want a power day; I just wanted a normal day without strange things happening. I wanted to sit this man down and give him a forty-five-minute lecture on why I did not want to be wished a fucking power day, but I just gritted my teeth and said, “Yeah, thanks.”

  The bike blustered off in a scurry of smoke and we found ourselves alone in a backwater of White Noise, where a constant low hum murmured from somewhere that I couldn’t place, filling in the space where silence would have been.

  Teb’s apartment was part of an old warehouse just across the way, so we began to cross over the silent, cool street that epitomized sleepy stillness. We were about halfway when out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sky split open and disgorge a black shape, while a wild explosion of noise reverberated virtually inside my head, like someone had placed an excited road drill in my ear. I instinctively dived behind a Litter Beagle that was wandering up the street as two GaFFA 6s screamed by at low altitude, but I realized instantly it was nothing at all to worry about. Mat was standing looking at me from the center of the empty road.

  “Chill out, Jonny, OK?” he called, slightly uncertainly, as the choppers faded.

  “Yeah,” I replied, straightening. “Yeah, sorry,” I added, suddenly aware that things were seriously getting to me.

  “Here, Beagle!” said Mat throwing a scrunched-up ball of paper down onto the sidewalk in its direction. The cumbersome-looking Dumpster-sized contraption snorted its way slowly over to the paper and sucked it up through one of its snouts, letting out a gentle “hmm” in appreciation. Most Litter Beagles were pretty friendly, but you just had to be on your guard because one or two rogues sometimes got loose, and they could take your leg off. We hopped up the steps to the entrance to Teb’s block as another bike raged past on the road behind us, snorting a change of gear as it went, and I forced myself not to look around.

  Mat was right. I had to chill out.

  The entrance hall was high, with one vast window that stretched up on the left side, and the whole thing was supported by a flurry of chic-looking pipes and high-tensile wires. Nobody had dusted up there for years, or in fact probably ever, and the tiny lights that pinpricked out of the ceiling looked dimmer than they should have been. No doubt the architects had assured the client at the time that the dust could all be magnetized to the dust trap I could see in the far corner, but Magno-Traps had turned out to give some people headaches, and so most of them were switched off.

 
Various spiral staircases wound down into this vast space at irregular intervals, and we found Teb’s and made our way up. A low deep hum droned through the building, masking the noise the echo of our feet made tapping up the stairs.

  When we were about twenty feet off the ground, it leveled out into a gangway that led toward a wall pitted with nine or ten doors, all irregularly spaced at different heights. Teb’s door popped open as we approached and warm light flooded out.

  Mat shut the door behind us with a heavy clunk.

  “Teb?” I called, but there was just a dull hum from somewhere, and otherwise the apartment seemed overly still, as though something busy had just happened and its sudden absence had left a gap. “Teb? What’s happening!” I called again, not altogether liking this emptiness, and I could sense that Mat was not reassuringly cool about it, either.

  We walked cautiously toward the living room, which was a clean, high-tech, steel-and-wires structure, with a glass roof and a floor littered with enough bits of electronic gadgetry and half-cannibalized machines to power a small country. “Teb? Don’t mess about. This is weird. Teb?” A sudden noise from close behind made us both jackknife around.

  “Jonny. You want to know something odd I don’t get?”

  “Teb? Christ!” I exclaimed, as he appeared down the loft ladder, absorbed with a typing gizmo.

  “The purring. That’s the only bit that still confuses me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Purring. Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. Who? Is everything OK here?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Teb. “But why would they do it? Just for fun, do you think?”

  “Do what?”

  “Purr. This is what I’ve got so far, but it doesn’t include purring.”

  “Teb, will you stop going on about purring?”

  “This isn’t an ideal time for hearing about your crazy ideas,” added Mat. And I thought, No, the best time is when I am too drunk to care.

  “Come on! It’s taken me three months and about six hundred doughnuts to get to this. Give it a look!” Teb persisted, handing me an open gizmo book scrawled with all kinds of equations. “It’s all there. Do you see it?”

  “Teb, if I had even the faintest idea what you were talking about, we could have something approaching a normal conversation, but I really don’t.” I shrugged, and handed it back to him with a brief glance.

  “The forces acting on a cat,” he said. “In simple black-and-white. It’s beautiful! See, those equations are how the forces acting on a cat manifest themselves in ambient conditions. V equals the wind. G is gravity. R is the random factor that is in proportion to the time curve of a meow. Are you with me?”

  “No. What?”

  “The time curve of a meow. Now do you get it?”

  “Teb,” I said, “only you and possibly a few small egglike creatures the other side of the universe who talk in clicks and whistles and eat carpet tiles will ever get this.”

  “No, it’s easy. You see, I began to wonder why cats wander about aimlessly. They look like there’s no pattern at all to their actions, but I thought that can’t be right, there must be something behind it all. And I found there was! It’s linked to the wavelength of a meow. I think you’ll find that’s not complicated, or sad at all.”

  “Sounds pretty dark,” said Mat.

  “Right. But tell me it’s not sad. I got suddenly worried about Natasha. Maybe she thinks I’m sad, doing all this.”

  Teb and Natasha had been going steady since high school. She was stunning, levelheaded, and generous. She wasn’t going to change her opinion of him now.

  “Teb, Natasha loves you, so chill out, OK?”

  “OK. If you think so. Good.”

