Mardock Scramble

by Ubukata, Tow

  “It’s from the DA. Apparently the other side wants to talk, and they’re putting in their offer to us immediately.” The Doctor looked away from his PDA and toward Oeufcoque, who was still in the form of a choker. “The person offering the settlement isn’t even directly related to this case—he’s stepped in to try and broker a settlement.”

  “Who is it?”

  “The director of OctoberCorp. Shell’s boss—and putative father-in-law.”

  –What’s going on? I don’t understand.

  Sensing that Balot was concerned, the Doctor smiled in order to try and calm her down. Behind his spectacles though, his eyes weren’t smiling. Rather they were set in steely resolution.

  “You remember the man standing beside Shell at the Casino. Cleanwill John October. Well, he’s proposing a negotiation.”

  –To negotiate what?

  “The second case, as it were. The one that will implicate all OctoberCorp officials for more or less ordering Shell to commit his crime spree. You see, we intend to use your case as a vein and continue digging till we find the mother lode—it’s not just Shell that we’re after. That’s what they’re afraid of, so they’re asking for certain facts to be made public…”

  –Use my case?

  Balot frowned a little.

  The Doctor hastily covered his tracks. “Not in a bad way. I just mean that the chips you won give us a lot of power and leverage.”

  –So, to put it in blackjack terms, what we’re doing is instead of staying, we’re hitting in order to try and draw out some more criminals?

  “Well, in the end, Shell’s just as much a victim of OctoberCorp as anyone else is. You’ve seen his memories firsthand, so I’m sure you understand that.”

  Balot nodded. Oeufcoque remained silent.

  The Doctor continued. “The brain surgery Shell received as a child, the A10 operation, that was OctoberCorp’s handiwork. It’s entirely possible to believe that this is what made him slavishly follow OctoberCorp’s orders.”

  –You mean they messed around with his head and made him their slave?

  “Not in the sense of controlling his thought processes directly, but I’d say there was a good chance they were artificially stimulating his pleasure centers, making it far more likely for him to follow orders with blind devotion.”

  –How?

  “Well, for example, they could make it so that every time he hears the OctoberCorp name or sees its symbol, a dopamine shot is released inside his brain, and he feels just that little bit better. Reinforced tens, hundreds of times, it becomes an unbreakable habit, absolute.”

  –I think that all Shell really wanted to do was escape. From his own life.

  Oeufcoque interjected for the first time in the conversation. “And what OctoberCorp did was provide him with an escape route. The ultimate inducement into temptation.”

  Balot nodded. She started to remember what it felt like when she was watching Shell’s memories.

  –Shell seemed to think that working for OctoberCorp was just like a fish returning upstream to spawn. He considered himself as no more than a little fish, placed deliberately in the river.

  Then Balot turned straight to the Doctor to look at him and ask him a question.

  –The case that they want to try and settle—is it my case too?

  The Doctor was about to nod, but Oeufcoque interrupted him. “You’ve already solved your own case. There’s no need for you to put yourself in danger’s way anymore.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, Oeufcoque. Her case leads to the mother lode. All that’s happened so far is that Shell has temporarily lost his liberty. As yet, OctoberCorp is still untouched and untroubled. In any case, she’s already been officially recognized as a co-opted civilian aide to this case. As your user, we do really need her.”

  Oeufcoque was unconvinced—and not only that, he was now uncharacteristically raising his voice. “Are you saying that we are the ones who get to choose whether Balot gets burnt out in the process?”

  The Doctor appeared to falter, but he had a rejoinder. “I don’t know if you noticed, but at the trial just now, Balot’s Life Preservation Program was extended indefinitely. You know why, don’t you? Because the Broilerhouse recognizes that she’s still in danger. We don’t know what Boiled’s got up his sleeve, and depending on how these negotiations go, we may find that both Shell and Balot end up targets of OctoberCorp…”

  –Half-baked little Oeufcoque…

  Balot spoke quietly. The Doctor swallowed his words. Oeufcoque also was silent.

