Scum of the Universe Read online

  Bob flicked at the bulky metal lighter until it ignited with a whoompf of gas. However, all that the flickering light managed to reveal were ghostly silhouettes. Glaring at the useless Zippo and sighing in frustration, Bob noticed for the first time that the underside of the lighter was stamped with a tiny logo that said TRANCE. Squinting at the word, Bob had the strange feeling that he was forgetting something, a single fact that was very, very important. What was it about the word TRANCE that he was supposed to know? Why was that word triggering something? What could it possibly...

  The Zippo was absolutely scalding all of a sudden. Dropping the hot metal box with a creative curse, Bob slapped it to the other side of the boot. Second degree burns proved to be a good way to break his chain of thought, and Bob didn’t think anything more about TRANCE for now.

  Bored senseless within minutes, Bob decided to feel around the boot to see if there was anything worth pinching. Thankfully, after a handful of seconds he accidentally knocked a touch-pad on the low roof, and a ring of oyster lights filled the whole area with a sodium glow. Bob could now clearly see the trunk was half filled with boxes that resembled the Military surplus creates in his Dad's basement. While the majority of the boxes were sealed solid behind high-tech card readers and deadbolts, Bob finally managed to pop an unlocked yellow crate that contained spare parts for the flying limo. Seeing as though the vehicle was suspended on antigrav wafers, Bob was confused to see that the crate was filled by a dozen rubber tyres, a stack of hubcaps and a pair of tire irons, but it made sense that the limo was capable of being equipped with wheels for emergencies. After all, you wouldn't cut off an eagle's legs, would you?

  Bob noticed a burlap sack had been ditched in the corner. Digging into it, he discovered a shovel caked with clay and a bag of ultra-lime. Putting two and two together and getting fifteen, Bob screamed hysterically in panic. Many of his Dad's darker gangster stories had involved the combination of a shovel followed by a heavy coating of lime, and Bob was suddenly certain that he was about to (as Jim had put it) “sleep with the fishes.” He couldn’t understand what he'd done to deserve such an end. none of this was his fault! His only crime was being born a Tuesday.

  Bob eventually calmed down by using the novel concept of thinking the situation through. He reasoned that if somebody wanted to dissolve his remains in a shallow grave, then it would have made a lot more sense for them to do it in the middle of nowhere…which is where all of this had started. Nice and neat. Taking him somewhere else for the whole murder-and-burial thing was a needless complication. This was mildly reassuring.

  Bob continued searching between the locked crates, chewing his bottom lip in the process.

  Jerry can…baseball bat with sticky stuff on it… …toolkit filled with drill parts…still no spare key ring…maybe…

  Bob blinked and reviewed his thoughts.

  Wait...a drill?

  Bob was unexpectedly thrown to the other side of the boot by a violent swerve, a hallmark of modern inner-city traffic, and had to crawl back to the power tools. He didn't know it, but this was the first time Bob had been in Old Vegas since he was an hour-old fertilised egg.

  Searching through the yellow Ryobi case, Bob soon discovered a big, expensive-looking drill tip buried under a lot of cheaper ones. Although he didn't recognise what its glittering holographic D logo signified, this sigil meant that the thin cylinder was made out of a synthetic carbon-based mineral called Densite, a material so tough and sharp that it made the best diamonds look like wet chalk. Just like his Dad, Bob could tell on sight if something was valuable, even if he had no exact idea why.

  Although Bob's plan with the drill was obvious (pop the lock and escape), its battery pack was stone flat, as were both spares. This meant all Bob could do with the Densite-tipped bit was to try and use it to cut through the keyhole by hand. After spending ages trying to get through the mechanism without any luck, Bob understandably had to stop and rest for a while, but a second session of painful twisting and cutting was soon rewarded with...nothing.

  Okay. It seemed the lock was also made out of Densite, or something even tougher. Great.

