The Municipalists

by Seth Fried

  OWEN waved his hand to tell me he was being rhetorical. “Half your colleagues gave me nicknames. Some of them called me Odie. Others called me O-man. On account of my eyes, Emma Ackerman in Renewable Energy got her whole department calling me Deep Blue.”

  “I never realized you were so popular.”

  “You didn’t notice that the team who won the agency’s softball league last year called themselves the Supercomputers?”

  I looked at OWEN seriously. “The agency has a softball league?”

  He laughed.

  “I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Henry, you were always yelling at me when I was a phone. Over a third of our interactions ended abruptly in a manner that I was programmed to interpret as anger. So my question is, if you’re passionate about the work you do for the agency, if it’s meaningful and important to you, then why don’t you seem to be enjoying yourself?”

  I was surprised by the question and told him that I liked the work just fine, but when it came to the people . . . My voice trailed off and I noticed OWEN looking at me, his eyes steady.

  “I shouldn’t have been so glib about your parents on the plane,” he said.

  It was a simple statement of fact, the way someone might say they didn’t like fish or that the turnpike would have been faster. I knew it was probably as close as OWEN would ever come to offering up an apology on the subject, or any other for that matter. I thanked him.

  “Come on,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  He led me to an exhibit on the history of technology and we stood there in the soft glow of the security lights, looking at the old adding machines and difference engines.

  “I’m one of a kind,” he said. “So I don’t really have folks either.”

  He regarded a desktop computer in a diorama of a modern office and then turned to me and cupped his hands, holding them out between us. Above his palms appeared a projected representation of his mind. It was a bright, irregular mass with bulbous protrusions branching off and then growing together or spiraling away in thin tendrils of light that pulsed faintly. Inside the mass, I saw what looked like millions of small particles spinning rapidly and sending small arcs of electricity between them. It was as chaotic-looking a thing as anyone could imagine, but I told OWEN only that it was beautiful and he smiled.

  He went on to describe to me the many anxieties of his new sentience. He said that while experientially he felt that he was here with me in Metropolis, he also knew that he was really back in Maryland, a thought that disturbed him, though he wasn’t able to say why. We talked for a while about the many joys and pains of consciousness as we walked among the towers and vacuum tubes of room-sized computers that were immense and mysterious-looking in the dark museum.

  The next night, I was nosing around the cafeteria for some food to steal and we found a stockpile of liquor in a storage closet. OWEN said I looked like I could use a drink, so we took a bottle of thirty-year-old Scotch and a turkey sandwich to a replica of a nineteenth-century pub up on the museum’s sixth floor. The Jolly Pigeon was complete with warped hardwood floors covered in sawdust and a long, scuffed-up bar lined with unfinished stools. When I turned on the lights, the place also filled itself with a trill of fiddle music, the sound of stool legs scraping the floor, and the warm murmur of a quiet crowd. We sat at a low table in back that was lit by the flicker of the bar’s fake gas lamps. There I ate my sandwich and we began to drink.

  By my fourth pour, OWEN was standing across from me, miming something I couldn’t quite make out. He was leaning forward and moving his hand back and forth as if he were using a frying pan or teaching a dog how to shake.

  “Second word,” he said.

  “You’re not supposed to talk.”

  He apologized and held up a placard that read “Second word.”

  Our earlier mistake had been in considering only games that relied on probability and logic, whereas charades was interpretive enough to keep things interesting. OWEN had at first been reluctant to try what he referred to disdainfully as a guessing game, but after he managed to get The Shoot-Out at Pilgrim Creek in just five guesses he was barely done congratulating himself before insisting that it was his turn.

  In his first attempt OWEN had transformed himself into George C. Scott while trying to get me to guess The Changeling and I had to establish the condition that he wasn’t allowed to use any of his imitations or shape-shifting capabilities. This had proven to be a significant obstacle for him.

  “Frying pan?”

  He stopped miming and stood up straight.

  “No. What’s the matter with you?”

  OWEN had established the rule that whoever made an incorrect guess had to take a drink. But after a few rounds we were both drinking steadily without keeping track.

  “Are you shaking hands with a dog?”

  OWEN groaned in aggravation and then began to do the exact same mime a little more insistently.

  I tried a few more guesses before OWEN declared me hopeless and slumped down at the table. He continued drinking while I finished off the rest of my sandwich, both of us realizing without having to say anything that we were too drunk to continue playing, though not necessarily too drunk to continue drinking.

  “I was doing Fortune’s Pool,” he said. “The Sandra Malcolm movie.”

  “What were you miming, though?”

  “Pool,” he said, sounding defensive. “I was playing pool.”

  “But you were only using one hand.”

  OWEN smiled and nodded approvingly at the memory of his performance. “It was a trick shot.”

  He finished his drink and took in the Jolly Pigeon before refilling his glass.

  “I like this place,” he said. “If Kirklin’s people want to destroy it, they’re going to have to bring it down on top of us.”

  Sober, I might have mentioned OWEN’s earlier point that he was safe back in Suitland. However, this didn’t seem to occur to me as I refilled my glass.

