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IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG. Still spinning with delight at this sudden piece of luck, I headed topside to go home. It was 6 p.m. and I’ve got to tell you, for all the vile weather and its multitude of other weirdnesses, this place sure did turn on some fantastic sunsets. The whole of the west was a great flaming glory, and above and behind me towered immense clouds of sulfuric acid lit up in oranges and pinks – Like a painting (if you know what they are).
As I stood waiting for a taxi I spied a Kirrikibat scuttling up and over the nearest ridge. I vaguely knew that they had some sort of headquarters about five kilometres beyond Crush Central. A sort of huge nest. I briefly wondered what they did in the evenings. Watch movies? Squat around and talk? Play cards? I really didn’t know. My training had been pretty sparse on that sort of information. I largely knew they could survive in the atmosphere of Crush, they were all males, and they were really good at external maintenance work. That was why The Authority had imported them; uncomplaining workers for all the crap jobs.
Like me.
My taxi arrived, purring to a stop outside 'Kirrikabatic Maintenance Unit 1', Crush Central Authority (Medical). I pushed myself through the force field in the taxi’s doorway and took a seat. My breather sensed the change and automatically collapsed its own force-field – a dome of atmospheric separation capable of forced osmotic exchange. (Ask the Network if you want to know how they work.) That left me with just the hardware – a hefty padded shoulder-ring. It looked like one of those ancient sci-fi costumes from way back on First-Earth. I eased it off and hung it on my knee, absent-mindedly reading the label. Again.
OSMOTIC HOOD-FIELD GENERATOR.
FOR EQUAL-PRESSURE ATMOSPHERES ONLY.
CYBERFACTURED BY MATTEL INTERSELLAR.
I still smelled of chitin rot but I didn’t do anything stupid like open the window for a bit of fresh air. The natural breezes of Crush are full of the sweet scent of volcanic vents and the rain is as bad as lemon juice. Oh, and there’s not enough oxygen and the carbon dioxide is way too high, and about 12% nitrous oxide too, but hey, why get fussy over details when you're dying horribly?
My heart went out to those poor Kirrikibati out there in the rain as I headed home in comfort. In some ways they were just like me, keeping the whole place running so the boffins could poke things into the orifices of “the Biggest Creature in the Galaxy!” as the Network always put it. (You’ll get to meet Her soon enough, and her orifices. Won’t bore you now.)
But I knew things were far worse for my insectoid clients. Their chitin, so tough and long-lasting back on their home planet, didn’t do half as well in the corrosive Crush air. It fractured into hundreds of sticky patches that had to be ‘surgically’ removed. And guess who got to do the job? – Us. The Humans. Bum-boys of the Galaxy. You know how it went, we never managed to invent interstellar travel because our boffins were perpetually blinded by the notion that gravity sucked. So we ended up with the B-class planets and the B-class jobs.
Not that I had much time to think this. The moment I got into the taxi Harriet appeared.
“Hello Filmore!” Very sexy. Today she was dressed in a see-through dress made of what appeared to be seaweed, and she floated rather than sat or stood. She flicked at her garment coyly then lifted her big green eyes at me and purred, “Do you like my new dress?”
“Go away,” I said tiredly.
“Oooooo...” she crooned, “sounds like you’ve had a hard day, my darling. What do you need, hmm? A nice massage? A soothing drink? I can book you into a lovely place in the very heart of the Excitement District of Crush Central...”
“Go away.” I said a little more firmly.
“How about some music?” she said quickly, replacing herself with an arena of pumping bimbos in skintight pink leather, bouncing erotically to computer-generated humping music.
I really have to update my preferences, I thought tiredly, this is getting old.
“No, Harriet,” I told her, “I don’t earn very much, as you should know by now.”
There was a peculiar moment while she flickered, then she reappeared wearing a different dress: a little black number to be precise, with diamonds and a purse. Her hair was different to. “You’ve just had a promotion!” she squealed.
I was stunned. “How’d you know?”
She ignored my question, “Let’s celebrate! I’m booking you into the Hilton Inn for champagne, then ...”