  Changing tactics, Bob did his best to carve through the boot itself, rather than focussing on the tough lock. He cut into the steel shell until a bright pinprick of light finally stabbed into the trunk. Blinking away the strobe effect until he got used to it, Bob put his eye to the hole to see that the limo was cruising through a place that lined up exactly with his Dad's description of Old Vegas. Bob knew it as a hub of gambling, drugs, prostitution, racketeering, parties, concrete shoes, hitmen and two-pound lunch specials. He was denied these charming sights and sensations a couple of seconds later when the limousine tilted and disappeared into darkness.

  Knowing that it may already be too late, Bob frantically tried to grind a second peephole with the Densite-tipped bit. He managed to cut through the boot quicker than the first time, but all this accomplished was the cumulative effect of nothing plus nothing equalling nothing...or, more precisely, a second tiny hole that only served to mock his efforts at escape.

  Bob heard and felt the slam of a car door. Knowing that those gangsters might be coming to check on him in a matter of moments, Bob thought it wise to hide the largest drill bit in the wild depths of his salt-and-pepper hair and put everything else back where it belonged. Quickly replacing all the smaller drill tips and the useless power tool itself back into the yellow clamshell kit and turning off the oyster lights, Bob curled into a ball and waited.

  But nobody came.

  After ten still, silent minutes, Bob had just started to drift off when his attempts at a nap were interrupted by a tremendous force kneading his whole body like giant fingers in raw cookie dough. It was almost as bad as a half-strength cuddle from his Mum. Bob was flattened out against the padded interior of the boot, screeching with all the power his nine-year-old lungs could manage, but within thirty seconds the pressure stopped and he experienced the effects of deceleration far, far above the Earth's surface for the first time, followed shortly by freefall. Floating about in a dark trunk full of tools and creates wasn't the best way to enjoy zero gravity, and Bob spent quite a bit of time engaging in his favourite hobby: forming highly offensive strings of insults. In this case, his expletives were directed towards space travel, astronauts, planets, stars, and pretty much all of the galaxy. This foulness was best lost to the deafness of the cosmos.

  Soon, as the unseen courier ship performed a sharp turn towards a planet located nineteen stars to the left of Earth, Bob had finally fallen asleep with a thumb in his mouth and a drill bit behind his ear.

  *

  Although slavery had been universally abolished on all civilised worlds within Unison space hundreds of years ago, few human-colonised planets in the 24th Century could be accurately described as “civilised” with a straight face.

  One particularly scrawny planet, a black not-quite-terraformed orb known on most stellar maps as The Dream Factory, fell so far beneath humanity’s low standards that its official status in The Unison's databases was Utterly Deserving Of An Imminent Nuclear Holocaust. However, even this didn't properly spell out its hellishness.

  Far from the Willy Wonka-style wonderland its name may have implied, The Dream Factory was nothing more than a planetwide labyrinth of grey manufacturing lines that all eventually intersected at warehouses the size of Hawaiian islands. Towering pallets of goods were then relayed from storage to whatever docks were closest. Although primarily dedicated to manufacturing, storage and shipping, all of The Dream Factory's few survivable zones were packed solid with hundreds of thousands of workers who were forced to drudge in this bleak nightmare, and these unfortunates were crammed into any gap they could claim as their own. As a result, decaying slums, leaning shacks, huts made out of fibreglass sheeting and worse had sprung up amidst the concrete, rust and razorwire fences.

  If you're wondering why anybody would live in this purgatory, it's because The Dream Factory was staffed al
most exclusively by slaves. And as adult slaves were usually too much trouble - what with all the riots, bad language and other non-productive behaviour – some bright spark had figured out that children were more easily-managed as indentured servants. After all, kids ate less, needed smaller clothes and tinier living quarters, and were less likely to throw cups of boiled piss on the guards. Despite this, The Dream Factory got more than they expected with their newest admission, because if you could say one thing for Bob, it's this: he came out fighting.

