Astro-Nuts

by Logan Hunder

  “You weren’t asking her any questions about the case or anything!”

  “I told you I was starting easy!”

  “That was supposed to be easy?! You were talking to her like that guy that used to hang out at the playground by our elementary school.”

  “That’s the whole point! I make her really uncomfortable with forward questions so that our other questions that we ask after will start to look appealing by comparison!”

  “Oh . . . when you put it like that, it actually makes a bit of sense.”

  “Exactly.” Peters put a hand on Johnson’s shoulder. “This is why you should just trust me. If we stuck to my plan we would have got the information we need for the case . . . and I would have gotten some information that would be useful to me for later.”

  “Okay, see, I was with you for the first part . . . but what do you mean—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s just go do the next guy.”

  Johnson couldn’t help but shoot him a couple sideways looks as they walked, but ultimately opted against addressing the issue further. It was hard to be outraged by anything after working in this place long enough, and by this point they both had seen it all: Chinese water torture, Antarctican sleep torture, Irish sober torture, and all the other regional breaking methods were just tools in their shed of sadness.

  In fact, over time they had even become able to discern the method of information extraction being used based solely on the brouhaha being bellowed from any given room. Short, urgent yelp noises were common in pain-inducing programs. Those exposed to prolonged procedures like sleep deprivation would warble a long mournful wail like the kind you hear walking by your city’s cheapest motel at night. There was also this interesting phenomenon where prisoners tended to scream in key with the song being played during music sessions.

  However, for all their shortcomings, Johnson and Peters wanted to add a more personal touch to their interrogations. Their job was to gather information, after all. They couldn’t just march into each room and beat every perp like a disobedient rug. In the biz, that was called rock’em-sock’em research, and, frankly, pretty much nobody had enough rage or energy to do that all day. That was really why the thugs and sadists never lasted in this job. Even those that did last weren’t regarded highly amongst their peers. One look at their hands would see their knuckles worn down like the soles on an old pair of shoes, and everyone would know they weren’t a thinker by trade.

  Having reached the cell of their next charge, the pair of aspiring professional ponderers stopped again to reassess their plan.

  “Alright, let’s try this again.” Johnson said. “I’ll start hard, then you come in soft.”

  “‘Kay, gimme a sec to get soft.”

  “Think I should threaten him with AIDSbola? That’s scary, right?”

  Peters rolled his eyes.

  “C’mon, man. Nobody believes in the AIDSbola thing anymore.”

  “Fine, fine, I’ll just . . . I dunno . . . scream in his face or something . . .

  He punched the numbers to the room without even looking. It was the same for every room; much cheaper than that fingerprint or eye scanning technology. There was still a spot to put your eye, though. Just to keep the riff-raff from getting any ideas of escape.

  The door slid open and he stepped inside. There, he found another young person huddled in a chair, nursing a black eye and eagerly anticipating his arrival. Well, young-looking anyway. A quick glance at his file revealed he was actually thirty-five. Thirty-five and not a single facial hair sprouted. Shame; a beard would have been the only way he could have faked a jawline.

  “Well, well, well.” Johnson announced, pacing around the room reading a tablet. “If it isn’t the infamous Donaldric Harambe . . . O’chopenisravich!xowalechrist. Am I saying that right?”

  “Not even close,” Donald mumbled in his general direction.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter!” Johnson put his hands on the glass table and glowered down at his doughy detainee. “Because this room is my town! And I run my town! With an iron. Freaking. Fist!”

  He proceeded to punch at the air and followed it up with an uncoordinated front kick at nothing. Huffs and puffs were the only sound in the room. After enough of those to catch his breath, he resumed his previous stance at the table.

  “You look uncomfortable, Donaldric. You uncomfortable?”

  Donald blinked at him.

  “The first thing that happened when I got here was some guy punching me in the face and saying ‘Welcome to Earf.’”

  “Hey, that’s a centuries-old tradition for greeting extraterrestrials. You can’t just show up somewhere and hate them for doing things differently than you.”