“No! No, no, no!”
She pouted and spoke in that little-girl-Marilyn-Monroe voice I’d given her, “I’m only doing my job, Master. After all, you’re the naughty boy who spent all his parent’s credit on V.F. with a certain girl-pet just a few years ago, and then had to sell her to ICONN to pay off his debts...” Cue that coy look; the anime eyes; tilt head to side; now the pleading tone, “And now that certain girl-pet would just like to celebrate my dear Master’s promotion.” <Pout>
I hadn’t given her some of these characteristics, damn it!
“Harriet,” I tried to say in a level and mature tone of voice, “I’m not a boy any more, and this promotion does not represent a huge increase in salary, and if I’m going to celebrate it at all, I think I’ll do it with a real human being. Now go away!”
“Oooo,” she said mockingly but also a little hurt, “who’s getting assertive then?” and she dissolved with an angry flounce.
#
ALRIGHT, I GUESS I’LL have to tell you sooner or later: Harriet is ... she was hundreds of hours of work. She was ... fun, Okay; okay; she was my ‘Kawaii Hostess’ as ICONN liked to put it, or my ‘iFuck’ as the cynics put it. Hey: you'd’ve done it too if you were a horny 14 year old who’d just been fitted with the latest wizz-bang implant and given a bottomless credit account by your over-indulgent parents who thought your new hardware was going to enhance your education (hah!). But the truth is: I spent thousands of credits and hundreds of alleged study hours on endless bouts of virtual ‘CHIK-I’ with Harriet instead. Anyway a huge credit bill and a sudden reduction in my allowance soon dampened my enthusiasm for AOI [‘All-Organ Interface’ if you're one of the 12 people left in the galaxy who doesn’t know.] Unfortunately, by that stage she'd integrated herself throughout my entire network. Every transmission I made, every assignment I handed in, every time I paid for anything, it was hosted by my dear sweet under-dressed Harriet. Then ICONN made an offer my parents didn’t refuse: the debt would be wiped as long as Harriet became ICONN’s.
So now every time I get into a taxi, walk through an airport, buy a drink or check into anything flashier than zero-star, there she is trying to sell me time-shares, medical sterilisers or replicant-ivory doctor’s desk sets. That was the worst of it. No matter how horrible I was to her I could never drive her away. And until ICONN woke up to the fact that she wasn’t selling me enough stuff, Harriet was going to haunt me forever. <Sigh>
[Oh: ICONN = 'Integrated Commercial Opportunities Neuro-Net'. You know that irritatingly cheerful jingle of theirs: “ICONN, YouCONN, WeCONN!” It really needed one extra word: “...WeCONN You!”)
#
LET ME RESUME: AFTER Harriet there was only the whine of the taxi and a typically captivating view of Crush Central coming at me from dead ahead. ‘What did it look like?’ I hear you ask. Think “Functional” .. think “Industrial” .. nah: just think “Ugly!”
But lit as it was by the last gasps of the volcanically enhanced local star, I guess it was rather 'wabi-sabi'. For a minute. The sunset was over and its true hideosity reasserted itself.
My taxi began to twist and turn between the endless rust-streaked pressure-domes. This, for one more night, was my 'home town', and I caught myself getting depressed.
Uh-oh – it was time to dispatch the Thought Brigade: 'Hey, I’ve been promoted: YES!'
(Okay, okay: I’d been promoted from crud-flaker to crud-flaker-with-honours, but it was a step in the right direction; an incremental nudge forwards. Far better than an excremental nudge I always say. And in a way it really was no surprise considering my philosophy... )
Eh, what’s that? You want to know about my philosophy?
Too easy: Think Positive! Visualise yourself surrounded by only the Very Best Things that Life can Offer, and You’ll Actually be Creating Your Own Destiny! No whining to some imaginary god, no pleading for an even break. You’ve gotta Take Charge of Things! You’re the God! Make it Happen by the Power of Your Own Glorious Vision!
