Here's another installment of the Evil Possum adventure, including the real setup for this. Here's a link for the first installment, and the post that introduced Percy and the assumed world. If you read this blog, you can probably guess that I am referencing a real film, long since lost in our time line. I can't explain why people are looking for it.
It had taken 3 hours of
searching before the marsupial found an object more important than any two of
his quarry. He stepped forward cautiously. It was the size of a large beetle,
though closer in shape to a scorpion. It bobbed strangely in a steady air
current. A light shone on it, revealing a transparent and empty shell. A
three-fingered metal claw picked up a loose piece, turned it back and forth,
and then crushed it. The light swung back and forth, revealing more objects. A
careful count put them at twelve. He amended, “Eleven.” Then the light fell on
a very solid claw, evidently severed by a single powerful stroke. “Ten.”
* * *
Percy arrived back at the
precinct headquarters a little before 9:00 PM.
He smiled and waved at the matronly woman manning the desk. “Hey, Luiza,
what’s new?”
“Well,” she said, “we
have a dead Woolie…”
“Uh-huh…”
“…And it looks like another Woolie didn’t do it.”
“Huh. Send it to Jason
with a priority autopsy order. Anything else?”
“Then there was someone
from Power and Utilities asking for you.”
“Okay, then you can tell
her where to find me.”
“I already did.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Luiza. Anything else?”
Luiza checked her screen.
“Oh, and a lady in the Deck tower lofts told the Citizens Network that she has
a vid of a giant lobster that ate her dog.”
“What, a terrier, Chihuahua…?”
“Afghan hound.”
“Huh. Well, I’m sure
Quarantine is on that one. Now take my calls, I’ll be showing a training film.”
“I bet you are.”
When he entered the
breakroom, Hector and a dozen rookies were already there. “All right,” he said,
“who’s ready for some Moral Contraband?” There was a ragged cheer. He sat down
next to Hector on the chronically fatigued couch. And then, to the group’s
surprise and growing dismay, he started Him.
* * *
If any human emotion can be attributed it, if any word
can be applied to what passes for its mind, it is “imperiousness”. It lies
hidden in darkness but for the gleam of its armored body. There is a fan of
pincers and mouthparts, like an unfolded Swiss army knife. There is a
shovel-like, slightly flattened head, and just beyond that, a bulbous,
humpbacked thorax. Then there are the spidery legs, the short, stout paddles
folded easily at its sides, the abdomen that tapers by several gradations into
a tail, and in the deeper darkness, a long spine that is its stinger. It seeks
shelter, if only because it is not ready to hunt, but it does not hide. To hide
implies fear, and fear implies a threat, and if there is one thing it knows, it
is that there is none, save perhaps another of its kind.
In its ancestral memory, it sees the world of its
sires, the world on which it was meant to be born. It is a world of towering
tree-ferns, which gave it a sense of home the first time it surveyed the city
far below, of dark, stagnant pools, of dense leaf litter, of narrow beaches
where swarms of jawless fish sometimes beach themselves. A world where it is to
its prey what an orca is to a water rat. The world it surveys now is different,
in many ways more hostile, with creatures possibly as large as itself. Even
now, it watches them pass from behind the slits of an air vent. They are large,
even somewhat larger than itself, but they are as oblivious and mechanical as
the easiest prey, and they leave abundant food unattended or left carelessly to
rot. It cannot wish for a world other than this one, because to a creature such
as this, there can only be the Here and the Now, and these are more than
adequate. There is only one wish, more anticipation than desire. It is a
female, so soon, it must find food, and one of the lesser creatures that are
the males of its kind.
In all likelihood at the same time…
* * *
The apartment Daisy returned to was often called a
“mistress apartment”, one of eight slivers of living space on the east
buttress. Officially, all citizens of the Arcostate were entitled and indeed
required to take residence in a permanent living space, and anyone had a chance
at any unit they chose. Unofficially, it commanded at least as much as a unit
twice as large on the lower levels, though still not as much as one of the even
more slender units that faced outward from the central face of the buttress. A
frosted glass door opened at her touch, and she
stepped inside.