  The very moment that Jeeves popped the trunk, two cross-shaped tire irons went spinning past the thug's ears like oversized ninja stars. Bob – dressed in nothing but his loincloth and moleskin shoes - followed right behind the projectiles with a lug wrench in his tiny hands. Not stupid enough to pick a second fight with somebody who had bulletproof skin and bigger arms than his Mum, Bob ducked under Jeeves' armpit and surprised the first wave of armoured kiddie guards with a feral scream. To be fair, these particular screws were barely in their teens at best, and were unanimously underfed and under-trained.

  Bob jammed the blunt tip of his lug wrench into the crotch protector of the first kid dumb enough to try and grab him, ducked a couple of clumsy batons, and stomped a second guard right on his toes. A child soldier managed to grab Bob by his nose, but quickly let go once a bloodied chunk was bitten out of his wrist. Bob headbutted the screaming, bleeding guard with a clop noise, rolled sideways like a commando as four more dove for him, missing by centimetres, and turned to swing his lug wrench as hard as he could at whoever else had decided to get in his way. Unfortunately for Bob, his random swing slammed Jeeves in his knee - which might as well have been a paving stone - and a massive shockwave rattled through Bob's hands. Screaming in surprise as bolts of pain arced from fingertips to shoulders, Bob dropped the weapon like it was hot.

  Jeeves wasn't so much as bruised.

  A dozen guards tackled Bob like a pee-wee gridiron team sacking the quarterback, knocking him to the mesh floor, and everything went black for a moment when Bob's temple hit the ground with great force. Still trying to scrabble and weave despite the darkness, rolling about like his Mum had taught him, Bob made it as hard as possible for the guards to grab a hold of anything.

  But he'd already lost. He just didn't realise it yet.

  By the time Bob's sense of vision dribbled back into his concussed head, the teen guards had managed to get a good hold on the wildboy’s limbs and weren't going to let go no matter what. Bob slammed his elbows, knees and forehead into the crowd as they tightened their grip, but soon he was officially overpowered and wrestled into submission.

  One mongrel rested his knee on Bob's bruised temple, sending a lance of pain through Bob's skull. His line of sight now fell directly on the two gangsters who had brought him here. Ernest Fell was smiling at this scene, obviously amused by the battle, but Jeeves was watching with a neutral expression. He didn't seem to take any joy from what was going on.

  Bob pictured them hanging from the ceiling by their own intestines. He grinned at the image.

  Bob's hands and feet were strapped with leather restraints and he was rolled onto his back. At this point, with his face pointing towards a black moon, Bob finally got a good view of his new home, and he could hear it, too. Above the sound of his own heavy breathing, Bob could register the din of a million children yelling and roaring their approval from far, far in the sky, and he looked through the mesh of arms and legs that were holding him down like a cage made of flesh. Beyond closely-packed steel bars and layers of security fencing made from razorwire and electrified monofilaments, a bland sequence of mouldy concrete cells towered far into the dark sky just short of forever. To Bob's untrained eyes, they verged on infinite. Looming higher and higher until their peaks were literally lost in the cloud cover of early morning fog, the millions of flickering maws that made up Cell Block Preschool said hello to Bob with the sound of countless child slaves having an awesome time.

  Bob was backhanded across the face.

  “You little punk!” a teen guard squeaked, careful to guard his language. He’d learned from a young age not to swear in front of his superiors…even when some half-savage cave child bit him on the wrist, apparently.

  Bob was dragged to his feet. Doing all he could to keep his loincloth where it belonged, Bob glared up at Jeeves Butler and Ernest Fell as they came closer.

  “Welcome to your forever home.” Ernest said in a sing-song way that would scare most people senseless. He smiled with too much in the way of bleached white and too little in the way of a soul. “Just so you understand the arrangement, you are here to pay off the debt that those...those things owe me in the only way that you can: through the indentured coercive labour of a minor in a state-run facility. Of course, this particular state seceded from The Unison's regime years ago and poses an ongoing danger to our entire species due to its involvement with every form of criminal activity you could name, but, on the upside...well, they make the best soft toys. Do you like toys?”

