In Favour of Fools: A Science Fiction Comedy (These Foolish Things Book 1) (2 page)

Interlude - Here be Aliens I

The Angels on a Pinhead Devotion was, in the opinion of most of those subjected to its arbitrary tyrannies, an unusual religion. They didn't believe in a bloke with a beard, or in a self-indulgent afterlife. They weren't concerned about the creation of the universe and all of the delights that it contained, and they didn't feel that they were a chosen people, and that everyone else had got it so wrong. There were no catechisms, or places of worship; no symbols or tattoos, and no great book to guide your every action from birth to the time when your body loses its integrity and you shuffle off this mortal coil.

What they believed in was balance; the yin yang of the cosmos. If that balance could be made perfect, then the Universe would go on forever, and entropy would be defeated.

Not the most ridiculous of the beliefs they could have adopted, when you consider the Offal Eaters of Sart, who believe that their God is a sausage, or perhaps the We Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil and See No Evil Believers of Sirius 5, who remove all these opportunities to perpetrate Evil in a moving ceremony when the child in question approaches maturity. In other circumstances, the APD would have been considered as mostly harmless. But in these particular circumstances, harm was definitely on the cards.

The Stolys (the race that instigated the APD movement) sought to achieve universal balance by working ever so hard to ensure that every good thing that happened was equally balanced by a bad thing.

For instance, if they passed a smiling child, they'd drown a cat. (To be completely accurate, Stoly young don't have the capacity for smiling, and Stoly cat analogues are amphibious – still, I think you see where I’m coming from). In theory, the process should also have been applied the other way. It practice, however, the Stolys are not especially good at doing nice things, so they leave that side of things to others, or to chance.

On its own, this drive for balance would have been a nuisance, but it hardly represented a threat to the happiness of the Universe at large. The Stolys however, ran the Galactic Confederation, and they had a mega credit budget to ensure that no good deed went unpunished.

The late and almost totally ignored Sig-Nal, Professor of Stoly Harmony at the Sirius Pan-Universiad, had his own views on the reason they were such wet blankets on a cosmic scale.

'They don't have proper sex,' he announced, to the eager audience. Then he sat down, confident that his case was made.

A quick look at their breeding process backs up his suggestion.

When a female is ready to breed, she whistles a sort of atonal tune, and spins on her middle leg, casting off her eggs to be carried on the wind. The male then leaps about, trying to spear an egg on the end of his pointy little penis. The successful male is then able to transfer his DNA to the egg and thereby it is fertilized. The egg remains attached to the said penis, extracting nutrition from the dwindling male, until all there is left of the male parent is a little X-shaped bone which is absorbed into the embryonic body and becomes the basis of its coccyx.

Not much in the way of intimacy, dignity or fun in the whole process.

It's hardly any wonder they are such spoilsports.

Chapter 3
- Now I'm hot and then...I wasn't

To say it’s hot out here doesn’t really cover it for me.

A hot day in Hell would feel cool compared to this. My grandmother used to cook her Sunday chicken roast at a lower temperature than this. If I had an egg, I could break it on one of these stones and listen to it sizzle. Ten seconds on each side and my sixteen ounce steak would be done.

Thank goodness I have my mac and hat.

I should say that, when I get the chance, I'm going to shake the hands of the designers of this coat. It has a built in cooling system, powered by the photovoltaic cells in the hat, that allows me to remain uncomfortably warm in these conditions, and not evaporate to nothing. My only gripe is that they didn’t seem to anticipate the temperature of the air I'd be breathing in; it’s hot and it’s drying out my mouth and all of my mucous membranes and I’m afraid to blink in case the dry grit in my eyes cuts grooves across my eyeballs.

Wait a minute; there’s some stuff in this pocket I hadn’t noticed. There’s a scarf, a pair of tinted goggles, and what looks like a pack of mints.

That’s much better. I can see clearly with the goggles on; the scarf is wrapped around the lower half of my face and seems to filter out some of the heat; and these mints are so cool and refreshing.

It’s not yet noon here, so only one sun is up. If I could be bothered, I’d look it up on my wrist-top and give you its name; but it’s just too hot to even think of doing something that complicated. I’m sure my narrative facilitator will provide full details, if he thinks that it is necessary.

In another hour, the other sun will appear, and even this fancy mac will struggle to keep me alive as the combined heat from the double suns of the Kepler-47 system (there you go, I knew he'd put it in - he can't help himself) threatens to agitate the molecules in my bloodstream to a such an extent that it turns to steam. I don’t like my molecules agitated; everyone knows that. Apparently, at this time of the year, the temperature is likely to reach a high point of close to 70 degrees C, or 178F, in the shade; not that there is any. And this is still early Hot Season! I don’t want to be here when it gets really hot.

