Scum of the Universe Read online

  Melchor gave a placating hand movement. The nearby children seemed to have recovered a little by this point, and Tuesday could hear a bit of baby talk and a laugh or two from beneath the helmets.

  “Ms Humple, I am here on behalf of the justice department on relevant business. Mister Tuesday,” Melchor indicated Tuesday superfluously, “needs to undergo a few uploads in order to make it possible to resolve his trial.”

  “I only do the basic upload suite here, sir. Anything more specialised or advanced happens elsewhere in this complex. I’m sure directory assistance can direct you with much more accuracy.”

  “Mister Tuesday only requires the basic upload suite,” Melchor said softly.

  Ms Humple glared at Melchor like he was trying to be funny, then gave Tuesday an equally hostile look as though he was in on the joke.

  “You know we never provide AutoEducation to off-worlders.” Ms Humple snapped.

  “He’s not an off-worlder.”

  It took a moment for that mistrust to disappear, but then Ms Humple’s face immediately collapsed into total pity. It was as though she’d just been told the intimate details of one of the worst atrocities of all time. She seemed lost for words, but eventually recovered.

  “Take a seat,” she said simply, her voice a bit shaky. “I'll do what I can. But you know that if they don't get it done soon enough-”

  “I am aware.” Melchor interrupted, giving Ms Humple a look. “All I ask is that you try.”

  *

  Tuesday was sure that the lounger wouldn't fit him, but the foam-and-leather slab automatically extended itself with a soft whirr before he laid down. Gripping the armrest, unsure how this would feel, Tuesday managed to sit still as the full-face helmet descended from his scalp to his Adam’s apple. His head was totally hidden.

  Tuesday winced as Mister Drizzle himself appeared before his eyes with a burst of childish cartoon music. The popular Disney character began to dance about while singing about the joys of a top-rate education. Although he could clearly hear the other children laughing and chanting along with what must have been a familiar song-and-dance number, Tuesday resisted the urge to bite off his own tongue. He hated musicals.

  “Now, kiddles!” Mister Drizzle announced with dopey enthusiasm. “It's almost time for school! I KNOW that you've all been looking forward to this for AGES, but I want to make sure that your first upload goes off PERFECTLY! After all, who loves you?”

  “Mister Drizzle!” every last child screamed on cue.

  Tuesday winced at the horror as Mister Drizzle continued his spiel.

  “Now, before we get to that, to congratulate you all for finally reaching this pivotal moment in your lives, I've got a present for all of you: it's time to give you your very own eyelid screens!”

  The kids were all squealing in an ecstatic way, but Tuesday's face twisted up in confusion. Eyelid screens? Nobody had mentioned anything about that. While Tuesday didn't know exactly what to expect, he wasn't left in suspense for long until some sort of articulated clamps extended from the full-head console and pinched his eyelids open with bug-like limbs. Trying to resist the urge to wrestle free of the device, Tuesday flinched as a burst of cold mist got him right in the corneas. Gripping the armrest of his lounger, blinking fitfully as the clamps disengaged and retracted into the mask, Tuesday gritted his teeth in annoyance as Mister Drizzle decided to explain the situation a minute too late.

  “Now kiddles, it'll take about twenty minutes for the vapour to settle into a permanent layer on the inside of your eyelids, but from then on you'll be able to watch all the best cartoons, documentaries, news programs and Olympic Deathsports right from the comfort of your own eyes! And all that from an organic screen that's less than a tenth of a millimetre thick!”

  There was a comical fanfare. This part of the process was apparently done.

  “Now, kiddles, before the AutoEducation process begins, your consciousness will have to be suspended for a leeeeettle bit while your operating system is installed.” Mister Drizzle winked with a jolly TING noise. “But don’t worry! That software will be uploaded in two shakes of a monkey-rat’s tail!” Mister Drizzle smiled with a slightly different TING noise. “Now do any of you kiddles have any questions?”