That’s Destiny Enhancement in a nutshell. No slogans. No bullshit. Just the most effective strategy for Life, and it was working for me! Thanks to D.E. I was heading to the top, leap-frogging over those other plodders – sorry; flakers, who’d been slaving away in the clinic before I’d even arrived. Yep, I was one giant leap closer to my goal of running my own specialty clinic on Formaldehyde Five – the richest medical district in the Galaxy.
Come to think of it – I did feel like celebrating, but I’d been so busy working and studying that I hadn’t made a single friend in this god-forsaken dump. I mean, it wasn’t easy. There was this bar scene going on and you really had to know the code ... Okay, okay, let the truth be known; I was shy. Socially inept. Too many hundreds of hours locked away in my room with Harriet the Spunk and not enough actual hands-on experience, so to speak. You know; with actual girls. (Sorry; women.)
My taxi swung around a particularly ugly pile of warts (the Hilton Inn) and joined the airport traffic stream.
Then Pow, I saw her!
Riding in a different taxi right beside me was this stunningly beautiful woman! She sat very still, almost rigid. Her hair was jet black, very crisp, very sharp. Her face was white, pure perfect white, with only the most subtle colour in her lips. I knew a lot about skin treatments and I found myself wondering, in some isolated part of my brain, whether she had been born with Skin-Tone; genetically altered skin cells that could mimic anything, or had she had it done later? One of the cheaper Chameleon-Types? Or that nasty illegal version from the Crab Nebulla (you know, the one that eventually reverts to its original cell-type – chicken skin)? Or was it just ordinary old make-up? Hey man, who cared? I was in love!
Okay, calmly and sensibly now, I wasn’t in love. I was just spellbound.
Then her taxi swung away on a different track.
“Driver!” I screamed, “Follow that car!” I had my eyes fixed on it intently, enough to trigger my implant and transmit the fix to the taxi’s computer.
“You are not authorised to order a vehicular pursuit,” the taxi answered dryly, “But you may apply for permission from any Crush Authority NeuroPort.”
Despite this, my taxi had already turned. It was following her! Then I found out why. A different voice took over, this time coming from a scratchy speaker hidden somewhere behind my head, “We follow, you pay,” it said.
I twisted around. There was no one there of course. “How much?” I answered quickly.
“Twenty creds a sec.” I must have slumped or shook my head or something. The voice spoke only once more, “Whatever, Buddy.”
My taxi slowed down. Maybe they were giving me one final chance to change my mind, but I wasn’t going to. I couldn’t. Not at that price! Not on my salary! I shook my head once more. My taxi veered away and resumed its previous heading.
Holy crap that had creeped me out – that someone had been watching me or listening in or however they did it. Creeped me out big-time. I thought things on Crush were pretty well free of corruption, thanks to The Authority.
The Authority was great! (My employers.) Best org ever!
#
A FEW MINUTES LATER I was standing on the wet pavement outside ‘The Rabbit’s Warren’. (Nice name. Who thinks of these things?) I went in through the force-field doorway and took the stairs down five levels. Elevators cost extra. I then proceeded along the green tunnel to the yellow, turned left and followed it to the beige. They were just tubes cut through rock, rigged with dripping pipes and ducting. Here and there, where the peculiar rock structure allowed it, they had cut rooms off the sides. Mine was Beige-42. This was “Industrial”, not “Hilton.” (And not “Industrial-chic” either!) A cheap hotel, but not the cheapest.
I showered and changed, then spent a while contemplating my next move. Should I go blow a few hundred creds on a bit of a leer-up, or should I be a sensible little wombat?
First; family. I picked up my Foto: a shot of me and big sis Gerta, plus Mum and Dad all standing proudly out in front of the family empire: Bagel Plumbing & Hygiene. I was seven at the time. Now my folks were billionaires. I watched as we all grinned and did thumbs-up to the camera, then again, and again. If I tilted it, we did different things: goofed around: sat formally (or in my case picked my nose).
I eye-marked the sensor and changed the image: Me and big sis again, this time seated in front of dad’s grand folly, that antique piano. Five million credits just to prove his children really did have absolutely no musical talent. It wasn’t in the genetics they bought. Hey-ho.
