by Tim Scott
“Ha! What are the chances of that, do you think?” he laughed, and his thick eyebrows danced across his forehead. “Fly that plane, Chico!” He paused. “We had a dog like that once.” He nodded at the screen, suddenly getting enthusiastic. “Used to leap the fence and come and meet you when you turned into the street, just because he somehow sensed you were there. I mean, how did he do that? I could never work it out. He could sense other things too, like whether people were going to be friendly, or whether they were only faking it.”
In one unexpectedly athletic movement, the man swung onto his feet and leered at me. Maybe it was the stench of hamburger on his breath, or the sheer bushiness of his eyebrows, but I sensed a trapdoor drop open to a rather alarming side to his character. “He could smell out the fakers a mile off,” he said, revealing an urgent need for dentistry, then he made half a sniffing gesture without breaking eye contact. “Just by doing that. Do you believe that’s possible?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps it depends on the dog. So, don’t mean to press you, but how are we off for security clearance?”
“Yeah, that’s it! Some dogs have it and some don’t,” he said, having some kind of feeding frenzy on the subject. “Tom there is a bit of a dog himself in some ways. The good ways. He doesn’t piss over people’s front lawns if that’s what you’re thinking.” He nodded to a small unshaven man snoring impassively in a chair. Tom definitely needed a shave, a clean uniform and, ideally, I guessed, some kind of basic body odor training. He had a large complicated gun laid across his lap, and I don’t suppose anyone had thought it worth the risk of trying to tell him.
“I’m telling you, he looks like he’s asleep, but he can smell a thief from fifty yards, and a drug dealer from twenty.”
Although I told my brain to stop being so fucking witty, I couldn’t help wondering if they had worked out Tom’s yardage on every sort of criminal going.
“Hands in here for Blood Clearance, then,” he said, tapping a machine on the counter that looked like an old-fashioned lever-arm orange press. The things had become obsolete twenty years before in most places, and this one looked like it was held together mostly with Wrap-A-Tap-Tape—“the tape that cannot stick to itself.”
“Can I tell you something?” he said, as we both shoved our arms into the machine.
“Sure.” His hand fingered the lever arm as a voice in my head pleaded with him to get the fuck on with it.
“I want to get a dog again,” said the man, “but my wife likes cats. So I say, well let’s get a cat and a dog and she says, ‘How about a cow? My friend Berlinda has just got one, and she swears by them.’ So now we have these two cows. Pedigree Friesians, they are. Very nice. But to be honest, they’re no fun. You can’t take them for walks really, and they never sit when you ask them to. I think dogs are just better. I think we should get a dog. What do you think?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m all for dogs.”
“Seeing Chico here has got me all excited about dogs again,” he said, and finally crunched the handle down. A sharp stab of pain arrowed through my wrist, as if a hedgehog had mistakenly thrown one of its spines into my arm while re-creating some great moment in Olympic javelin history.
“Ahh!”
“Yeah, sometimes does that; never found out why,” said the man, wiping his nose with his hand. “Canteen’s first on the left. That’s an hour you’ve got in your arms. Don’t be any longer; they say the pain is worse than childbirth if you’re late. Catch some of Chico on the screens when you can. He’s great. He makes me laugh, but he has a serious side too.”
“We’ll try,” I said, my head unable to clear away the pain fast enough to fully grasp what he was on about.
“Zap those ads till the cows come home,” he chuckled, “or as I say to my wife, until they get within mooing distance.” He settled back to watch the screens.
We grabbed the toolkit Teb had given us and lugged it clumsily toward the canteen. The overalls suddenly seemed to fit more badly than ever.
“Did you really, honestly think it would be quite that easy? I mean, get a life!” cried the security monkey from behind us.
I jerked to a halt. Had Tom’s nose sniffed us out? Was he now standing miraculously alert behind the desk, wearing a loose, toothless smile like those pleased-with-themselves cowboys used to have in Westerns, and pointing that contraption of a gun at my head?
I turned slowly.
“Chico’s coming, man. Go get him, Chico! Go on, boy.”
