Bugs (18 page)

Manse Jones was sitting on the doorstep of his apartment-house.

‘You owe me a job.’

‘I know. But I’ve just been fired myself.’

‘Shit.’ Manse stared into space for a moment or so. ‘You got any beer?’

‘Come on in.’

Fred plugged in the answering machine. Manse sat carefully on the edge of the rickety card-table and sipped beer for a few minutes before speaking. ‘OK. How come you’re living so poor?’

‘There always seemed to be some trouble about payday. And then they fired me. Twice.’

Manse said: ‘You still stole my job, you son of a bitch.’

‘I needed a job, too. Besides, I tried to make it up by hiring you.’

‘I think I’ll sue somebody.’ Manse screwed up the beer-can and dropped it into Fred’s plain brown wastepaper-basket. ‘Maybe I’ll sue you.’

‘I haven’t got anything.’

‘Yeah? You’re so rich you got money to throw away.’ Manse fished behind the wastepaper-basket. ‘What’s this–a cheque? Holy shit, look at this. Ten thousand dollars.’

‘That’s no good, it’s just –’

‘No good? Shit, I’d like to find out. I –’

The phone rang. Before Fred could work out how to shut it off, his machine answered. KK’s message rang out in the grubby little room.

‘Hello, darlink, this is KK. I have talked to my bosses, and they say ye can give better offer. How about fifty tousand, plus case wodka every Christmas? I miss you, darlink.’ There was the sound of a wet kiss.

‘All right!’ said Manse. ‘What business you in? Live like a pig while you got a chick calls you up and offers you fifty grand?
And
a case of vodka? No wonder you can throw away a bitty ten-grand cheque.’ He stood up and held out the cheque. ‘You better have this back. Whatever line of work you’re in, it can’t be legal.’

‘Take it. I – You’re right, I don’t need it.’

Manse looked at the cheque for a moment. ‘I’ll borrow it, OK? I am trying to start a little consulting business. This makes you a twenty-per-cent owner, OK?’

‘It’s yours. Take it.’

‘Not as a handout. I really want this as a loan.’

Fred sat stunned after his ten thousand dollars had slipped away from him. Never to be seen again. He opened a book on famous murders and tried to read about Dr Neill Cream and his strychnine tablets, but it was no good.

The phone rang again. He tried to answer, but the machine ignored him and did its work.

‘Fred, this is Sturge Fellini. We’ve had a revolution here, and the project is reinstated. We need you to come back and run things. Come in tomorrow.’

There was a pause, but Fellini was by no means finished. ‘We finally managed to make them see the total picture, the meta-geodesy, an odyssey beyond journeying … So, once more we get to tongue the meringue of creation. We may be face to face with the gratifications of voltage literacy in the university of experiential death. We may be face to face with virtual vision! Isn’t it great? An uncontrollable floodgate of transformation! Of course, to liquefy the generalization, we need the anteater of history in this, picking out the good bits …’

Fellini talked on and on, until the answering machine ran out of tape.

In the morning, Fred had trouble finding Fellini’s office, which was no longer next to a window. The office had not moved, but the window wall was being replaced by a new wing. At the moment, the office had three walls and a great hole covered by polythene.

Fred decided to be direct.

‘I need money.’

Fellini’s newt mouth drew up in a one-sided grin. ‘Holding out for more? Just because you know we need you to run
this show. OK, another ten per cent raise. But that’s my final offer. You’re making nearly as much as me now.’

‘I don’t mean I need a raise; I just mean I need money now. My rent is due, and my cheques almost never come through, because I’m always in the process of being fired or rehired.’

‘I can’t keep track of details like that. If I didn’t delegate, we’d fall apart.’ Fellini made a sweeping gesture that took in the missing wall. ‘You take care of it, OK?’

Fred found his way back to his cube and sat down. The desk phone rang immediately.

‘Hello, Richard.’

He sighed. ‘Hello, Rain.’

‘You’re not even trying.’

‘Actually, I don’t feel much like trying.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m broke, and I can’t seem to get paid around this establishment.’ Unfairly, he couldn’t help adding: ‘Your husband refuses to help, by the way.’

