Organo-Topia (14 page)
Authors: Scott Michael Decker
The hole you dug, the bed you made, the cards you're dealt, the prison you built, the corner you painted yourself into. All the phrases of self-blaming ever invented cascaded through his mind.
She yanked his arms behind him and cuffed him. “Everything slow, Maris. You move too fast, you die. Get to your feet.”
The pistol remained at his neck as she pulled up on the cuffs. He yelped, standing with her, the shoulder strain exacerbated by his recent alley encounter. The hot point of her blasma pistol burned against his neck. The hot point of her breast burned against his back.
The multitude of pithy things he could have said all seemed trite. “You won't get away with this,” was a cliché out of a detective potboiler. “We'd have made a fabulous pair,” was a romance-novel rubber stamp. He decided on irony. “We're goin' dancing again?”
“Move it, jerk face,” Ilsa said, steering him toward the door.
A gurney slid into the room from the outer office, a well-muscled Omale orderly at either end.
“Climb on face down,” she said.
He complied, and they threw a sheet over him, pulling it up to his neck. He tried his trake and got only static. Of course, they'd have a distortion shield handy.
She pocketed the pistol in the front of her smock, looking like any employee in sterile white scrubs. The pistol tip bulged toward him. “One wrong move, you get it.”
“Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just blasma to see me?”
“Jerk off, Maris.”
The four white-coated “staff” escorted the “patient” on the gurney into the corridor, its hum joining the hushed buzz of regular workday activity. They headed to a lift, which the group commandeered to themselves.
They dropped to the basement garage. There, a magnambulance awaited, the emblems emblazoning its sleek sides giving it the air of officialdom. They loaded him in back, Ilsa and one orderly thug staying in back. In the cab, Dagnija Krumins took the passenger side, the other orderly thug driving. They fixed the gurney to the corrugated rubber floor, which extended uninterrupted between cargo and cab, Maris saw, calculating the distance.
“Gag him,” Krumins said from the cab, half-turned toward them.
“I'd rather hear him whine,” Ilsa said.
Maris sensed accord between the two women, their actions thus far coordinated with nary a word, as if they'd been working together awhile. That, or they were intimate. “Whine about what? The way you left me with a heavy heart and a leaky dick?”
Ilsa shot a glance at Dagnija. “I don't have—!” Growling, she positioned herself above him. “Roll him on his side,” she told the bulky orderly. He grinned and rolled Maris. Ilsa sank a right cross to his jaw.
Lightning lanced his brain, and a starry sky threatened to swallow him in darkness. But he found out what he needed to know.
Motion and increasing engine pitch indicated they'd hit a main thoroughfare. He wondered where they were headed. That whole planet of freed Ohumes he'd dismissed days ago as a farfetched fantasy might not be the chimerical legend he'd supposed. “You gonna feed my proto to your stinking pod?”
“And spread your disease?” Ilsa snorted. “We're gonna paint our signs with your proto and make you a poster child. We're gonna perfect our nanochines by experimenting on you. Muceniek was a test run. Once we get the nanochines to spread like a venereal disease, we'll wipe out incubation centers and Brehumes across the galaxy in five years, and then we'll be all that's left to humanity, Organo-humes only. You and your Ihume crèche sibs will die off, and we'll be rid of indenture forever. And then we'll have our Organo-Topia.”
Maris thought back to the secuvids he'd viewed at Sabile Nanobio Research, in which Ilsa had rubbed her feet on the carpet in front of Eduard Sarfas, who'd moments later stepped onto that same carpet. And the foyer to the Ozolin penthouse and the rug that Ilsa had sprayed nanochines on. And the neat, two-inch bore hole administered by Valdi Muceniek. And the ovum collected by Omale Karlen Araj, later delivered to Plavinas Incubation. And the Chow Fung spiced up with a dash of nanochine. And the nanochines that the boy, Edgar, had nearly carried into Plavinas Development. And the vial of nanochines given to the Omale waiter. And the nanochines put in Raihman's coffee by the figure in fedora and trench coat. All experiments in nanochine delivery. And Maris thought of Vitol's fertility spot on the statistical pavement. “It's happening anyway, you fool.”
Ilsa's gaze narrowed.
“He's just jerkin' your chain, Ilsy,” Dagnija said.
The intimacy nauseated him. “You haven't seen the fertility regressions. You'll have your Organo-Topia eventually. Why go this route? Recycling is all you'll get from it. And it won't bring on your paradise any faster.” He knew he couldn't convince her, his only hope to distract her.
She smiled at him, shaking her head. “You suck their pap like everyone else. The Coalition won't acknowledge it. Paradise is nigh, I tell you! Systems are capitulating daily to our control because of resistance like ours.”
No use in arguing with an ideologue. Debate never persuaded fools convinced of their own righteousness. Natural consequences sometimes did that, but only sometimes. “And when you're done with Brehumes and Ihumes, you'll turn your persecution on yourselves. Indenture will be justified. You'll delude yourselves inequality is inevitable. First it'll be the dumb ones, like those Digris crèche-sibs you found so expedient to sacrifice. They didn't need to die, and you know it.”
“Shut up, you jerking fuck!”
“And all those Ihume kids at Plavinas Development. Those crèche kids didn't do anything to you!” Now, he was screaming. “They'll call you Ilsa the Bloody, the recycling queen, and you'll be known only for the mayhem you wrought, not the Ohume you freed! Reviled for all time! That's all you'll—”
“Shut the jerk up!” She pounced on him, straddled the gurney, and unleashed a fusillade.