Tom was still asleep and the security monkey had no interest in us at all. He was simply engrossed with the bank of screens. From here, I could now see there were about twenty monitors all showing the same picture of a rather excitable collie dog in grainy black and white. My mind squealed into gear, and I remembered one of the Zone Securities guys telling me that a hacker had dug into their security system and was playing Chico the Dog on all the security camera circuits twenty-four hours a day.
We turned, exchanged a glance, then sauntered down the corridor.
Tony Christie was crooning quietly over a PA somewhere as a faint reminder we were in Easy Listening, and I strained to hear the lyrics, but his voice got buried by a commotion up ahead as some poor idiot in an Odysseus Hat blindly staggered around the corner. Behind lumbered an overweight Zone Securities woman.
“Jesus, what is it with these people!” she managed to shout, breathing hard. The person under the Hat was gaining ground and shuffled frantically down the corridor, taking irregular, glancing blows off the walls and gouging out scrapes of plaster. Mat scooted into a doorway and I flattened myself on one wall, but the person in the Hat blindly veered toward me. I shifted to the other side, but the Hat clanged off the far wall and still staggered straight for me like it had a homing beacon or something.
I could hear the desperate person inside breathing furiously, like some unfit monster from a swamp. I jumped quickly to the other wall and watched the feet of the person in the Hat shuffling maniacally, his knees painfully banging the inside of the metal.
At the last moment, the Hat swerved for me again. This time there was not a cat in hell’s chance to get out of the way, and I stiffened for the impact.
The clang was earsplitting.
The Hat shuddered an inch from my nose, wavered for a moment, then keeled over backwards like a felled redwood. I stood for a second as my mind took a frantic inventory of my body and discovered that I hadn’t felt anything.
Then I noticed Mat nodding to something on the roof. The top of the Odysseus Hat had smacked a beam that protruded slightly lower than the rest of the ceiling, halting the poor sucker in his tracks just in front of me.
“What a waster!” said the woman loudly as she plodded up. Mostly, I suspected, for our benefit. “Some people have no manners! I preferred the old days when you could tar and feather them.”
“Right,” I said, wondering whether she was referring to the seventeenth century or just a time when she had actually done it herself.
“It’s the paperwork I’ll get for this,” she huffed on, “but I just write ‘C.B.B.’ on everything they give me.” She snorted, winding a leash over the Hat before grabbing a fire hose, slipping the nozzle expertly into the open end of the tube, and dousing down the person inside with water till they came around. “‘C.B.B.’ Cannot be bothered,” she said, enunciating each word proudly, before dragging the guy in the Hat to his feet and leading him away, dripping, to God knows what fate. “Never had anyone complain about it,” she called back. “Not a soul!”
“We have an hour in here,” I said to Mat. “An hour. And that is more than enough time to last me for the rest of my life.”
We found the canteen easily enough and hunkered down on one of the shiny white tables, which I now realized were designed in the shape of pairs of handcuffs. It was virtually deserted and strewn with paper cups and discarded discharge forms. If they did have a Litter Beagle, it wasn’t working. Perhaps they had assigned it to some ot
her inconsequential task, like Chief Commissioner.
I watched Mat carefully unpack Teb’s humongous toolkit, and he pulled out a couple of machines that were supposed to detect and zap the spores that gave rise to ad viruses. Why Teb had such things, I don’t exactly know. But then, asking questions that contained the words “why” and “Teb” in the same sentence rarely got you anywhere, and I had learned not to do it.
“Come on, look busy,” Mat said, handing me an Ad Sniffer.
“Do you have any idea at all what to do with these things?”
“Absolutely none. Now, let’s get going.”
I slipped the goggles on and stared at the thing with a mixture of confusion and vague temerity. I’d seen pairs of Virus Ad Cleanup staff in our office wandering around, usually showing faces of utter boredom that they tried to pass off as concentration, wheedling out ad spores that had somehow taken root in EasyDreams. It really didn’t look that taxing.