  There was a pause, then a sniffly, snotty little girl’s voice piped up from somewhere out of sight.

  “I do, Mister Dwizzle.”

  Mister Drizzle beamed. His teeth were bright enough to burn your eyes right out of your head.

  “Sure thing, kiddle! What's that question of yours?”

  “My...my big bwother told me that you're going to stick bits of metal in my bwain, and that this will weally, weally hurt.”

  Mister Drizzle was still smiling just as much as before. His sheer jolliness was starting to get seriously creepy.

  “Now then, little lady, it sounds like your big brother is being a big MEANIE!” TING went his white teeth. “First off, kiddle, modern AutoEducation is totally non-invasive and painless. One of the major reasons that our award-winning AutoEducation programs have become the industry standard across all of Seven Suns is because they don't require cybernetic implants, or cerebral burning, or surgery, or needles, or anything like that. In fact, those older methods are crude, dangerous, don't work very well and are very, very ILLEGAL!” Mister Drizzle bared his teeth again, but in a more hostile way. “You see, our AutoEducation software speaks the exact same language that your brain does when it wants to store information in the traditional way, except at a much more efficient rate. It’s just like forming real memories!”

  “Mister Drizzle?” a little boy's voice quavered from the opposite direction. “How do I use all the new stuff I'll learn from today's lessons?”

  Tuesday was beginning to think this was all staged, a fake attempt to give the impression that this process was interactive. This question-and-answer time with these stupid sprogs was going too smoothly, too efficiently. If he was going to use any words to describe small children, “efficient” didn't even make the top five thousand.

  “Easy peasy, kiddle!” Mister Drizzle announced. “Just think about what you want to know, focus on your left eyebrow with both eyes, and the answer should immediately pop up in your head! I have to mention that this works better for some people than for others. No given search should take longer than three seconds between twitch to retrieval, and if your recall software takes longer than five seconds, you should report back for troubleshooting.” Mister Drizzle danced a manic little dance. “You'll all be getting the standard suite installed today, but of course there are many other programs available depending on where you want to go in life. Do you want to be a polymath? A physicist? An astroengineer? A philosopher? An astrobiologist? Well, whatever you want to be is just a few jolts away!”

  And that was when Mister Drizzle vanished. Tuesday was startled by the sudden lack of colour and sound, but then he could detect a soft keening and a distinct feeling of...disconnection. He didn't know what else to call it.

  The AutoEducation was starting.

  There was a soft feeling of waves undulating in his head, a gentle massaging sensation that spread from brain stem to cortex, and Tuesday suddenly felt an intense need to close his eyes. He could hear the nearby children murmuring softly as some kind of calming effect relaxed all their bodies and minds in preparation for the upload. Sleepily, Tuesday finally registered that he was only a few hours away from being a total, utter genius, of knowing everything he’d ever wanted to know, of never having to feel like the dumbest spug in the room wherever he went. Combining his innate cunning with a triple-digit IQ would make Tuesday a force to be reckoned with.

  The calm disappeared with a noise like a platoon of smoke detectors having a screaming competition. Tuesday felt two distinct explosions inside his skull like the tiniest nail bombs of all time, and sticky blood immediately fired out of his facial orifices. Choking on a shriek and a load of coppery gunk at the same time, Tuesday gagged as he felt thick, viscous liqui
d pouring out of his nose, ears, the corners of his mouth and his eyes. Retching as the wave of red caught in his throat, Tuesday's brain finally registered that an alert was being pumped out at top-volume in Mister Drizzle’s distinct voice.

  “Lounger seventeen-delta has suffered a reaction,” the alert boomed in Mister Drizzle's goofy voice. “Medical intervention required immediately. Don't panic, kiddles! Lounger seventeen-delta has suffered a reaction...medical intervention required immediately...Don’t panic, kiddles!”

  Beneath the alarms Tuesday could vaguely hear the wailing of the kids as they reacted to the alarm exactly as you'd expect.

  Tuesday tried to open his eyes. He could see nothing but red.

