JO-JO RASTEROVICH

 

Jo-Jo Rasterovich was a Cerulean, a blue-planet kid. At least, that was how he thought of himself. The truth was (and Jo-Jo had some difficulty with that concept) that his family hadn’t lived on that world, in that constellation, for a thousand years. Yet something deep in his often-rejuvenated psyche stayed immovably Cerulean. He even still thought of the blue planet as ‘Earth’ although most of the Orion Sentients had never heard the name.

Sole Entity had entered Jo-Jo’s life just in time to save him from a rather unpleasant permanent biological death (or perhaps Sole had caused the death, in which case the point was moot). Adrift on the edge of an uninhabited system due to some dodgy navigational software that he had purchased cheaply from the Spiral Arms swap-meet in Vega and which had bugged his propulsion start-up, Jo-Jo had strayed into an uncharted gas tube.

Instead of low-density X-rays, the space anomaly was crammed with high-density microwaves. The last thing Jo-Jo remembered, as life support faded, was the propulsion bay glowing blue as he tried uselessly to cold-start his ship.

When he regained consciousness the propulsion system was back on line and breathable air flowed sweetly. One part of him felt unhappily as if it had just been tipped out of a freeze-dried sachet and mixed with ice cubes into a lumpy consistency. Another part of him suggested running diagnostics to see what had caused the problem.

Jo-Jo staggered to his bridge-cum-bedroom and lit up a fat smoke of chang-lo hemp. Something BIG had happened. Something WEIRD. Jo-Jo hadn’t run a full diagnostic check since he’d earned his licence. Even then he’d failed to do it properly and had had to bribe the astrogator to pass him.

His mind felt like it had been crapped on, rolled in and dissected.

He toked deeply, hoping that the killer cannabis might reglue things but all it did was activate the smoke alarms. In among the warm fog of the hemp and the unnatural patterns of his altered thinking, he felt a presence enter his mind.

<you’m in distress, prevent’m decay you. chose’m inhabit mind you. problem without’m alter you. >

Jo-Jo inhaled so deeply that the butt burned his lips. There’s nothing out there, he told himself sternly, but a big fat bundle of microwave radiation. Oh, and those leech-shaped things. But I imagined them. He fumbled in his utilities bag for a second scoob and sucked noisily until he passed out.

Later, when the narcotic hangover cleared, his mind had two new and persistent voices in it. Jo-Jo was left to confront the fact that he’d discovered another type of life (or it had discovered him, because for all intents and purposes it had killed him and then resurrected him: no sentient species he knew of had the ability to do that) which had altered his mind, and that perhaps he should make the most of it.

So Jo-Jo set about making a living off the story that he’d discovered Sole Entity, a benevolent type of god-thing that had strayed in from the fathomless stretched space between galaxies.

He paid no attention to the nagging feeling that he had forgotten something really important, or the sneaking notion that Sole Entity was not in fact benign but rather more like a cosmic-sized feline toying with a blind, legless lizard.

The story, as it stood, earned him enough lucre to purchase a biozoon from a black-market slaver and have it luxuriously appointed in a manner suitable for a wealthy space-nomad bachelor. He dubbed the biocraft Salacious II and planned to live out the rest of his life travelling through lesser-known sections of the galaxy.

In general Jo-Jo liked other sentients well enough, particularly humanesques, as long as he didn’t have to spend too much time with them. He had a particular dislike for some of the slug species on Lucas’s World and found he had a severe allergy to korm odours.

But mostly he preferred his own company.

He washed infrequently, swore aloud when he liked, and kept a substantial array of bizarre recreational flesh- simulations for which no one could reprimand him. His relationship with the hottest sexpot sims of Galaxy Productions was as close to perfect as Jo-Jo could imagine.

In short: he didn’t want a wife.

His closest, most terrifying scrape with a real woman (which had rather set the seal on his bachelorhood) had been on the planet of Ikar. He’d been delivering a Sole recount to a theatrette bulging with Studium smarts. Afterwards, a woman with several degrees, more than her fair share of chins and equally shivery thighs (which he could see through the strips of material that wound around her legs like snakes) asked him to stay behind for a drink. The faint repulsion he felt at her physical appearance was well offset by the swollen credit voucher she waved under his nose.