The entryway went directly past the bathroom that filled half the area of the apartment. Beyond that were a kitchen, an L-shaped dinette meant to serve as their bed, and a window that filled almost the entire end of the apartment. Wes lay on the dinette. A compact screen was playing a Physical Therapeutics video. It was an introductory segment, playing in a loop. A female narrator spoke: “…Across time and space, every race and civilization has faced the same struggles and strove toward the same achievements. Industry. Commerce. Morality. Monotheism. Monogamy. And with it, the physical and mutually pleasurable act of romantic love…” She promptly ducked into the washroom and emerged in a black nightgown that revealed little but stunningly accentuated what was out of sight.
She curled up beside Wes on the short leg of the dinette. She gazed, stared, down at him, with her chin resting on his shoulder. As she watched, he shifted without seeming to grow more awake. She looked more intently, and an almost troubled look came to his face. Only then did he stir. The next moment, he half-rose with a stifled cry. In another moment, he sank back, breathing heavily and staring back at her. “Jeezus,” he said, “that’s weird…”
“It wouldn’t work if you didn’t want me,” she said. He settled down, and soon she stretched out beside him. The screen showed digitally animated figures not much more detailed than mannequins but amazingly lifelike in their motions. It was evident that there were several different couples, including a woman in the early but quite visible stages of pregnancy. “I thought you hated these,” she said.
“I like the voice,” he said. His arm slipped around her waist, and she tapped the screen to skip forward. Then his lips pressed to hers. They had only done that three times before, twice under the supervision of their state-provided therapist, and always on her initiation. She accepted and more than returned the kiss, but then drew back to the other leg.
“I’m sorry,” Westley said, almost instinctively. He scooted up to her, and she allowed him to cradle her knees. For a moment, he tilted his head in the direction of an air vent. There had been a sound, something like the crack of a distant whip.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“That was… different than I thought it would be.” He nodded. “Anyway, the
therapist says we’re better off doing more with less. Look, I’ll just take care
of you…”
He instinctively said, “Please don’t.”
She relented and stretched out again her stomach. After a few minutes, she pronounced, “I’m gonna shower, come watch me. That’s always fun, right?” He nodded, and she rose eagerly. He paused as he stood up to look inside the air vent, and found a single eye peering back at him, as big and bright as a dime.
“Do not be alarmed, I am an agent of your government,” a nasal but commanding voice said. “My mission is sensitive but unclassified, so you may help. My targets are arthropods of the subphylum Eurypteroidea, species Neocarcinosoma fecundarum, commonly known as sea scorpions. They are amphibious, extremely large, 1 to 3 meters in total length, including a long tail and large pincers… Have you sighted such a creature?”
“Are you coming?” Daisy
called.
“You bet,” Wes said,
backing away.
“Oh, and I expect you to
stare at my legs and my chest!” He scrambled to join her.
* * *
The marsupial found the next of the creatures at an intersection of the airducts, feeding on something. At first, there was little to be seen but a long segmented tail, 30 cm long and ending in a poisoned spine. As he shifted, the legs, body and carapace came into view, and finally the long pincers and venomous chelicerae. He also glimpsed what it was feeding on, and it was no surprise that it was a smaller creature of the same species. “Nine,” he said as he took aim. He fired one barrel of his slug gun, rocked with the recoil, and fired again. “Eight…”
He cautiously approached the creature as it twitched. His lips curled as he examined its prey. “Female and possibly mature male…” He froze at the sound of skittering claws. He cracked open the gun as he advanced, hopping over the twitching tail spine. He loaded one stout 9mm slug from a half-empty bandoleer, then selected a shot shell for the other barrel. Then he paused, the shell still in his claw.
He looked over his
shoulder just in time to see the female’s pincers start to move. “Nine!”
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