  Bob didn’t like where this was going. He could hardly understand a thing that this weird little thin man was saying, but Bob knew for sure that he was now a prisoner on a rock far, far away from home.

  Ernest playfully offered Bob a large, plush Mister Drizzle stuffed toy. Despite the fact that Mister Drizzle was one of Disney's most popular characters, every one of his cartoons was loaded to the brim with unpalatable homophobic racism, and the character had been blamed for quite a few high-profile hate crimes. After never seeing such a beautiful toy in real life, Bob leaned towards the plushie...

  Ernest snatched Mister Drizzle away in the same gesture. Bob watched in horror as Ernest slowly tore the toy open along its seams, popping each stitch one at a time. Stuffing erupted in all directions with a flick. Synthetic cotton wool drifted to the mesh floor like manufactured snow.

  “Now, you will do as the nice boys say from now on,” Ernest suggested quietly, dangerously. “We all need to learn our place...especially you.”

  “Do what they say?” Bob snarled, preparing to vomit out the corrosive verbal bile he'd learned from tens of thousands of hours of offensive television programming. “But they smell like somebody scooped a rancid wad of scrotum cheese out of a syphilitic monkey's bum.”

  Bob sniffed loudly at the guard holding his straps and made a disgusted face to highlight his point. TV had obviously taught Bob well, and his advanced grasp of offensive language would doubtlessly have many more victims before the day was out. However, it was clear that Bob couldn't be allowed to show such vulgar defiance in a facility with enormous MIND YOUR LANGUAGE signs all over the place, so a teen guard raised his baton, ready to scramble some eggs. Bob simply shrugged in a bored and dismissive way.

  “Why are you getting upset? It's Porko McBumhole over there who stinks.”

  The young thug dissolved into laughter so violent that he almost dropped his baton, and all the others joined in too...besides the target of the jibe. Nudging the smelly, embarrassed teen guard and holding their noses in mock disgust, it was obvious that this was just their kind of humour.

  “You know what, kid? You're perceptive for an inbred Neanderthal.” The biggest teen guard rumbled, getting right in Bob's face. “But you know what happens to cavemen who like mouthing off at the security staff?”

  “They lose five chromosomes and mutate into a muscle-bound scum-smear like you?” Bob replied sweetly.

  Bob didn't even see the baton swing. Everything just went black.

  *

  Bob Tuesday woke up at the crack of dawn to an electronic rooster screeching from a rusty speaker so old that it must have been crafted by Abraham himself. Feeling very lost thanks to a winning combination of severe concussion and whatever insane level of jetlag you got from hopping across nineteen star systems (starlag?), Bob looked around at his coffin-sized concrete cell. It only took one blink to do the entire royal tour: it was made of moss-spotted concrete and had heavy-duty bars on the front. The entire floo
r was a padded mattress. There was a bucket in the corner that was half-filled with caustic, sewage-disintegrating chemicals and a roll of toilet paper so thin that it was almost theoretical. Tour complete.

  There was a metallic clunk and the bars retracted into concrete with a vicious grinding noise. Somehow managing to stand on his first attempt, Bob could immediately tell that he wasn't in any shape to have another rumble with the entire security team, so he placidly took his place with all of the other inmates in the corridor. Bob was able to tell with one glance that none of the other inmates in this stretch were older than ten, and their clothes seemed to be a random assortment from at least a dozen worlds. Despite the irregularity of what they were wearing, Bob's loincloth and crude moccasins were the most out of place and drew the most attention. From their puffy eyes and lost expressions it was pretty obvious that these kids were all new arrivals like him. It seemed child slavery was big business.

  A bunch of armoured teen guards (including the fat one who smelled like rancid monkey cheese) immediately hustled Bob and the other new admissions across Cell Block Preschool with baton swings and raised voices. The new fish were all rushed into Orientation and ordered to sit down on plastic lawn chairs. As with the rest of The Dream Factory, the interior decorator of Orientation must have had a thing for stained, mossy concrete and rust-orange metal.