  “Look, can I drag you away from cats? Great though that is, I’m really hoping you can help me. There’s been a leak on my Medi-Data and I’m kind of hoping you can find the source.”

  “Love to, but I can’t. No way, José,” chirped Teb. “The Pit is more corrupted than the average politician. It was shorting last time, and starting it might kill it off forever. Who wants a doughnut? I’m supposed to be cutting back.”

  “No thanks,” said Mat.

  “Teb, honestly, I’m pretty desperate. My life is fucked up in a complicated way and I think you are the only person who can help me right now. Is the Pit really not usable at all?”

  “Oh.” He paused, sensing the depth of my desperation. “Well I could, I suppose. But I don’t know. Don’t get your hopes up. If it shorts, that’s it—and I may not even get past the first wave of viruses with this belly. I tell you, if the Pit goes up, we’ll have a bigger fireworks display than the Lady Pom-Pom on night one. And the management committee won’t like that.”

  Lady Pom-Pom night was a pointless tradition invented by a new mayor a few years before, where a zillion girls lined the streets waving pom-poms, while teams of men, who felt they had something to prove, competed in a race to tow burning refrigerators from one end of the city to the other. Don’t ask me anything more about it, because the answer is I simply don’t know, I especially don’t care, and I rigorously make sure I’m never there.

  “Takes fifteen minutes to get the system warmed up, so I’ll stick it on. Let’s get some coffee and doughnuts and you can tell me what I’m looking for. Make a change from cats, I s’ pose, but I think it’s really pushed back the frontiers of science a bit, don’t you?”

  “Chill out,” I said. “The cats thing is doing my head in.”

  The Pit was somewhere in the middle of his vast apartment. It wasn’t exactly illegal to have made such a thing, probably because Teb was one of the few people who could actually build one; but if Zone Securities had found it, I get the feeling they would have taken it apart.

  Probably with a sledgehammer.

  There was an area about the size of a double bed sunk into the floor, and stacked around it were a variety of machines that blinked with lights and made occasional pinging noises. Teb crunched down a large power main handle, and blue strands of static electricity arced rather menacingly across the sunken area. More tiny lights than I remembered winked on, skipping their way back and forth across various machines and consoles.

  “How did you think of all these things, Teb?” Mat asked, as Teb whacked a particularly stubborn piece of the contraption until he had coaxed it into life.

  “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Mat, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

  “Don’t go all Shakespeare on me now, Teb. Where’s the coffee?”

  “Usual place,” he said, waving a hand at Mat, and we both hunkered down on a curved sofa in the little snug area at the side of the machine. Mat made the coffee and I was grateful because he understood the importance of getting it just right. With Teb, it was a complete lottery.

  “So what’s it all about? Something to do with that Emma is it?” I noticed an edginess in his voice, as the words came out slightly too quickly, and I sensed he was worried about going into the Pit.

  “Emma? Why do you say Emma?”

  “I don’t know. She seems a bit funny, somehow.”

  “Really? Well, we did have a humongous fight, but I can’t see that’s connected to this,” I said, taking my coffee from Mat and sipping it thoughtfully. He had made it exactly right. “This is what’s happened, OK? I’ve already told Mat, so apologies for saying it all again.” And I explained to him briefly what had been going on in the last thirty-six hours but spared him a lot of the details because I didn’t want to overload his head too much—especially when he was about to go into the Pit.

  “Interesting,” he said at the end of my story. “‘Though this be madness, there be method in it.’”

  “What?”

  “Polonius says it in Hamlet.”

  “Right. Leaving Shakespeare out of this just for a moment,” said Mat, “what can you do in the Pit?”

  “Oh. OK. Right. Well, your Skin Media is easy to rectify,” he said, �
��as long as they haven’t terminated the source extensions; that would be annoying and a bit of a pain. The Jab-Tab could be tricky if the credit block has been fixed at a high level, but not really ‘tricky’ tricky. Those guys are still using codes from the Stone Age.”

  “And the leak from the Medi-Data source?”

  “Depends if it shows up as a thread or not. Sometimes these things are invisible because they’ve got virtual mustard on them, which kills the signal.”

  “Right. What,” I said, “does that mean to someone like, for example, who doesn’t understand how a lightbulb works?”

  “Means it might be tricky.” He sniffed. “I haven’t been in the Pit for six months and things may have changed.”

  “Six months!” I echoed, with rather too much surprise, thinking no wonder he was out of practice. “Teb, if you don’t think this is safe, you mustn’t go.” The Pit arced, sending blue static forking from one side to the other, and the room lighting dimmed automatically, isolating the Pit like an arena.

  “It’s OK, I can do it. Piece of cake—or in my case, a jelly doughnut,” he said, not altogether happily. “You see that power switch? Throw it all the way up if it looks like I’ve lost control.”

  “What, now?” said Mat with a smile.

  “Very funny,” murmured Teb. “Right.” He was clearly nervous, and beads of sweat had started to form on his forehead.

  “Need a rollicking bit,” he said looking me in the eye.

  “Bit of what?”

  “Henry V.”

  “Henry the what?”

  “The fifth. Shakespeare? The English guy? Right. Oh, I know. It’s obvious. ‘I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips!’” he growled, staring around the room, “‘straining upon the start. The game’s afoot! Follow your spirit; and upon this charge, Cry, “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” ’” he yelled wildly, before jumping like a sack of cement into the Pit and standing like a martial arts expert, who’s learned his skill entirely from out of focus EtherMat pictures of grainy old films.