The machine extended to about six feet and came with a harness that appeared to be something more appropriate to a parachute. There was a snout on the end, looking like a dog’s muzzle, which made an unnecessary chewing sound when destroying a spore. I hauled the shoulder straps on and slung the thing out, then flicked the switch. It hummed like an overloud bee that’d spent too much time at the poppy flowers and was high on opium.
I kept my eyes peeled for any tiny scrunched-up bits of card among the flotilla of paper on the floor, and headed off. A skinny cop sat alone at a table, staring motionless at an ice cream that was topped with a gaily sizzling sparkler. Across the ice cream it declared “Surprise! Your Retirement Today!” in curly chocolate writing. The sparkler burned down to a stump but the guy didn’t move. I didn’t get too close.
A few tables away, a group of smart men in suits were earnestly examining a football-sized model of a chicken, and pointing at it animatedly. For what reason, I had no idea.
There were a few other cops about, and one seemed to be trying to chat up the Hispanic girl who was serving the coffee. And he was having some success, judging by her laughter. Or maybe she was just being polite. Either way, I think the cop was more interested in the size of her chest.
I wandered on through the canteen, picking up the odd bit of paper here and there, but finding nothing but scrunched-up cards for prostitutes or drug dealers—the latter with badly drawn sketches of lines of smack or coke next to a sketched nose.
To my right, a counter ran down one side of the canteen. Pictures of food turned slowly around on the plasi-screens, except for one that baldly announced LASAGNE IS NOW ILLEGAL. I had read someplace that a judge had decreed lasagne was a risk to public safety because someone had slipped over some and won a large damages claim. It had been withdrawn from menus as a result—although in some places they got around the ban by, apparently, calling the dish “Wheat Flaps Extra,” which was permitted because of some bizarre, pedantic loophole in the law.
I edged more to the left of the canteen.
A squeal of outraged metal sang out from the midst of a group of people in the far corner, who were taking the reflective ribbed panels off the walls. They were some sort of maintenance team who had cordoned off the area with enough yellow tape to truss up a buffalo.
I continued to scan the floor, kicking over any bits of card that looked hopeful, but they were mostly empty sugar packets and discarded envelopes of teeth-cleaning “fuzz”—the powder you put in your mouth that eats all the plaque. Dentists hated the stuff because it cut into their profits, and there was even an armed wing of the Dentists Union that occasionally made raids on the “fuzz” factories to put them out of commission, claiming the stuff caused disease, but there was no evidence for it. It was just another case of someone trying to cover up their own greed or fear with the pretense of caring for others.
Without warning, the Ad Sniffer began shaking violently, like an excited dog on a leash. It sniffed out an ad spore and chewed it up in a flurry of vibration and unpleasant noise. Great, I thought. Now I’m a success at this job.
I pressed on, but the harsh, inhumane artificial light and soporific atmosphere lay heavily on my brain, and I drifted into a dreamy torpor. Events from the past days shambled through my mind in snippets, and it felt like my body was operating on backup power.
The next thing I knew, I was wrapped up in the yellow tape spooled around the cordoned-off area. Ahead were a herd of arc lights, burrowing into the darkness of a hole that spewed wires and ducts like a decomposing whale. All about the place, oversized machines with razor-sharp claws and excessively pointy pincers—each stamped WOMBAT RETRIEVAL—were poised to do God knows what.
“Hey! Can’t you read?” called a woman who I guessed had long brown hair, but it was coiled up in a series of tight complicated plaits so that it swam around her head like cats’ tails.
“Sorry?”
“Jesus, we’ve got a Wombat in here. Can’t you read?” she bawled, marching over to me as I untangled myself. “Or should I call a cop?” she added, stressing the cataclysmic irony of this last idea. “See?” She tapped the tape. I glanced down at the lettering, and saw it had the phrase JUST FUCK OFF repeatedly printed in neat black letters down it.
“Just swabbing for ad viruses to keep us all safe,” I said, giving her an answer to a question she hadn’t asked—a trick workmen love to use.
