Prophet Margin (9 page)

He was one hundred per cent wrong.

Kid Knee slouched in a front row seat and took a deep breath, resisting the urge to reach for the metal shape nestled against his hip. He must be strong.

The studio was a mess. Scaffold joists tangled in an emaciated mess behind the seats, chains hanging like jellyfish fronds from rigging gantries high above. Camera turrets slumped devoid of power, microphone drones poised against magnetic surfaces and the frail set beyond the stage was now so much ash. The lectern from which Koszov had delivered his speech was blackened across its forward face, shrapnel peppering its surface, and the aquarium that had risen from the floor stood shattered, broken glass littering its base. Even the yellow police tape threaded with a complete lack of geometry around the place couldn't cheer it up. There was too much dried blood for that.

Most of the auditorium was flattened, breached in a concave depression that had ripped apart concentric circles of seats.

"Bomb went off up there," said Johnny, unnecessarily.

Kid Knee rolled his eyes.

Alpha, on the other side of the auditorium, picked his way thoughtfully through the tangled mess. The Kid watched him for a moment, considering for the fiftieth time how daft it was for a man routinely in combat to wear such brightly coloured clothes. He dimly suspected some kind of brand sponsorship, but decided not to say anything. Alpha had been unnecessarily snippy since the whole episode with the rental car and the overhanging cliff.

He sighed again, bored.

"What are we doing here?" he griped, hand creeping unchecked towards the holster on his waist.

"Just looking," Alpha said. "You never know what might show up."

"The police have searched the place already," he grunted. "Didn't find a thing."

"They didn't have my eyes." Sure enough, an ethereal glow lit the spaces beneath Alpha's brows. He gazed around, scanning.

Kid Knee crossed his arms and sulked. "Just rubbing it in, now," he muttered, a little too loud.

Alpha glanced up with a scowl. "Rubbing what in?"

He sulked even harder. "Nothing. Doesn't matter." His hand hooked inside his waistband, creeping towards its prize.

Alpha wasn't about to let it go. "No, come on. Something's been bugging you since the Doghouse."

"Doesn't matter, I just-"

"It does matter. You got a face like thunder."

"You're doing it again!" He fought back angry tears, misery bubbling up.

Alpha looked bewildered. "Kid, what is wrong with you?"

"My face! You're making fun!"

"What? No I'm n-"

"It's him! The scientist! What he said!"

Alpha looked towards the lectern. "Koszov? What did he say?"

"You know what! On the video! 'Biologically Non Viable', that's what he called it!"

"Now hang on a mi-"

"He said... he said that if you want to judge how successful a mutation is, right, you got to look at how it affects a... 'a specimen's ability to pursue life goals'. Right?"

"Well, yes..."

"Yes! See? It's all right for you! You do that thing with the eyes. 'Oooh, look at me, I can see into your sssooouuull. I can plaaaaay with your miiiiiiind' Bastard!"

"Kid, this isn't the ti-"

"What good is being able to see out of my snecking leg? What sort of life-snecking-goal would that let me pursue, huh?"

His fingers dug beneath the leather covering, struggling with the buckle. Alpha's eyes widened as he saw what the Kid was planning.

"Kid, wait-"

Too late. The hipflask was emptying its sweet, sweet gigastrength gin down the Kid's shin-throat before he could do a thing about it.

"Idiot," Alpha grunted, helpless.

Four gulps was all it took. Kid Knee felt the glorious pink cotton wool of inebriation snuggling itself around him, protecting him from the miseries of his biologically non-viable existence. He slipped off the chair, tumbled sluggishly onto his arse, then toppled sideways like an overbalanced spinning top. The motorcycle helmet parted company with his shoulders, bounced on the floor and rolled across the studio to clank lightly against the shattered aquarium. Johnny bent to pick it up, shaking his head.

And stopped.

Near the base of the aquarium, nestled behind the pulleys that lifted it from its recess, something caught his eye. In a conventional sense it was all but invisible: a smear of translucent matter encrusted like glue. But in Johnny's eyes, eyes that smouldered with the reflected activity of the entire electromagnetic gamut, it shimmered like a dying glow-worm.