Maris squirmed side to side, trying a fetal curl, his legs slipping from under the leg strap. He took triple blows to the face, brought both knees up into her butt, and sent her flying over his head. Then he kicked the Omale orderly in the neck with one foot, twisted and lashed with the other foot, catching the jaw. The Omale withered to the floor.
Ilsa crashed into Dagnija, both falling onto the driver, and the magnambulance slewed into oncoming traffic. The cab exploded, inflatables deployed, and the world disintegrated around Maris. The dense cloud of balloons contorted around him, and the vehicle tumbled to a halt.
He wasn't sure if he lost consciousness. Voices and sirens intruded, then motion as someone tried to extract him. They found the catch to release the gurney and hauled him, thankfully upright, from the rear compartment of the smoldering magnambulance.
“Here, let me get those,” a familiar voice said.
“Filip? Dukur, boy, is that you?” Maris didn't recognize his own voice.
“Yeah, Detective. I got a spare bracelet key. Nice collar. What gave them away?”
“That collar's yours, Dukur. Somebody better get you a leash.” Out of cuffs, Maris tottered around the wreckage to the front. Dukur followed him like a dog.
Maris found Ilsa laying half on the hood, nearly slashed in half by the windshield, entrails spilling from a gigantic gash across her abdomen. The three corpses were piled under her, all the bodies having flown forward.
“Mare…” Her gaze was glazing already.
“Ilsy,” he said, cradling her head, cursing clichés. “Really? Was it that jerking important you had to throw away your life? We coulda been happy. What made you do it?”
“Mare…self-deluded asshole,” she whispered. “You'll always be an agent of the oppressor. And you'll never know it…”
“Ilsa,” he pleaded, a sob escaping him, “Ilsa, no…no…”
But she was gone to join that great pool of proto in the heavens.
* * *
Natural consequences sometimes persuaded fools convinced of their own righteousness.
I've been such a fool, Maris thought.
Red-striped cloud wept rain from the dusken sky. Gusts of guilt on the stinging wind sliced through his trenchcoat. Building windows turned disdainful stares upon him. Magnacars whispered whiny, vicious rumors in passing. The haughty skyline humbled him, his pride destroyed, his spirit fallen.
“Tempting, isn't it?” Shoes scuffing rooftop mocked him with laughter.
From the parapet, he looked over his shoulder.
Urzula stood there, wearing slumped shoulders and a shapeless smock. Behind her, outlined in the doorway leading up to the roof crouched the pup reporter Filip Dukur, panting avidly. Professor Bernhard Vitol lurked behind him, filling the stairwell landing.
The ground below lured Maris with relief and redemption.
“Did you see the headlines?” Urzula asked.
It was all over the neuranet. It'd practically foisted itself upon him, injected itself into his brain. They lauded him, but it felt like persecution. They praised him for a lie. What he'd done, he'd done to survive. A hundred thousand Ohumes had been ferreted out of the underground and returned to their indentures, largely due to his work, a dab of salve on the third-degree burn covering eighty percent of his soul. “It's all a jerking lie,” he replied.
“Not all of it,” the Coroner said. “Must have felt that way to Ozolin, too. But even she didn't take the plunge on her own.”
She hadn't let it defeat her, Maris heard. He blinked away his tears and sighed. “Ilsa deserved better.”
“Maybe,” Urzula said. “And just maybe, Maris, she had a moment or two of paradise with you.”
He'd felt he was in paradise, drowning in her love. Whatever else Ilsa might have felt for her female lover, the passion they'd shared was the thick immersion of total abandon, reaching the place in his soul where the universe touched him with all its creative regeneration.
He felt he'd let her down, in some odd, perverted sense. Perhaps it was her betrayal of him that he'd inverted out of survivor guilt. Why am I still here? Why did she die, and not me?
The leap whispered it was better down there. Only the impact would hurt, the wind hissed. More cliché, he thought, and more ways to run from the guilt, the betrayal, the hurt. He hated living the cliché. Better to have loved and the happy crap that followed.
There wasn't any way to run from the hurt. Pile-driving his proto into a puddle and spotting the pavement with his grease wouldn't take the stain from his soul. Redemption didn't sprout from a sidewalk.
“Hey, Maris,” Bernhard called, “how about some fries? Real ones.”
“Yeah? Who's buying?”
“On me, pal.”
He snorted and closed his eyes. “Redemption can't be found in the pavement, can it, Urzula?”
“Not from any height, Maris.”
Detective Maris Peterson glanced one last time at the street beckoning below. “Then there damn well better be some redemption in a serving of fries.”
Scott Michael Decker, MSW, is an author by avocation and a social worker by trade. He is the author of twenty-plus novels in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, dabbling among the sub-genres of space opera, biopunk, spy-fi, and sword and sorcery. His biggest fantasy is wishing he were published. Asked about the MSW after his name, the author is adamant it stands for Masters in Social Work, and not “Municipal Solid Waste,” which he spreads pretty thick as well. His favorite quote goes, “Scott is a social work novelist, who never had time for a life” (apologies to Billy Joel). He lives and dreams happily with his wife near Sacramento, California.
Websites:
http://scotts-writings.site40.net/
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