With a bit of luck, I won’t have to hang around out here for too long. When the police arrive and rush inside the hotel, I’ll be able to go back to the squirtbooth near its grand entrance and get out of here.

No, wait; I can't. I haven't seen Strange leave; he might still be there, waiting to catch me out.

Or he might have gone already.

I can't work out which is more likely, and any moment now there is a very good chance that my brains will start to melt and leak out through my eyes. I can't see that helping the decision making process.

If I can't guess what Strange is doing, I might have to stay out here all day. Sometimes I wish I had greater range of expletives at my fingertips; ‘bother’ doesn’t seem to cover this situation.

I can see the hotel from where I’m standing, though it shimmers in the heat haze. I keep feeling that I’m going to be segued from this scene into an erotic flesh on flesh sequence; no such luck.

Whilst I’m being slowly roasted, I may as well tell you what I’m doing here on Greenhaven. Look at the place and tell me how they came up with a name like that.

It all started on a Monday morning in June. I remember the exact day because it was two years to the day since I'd kissed a woman, and she was called June.

**********

I was waiting for my first coffee of the day and, as usual, I was going to have to wait a bit longer than I felt I deserved. I’m not a hard boss, but I do have some fairly strict rules about timekeeping at work, and Julie ignores them all. If I actually paid her on anything like a regular basis, I’d probably pull her up about it.

For some reason that I'm not privy to, Sam isn't here yet, and he's been hanging around here, doing not very much, for as long as I've had an office. I'm fairly sure that he was hanging around somewhere else with the same level of commitment and activity long before that.

So, I was trying to decide if I should get up and make my own coffee, or take a quick nap on the old brown leather couch that I inherited from my uncle, when there was a gentle knock on the outer door of the office. I know; who knocks these days? And why are they knocking on my door? No-one ever visits me at the office; well, not for years anyway.

There was another knock on the door, and I decided that some response was required on my part; I’m quick like that.

When I opened the door, I found that my visitor was a tall woman, dressed in a smart green two-piece suit, with short, curly blonde hair and an air of sophisticated desolation. She was probably on the low side of middle age, and she had certainly had some work done.

I must have held the door open without moving for longer than was polite, because she stepped forward until she was very close to me and whispered, ’can I come in?’ Her accent could have been American, or Welsh; I’m not good with accents.

Her voice was low and a little hoarse; from crying or from smoking; I couldn’t tell.

‘Of course,’ I answered; a little too jolly perhaps.

I allowed her to walk first into my office, and I didn’t check out her rear; I promise.

When we were both seated, on either side of my scruffy scratched desk, she leant forward and undid the single button on her suit jacket. She was wearing a plain, light yellow blouse; it went well with the colour of her suit, but it struggled to contain her figure.

Now, I‘m going to make a confession here. I’m an adult male in my mid-thirties. I have a lot of life experience, and I’ve been around; ask anyone. Despite that, whenever I meet an attractive woman for the first time, I may as well be a fourteen-year old boy again. I can’t help it; it’s the breasts. Women have breasts, and you can forget your great wonders of the world, your Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or Temple of Diane, or your Phoenix. They all pale into insignificance compared to a woman’s breast; and she had two of them!

There, now I’ve got that out of my system, I can continue with my story.

‘What can I do for you?’ I asked, eventually.

‘You can look at my face, for a start,’ was the somewhat icy reply.

I looked up at her face, and tried a smile. It didn’t get much in the way of a response, so I let it slip away.

‘Sorry about that. What can I do for you?’

She sighed. ‘I’d like you to find my husband. Well, my ex-husband, I should say. He’s gone missing, and he owes me money.’

Taking great care not to let my attention drop below her chin, I opened my wrist-top.

‘Do you mind if I take some details down? I’ll record it if that’s OK.’

She nodded, then, with her cold blue eyes staring at me, she quite deliberately chewed her bottom lip.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Just the usual.’

She told me all the usual. His name was Ben Masters, and she hadn’t seen or heard from him for two weeks, which wasn’t a problem in itself; they were divorced after all. But he hadn’t paid her this month’s alimony; and that was a problem. She zipped a photo to my wrist-top, along with all of his personal details.

‘Two metres tall, and one hundred and twenty kilos. He’s a big boy, isn’t he? What did you feed him on?’

‘He wasn’t that heavy before he went to prison. I looked after him, made sure he ate the right things.‘

‘What did he go away for?’

‘He robbed a bank, and someone got shot.’

‘So, he’s not your average citizen then?’

‘Nothing is average about my Ben.’