  “...has suffered a reaction...”

  Tuesday could feel pumping on his chest, possibly from human hands. Then, gurgling and senseless and blind, Tuesday reflected on the fact that nothing ever went his way in this stupid Universe.

  He felt something small and sticky adhere to his carotid artery, and with the distinct taste of opiates in the back of his throat Tuesday descended into an induced coma.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ELEMENTARY, DEAR TUESDAY

  Tuesday awakened to the sound of Darth Vader making a lewd phone call to a sex line. After another few seconds of consciousness it became clear that the noise was coming from a tube that had been shoved so far down Tuesday’s throat he assumed it ended at his toenails. Reaching for the offending pipe in reflex, Tuesday panicked when his arms barely moved. Rolling his eyes like a terrified cow, Tuesday could see that his wrists had been restrained by Velcro strips. He tried to move his head, and failed.

  “He’s awake.”

  Tuesday blinked heavily. Two familiar faces – one a man and one a woman, but both in equally spiffy clothes – leaned over to block the ceiling. Tuesday tried to sit up, but it seemed that an even bigger Velcro strap was holding his chest in place. Although he wasn’t Mister Memory at the best of times, Tuesday couldn’t remember who either of these people were…or even who HE was.

  Tuesday tried to swear around the tube. He failed.

  “Mister Tuesday,” the man said calmly, placing a soft, flawless palm on Tuesday’s shoulder. It was pretty obvious from the hand-model-quality fingers that the guy had no experience in manual labour. “This is Travis Melchor speaking. Please be still. You’ve suffered two minor strokes and burst a dozen capillaries in your head. Your sutures haven’t finished sealing yet.”

  “Kgg?” Tuesday managed, trying to wrap his lips around a throat full of plastic.

  “You almost bled to death.” Melchor continued. He gave the woman an embarrassed look before making eye contact with Tuesday again. “It turns out you suffer from an extremely rare genetic disorder. You have an allergy to AutoEducation known as the Raffle Gene. The doctors tell me it’s the worst case they’ve ever heard of, let alone seen. It’s a miracle you’re alive, to be honest.” Melchor bit his lip. “In hindsight, I’m pretty sure we should have tested you first, but your citizen card makes no mention of it. Most unusual…”

  Tuesday scowled, shook in fury, and then tried his best to strangle Melchor. It was lucky for the Legalitor that Tuesday was strapped down with enough Velcro to stick an elephant to the ceiling.

  “Ggrt! Kk!”

  “We’re talking one in a billion.” Melchor continued, apparently happy to continue this one-sided conversation all afternoon. “The bad news is, you will never be able to go through any form of AutoEducation, no matter how basic. It would literally kill you…and it wouldn’t work, either.” Melchor looked frustrated. “While you were in surgery I looked into our options concerning your trial. To be succinct, now that neural imprinting isn't an option, there’s only one thing we can do. You remember Ms Humple?”

  Tuesday shot Ms Humple a dirty look.

  “Rk! K!”

  Ms Humple leaned closer. With the lights behind her, she seemed to be cloaked in an angelic halo that lit up the edges of her face. Of course, as Ms Humple was so close, Tuesday wasn’t looking at her face.

  “Robert, I work with children with your condition, and I may be qualified to help you.” She smiled, but there was something in her eyes that scared Tuesday. He shrank back a little. “Due to the rarity of your allergy, I’m one of the only people on Seven Suns who’s been trained in conventional education. I believe it’s possible to teach you enough fundamentals for Melchor to…how to put this…for Melchor to grasp onto? So, while you wouldn’t have any software installed, per se, I could prepare your mind to the point where you could be read without bursting anything.” Ms Humple drew back. “I’m warning you, Mister Tuesday: this will take at least a year or two of full-time study, and I expect certain things from my students.” She glanced at a band around her wrist. Tuesday could see it had three faces and ten hands. “How long did they say he needed to heal?”

  Melchor shrugged.