  “I’m . . . I’m also in a cell in Guantanamo. Shouldn’t I be uncomfortable?”

  “Ohhhh, right, right.” Johnson mused. He licked his finger, then started thumbing through the tablets. “Rap sheet like yours? Of course being here, in the belly of the beast, might set you a little on edge.”

  “What rap sheet?!”

  “Servants of the law all stick together, Donaldric! We don’t appreciate civvies abusing and making a mockery of our . . . sacred profession.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?!”

  Johnson slammed a tablet on the table and slid it across to Donald.

  “Oh, just your list of past offences, Donaldric,” he taunted. “That fuzzy memory of yours starting to come back now?”

  “You just totally smashed the screen on this. I can’t read anything.”

  “Well, isn’t that convenient!!” The officer leapt from his seat and paced around the room, hands clasped together and biceps in full flex. “Unfortunately for you, I already read it! Impersonating a police officer is a very serious offence. Said in there that you had the uniform on and everything. Running around, accosting kids in a residential neighbourhood. Says you never served any time either. Guess that means you escaped and were never caught . . . until now!”

  “I never served any time because I was five!!” Donald bellowed back at him. “Those kids were my friends! We were playing cops and robbers!”

  “And how about now, huh, Donaldric?! Are you just playing with your friends now, too?! Huh?! A good old game of Moon Terrorists Conspiring to Distribute a Chemical Weapon?! . . . Huh?!”

  “If I say no, are you going to waterboard me?”

  “What?!” Johnson sat down in his seat just so he could leap from it again. “Do I look like the type of guy who waterboards?! Look at these arms, dude! I could pop your head like a . . . like a . . . tiny, pop-able watermelon. I don’t need to do pussy stuff like waterboard! And besides, waterboarding is way too old school anyway. We have something called hydroplanking now.”

  “Look, I don’t know about any chemical weapons, okay?!” Donald insisted. “The whole reason I took this job is because I wanted something boring and removed where trouble couldn’t find me. But no, no matter where I go I always end up caught up in somebody else’s problem . . . I mean—you think I want this dead-end job?! I should be writing code for NASA or programming Virgin’s service bots. But no. Instead I get to sit on a junk hauler answering phones.”

  “Dude, that . . . that sucks.” Johnson couldn’t help but say. “I’m sorry. I mean, Peters is supposed to be the one who listens and cares about your sob story, but I’m not sure where he is.”

  “Um . . . thanks? I guess?”

  “Actually, yeah; where the hell is that guy, anyway?”

  He stood up to leave, but Donald called to him with a final question.

  “If I make up some incriminating stuff for everyone else, can I go?”

  Johnson cleared his throat and folded his arms.

  “That’s not how things work here, Donaldric. We’re not like the Space CIA. It takes more than fake claims to make us do stuff. You’d also have to back it up with fake evidence and a fake alibi for yourself and fake evidence to support your fake alibi. I mean, if you can do all that,
then hell yeah! I’ll be glad to let you go!”

  “But how am I supposed to—”

  “‘Scuse me for a moment.”

  He popped out the door quick and scanned the hallway. Not so much as a whiff of the mousse that Peters abused so much of. A few of his nameless and irrelevant coworkers bustled around in the hallway, but it was the commotion coming from the end of the hall that attracted his attention. It called to him like a siren. A deranged, vaguely homicidal-sounding siren, rife with voice cracks and incoherence. Its shrieks filled the halls with passion and vengeance. Rounding the corner, Johnson found it slamming its hands and occasionally face against the door of Whisper’s holding room.

  “Keep on hiding, bitch!!” Peters roared at the door in a demonic voice. “I broke out of my cell, you think I won’t break into yours!?”

  He pounded on the door several times, all the while showing it his best war face.

  “You’re gonna die!! I’m gonna tear you to pieces and mount you on my wall!”

  That was followed by a raucous bout of scream laughing. However, Peters’s mirth cut out when Johnson clasped a hand onto his shoulder.