Over her shoulder, I saw a tiny sweating blond girl emerge from the hole and cry, “Pincers! Wombat located! She’s off the rails and kicking! We may need to douse her like we did with that Sally woman.” And that got everyone scurrying to start up one of the machines, and the woman with the brown cats’ tails was gone. She’d no doubt take her tightly reined-in indignation out on some other sucker soon enough.
I scanned the room for Mat and caught sight of the men with smart suits who had earlier been animatedly discussing the model chicken. One of them was crying, and the others were gathered around comforting him. Another was repeatedly offering the crying man the chicken. For what reason I had no idea.
An Odysseus Hat slashed through the transparent tube in the roof with a battling swoosh and dislodged a butterfly of paint from a beam. It floated down jerkily.
I pressed on with the virus scanning. There was no shortage of scrunched-up cards scattered about the floor, and I gingerly unraveled another. It was from a person who guaranteed to guard your cat when it was wandering about outside. “Make your cat the top cat,” it said. “I’ll follow your cat and tip the balance in fights with other cats. I’ll make sure your loved one is safe from the wheels of a bike.” People really did pay for services like that, mainly because there were morons out there who had so little sense you would’ve had no trouble persuading them their mothers were badgers.
I picked up another ball of card and, crouching down, unraveled the wrinkled edges. “Don’t you hate it when this happens?” it said. I smiled. I had found the fucker!
A hard, cold object tapped the back of my neck, and my excitement immediately drained away through my feet, sucking pints of my blood with it. Or so it seemed.
I heard a voice.
It was speaking English, but the words had a lot more vowels in them than I had been brought up to believe were necessary. It took me a moment to realize it was a deep Southern accent.
“Drop what’s in your hand and turn around sloo-ly, mister,” the voice said.
There was no fucking way I was dropping this card again. My brain raced for an idea, and I suddenly wished I had paid more attention to the magic set I had been given when I was seven. Then maybe I could palm this card, but I didn’t even know what the phrase “palm this card” meant. I mean, palm it where? Detroit? The image of a trick that involved pulling some twisted bits of metal apart came to mind with unhelpful clarity. Seconds ebbed past and I stood up slowly, then shuffled around to see the unshaven cowboy, Tom, from the front desk pointing his tree trunk of a gun at me. “Said drop waaaas in your hand, mister!”
I opened my palm and the card
fluttered to the floor like the entire consignment of confetti at a very tightly budgeted wedding.
“Jesus, man, can’t have youse getting in with those drug dealers. Come on, I’ve a job for you,” he said, dropping his gun and breaking into a broad smile.
This abrupt change of gear threw me. Tom clapped an arm around my shoulder with the strength of a brown bear who’d been at the steroids and bundled me toward the door like we were best friends.
I caught the eye of the guy sitting with the retirement ice cream and swiftly broke his stare. It was the man in the suit who had interrogated me in here earlier. There was a flicker of something in his eyes and I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I wasn’t hanging about to find out.
“Basically, they have the biggest moment of the year, of the decade—of the whole millennium—going on in Decom.”
“Wha?” I said, with a guttural nonword.
“Sure! It’s a huge celebration. Huge! Decommissioning our ten thousandth person. Can you believe that? Isn’t that special? But there’s some awful ad virus spreading in there. I’ll introduce you to the Chief of Whoever-it-is. Come on!” And with that, he manhandled me out of the canteen and down a corridor jumbled with Odysseus Hats. The nearest was casually slapped with a smattering of colored labels, reminding me of an old-fashioned clothes trunk that had done its share of rail travel. Tom made no allowance for the fact I had a bulky Ad Sniffer slung about me, and it rang and clanked on almost every Hat as he blithely hustled me along. The effect was like a stuttering peal from a set of cracked old church bells.
Rooms off the corridor flashed by, and I only caught snippets of the conversations that flew out of them.
“Oy, Frenchy!” a young lad with greased-up hair cried. “I watched that film Agincourt last night, and your lot lost!” More Odysseus Hats. Then a whole bunch being wheeled on hand trucks so that they virtually blocked the corridor.
We squeezed our way through. The Ad Sniffer scraped down the metal sides of one Hat with a squeal that sent my ears into meltdown.