  –Thank you so much for trying to protect me from ending up even more burnt out.

  Just as Oeufcoque could now sniff out Balot’s innermost feelings, Balot was attuned to Oeufcoque’s emotional state. She knew full well that he blamed himself for not being able to protect her from the worst excesses of Shell’s corrupted memories while she was in her dream state.

  –This is what I’ve chosen, though. I want to use you constructively. If you want to protect me, the best way to do that is to guide me.

  “Even if, as a result, you end up facing something deeply unpleasant?”

  –Bell Wing called you my guardian angel. Guardian angels are strict but kind. If I run away from everything that’s unpleasant, I’ll end up just like Shell messing with his own mind in order to try and find peace.

  Why me? She still wanted more answers to this question. She was the Concerned Party in this case, and she wanted to find out what that really meant…

  She wanted to determine with her own eyes what exactly it was that lay beyond the depths that she and Shell had fallen into.

  She wanted to be able to feel with conviction that her own life was somehow meaningful.

  She touched the choker on her neck, gently transmitting these feelings to Oeufcoque, like a prayer.

  –This is our case. Yours and mine. All three of us. Won’t you please show me your way of resolving it?

  Oeufcoque stayed silent for a while. Then, wordlessly, he agreed to bring Balot out. To take her away from her safe place and into the maelstrom.

  “We need to solve the second case, and as such I’d like Balot to use me,” Oeufcoque said eventually.

  The Doctor breathed a sigh of relief. “I have absolutely no aptitude for this sort of thing myself, you see. Gunfights aren’t my scene. Preparation and maintenance—now, you can rely on me for those—but if things start getting violent it’s Balot who will to need to protect me.”

  Balot nodded. As long as she had Oeufcoque by her side she was confident she could do anything.

  “Looks like we’re on the road to victory, then. Come on, let’s go. Time for us to solve our case.”

  ≡

  Balot went to sort out her outfit in the bathroom while the Doctor settled the bill.

  She rolled up the long skirt that she had worn for the trial and took her underwear off and placed it on top of the toilet.

  She took off her shoes and socks, placing her socks next to her underwear. Then she reached around and unzipped her dress, unhooked her bra, and loosened the belts that ran up and down her body.

  She focused her mind on the precise image of the new outfit—a new shell—that she wanted.

  –I’m ready.

  She touched her choker to transmit the image to Oeufcoque.

  Oeufcoque’s turn was quick and thorough. A skintight bodysuit spread out from underneath the choker, sliding neatly between Balot’s body and the clothes she still had on. It enveloped Balot swiftly from tip to toe. Power flowed through her.

  Balot adjusted her clothes, put her shoes and socks back on, and left the bathroom. She glanced at herself in the mirror on the way out and subtly altered the design and color of the bodysuit so that it matched the rest of her clothes.

  She returned to the restaurant and joined the Doctor to head out to the parking lot.

  The red convertible was as good as new, brought back up to scratch in a week.

  The car was officially registered as
being made by an obscure custom car company, one that existed more or less in name only. There was only one garage that did repairs, and they had to special-order the parts on contract.

  The parts in question were, of course, Made by Oeufcoque. Oeufcoque’s existence as a sentient being may not have been officially acknowledged, but the parts that he made certainly were.

  They climbed into the car and the Doctor inserted the key and set the controls to AutoDrive. The steering wheel sank into the dashboard and found itself fixed in position.

  “I’d be drunk driving otherwise. It’ll take us a little longer, but let’s go on auto.”

  Balot fastened her seat belt, and the car moved off.

  Their destination was a high-class bar on the North Side, and they had plenty of time to get there.

  “Excuse me a minute,” the Doctor said as he leaned over toward the passenger seat and pressed his fingers against the electronic fingerprint scanner. A compartment in the dashboard opened out, revealing maps, a wallet, a small handgun, and a bottle of pills.