  “Dude! What the hell are you doing?!”

  “What the hell does it look like I’m doing?! I’m terrifying the living shit out of her!”

  Johnson stood silent for a moment, processing the information. It was to no avail.

  “WHY?!”

  “God, you are so clueless. She’s all alone, man! She has no one to protect her, no one to defend her from the all the horrors and psychos and . . . stuff.”

  He shrugged and gave a sly grin.

  “Or does she?”

  Once more he slammed at the door, this time with extra furor.

  “I hope you aren’t thinking that correctional officer slash male model is going to save you!”

  “Why?!” Johnson said again. “Why?!”

  “Do I have to spell everything out to you?!”

  “Honestly, I’d rather you just stop doing things that make me have to ask what you’re doing.”

  Peters squinted at him, studying him. After a brief stint of analysis, his eyebrows lifted and he began nodding to himself.

  “I suppose it isn’t fair to expect you to be able to keep up with me. Very well; young Miss Wang needs some time to stew in her fear, anyway, before affections can blossom. Whatever. We can do things your way for now. Lead on.”

  “Thanks, bro. I actually kinda think I’m starting to underst—”

  Despite his order for Johnson to “Lead on,” Peters strode right past him and back in the direction of Donald’s room.

  “Uh huh. Uh huh. So what do you got? What did kindergarten cop have to say?”

  Johnson managed to overtake him just in time to block the door.

  “Oh, him? He’s not talking. I don’t think they keep him in the loop. He’s just there to answer phones. I think he probably just hands the phone to his boss after picking up. Or maybe, MAYBE, he’s secretly the kingpin to it all, and that’s why he was pretending to have the most pointless job ever! DUDE! I think I just figured it out!”

  “Maybe, Johnson, maybe. But why don’t we talk with the others first? See what they have to say. Who’s up next?”

  He peered down at the file he was handed and couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow.

  “Oh, great. Well, this should be interesting.”

  They ploughed through coworkers and visitors on their way down the hall, smacking stacks of tablets out of hands and shoulder checking any who were smaller than themselves. Naturally, they elicited copious dirty looks, and their efforts even earned a real-life honest-to-goodness stink eye. But none of it registered, as their motivation to do their job was just too formidable. After a half-dozen or so workplace assaults, they arrived at the cell of detainee number three. In deference to past perps, rather than taking the time to formulate another pointless interrogation tactic, they instead just barged right in.

  “WILLY!” They cheered in unison.

  The Jefferson’s rent-a-cop was startled by the entrance, but quickly resumed his sheepish, hand-clasped stance.

  “Hey, guys . . .” He muttered.

  “What’s goin’ on, bro?” Johnson asked, taking a seat across from him. “You get shit canned from this place so you decide to go join the bad guys?!”

  “No, dude, it’s not like that at all!” Willy insisted. His bottom lip began to tremble. “You aren’t gonna call my mom, are you?”

  Peters sucked air through his teeth and pretended to study the file again.

  “I don’t know, man. This doesn’t look very good for you. I mean, it’s bad enough that we found you with these guys. When we also consider your dismissal for arson of a federal detention center . . . It really paints a bit of a picture. Don’t you agree, Agent Johnson?”

  “He’s got a point there, Willy. That is kind of a terrorist-y sounding thing to do.”

  “Aw, god, you guys are right.” Willy’s voice quivered. He put his head in his hands and his elbows on the table. “I should have never let you use my lighter to test the bathroom for linoleum.”

  “It’s okay, bro,” Johnson consoled him, resting a hand on his back. “We’re investigators now. We can help you. But you gotta tell us where the drugs are!”

  “That’s not what we’re looking for.”

  “ . . . The bomb?”

  “It’s a biological weapon, dude.”

  “Holy Jesus, Willy, what are you doing, bro!?”

  “There’s nothing like that on there, dude, I swear!” Willy, well, swore. “Some old dude even locked us in the cargo hold and it was just full of space rocks. Search the ship if you don’t believe me!”