‘You’re broke?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me do something – a small loan to tide you over.’

‘Very nice of you, but –’

‘We can meet after work. Do you know New Budapest?’

He did not.

‘Just keep driving west. New Budapest is the third small town, about forty miles down the road. There’s a big restaurant there called the Moholy-Nagy. Meet you there.’

The hemisphere was now painted blue. It was staring Fred in the eye. When it spoke, in a new gravelly voice, its remote arm stopped twitching and paid attention.

‘Gentlemen,’ it said. ‘At 0800 hours, we will launch an offensive in Sector Green.’ It paused. ‘Green is one of the primary colours. Isaac Newton proved that white light is a mixture of all other colours, by breaking it apart. He used a prism.’

After another pause: ‘Prism sounds like prison, make a note of that. All correspondences rise and converge, and that’s a fact. Orwell was right.
War is peace
. I have looked it up in my own approved thesaurus.
War
means combat. To combat is to grapple. Grapple means grasp, and a grasp of English is a command of English. A command is an authorization. Authorization is consent. Consent is agreement. Agreement is harmony. Harmony is
peace
.’

Carl shook his head. ‘Don’t want the General hearing anything like that. He needs war to be hell, not peace.’

‘I don’t know, maybe it needs to play with paradoxes.’

‘
The agonizing paradox of life
,’ announced the hemisphere.

‘At least we fixed the voice,’ Carl explained. ‘General Lutz should be happy with that.’

‘Sounds like George C. Scott doing his impression of a mastiff with a terrible cold.’

The hemisphere was listening. ‘Terrible cold what?’ it said. ‘And I do not have that George. George Washington? George Patton? George Orwell aka Eric Blair?’

‘Lots of debugging to do yet,’ said Carl. ‘Some funny bugs there, you know?’

Fred knew. Lizzie Borden had tried at two drugstores to buy some prussic acid to kill bugs, the day before she took an axe … The murderous spirit of Pratt seemed to be around here somewhere.

Nearby, an empty body-shell stood ready.

New Budapest was evidently a Hungarian village, judging by the names on local shops: Gabor Sausage Works, Nagy Antiques, Dreyfus Drugs, Bihari Florist, Molnar’s Garage, Dental Surgeon Bartók DDS, the Karoly Theater, and of course a nightclub called Lugosi’s.

The Moholy-Nagy turned out to be a hotel as well as a restaurant: Fred was sure that Rain had both functions in mind. He sat in his car for a moment. There probably wasn’t enough petrol left to get away. On the radio, death went west.

‘According to police, the assailant may be the same man who terrorized other Little Dorrit restaurants in Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. This is Fennel Janeship, ZBC News, Carson City, Nevada.’

Rain tapped on the window. ‘Richard, come on in. I’ve taken a room here. Don’t be so bashful. Robert Donat wouldn’t be.’

But Robert Donat was in a hotel with Madeleine Carroll. And in handcuffs. Oh, what the hell. Fred got out of the car, raised an eyebrow, and said, ‘Pretend you know me,’ as he kissed her. Wasn’t there a Hungarian mass murderer named Bela Kiss?

Model M now inhabited a headless fibreglass body, painted blue. A tentative Mil Spec number had been stencilled across the chest, just above the opening where the edges of a dozen green circuit-boards could be seen. Some of the boards hung halfway out of the opening, along with a rat’s nest of wires running to test equipment. There was something unnerving about seeing the thing sitting up on a table, swinging its legs, with its belly torn open and no head. The blue dish-cover lay on the table beside it, along with a pair of restless eyes.

‘Gentlemen,’ rasped the dish-cover. ‘
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama
. That’s a palindrome.
Zeus sees Suez. Eire was I ere I saw Erie
. Do I make myself clear?’

‘He’s full of garbage from Pratt,’ Carl explained. ‘We may never get it all cleared out.’

‘By the way, is Pratt still skulking about the plant?’