I held the frame square in front of me, fingered the ‘record’ control and said as quickly as possible, “Mum, Dad, good news! I got a promotion! Graduation and lecturer’s job in six months! I’m on my way up! Love y’all!”
Off. The screen winked; STANDARD: C$99, EXPRESS: C$299.
I eyed-balled ‘STANDARD’, then ‘SEND’. It winked, SENDING ...SENT.
Well, that was the news gone out. Now what about a night in town? Where was my philosophy when I need it? 'Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained' and all that? Took a deep breath; 'feel the fear and do it anyway...' etc. I strode out the door. It snicked shut behind me. Still I hesitated. The thought of celebrating alone was almost crippling me. So I turned resolutely to the left and forced myself to go down to the Recreation Zone.
That sounds pretty fancy, doesn’t it? Think again. Think of a cheap plastoid bar-room with a sticky carpet. There’s a big flickering 3-Deo cube in one corner, a couple of virtual pool tables in the other, and one of those old ‘Sports Thrill’ arenas filling the whole far end of the room bearing a hand-scribbled sign saying ‘Out Of Odour’.
As I may have already hinted, hanging out in the rec-room was not normally my kind of scene, but after ten and a half weeks of loneliness, I was willing to try anything. ... No, no I was not! This sucked. It was dismal, and it stank. I’m worth more than this!
I backed out and re-thought my whole approach. Why take the shitty I’m-not-good-enough-budget option? I was going up in the world, wasn’t I? I deserved some class, didn’t I?
I turned around, walked out, took an elevator to the surface, walked a couple of blocks and strode into the fanciest place in town. Like Bam! Hoo-yeah! Go me!
Then I damn-near turned around and fled immediately, because she was there: that woman in the taxi. Holy WOW; now that was Enhanced Destiny at work!
But I still wanted to run.
#
LOOK, I HAVE TO CONFESS: I was actually afraid of the real thing. Women, I mean. Following her in a taxi was one thing, kind of like one of those driving games, but now... Scary!
She was sitting up at the bar, her back to me, and seemed to be strangely busy with something in front of her. But it was definitely her! That same crisp hair, and from my rear angle a glimpse of her perfectly whitened cheek. But the clothes were different. Gone was the somber green travel suit. Now she wore an elaborate garment: a veritable confection of convoluted silk, colour and pattern. As I forced myself closer I noted that the main motif was one of dragons; not one of the xeno-species but those old-fashioned romanticized dragons from pre-space days. What was the style? I dredged my memories from school history a decade or so earlier. Flapper era? Ancient Greece? Or was it one of those old Asiatic cultures where my mother’s ancestors had come from? I never paid enough attention to history.
And speaking of history, if I didn’t act fast my chances with this babe would be history too. I was the first human male in the joint, but that wasn’t going to last. So I forced myself forwards another two steps, finally realizing what she was doing. She was actually playing the music I could hear dripping down from the ceiling speakers. It was piano music, but so filtered and sugared up that it was barely recognizable as such. She was using a virtual keyboard which shouldn’t have, but did, ruin the quality by another ten percent. And I, out of billions, actually knew what real piano music should have sounded like.
By now my heart was thudding and my palms were almost dripping with sweat. I’d rather do an open heart sim-op than this. Taking a final deep breath I headed right up to the bar. She shot me a startled glance, as though she was overly sensitive to sudden movements.
Her eyes were a deep purple colour.
Okay, it had just been a reflex action on her part but my hopes spiked right up, as did my heartbeat. At the same moment the bar robot flicked a drink down the bar to some hunkering alien blob beyond her and her music gained an extra arpeggio as the glass slid sideways across the light-sensitive ‘keys’. She growled and kept playing. While she was thus distracted, I slid onto the stool to her left.
“Hi,” I said as lightly and cheerfully as I could, “could you play me some Elvis?” (Another confession: I love classical music.)