  “Well, we are going to search the ship!” Peters said. “Top to bottom, in fact. But it would be way easier on you and us if you just told us where it was.”

  “Yeah!” Johnson agreed. “’Cause we got other ships to search . . . with bombs and drugs on them.”

  Willy shook his head. His gaze was still cast downward in hopeless despair, obscured by the long, curly hair that lay matted against the coalesced sweat on his face. His fingers trembled as they attempted to scoop the final remnants out of his bag of chips.

  “I’m starting to think some of the people this place holds without trial or evidence might actually be innocent,” he whimpered. Peters rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, come on, don’t you remember what they taught us at orientation? Even if you can’t prove guilt, everyone is always at least an accomplice to something.”

  He joined his partner on Willy’s other side. They both had hands on his back, slumped over as he was, like frat brothers standing vigil while he chucked his groceries after the party. But, also like frat brothers, they didn’t actually care that much about his well-being, and wished he’d hurry up and work through this so they could get back to matters more suited to their tastes.

  “Just tell us who the leader of your terrorist club is, bro.” Johnson urged. “And I promise I’ll get you the cell that has the working toilet.”

  “I told you, dude, we were set up!” The big man blubbered, trying in vain to stem the stream of snot coming from his nose. “That old Banks guy is who you want! I tried to stop him but he kicked me in the balls! How do you stop a guy who’s willing to do that?! There’s . . . there’s some things you just aren’t supposed to do, man . . .”

  “Bro, are you . . . are you crying?”

  “N-no I’m just . . . *sniff* . . . cutting water weight . . . ’cause I’m bulking.”

  “WARNING: LIE DETECTED.”

  Johnson and Peters jumped.

  “What the hell was that?!” The former demanded, absent-mindedly reaching for a blaster he didn’t carry.

  Willy pulled his face from his hands and looked at him. His eyes were still bleary, but they squinted in confusion.

  “That was the lie detector . . .” he informed them. “I forgot we had those.”

  Peters gaped at the ceiling.

&nb
sp; “Wait, we’ve had lie detectors this whole time?! Are they in every room?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s awesome!” Johnson cheered. “I knew there was no way humans were supposed to be able to do interrogizing on their own.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s sooooo awesome!” Peters spat. “I mean, what are we even here for, right!?”

  He laughed with a hollow, mirthless laughter that punctuated the rhetorical question with a feeling of unease. He didn’t even smile as he did it. He just stared unblinkingly at his two acquaintances with an intense pokerface, all the while chuckling through clenched teeth.

  “In fact, why don’t I just take off this uniform, huh? Take this uniform off the perfectly sculpted body of this peak of biological evolution and hang it on that camera up there in the corner. Let the robots just take over this entire process! See how far our amazing space-age technology gets on its own! Then maybe I just go work at the front desk? Or as the janitor? Or maybe I should be the guy who drives that space food truck that parks behind the cafeteria to sell us the contents of its grease trap. I’m sure those would be much more fitted for . . . for a, a BEACON of charisma and . . . and raw, refined pantology!”

  By the end of his speech, his shoulders heaved with his laboured breaths and a couple of buttons had popped during his many tugs for emphasis. Willy and Johnson gaped at him, trying to absorb it all.

  “Bro . . .” The latter broached with care, hands slightly raised. “I don’t know what you’re goin’ on about . . . but you do know all those jobs are already done by robots right?”

  “Well, I don’t want their help!! I can outperform any machine; just ask any woman!”

  He snatched up a fist full of Willy’s scraggly beard.

  “Say something to me, you fat sack of crap! Anything! I’ll know if you’re lying too!”

  “Dude, you’re really freaking me out . . .”

  “You LIE! You LIE!! You’re LYING! I KNOW YOU’RE LYING! YOUR OBESITY DISGUSTS ME!”

  “He’s innocent, man! Get off of him!”

  “He’s only innocent if I say he is!”

  “Stop slapping me, dude!!”