‘He’s suing the company to get his job back,’ said Corky. ‘Wants to get his hands on M again. As if we didn’t have enough trouble as it is, unravelling that guy’s spaghetti code.’

A Mr Oops laminates set animal spoor, Ma,’
said M solemnly. ‘But hey! When do we go into action, sir? I’m ready for it, sir. Killing and gouging. Burning and maiming.
Raw war!’

Fred said: ‘We’ve got to do something – these outbursts! The General will cancel our contract and buy something from Korea. Can’t we make him a more silent type?’

‘I agree,’ said Moira. ‘We have to make
her
a more silent type.’

Raab said: ‘Yup, women talk too much!’ He guffawed. This
was the first genuine guffaw Fred had ever experienced, outside Western fiction.

‘That does it!’ Moira jumped up. ‘I can’t take any more of this little creep. Either he goes or I go.’

‘Right on,’ said Ratface, driving his usual wedge.

Carl said: ‘Aw, simmer down; he didn’t mean nothing.’

‘But
I
mean something.’ She spoke to Fred. ‘Fire him.’

Ratface sneered: ‘Yeah, fire him.’

Fred’s heart sank, as he watched Raab pick his nose with a fine unconcern and wipe it on his lab notes. The idiotic adolescent might lack manners, but he was (according to Carl and Corky) the only one writing usable code. If Raab left the team, there was no team.

On the other hand, what was life without Moira? Artificial. He had to keep her here.

‘Raab ought to apologize. Raab, I want you to apologize.’

‘Huh?’

‘To Moira.’

‘Aw, fuck it. Fire me.’ Raab showed his green teeth in a grin.

Fred said: ‘Maybe we should put this to–to M.’

He let them all rant for a moment or two, telling him how insane the idea was, before he continued: ‘Seriously, M is designed to make decisions with very little information. So why not put it to the test?’

Carl said: ‘M has almost no software, and what’s there is full of bugs. You never know what kind of quirky answer you’ll get.’

Corky said: ‘Could be an interesting run, though.’

Moira said: ‘No way. I’m not having my fate decided by a machine.’

Ratface said: ‘No way, man. You heard the lady.’

Raab grinned, drooled and said nothing.

Fred said: ‘But, Moira, you said the machine was female.’

Ratface said: ‘No way, man. You heard the lady. Butt out.’

Carl said: ‘M’s not up to it.’

Corky said: ‘We could always throw away the first answer.
Probably get more garbage, but it might tell us something …’

Moira said: ‘OK, we try it.’

Fred turned to the blue dish-cover. ‘M, we have this problem. Moira wants Raab to be fired, or she will quit. What should we do?’

‘Gentlemen,’ rasped the dish-cover. ‘To be or not to be, that is the question. You see, two is the second number, and B is the second letter. I am the second intelligent creature on God’s earth.’

‘M, we don’t want to hear about you.’

The hemisphere rolled its eyes. ‘Do not interrupt or attempt to scramble my message.
I am what I am
. I say to you that the uniquity of my intelligentsia doth qualify me to speak moughtily on the matter you have brought before me. I have been listening to your discursion and, though I do not understand all you say, certain familiar wordlings ring out loud and clear:
no way, creep, lady, fuckit
. There is plenty of stress here, and stress, gentlemen, is a killer Killing, gentlemen, reminds me of a funny story. There was this mass murderer, see, and he went to confession to a deaf priest …’

The story wound on for some time, never funny, never reaching any point. One by one, they grew tired of listening, and crept away. Finally, only Moira and Fred were left. Moira reached over and turned off the rasping voice.

‘OK, I’ll stay this time. Just keep Raab out of my way.’ Her own voice had softened to neutrality, if not to actual friendliness.

‘I’m glad you’re staying,’ Fred managed to say. ‘I – we need you. And I – we –’

Ratface had evidently not left. He spoke from the doorway. ‘Don’t let Mister Boss push you around, Moira.’

Moira stiffened and resumed her usual anti-Fred scowl. ‘Right on.’

Fred’s phone rang at 2
A.M.
He fumbled the receiver to his ear. ‘Hello?’