"Organic," he muttered to himself, scraping a layer of the substance into an evidence cartridge and slotting it carefully into a belt pocket.

Kid Knee gargled on his own spit, snoring lightly. Johnny sighed and went to find the dressing rooms.

He stepped beneath the police tape that cordoned-off Koszov's greenroom and glanced around, surprised. His expectations of showbiz tackiness, hybridised in this case by bubbling test tubes and technocrap, made way for a rather boring little room, putting him in mind of a cheap inter-system Votel. There wasn't even a wall-sized portrait of Koszov, or a shelf stacked with gaudy awards.

"Vanity's not what it used to be," he muttered.

"You're not wrong there," said a voice. A cold metal
click
with all the hallmarks of a weapon being cocked followed the statement, like a full stop with attitude issues.

Johnny's blaster was in his hand before his brain had even registered a threat, spinning him around and fingering the trigger stub. It was an instinctive process - from the moment of alarm to the draw, from feathering the locking pin to the discharge itself, roaring like a highly personalised thunderstorm.

Something metallic belched a shower of sparks, rocking backwards like a drunken granny. A brief geyser of shattered metal rattled against the rear wall which is generally the province of interesting fluidic splatters. Johnny, who was already fighting the usual rush of guilt (it was always worse when there was no money involved), sighed in relief. Just a droid.

"Well, that wasn't very friendly," said the voice, dripping indignation, from behind the clouds of oily smoke.

Johnny holstered the weapon, spinning it on his knuckle. "Yeah. Sorry. Thought I heard a gun."

"I was only switching on my minibar unit..."

The smoke cleared enough to reveal the battered droid, its gangling limbs giving it the appearance of an emaciated ape. Sticky battery fluid dribbled from a hole in its chassis.

"You with the police?" the machine rattled, apparently oblivious to its damage.

"Uh, I catch criminals, yeah."

It wobbled uncertainly. "I'd shake your hand, except the right side of my armature isn't responding."

"Sorry."

"Not to worry, sir. That's showbiz!"

Johnny went back to scouring the room, keeping half an eye on the droid. With a blaster charge monkeying with its hardware, the directive leap between "passive/submissive/assistant" and "Crush Puny Humans" wasn't as enormous as one might imagine. "Listen," he said, peering around the drab walls, "what are you doing here?"

"I'm a hospitality facilitator."

"Meaning?"

"Oh, you know. PA responsibilities, makeup, hair, sexual favours. Ha ha, once I even had to perform an act of gro-"

"I get it. You knew Koszov, then?"

"Oh, goodness, yes. Charming man."

"And I'll bet the police asked you all sorts of questions about him?"

"Of course. Your colleagues were very thorough."

"They asked you if you knew where he was, what he was up to, all that stuff?"

"Oh, yes sir. I told them the truth, of course. I haven't the foggiest."

"And then the cops left you switched on?"

The droid tilted its head. "Oh, under normal circumstances they would have deactivated me. Confiscation of evidence, you see. They certainly tried."

"But?"

"But I'm run off a macroreactor. Self sufficient." It gave a small twirl, like the world's weirdest catwalk model.

Johnny gave up on the walls (all of them one hundred per cent solid and devoid of hidden safes, vaults or escape routes) and frowned. "That makes you a - what's it called - CAB?"

"Near enough, sir. Citizen-Class Artificial Being." If it'd been able to puff out its chest, it would have. "Not just some glorified toaster."

"So the studio doesn't own you?"

"Goodness, no, sir. I own me, just like everyone else." It shuffled its feet. "It just so happens I'm paid less."

"And the cops couldn't turn you off without violating your rights?"

"Got it in one, sir."

"Which also means they weren't allowed to read your memories."

"Yes... Sir, if you don't mind me asking, where is this line of questio-"

"And it means you're not programmed with all that Asimov crap? Always be honest, always protect human life, blah, blah..."

"Assy-who, sir?"

"Right. Which means you could have lied to the police."

The droid flexed the light flags above its optics; a rather sinister analogue for narrowing eyelids. "I think I should like to see your police identification," it said. "Sir."