  The Doctor placed the handgun in his jacket pocket and took the bottle in his hand.

  The pills contained a potent double dose: a mixture of caffeine and enzymes that accelerated the breakdown of alcohol. The Doctor threw a fistful of them into his mouth as if they were so much candy, then popped the bottle back in the compartment, which he pushed back into the dashboard.

  “Now, let’s see how they’re going to play this one…”

  “They’re doing everything by the book so far,” Oeufcoque said, his voice emerging from the vicinity of Balot’s left hand. The Doctor nodded as if the short conversation had settled everything.

  Balot looked straight ahead at the road. She thought how there was still so much she needed to learn.

  “This is not a good smell. They’re waiting for us, ready for something. We’re not talking just one or two people there, either—there are at least five of them,” Oeufcoque said when they parked the car two blocks away from the bar.

  The Doctor checked something out quickly on his PDA, then shrugged. “I get it. The bar’s part of a chain, and guess which corporation owns the chain? Not that I imagine many of their directors visit on a regular basis, of course.”

  “How convenient for them. I guess the idea is that the whole bar could disappear off the face of the earth if need be,” said Oeufcoque.

  “Uh-huh. It’s the underbelly of their empire—a place they use to conduct the shadier end of their business transactions. Rather than bothering to go in, why don’t we just launch a rocket or two at them? The joint’s a front, anyway—it’s not as if there’d be any innocent bystanders caught up in it.”

  Balot braced herself, imagining for a moment that the Doctor was indeed about to do as he suggested.

  “So we’re terrorists on top of everything else now, are we, Doc?” Oeufcoque’s sarcastic reply made Balot realize that of course they were going to do no such thing. “They’re going through the official channels, and as long as they stick to this, we do the same.”

  “Sure, sure. Can’t say I’m wildly enthusiastic about the prospect, though. I suppose we can expect them to suggest some sort of trade or information exchange, although I’m not quite sure what they imagine is going to be in it for us. They must know by now that we’re not the sort to be bought off.”

  “So we go in fully expecting that they’ll have other means of persuasion at their disposal,” said Oeufcoque.

  –Are we going to be using guns?

  “Hmm… If it comes to it, I’ll leave that side of things to you and Oeufcoque, if that’s okay. My speciality is really the negotiating part. If the going gets tough, I hope you won’t mind if I’m first out the door?”

  The Doctor looked so serious that Balot nodded without even thinking.

  “Right, then, let’s go!” With these words the Doctor hopped out of the car and walked toward the quiet bar on the quiet street. Balot followed, and soon they had reached the main entrance of the pub.

  There were two sets of doors, and Balot realized that something was up the moment they passed through the first set.

  Someone was watching them. The Doctor had noticed it too.

  They opened the second set of doors and went in. The clientele seemed at first glance to be a surprisingly refined lot—some were smoking cigars or drinking brandy from large goblets, others were reading newspapers or discussing the latest stock market fluctuations.

  It was a veritable pocket of resistance against the recent all-pervasive trend of smoking bans.

  Balot and the Doctor went up to the center of the bar and took a seat. Had they not been in the clothes they wore for court, they would have felt terribly out of place. No one else sat at the bar; patrons lounged on plush leather sofas or in boxes lined with red velvet curtains.

  The Doctor pointed to a bottle on the counter, then went into a detailed spiel as to how exactly the bartender was to prepare it.

  The bartender—middle-aged, receding hairline—took his order with a nod, and then looked at Balot. Balot didn’t really need anything, but she thought back to a Western she had seen in her childhood and recalled what the hero ordered when he was in a bar.

  –A glass of milk, please.

  She spoke through the crystal on her choker. A funny look flickered across the bartender’s face.

  Balot didn’t know whether it was her order that was at fault or whether he was just surprised by her voice. Or it could have been that he was surprised by the very fact that someone like Balot was in this place.