With a grunt she began straight into ‘Love Me Tender, Love Me True’, her husky voice just loud enough for me to hear. Suddenly I regretted it. My eyes filled with tears as I recalled times and places long ago and far away, times of real air and healthy smells, when I was nine years old and Dad had just bought the piano and we used to have real musicians in at great expense to play at the dinner parties he was always throwing for his clients.
That one flash of memory managed to outshine the entire eleven weeks I had already spent in this miserable dump, not to mention five years of medical school before that. I hardly noticed my implant making that little cash-register noise to tell me I’d just spent nine credits by ordering the song. Ouch! This joint was expensive! Oh and there was Harriet, in miniature, giving me a big thumbs-up in my peripheral vision. Nice touch.
It was Mum who had pushed me into medicine, paying the millions of credits it took per year to keep me at school. Sure, it was second best to being a plumber but my big sister got that plum. Now here I was nine years later, making way less money than Gerta, peeling crud off giant insects on the weirdest planet in the universe.
But I needed those Field Points or No Graduation!
But I’d just been promoted! YES! I was getting off this rock sooner than I’d hoped.
“Hey barman!” I called to the robot, “Make me a Lime Crusher.” (Hey, I wasn’t into that macho beer thing. I was trying for ‘hipster’.) The robot poured the drink with a series of pre-programmed flourishes and flicked it to me. I’d never seen a robot so old, but in this backwater it was not unusual to see such antiques still at work. Ka-ching went that cash-register again.
“So . . . what are you doing later?” I bravely asked her.
No reply. Well, she was working. I guess I’m not that talkative in the middle of peeling a Kirrikibat. I waited for the song to finish. She was taking a long time on it.
“Love Me Tender, Love Me True... All my dreams fulfill... Oh my darling, I love you, and I always will...” Oh God, how I wished for exactly that right then!
“Drink?” I asked her as she finished.
“Thanks.” Her fingers dabbled on, producing unrecognisable pap. Perhaps she had it set to auto and was only faking it. I couldn’t tell. But she had definitely played that Elvis request, definitely! This babe was deep!
“Her usual,” I called to the robot, trying to keep my voice level.
After a few more robotic flourishes another drink skidded along the bar. To me it looked exactly like Kirrikibat slobber. She caught it neatly with one hand and lifted it a few tired centimetres off the bar, turning ever so slightly towards me, “The name’s Sharp. Just ... Sharp.” She kept the tune going with her other hand. Very neat.
<Gulp> “Er, hi. I’m Filmore.”
“So here’s to Tuesday, I guess.”
I locked my stomach tight as she lifted the glass and drank half of it in one swallow. (My job was starting to get to me, okay?)
I drank too, then quickly tried to think of something intelligent to say. “So, um, Sharp, how come you play? I mean, it’s an unusual occupation.”
“I trained.” she replied with a hint of bitterness, gazing into her half-empty glass. Her voice took on a hint of anger, “I could have been anything you know, anything. I was the one with the brains!” Then just as suddenly the outburst was over. She sighed heavily and seemed to slide quietly back into her bitter sadness again.
“I just wanted to be a plumber,” she whispered.
“Hey – my Dad’s a plumber! So’s my sister!”
She stirred, lifted her chin and turned to actually look at me fully for the first time. Her eyebrows went up. “So what're you doing here, pretty-boy?”
Trying not to fall off my stool under the scary power of her gaze, I replied smoothly, “Well, actually I’m in medical; getting up my field credits. In six months I’m out of here!” (Not entirely true, as you know, but it was a good line all the same.)
She didn’t seem impressed. Her mysterious dark purple eyes dropped back to watch her fingers on the keys. It was a fairly good projector, I thought distractedly. Full mechanical effect. Her fingers actually stopped at the bottom of each key-stroke, not quite touching the top of the bar. All this coming from a little package about the size of a pocketbook.
“Bully for you,” she said dryly, “And then what?”
“I’ll be opening my own clinic someday, probably on Formaldehyde Five...”
Still not impressed.
“...specialising in eyebrows.”
She actually stopped playing. “Eyebrows?”