Johnny wasn't listening. "And if you're run off a macroreactor you don't have any batteries."

"What's that got to do with anything? Look, unless you show me some ID I'm calling secu-"

"It's got to do with the fact that there's still battery fluid squirting from that blasterhole."

The droid fell silent. Very slowly, Johnny drew his gun.

"Number four cartridge," he said, making a show of thumbing the selector. "No more cute little holes. This one'll blow you to sneck."

The droid glared back.

"What you hiding in there, citizen?"

No response. Johnny shrugged and primed the gun, thumbing back the hammer.

"Oh well. So long." His finger curled around the trigger stub.

"No! Wait!"

The machine's chest popped open like a car bonnet. Lining the door, a sheath of false battery fluid dribbled from the hole. Its deception thus exposed, the droid dropped the pretence of damage and straightened. It had the decency to look embarrassed.

The chest cavity contained several packages of shimmering black powder, a pile of caplets, a neural anti-stimulator and an optical Trancelight. Downers, downers and more downers.

"Would it be beyond the realms of possibility," Johnny said, sighing, "that our friend Professor Koszov was a little tense?"

"H-he never told me what it was all about."

"And now he's vanished. That's quite a stash to just leave behind."

"I-it's yours! Just don't sh-"

"And now you're giving it away." Johnny stroked his chin. "He's not coming back, then."

"He just told me he was leaving."

"Leaving as in: 'expecting to be dead'?"

"No! He said h-he'd done some business, and, and... and he'd come into some money, and he was going to get away from it all to avoid the, ah, heat."

"Heat?"

The droid shrugged. "He managed to lose a multi-million credit specimen during a televised performance. That sort of thing doesn't do your popularity any favours."

"Where did he go?"

"I really don't kn-"

"Where?"

The droid stared down fifteen inches of high calibre barrel and sagged. It pushed a hand into its chest cavity, shunted aside the relaxants and produced a dogeared holiday brochure.

"Kostadell Zol," it sighed.

Johnny groaned under his breath.

EIGHT

In the beginning, the One True God Boddah created almost everything. Including himself.

He created the universe, the emptiness of the void, the stars, planets and moons and all the geographical gubbins they entailed. He went in for asteroids and meteors. He created, in a casual sort of way, life. He covered planets with creatures, jungles, cities and railways. He put aeroplanes in the sky.

He created spaceships, and noodles, and glass. He created computers. He designed turtles and methripps and badgers.

He filled landfills with litter. He left nasty little hairs in plugholes. He created egg timers. And cutlery.

He created, in fact, pretty much everything there is.

The one thing he didn't create was
time
.

The One True God Boddah was an enormously meticulous being. His decision to create a functional universe was built on an appreciation of aesthetics: he wanted to demonstrate how it would all look, how it would appear in a single frozen instant. Exactly who he was attempting to demonstrate this
to
is beside the point.

Boddah's creation was static. An installation piece of universal proportions. Laws of physics were theorised then frozen, brains were created with neurone packages of memories but never started.

It was a masterpiece of breathtaking complexity, and when the Great God Boddah had finished - at the same instant he had started, naturally - he saw that it was good.

Almost. Something was wrong.

At the instant that Boddah created himself, he made what might be described charitably as a
cockup
. He created an assistant to help him with the more tedious parts of universal genesis. He named his assistant Ogmishlen and, initially, he performed more than capably in the rather dull task he'd been appointed.

But Ogmishlen quickly grew impatient.

He could see the Boddah's wondrous works and wanted to make his own mark. Halfway through designing the capillaries of an Acrotholiian Nbongbong tree, he hit upon the idea that was to change existence forever.

Time. The answer was time.

Slowly at first, but with growing confidence, he bent his intellect towards the creation of causality. He created books filled with accounts of past events. He invented wild stories and made historical documentaries out of them. He created a vast army of helpers shaped like wasps, and dispatched them to plant the neurone patterns of historical knowledge in every sentient being they could. In a sudden burst of inspiration he came up with the idea of evolution, and buried complex fossils in solid rock to support the ludicrous theory.