  “Damn straight,” I said. “Anyway, Kirklin’s men are just a bunch of stupid townie goons. And Kir—Ki—Excuse me. Kirklin is a big grumpy weirdo. If we see him tomorrow,” I added, “I’m going to tell him that to his face.”

  “You should.”

  “I will,” I said.

  From there things degenerated into OWEN and me improvising new insults we imagined directing at Kirklin in person. The news coverage in response to Sarah Laury’s disappearance had focused on the lurid implications of her running off with an older man, painting Kirklin as a presumed deviant, and so my and OWEN’s insults quickly became both elaborate and obscene. They evolved into full-on sketches depicting Kirklin in a series of embarrassing and sexually compromising scenes with his own cousins as well as a small monkey also named Kirklin, which allowed for several humorous ambiguities. I was never much of a drinker, which was probably why I got carried away and added a dozen sexually aggressive leopards and a birthday cake shaped like his own face. OWEN was laughing so hard that my tie clip began to overheat. I drunkenly insisted that he remember everything we said verbatim so I could repeat it to Kirklin once we were face-to-face. He assured me that though drunk he was still a computer and that our living eulogy of Kirklin was at the ready.

  “Good,” I said, resting my head on the table. “Good.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, waiting for a spell of dizziness to pass. I might have fallen asleep right there, but OWEN led me out of the Jolly Pigeon and into a dark street showing what Metropolis had looked like 150 years ago. At one point I demanded that OWEN carry me the rest of the way. I fell backwards into him, which set us off laughing as I struggled to get up off the cobblestones. When we eventually found our way to my tenement, I crawled onto a small cot and pulled a coarse, faded quilt over me. The last thing I remember was listening to OWEN humming the theme song to some old movie as he sat
in the apartment’s small kitchen and refilled his glass for what must have been the dozenth time.

  * * *

  I woke early the next morning to the sound of a loud military reveille. The noise jolted me awake into a half-conscious panic that gradually materialized into a sharp pain in my temples. I looked up to see OWEN sitting at the foot of my cot holding a bugle.

  “Doesn’t your program come with a hangover?”

  “I think I’m still a little drunk,” he said, putting the horn back into his jacket. “I tried bird noises for a while. Did you know that you snore?”

  I was too nauseated to answer. I made my way out of the tenement to a drinking fountain and splashed water on my face.

  “Kirklin’s men are probably on their way,” OWEN said.

  After some experimental sips of water, I headed to the museum’s lobby, where there was a phone at the reception desk. I dialed 911, telling the operator there’d been a break-in at the Metropolis Museum of History. I put the receiver down without hanging up.

  OWEN nodded his approval and led me up to the third floor to a massive hall that was bare except for a few dozen vintage planes. The north-facing windows afforded us a view of all the spectators streaming toward Sixth Avenue and 46th Street, where the Civic Pride Parade would start within the hour. Already I could make out the distant revving of the motorcades and motorcycle clubs, while, closer by, children and adults alike were letting out long, baleful honks with the plastic horns they’d bought from street vendors. The room’s southern windows overlooked Attleman Park, which was empty except for a trickle of spectators heading over to take their places along the parade route.

  Twenty minutes passed before two police cruisers finally pulled up in front of the museum. We were relieved to see them, though we’d been hoping for a bigger response. OWEN suggested we create a scene to goad the arriving officers into radioing for backup and before I could give the plan some measured consideration he was standing in front of me in the nude and holding a rocket launcher. He instructed me to get away from the windows in case the police opened fire, which I was only too happy to do. I watched from the middle of the room as he added a pair of bandoliers to his chest and changed the model of his rocket launcher until it looked sufficiently menacing. But just as he was about to vanish and reappear on the building’s ledge, he took a step toward the windows and let the rocket launcher disappear.

  “Hold on,” he said, his suit flickering back on. “There’s some movement in the park.”

  He called me over and we watched as twenty well-dressed men in matching raincoats emerged from a stand of trees and began walking toward the museum in a double line. The four officers had gotten out of their cruisers and seemed to assume that these men had something to do with the festivities. One of the officers waved them toward Sixth Avenue. When the men continued walking straight ahead, he opened the driver’s-side door of his cruiser and issued them instructions through the car’s public-address system. I couldn’t make out what was said, since one of the parade’s drum lines was passing us to the north, performing a series of escalating cadences. The men continued to close in and the officers gestured emphatically for them to stop. When the men finally did halt, they pulled assault rifles from their coats and dropped to kneeling positions.

  OWEN and I were halfway to the stairs when they opened fire, the bursts from the rifles mixing with the roars of the nearby crowds. By the time we reached the lobby the shooting had already stopped. There was the sound of glass crunching underfoot, which meant Kirklin’s men had smashed through the exterior doors of the museum’s foyer and now only had to break down the large oak double doors that opened onto the lobby. Soon there was the same methodical banging I had heard as Teddy hacked down Bao-yu’s front door.