  “Should be fine by tomorrow.”

  Ms Humple nodded.

  “I expect to see you the day after. Class starts second afternoon, sharp. Be late, and suffer the consequences.”

  And she was gone. Melchor watched her leave, his eyes barely leaving her fine behind until Tuesday heard the door hiss shut. The Legalitor eventually remembered his place.

  “Mister Tuesday, as you are currently of no fixed address and your PusCo earnings have been frozen pending serious charges, we’ve had to make arrangements for your next fourteen to twenty-eight months on Seven Suns. We’ve assigned you a standard mini-flat in the Welfare Sector, and this means you’ll be expected to work at the cricket farms three days a week between afternoon three and afternoon five in order to cover your rent, electricity and sustenance.” Melchor blinked his reptilian blink. “I believe this concludes our business until you have completed your studies. Good day.” Melchor went to leave, but then a thought made him pause. He gave Tuesday an odd look. “By the way, I’ve been reading your case notes, and I've been meaning to ask: did you really throw a Tupperware container full of noodles at a Monolith?”

  Tuesday’s smile expanded around the tube in pride.

  *

  Two days later, Tuesday was laying down on a soft seat on a highly efficient, dead-silent needle train with his sneakered feet halfway up a bay window. It made his eyes water painfully, but Tuesday was doing his best to see if he could tell which one of the five glowing moons currently had a snoozing World Slug as a tenant. He was pretty sure moving something the size of The Mistress would need some serious hardware, no matter how advanced this world was. Tuesday tried not to think about how he might be footing the bill at some point.

  His eyes changed focus and Tuesday saw himself in the window. He was dressed in a government-issue neon orange uniform. Somehow he’d already scuffed the pristine leather of his sneakers into garbage within the space of a day.

  As usual, the trip was so gentle that Tuesday didn’t immediately realise that the free needle train had gone from four hundred kilometres an hour to a complete standstill. Blinking, Tuesday stepped out of the whisper-quiet door and into a gateway two kilometres below the plane of the city. Like every inch of the world of Seven Suns, a planet that was often referred to as The Glow or The Blind by foreigners, this deep-core hallway was totally without shadows. The omnipresent white paint slathered across this planetwide city was more than just cosmetic, however: the thick layers of enamel absorbed solar radiation so efficiently that the abundant local starlight provided more than enough joules to fuel the power needs of this entire civilisation. A notable side-effect was that the paint gave off a strong glow as it seeped up the radiation, meaning that Seven Suns was truly a world of perpetual brightness.

  Tuesday had already learned from an especially friendly nurse that many locals on Seven Suns literally had no concept of darkness, which was strange enough, but some of the other stories about this local aversion stretched belief to breaking point. For starters, there was a popular fad that had involved installing wafer-thin light strips on the inner e
yelids of newborns so that these kiddles would never need to know the horrors of total blackness even when they had their eyes closed. This was weird enough, but this trend had snowballed over the better part of a century until The Glow’s billions of residents went the whole hog and had a specially-engineered bit of code installed into their collective genome: a custom protein strain that gave every citizen eyelids like one-way mirrors, so they were opaque on the outside and transparent from the inside.

  Tuesday called bullcrap. The nurse assured him it was true, and then proved the story by tightly closing her eyes and accurately guessing how many fingers Tuesday was holding up without a single mistake. He eventually grew bored of the game within forty-five minutes.

  Making it through a tunnel that was more sooty grey than white, Tuesday slouched into a greying four-way tunnel intersection, pushed open a sticky door and moped his way into a decidedly old fashioned schoolroom complete with low wooden desks, defective child-drawn art and a sweeping chalkboard up the front. There was even a guinea pig in a plexiglas hutch. As a consolation, Ms Humple seemed to have gotten even hotter in the last couple of days, and Tuesday watched her posterior for a few moments as she scratched at a chalkboard with a stubby piece of orange chalk. Tuesday got the distinct impression that this school thing wasn’t funded all that well.