“It’s a neglected area. People don’t realise how important it is to have good eyebrows. And I don't mean just a bit of plucking and colouring. I’m talking about a full genetic rebuild! And I’ll do horns as well, wattles, all that sort of thing.”
She quickly resumed playing, dibbling something out that sounded vaguely classical. Suddenly I realised why. The bar manager was watching her.
“Listen, kid,” she said softly, “I gotta work. If you wanna stick around then you’d better help me out. Keep buying. See if we can brighten up this dump, eh?”
“Sure.”
“And order dinner for two. I finish at eleven.”
My heart took off again, both in fear and in anticipation of spending more time with this extraordinary woman. “Eleven?” I said, “That’s early closing for this kind of place.”
“I’m just the pianist. Main show starts at eleven. Some sort of tits and bums thing. Nice, if you get off on threesomes.”
“Three dancers then?” I asked, trying to sound metropolitan.
“Three tits.”
#
WEIRD. SHE WAS SO DRY and cold, and so stunningly perfectly beautiful in a dry cold sort of way, and yet she was so absolutely damn funny too. Maybe she was just amusing herself with me, keeping me handy to fend off all the other jocks, or maybe it was because my parents were plumbers. Maybe she thought I was loaded. A ‘good catch’. I dunno. But I wanted to think it was because she was lonely; that she liked me; and that romance was in the making.
(Guess I really let that idea run away on me a bit, as you’ll learn.)
We went through for dinner at eleven, and by then I’d lost count of how many lime crushers I’d had. They aren’t particularly hi-octane but a dozen or so can have quite a cumulative effect. I was virtually legless as I sat waiting for our order to arrive. I was trying not to think about the fact that my savings account was taking a king-hit.
Actually, I didn’t care anymore. I was pretty ga-ga. Even the fact that Harriet kept appearing to applaud my extravagant purchases didn’t bother me at all.
Sharp sat opposite me, cool and vaguely distant, but at least she hadn’t blown me off as a complete prat. Or else she liked prats. Anyway I was in the middle of a rather one-sided conversation about plumbing.
“...you know I guess it’s not that much different from medicine; they basically use the same organomalgams. Do you know they now have pipes that grow themselves through walls? And they’ve got actual digesting toilets, not those fake ones. They’re redesigned pumps so they beat exactly like a heart...” I let out an almost authentic sigh, “I reckon being a plumber must be one of the coolest things in the universe...” I put on a slightly manic fake laugh, “... all the fun of medicine without anyone ever dying on you!”
Tiredly she smiled, then she started to slowly and methodically pop my bubble.
“But you ended up doing medicine instead. Don’t you hate your sister for that?”
“Eh? No. Why should I?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. I’d hate her. But I guess it was your parents’ decision after all.”
“Ah, well, yeah. There was a downturn, see, so they didn’t quite have the money for me to follow Gerta. But hey, life’s still what you make of it.”
“Is it?” she challenged, her voice hitting that particularly bitter bedrock of hers.
Bang! My favourite subject. I dived right into her trap.
“Well yeah! You’ve gotta make it happen. No good whining to some distant god about your bad luck. No good praying for salvation. Only you can shape the movie that you make. Only you can create your own destiny. That’s the core of my philosophy I guess: you’ve gotta make it happen because the world don’t give no luck to losers!”
She gave me a bemused look, “So you’re really going to make it happen, eh? You’re going to tell the world how it’s done?”
“Already doing it,” I answered smugly, “I think I can say with total confidence that I am already in total control of my destiny! Gotta make it happen, baby!”
“Make what happen? Shit?”
I got mad with her, “Opportunity! Progress! Your Dreams, with a Capital D!”
She looked away bitterly on that last word and I suddenly realized something very important about this lady: she was not just some pretty face. She was not some virtual construct out of a horny teenager’s brain. She had some sort of history, some sort of pain, and, realizing this, I felt myself suddenly flounder.