  OWEN positioned us in the middle of the room and told me not to move unless he said so. Axe blades were beginning to make their way through the doors and with each blow slender rays of daylight cut through the otherwise dark lobby. I put my hands in my pockets to hide the fact that they were shaking. I also found myself thinking about my agency hat, which I had left on my bag back in the tenement. There was something about the prospect of being gunned down in the line of duty that made me feel suddenly homesick without it.

  OWEN projected a bulletproof vest onto me with USMS stenciled across the chest in large white letters. Meanwhile, all around the lobby appeared projections of men in SWAT gear with assault rifles. Behind the lobby’s information booth there was even a projection standing behind a chain-fed machine gun.

  As the doors began to wobble and give way, OWEN turned to look at me, making a few small adjustments to my vest. The expression on his face was bittersweet.

  “If they end up shooting you in the head or something, I just wanted to say it’s been a pleasure working with you, Henry.”

  I was still processing this sentiment when the doors burst open. Kirklin’s men froze when they saw us. The laser sights of OWEN’s projections were trained steadily on their chests and OWEN himself was standing at the ready with what I was relieved to see was a handgun from this century.

  “US Municipal Survey!” he shouted. “Drop your weapons!”

  Three men standing toward the front of Kirklin’s squad were armed with axes, while the rest were holding rifles in firing positions. Their leader was a young dark-haired man wearing sunglasses. His new teeth were too large for his slender face so that his mouth looked full and threatening like a shark’s. He glanced down at the initials stenciled on our vests as if he wasn’t sure he had heard OWEN correctly and then smiled.

  “So you guys militarized too, huh?”

  He was loosely gripping a handgun and raised it to scratch his temple with the barrel as he looked around the room.

  “Good for you,” he said, his tone genuine, as if OWEN’s SWAT team was the first sensible thing he had seen come out of Suitland.

  “I suppose you’re the ones who’ve been giving our guys trouble the past few days. A lot of our people are pissed about our friend you threw off the Census Bureau. Very unsporting—but I don’t blame you. That’s the way it is. To get anything real done nowadays you have to kill who you have to kill. Progress is war.”

  “Tell your men to drop their weapons,” I said.

  The man raised a palm to show he wasn’t a threat, then holstered his weapon.

  “They shouldn’t need to,” he said. “We’re outpositioned and you have more firepower. What is that over there, an M60?”

  He pointed toward the information booth and chuckled.

  “Garrett must still be as old-fashioned as ever. Tell him to invest in an M240. Superior reliability.”

  “My partner told your men to drop your weapons,” OWEN said.

  The man considered this for a moment.

  “You Suitland people never see the big picture, do you?”

  He looked at us almost hopefully, waiting for us to understand what he meant.

  “We’re telling you to put your weapons down,” I said.

  “Let’s try this for starters,” he said. “We just killed four cops outside. Traffic is a nightmare because of the parade and we have a few teams running interference, but before long this place will be crawling with MPD. And you may have cleared your request for all this gear with Garrett on the sly, but I’ll blow an appropriations committee in hell if he got approval for a tactical assault team from the board. That means the authorities have no idea you’re all here playing army, which also means you couldn’t have worked any of this out at the state or city level. As far as the MPD is concerned, you’re just another bunch of lunatics with automatic weapons hanging around a couple of dead cops. So you’re dealing with the same time constraints we are. And yet, you’re all just standing around not killing us, which means I don’t think you’re going to shoot.”

  He took a step forward.

  “Stay where you are,” OWEN
said.

  The man smiled again, taking another slow and deliberate step in our direction.

  “Feel free to kill me when I get too close.”

  His men began to move slowly into the lobby.

  “This is your last warning,” OWEN said, his gun shaking in his hand.

  Kirklin’s men continued their advance.

  “Stop—stop right there,” OWEN said.

  The panic in his voice was over the top, like a stock coward in an old film.

  “I’ll shoot,” OWEN said. “I swear to God, I’ll do it!”

  He was stepping backwards, his eyes wide with showy fear. Then he stopped, lowered his weapon, and looked off behind Kirklin’s men.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s that?”

  Before they could turn around, an eleven-foot-tall clown with long fangs and tentacles for arms sprang up behind them. It let out a piercing shriek and swiped at them with its tentacles, making one of the men lose his balance and fall over, accidentally discharging his weapon and spraying several of his team members with friendly fire.

  “It’s worse than we thought, men!” OWEN shouted to his SWAT team as he motioned for me to withdraw from the room. “There’s a clown monster!”

  OWEN’s projections opened fire as we fell back to the natural history exhibit. Kirklin’s men retreated into the foyer, dragging their wounded away from the clown and the convincing hail of bullets from OWEN’s SWAT team.

  There was a freestanding map of the museum in etched glass that I had assumed was real, but which shattered when the clown picked up one of OWEN’s SWAT team members and tossed him through it, sending a realistic spray of glass across the lobby floor. As the other projections continued to fire, the clown howled in pain and began to drip yellow blood, which bubbled and steamed where it fell.

  “OWEN, what is that thing?”

  We were sitting behind the open entryway leading into the natural history exhibit.

  “Klaus let me watch some horror movies once in a while. Did you ever see Blood Clown?”