They drank and caroused vociferously, until Jo-Jo found himself behind rows hess and thess of the theatrette with his face trapped between the woman’s thighs.

‘Can’t breathe,’ he snuffled.

‘I’m assuming that you are having trouble breathing,’ she warbled. ‘I am told that it is the most erotic movement in my repertoire. I can clench for indefinite periods of time given the right mood. And you, God-discoverer, have put me in the mood.’

‘Let go,’ gasped Jo-Jo.

But the smart didn’t seem to hear him.

‘I don’t mean to be forward,’ she continued, ‘but you could be the recipient of other such delights for a small favour. I could be persuaded to perform in a number of ways, including my formidable chin massage—my chins massage you, ha! ha!—in return for an introduction to God.’

Chagrin was too insipid a word to describe how that made Jo-Jo feel. The woman was bribing him with sexual suffocation. Furious and desperate, he resorted to a move told to him by a court-martialled special-forces hermaphrodite on Bosun.

He bit her pubis with all musterable ferocity.

As the smart collapsed in pain, her legs fell apart.

Jo-Jo struggled to his knees and wiped his damp face on the plush theatrette seats. Then he climbed to his feet and ran like fuck.

For months afterwards he had nightmares, which only abated if he drank vodka chasers and played Malconfunk arias after his evening bong.

 

* * *

 

Despite the chin and thigh affair, Jo-Jo’s Sole-wealth bought him another hundred years of rejuve, which fitted in nicely with his desire to continue exploring. As long as he returned periodically to a civilised world with the necessary technology to do a disease appraisal, everything in Jo-Jo’s life was, to use a Cerulean term, hunky-dory.

Then Sole mind-spooked him again.

<observe’m>

Jo-Jo took some time to decide that the mind-voice and its pretentiously commanding greeting was real—so to speak. In fact he ignored it until his head reverberated like a tuning fork.

<OBSERVE>

<Sole?>

With a flash of quick thinking Jo-Jo ordered his shipcom to ‘record and convert patterns to something audible’. The ‘record’ bit was actually redundant. As a precaution against getting so stoned that he couldn’t perform basic ship functions, he’d instructed Salacious II to monitor constantly his neural activity. When his brain turned to mush it administered him a fluid flush and a vitamin boost.

The ‘audible’, though, was a better signpost to Jo-Jo’s personality than a Rorschach test. See, Jo-Jo was a person who liked to verbally restate things. If a problem was outside his ability to solve (as things often were), he would find inumerable different ways to say, Crap, that’s hard, or Fungul, who but a teranu brain-master would know that?

Restating gave him comfort.

He also liked to hear things out loud. Somehow it made the whole process of mind-talk with an unfathomable energy entity less wholly bizarre.

The audible came through precisely 1.263 seconds after he heard it in his head, causing a slight echo effect. Jo-Jo eyeballed the ship’s filmdisplay as if he could look at the Entity.

‘You just don’t get the “person” thing, do you? I have a name. J-O J-O RAS-TER-O-VI-CH.’

<return’m>—Sole’s voice, generated through Salacious II’s decoder and replayed, lacked inflexions. Corresponding fractals of the thought energy, mutated across the bridge’s main filmdis like algae, <return’m Belle-Monde/present’m ménage lounge>

Jo-Jo spent a moment recalling the ménage lounge. His flawless mind-catalogue of bars and clubs was a source of some pride to him. Uncomfortable chairs, gaudy urinal. Distinguishing features: uuli hum and exclusive academic clientele.

‘But I have business on one of the teranu worlds,’ he protested.

Actually he planned to attend a symposium on how to enlarge the pleasure centre in the humanesque male cerebrum—but he didn’t think he needed to be precise.

Although he wasn’t entirely sure that Sole couldn’t read his mind as well as talk in it.

<change’m plans>

‘Er... no,’ he said out loud and with feeling. ‘Fuck off.’

The long silence that followed suggested that Sole had taken his advice and Jo-Jo climbed into his bridge hammock with a self-satisfied grin. ‘That showed it,’ said the master of restatement.

Not long after, however, a peculiar sensation began to seep through him. It started in his toes and fingers and crept upwards along his body until it converged in his head. His mind fell into thin slivers as though someone had carved through his skull with a large egg slicer.

Only, in Jo-Jo’s case, the egg was soft and made a God-awful mess.