Melpomene banged on the accordion door with her fist. It made the same sound a softball makes when pitched into a cyclone backstop (the girlfriend played first base on her junior high softball team, and had fond memories). The ineffectual clatter of the door infuriated Melpomene. I saw she was preparing to open a path through the chains and the padlock, with her femme fatale charisma, but just then a small door we hadn’t noticed opened up.
The largest human I’d ever seen (arms like slaughtered hogs, black hoodie, sweats) motioned us over, and we followed him through a huge warehouse full of old automobiles, with crews of twinkie mechanics tearing them down. We were led up some stairs to glass-walled offices perched over the warehouse floor.
It was there we met the man in charge.
He was seated at a desk, with four prick associates scattered around the room, hands on pistols tucked into their pants. I thought, not for the first time, that this kind of low-level management shouldn’t be reserved for pricks - what strange enslavement has made the women cower so? The walking tree trunk who escorted us said “These whores volunteered to donate their bikes to us, boss. Some nice classics, an old Indian and a Triumph Bonneville.”
Melpomene barely twitched, but TreeTrunk found himself groaning on the floor, and we suddenly had four pistols aimed at us. I told the prick behind the desk, who had not moved, “Tell those limp snotrags to put the guns away, before things get ugly, boss.” My inflection on the word “boss” was not respectful.
One of the pricks pointing a gun said “Say the word.”
Melpomene was simply glowing with power, and was looking hella sexy, in my opinion.
The boss prick said “She cool. Chill.” When we call it up, live steam insinuates into our vibe, like an opiate, but it also focuses attention, like banderillas in a fighting bull. It gives us powers you are not able to access. For one thing, we can recognize bullshit. The boss man was full of it. He was putting on an accent and an attitude that fit him like a sideways ball cap on Amália Rodrigues. The guy’s roots were more Justin Bieber than Jay Z, but I let it pass. He seemed to know what he was dealing with, on some level, and he adjusted to the new situation.
Maybe we could just transact some business and be on our way.
“I want one million new dollars for the bikes. Non-negotiable. They are worth ten times that.”
“Here’s how I see it. You’ve got four guns pointed at you. You’re the spitting image of that chick at the UN everyone’s trying to track down. You’re right, I’m not going to negotiate. I’ll give you twelve thousand old dollars, and you’re going to tell me what the hell’s going on. I had a guy turn blue here at the shop, for God’s sake. The piece of shit machine went down, but it wasn’t easy. I’ve got guys taking it apart now, to see if there’s something I can sell.”
He reminded me of the prick interns at the palace on Shaula, before they study reverence. I suspected that he was a quick learner - in a flurry of action between the en dashes, Melpomene and I took down his four men - so I asked him again for the million, last chance.
He looked around at his men on the floor, and that’s when his pet name came to me: MouthBreather.
MouthBreather opened up a safe under the desk, and counted out the million in ten-thousand new dollar bills. I guess he grew weary of the negotiations.
“Tell me what’s going on, you can at least do that.” He was walking with Melpomene and me back to the loading dock. A corollary of the Warrior Ethic is to be gracious in victory, so I gave him a run down of what was really happening, under the covers.
“You know,” he said, “when we cut open the blue guy’s chest, we saw flesh and blood, at first. When these robots sense that they are about to be cut open, they set loose an army of nano machines that create an illusion of what we expect to see. Same thing if you try to have sex with them. Eventually the fuel cell became too depleted, and the piece of shit gave up. Then we saw the pulleys and muscle wire, the latticework of simulated flesh. But outside of an autopsy room, say at a nightclub or a political convention, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish them from real human beings.”
“I can distinguish them,” I said. I also told him that we were heading west to change everything, to take down the machines. He was pensive a moment, then he surprised me. “Bring me with you.”
“Why would you want to leave all this,” - we were walking through the crumbling warehouse, rubble everywhere, dust in the air, shrieking pneumatic wrenches, the smell of old grease - “leave all this to go to war against inhuman killing machines, facing near-certain failure, death and humiliation?”
“The world has gone to hell, even before these machines turned up. There is no hope, anywhere. I do what I need to do to survive, but the things that used to get me out of bed in the morning are gone, forever. I was a teacher, a good teacher, but the voters saw us as the enemy. The teachers union was “destroying America”. If there were teachers getting rich on the largesse of the taxpayer, I didn’t know any. The money was there for war, but not for education. I don’t know if what you are trying to do will help or not, but I can read people. I’ll take my chances. I’ve got thirty dependable guys I can call on to join me, in a heartbeat. The two of you, impressive though you are, can’t do it alone.”
So we took him with us. He donated a blue 1968 Pontiac Catalina convertible, with a rebuilt motor and a clean title, to the cause, and we headed back to Interstate 80. Melpomene and I both plumbed the depths of his character during the next few days, and judged him sound.
He was smitten with Melpomene, but who isn’t?