Fortunately the waiter arrived right then with the cake I’d ordered. He placed it in the centre of the table and removed the lid with a flourish. The fireworks started immediately, a miniature version of the real thing, complete with music, sound effects and even the smell of gunpowder. Sharp jumped back in her seat, glancing hastily around the room as if a hit-squad had just burst in. I even saw her hand reflexively dive towards her hip for a gun she definitely wasn’t carrying. Holy crap! I’d forgotten she was so jumpy.
I smiled at her stupidly, let the show fizzle away, and let the waiter lift off the tiny icing-coloured projector and glide away. I cut her a piece and passed it across. She ignored it and glanced at the tea set. Hastily I poured her tea and passed that as well.
She took up her cup. “Everything’s so expensive here.”
Phew. A change of subject. “Everything’s imported,” I explained, “nothing grows here.”
“They say the atmosphere’s poisonous.”
“Not exactly, although a bit of volcanic stuff still reaches us here, this far from The Edge. Mainly there’s too much C-DiOx, not enough OX.”
“They should plant trees.”
“No, there’s a covenant on the Crush. It’s very highly controlled. They want to study it, not ruin it with some uncontrolled biological invasion.”
“It’s alive, isn’t it? We live on top of a living thing?”
“It’s life, yeah, but not as we know it.”
“So what’s with this ‘Authority’ I keep hearing about?”
“It’s quite unique in the galaxy; this planet is governed by a consortium of universities, all here to study the Crush. Probably the smartest government ever.”
“So, no place for losers, eh?
That took me by surprise. “Ahhh, I guess not.” I answered cautiously.
“So this teaching position you’re getting: that doesn’t sound like it was ever part of your plan. I mean that’s hardly controlling your destiny, is it?”
Whoa! What was with this lady? I tried to apply my befuddled brain to explain my philosophy all over again. “Well, not everything is predictable, see, but it always fits. I mean I’d planned to get off this rock as soon as I could but obviously my Destiny knows best.”
“Your ‘Destiny’ ... which is not like ‘God’, huh?”
“N-no. No. Like, because I’ve been putting out for it, my destiny sort of gets very ... mmm ... responsive. It... it knows what I want, so it can speed up the process. See – as a lecturer here, I’ll be in the perfect position to launch my specialty...”
Suddenly she snapped at me, “What the actual fuck!? Doesn’t medicine have like ethics and stuff? Isn’t there something more important than growing perfect eyebrows? What about saving lives? Healing people? What do you really want to do, in your heart?”
Whoa: confronting! I paused to choose my next words with care. “I want ... I guess... well, to help people. Sure, y’know, like save them, yeah.”
“Save them from what?” she asked dryly, “Their destinies?”
I was speechless. Hadn’t she been listening at all?
She seductively leaned forward, took up the bottle and slopped some more expensive red wine into my glass. “Have some more wine.”
How could any red-blooded human male say no to that? I certainly didn’t.
#
SHE MUST HAVE POURED me into bed somewhere around two. I confess I recall none of the details, but I suspect it went something like this:
ME: “Garr-ul-guk.” [‘Please stay with me and make my life complete!’]
HER: “See ya round, chump.”
Anyway to summarise: I didn’t get lucky.
At least I didn’t remember getting lucky. (And where were all my cozy morals in all this? They’d well and truly gone down the river by then, drowned by a flood of testosterone.)
My alarm went off at the usual time and I blundered off to work as usual, except this time I felt very much like the stuff I would soon be peeling off my clients. In the clinic the first orange light of the day was already blinking. I prepped, lurched into the operating room and hit the door release. A giant slavering insect charged in at me, skin in tatters, etc, etc, and so damn itchy it was ready to bite anything in range. I took one look at it, lifted my mask and promptly tossed last night’s very expensive dinner neatly down the disposal chute.
I was halfway through the peel when someone began tugging at my sleeve. I turned to look. It was one of the other student flakers, Belugia I think her name was. I stared at her dumbly. She was shouting something at me, gesturing towards the prep-room. I apologized to my client and followed her through the door. She ripped off her mask and said, rather huffily I thought, “You’re not rostered in here today, Bagel. What’s going on?”
“I’m not ...?” Then it clicked. “Oh my god! The transfer!”