  If he felt something was odd, the bartender certainly hid it well. “Would you like ice with that, miss?” he asked.

  This part wasn’t in the Western.

  Balot thought for a moment, then nodded meekly.

  The bartender prepared the two drinks with a precision that could only come from years of practice. He put the bottle the Doctor pointed to on the bar so that the Doctor could check the label. Balot thought for a moment that the bartender might do the same for her with the carton of milk, but it wasn’t to be—it went straight back in the refrigerator.

  The bartender placed the glasses on the bar, then retreated to one side.

  “Hmm, maybe I should have ordered the same as you,” said the Doctor, who could barely keep the laughter out of his voice. Balot looked at him.

  “This is just some token hospitality before negotiations begin in earnest, by the way. They could well be here already, of course, just making us wait…” The Doctor took his glass in his hand.

  Suddenly, Balot’s left hand jumped up to rest on the Doctor’s shoulder—without Balot controlling it. “There’s a fast-working sleeping draught in yours, Doc. Balot’s is clear,” whispered Oeufcoque.

  The Doctor seemed more nonplussed than surprised. “So it’s Balot they’re after, is it? They’re still hoping for the Trustees to slip up, I guess. They sure don’t give up easily.”

  “All seven people in the room, including the bartender, are armed with handguns of one sort or another,” continued Oeufcoque, before his hand moved off the Doctor’s shoulder.

  The Doctor shrugged. “Not much I can do to help, then. Looks like you two are on your own, sorry about that!” He clinked his glass with Balot’s and downed his drink. “Urgh…and I’d only taken an antidote just before I came in too. I think I’m going to be sick…” The Doctor pulled a sour face, and Balot looked on at him with wide eyes.

  The very next moment the pub entrance opened wide, and in came a well-built man, smiling broadly. “Dr. Easter? I’m Skyscraper. I trust you received my messages?”

  “You’re OctoberCorp’s legal representative?” The Doctor’s eyes were already starting to sag. Balot couldn’t tell whether it was an act or not.

  Skyscraper smiled again. “I’m one of the legal team, yes. I mainly handle criminal cases and compensation claims. I do apologize for having kept you so long. Please, do come and take a seat over here where it’s more comfortable.”
<
br />   “Thank you,” said the Doctor, walking over to the chairs as if he were floating on clouds. Balot followed him.

  The man who called himself Skyscraper sat down last, squeezing his generous frame into the chair.

  “I’ll have the same as she’s having,” Skyscraper said to the bartender when he came to bring over Balot’s glass on a tray. “What about you, sir, are you not drinking?”

  “No, I’m fine, thankshh…” The Doctor’s speech was growing suspiciously slurred.

  It was pretty clear by now that the Doctor really was getting tired. Balot nudged his shoulder gently. She was trying to tell him that he could fall asleep safely and that she had everything under control, but Skyscraper evidently interpreted this move as concern on Balot’s part.

  “You do seem to be tired, sir. We’d better get this over with as quickly as possible, then. Not to worry about your return—we have a chauffeured car on hand to take you both back to wherever you need to go.”

  “You put in your request for a pretrial settlement just this afternoon?” The Doctor yawned.

  “Yes, although we’ve had all the relevant paperwork prepared for some time.”

  “That’s very considerate of you.”

  “Ah, yes, well, we may be on different sides, but we do have certain issues in common. Our jobs are to safeguard the long-term interests of our respective businesses by ensuring that our people are protected and that our businesses are allowed to develop progressively.”

  “Is that right? Well, uh, I suppose that’s so, isn’t it?” said the Doctor.

  “Yes, and we at OctoberCorp are most concerned about the man you brought to trial, Shell-Septinos. We feel that his future prospects are most lamentable,” said Skyscraper.

  “Well, you would, wouldn’t you, given that he seems to know everything about everything. And?”

  Skyscraper’s beaming face was unflinching in the face of the Doctor’s flippant riposte. Then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled at Balot with a concerned expression.