‘That’s very nice for you, I’m sure. When did you last see him, and can you give me details on his friends and associates?’

‘We had a meal, two weeks ago, at Mellies. You don’t want to get involved with his friends and associates. They’re not nice people.’

I shrugged and almost said, ‘I can look after myself,’ but I didn’t, because experience tells me that I can’t.

‘OK, Mrs. Masters. You still use your married name? I think I’ve got all I need for now. I’ve zipped over my charge details, so, if you could just transfer the deposit to my account, then I’ll get right on to it.’

More than a little relieved when my account flagged up the receipt of the much needed funds, I smiled at her and stood up.

‘How did you hear about me?’ I asked, as I held my hand out for a business-like shake.

‘I looked you up. Chandler Investigations; why wouldn’t I pick you?’

She paused for a long moment before she finally accepted my hand and gave it the slightest of squeezes.

Then she was gone and all that was left was the scent of her cheap perfume.

Chapter 4
- Then the missing fat guy

When the fragrant ex Mrs. Masters had gone, I switched on my desktop and began to work my magic. My computer is the best that the small amount of money available to me could buy: the website I used to purchase it actually queried my request for a physical, non-virtual keyboard. In many ways I’m quite old fashioned, and don’t get me started on squirtbooths, or modern atonal music, or TV, or Hollywood comedies.

Before I’d got properly started on my new assignment, the outer office door swung open and Sam scurried in. He doesn’t walk like most people; he dashes from place to place, with tiny steps, as if he hasn’t got the time to take strides. Given that, in all the time I’ve known him, he’s never worked or studied, or travelled, or had any sort of responsibilities, you’d think he’d be able to take a more relaxed attitude to the minutiae of daily life, but it seems he feels compelled to rush to his next opportunity to do absolutely nothing.

He didn’t stop to say hello or how are things going as he trotted past my desk.

‘What’s up?’ I called as he disappeared into my bathroom.

‘I’m going to have a bit of a sit in here,’ he called back; at least that’s what I thought he said.

I know a true friend would have followed him into the bathroom to make sure he was OK, but you only do that sort of thing with Sam once, so I just stood at the thankfully closed door.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Have you eaten something that disagreed with you?’

‘I’m not taking a dump. I’m sat on your floor.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m hiding. There’s no electrical stuff in here, is there?’

‘Just the lights. Who are you hiding from?’

‘The AI’s. I think they’re watching me.’

‘They watch everyone. It’s sort of what they do.’

‘No, they’re watching me, personally; specially.’

‘What’s special about you?’

He grunted; it could have been a laugh, or he could have actually been on the toilet.

‘I know stuff.’

I shook my head and went back to my desk. Sam knows stuff the way religious zealots know that God wants to be their best friend.

Back to the absent Mr. Masters.

Within minutes, I’ve got all of his social media sites up and start building a timeline. Whilst I’m working on that, I set a couple of programmes running to data mine the accounts of his electronic ‘friends’. After an hour or so, I’ve got a fairly good picture of who Ben Masters is. Or at least, of his web persona. It’s not always wise to mix the two.

He was forty-two, with only a basic education and a remarkably truncated work life. His closest ‘friends’ all had similar backgrounds, so it was easy to get a handle on his criminal gang. I didn’t have access to police files, but public records, and their own private, indiscreet social media posts gave a pretty clear picture.

With his timeline established, I used one of my trickier, less than legal programmes to download data from the surveillance cameras that bedeck our moistened city in ever increasing quantities. As I mentioned, this is not strictly speaking legal. I’m sure that one or other of the governing AI’s knows what I’m doing, but, as long as I am careful and there is no ‘against’ that can be attributed to my actions, I’m usually left alone.

Knowing where he lives and hangs out, and what he’s been up to, it was fairly easy with today’s sophisticated face recognition software to trace his last sightings. I must admit that I groaned a little when I saw him exiting one of the squirtbooths that ringed the publicly accessible concourse of Manchester’s Interplanetary Squirtport.

So that was that. He’d left the planet and she didn’t have a chance in hell of getting any money off him. End of job; here’s my report and final bill; thank you very much and goodnight.

That’s what I should have done. There was nothing to be gained from digging any deeper, and I pride myself on being straight with my clients and not bumping up their bills unnecessarily; no, I do; honestly.

Still, it was a quiet day, and there was still no sign of Julie, so I decided to make my own coffee and have a look to see if I could track where he’d come from. It wasn’t just boredom, however. My interest was piqued by the fact that, before he turned up at the Squirtport, he hadn’t been seen for three days.

If I‘d had more work, or if Julie had been there to distract me and make me coffee, or if Sam had come out of the bathroom, I wouldn’t have ended up with half-melted boots.