Chapter 3: Sand dunes and salty air
“What is that?” Allan Exit demanded.
“Bucket and spade.”
“This is not a holiday!”
“But you said…”
“Get in.”
“Good morning would be nice,” Riga huffed, pouting.
“Would you care for musical ambiance on the journey, Mister Excite?” Smooth Eddie piped up as they set off on the long journey to the west coast.
“No, thank you. And it’s Ms Exit: M-I-Z E – X –I – T.”
“Which exit would you like me to take, sir?”
“Just shut it, toaster,” Riga growled, “we’re not in the mood.”
“I have taken the liberty of compiling a bespoke playlist to compliment the business in hand,” Smooth Eddie continued, not programmed to be abashed, “courtesy of this hour’s sponsors, MuStream.”
“They sound like the symptom of a bad head cold,” Allan Exit observed.
“Featuring golden oldies such as: Don’t fear the reaper; Funeral for friend; Another one bites the dust; Monster mash, a graveyard smash.…”
“I’ll smash you,” Riga gritted. “Regardless of the consequences, I swear, just one more peep…”
“No music, Eddie,” Allan Exit commanded, “just get us there as quickly as possible please. And as quietly as possible too, please.”
“Yes sir, Mister Excite!”
“Ah, peace at last,” Riga sighed.
“Peep,” Eddie peeped.
“Is it programmed to wind me up?” Riga asked her boss.
“Ignore Eddie and let’s see if we can’t find Mister Green,” Allan Exit said, shrugging her way out of her frock coat. “I’ve sent you the auxiliary data I got from the Ministry. I was up half the night cutting through red tape to get just this little bit of gen.”
“They’re tight as a moll-man’s posing pouch with data,” Riga sympathised.
“Let’s work with what we have,” Allan Exit said tightly, one prudish eyebrow raised, “see if we can find a lead. You start back at his blog, work out from the comments, likes and shares. I’ll sift through the little extra background that the Ministry sent.”
So the undertakers got down to it, tracking Mister Green across the virtual world. Smooth Eddie had estimated that it was a little over eight hours drive to the west coast. Since climate had warmed, polar ice had long since melted and the seas had risen and flooded so much of the land, it was never so very far to the coast from anywhere in U-City. Although their current journey was only nine-hundred and ninety-nine nine kilometres, however, it would be slow going, skirting war-zones, some of the worst ganglands, areas of persistent high radiation, chemical and bio-contamination. To make the undertakers’ journey even more interesting, few of the roads were maintained at all, many amounting to not much more than a continuum of potholes, some of which verged on being classifiable as craters. That said, the hearse’s grand prix nitrogen suspension and predictive hover technology meant that, as Smooth Eddie assured them, they should enjoy a largely smooth journey.
“Farmhouse last words,” Riga said.
“Famous,” Smooth Eddie corrected.
“No, farmhouse: they’re bullshit!”
“Cannot compute.”
“Data dummy!”
Occasionally during the journey, Allan Exit would look out of the window, focussing on the distance beyond the plethora of tasks and distractions writhing inside her head and consciously exercising her eyes. On one occasion when she was taking such a break they were passing through a perfectly replicated suburbia. The boxy little houses came complete with plastic hedges, lurid green 12G AstroTurf lawns and herbaceous borders replete with purple, orange and yellow artificial flowers. Here a there a garden gnome stared sightlessly at an incessant water feature. On the sidewalk a young couple were teaching a child to ride a bicycle. The child, Allan Exit observed, was a robot. There were giveaways, signs that she was supposed to know in her trade – too shiny, too smiley - but in the end the judgement came down to instinct. This whole neighbourhood was protected by a network of automatic gun turrets, discretely situated on the Victorian style street lamps and in the ersatz trees. Wiping away a tear from the corner of her eyes, Allan Exit wondered why it upset her to see weapons of death sullying trees, even though these trees, in common with any trees that she or most anyone else still alive had ever known, were totally fake.
A boxwood bush was perfectly pruned in the shape of a domestic cat. The cat appeared to be drinking from a garden pond. Allan Exit knew cats because they were a popular virtual pet and they still featured in commercials, purring to encourage the purchase of everything from perfume to personal protective equipment. Perched on one of the cat’s ears, a bird trilled, chirped and piped in the morning sun, celebrating the advent of another day. A song thrush, Allan Exit checked online, Turdus philomelos.
Well, it did look a bit shit.
A drone, obviously.
Apart from this fleeting reproduction of the historic suburban idyll, what Allan Exit mostly saw on their journey was urban devastation and abandoned neighbourhoods. She spotted just the odd soul – perhaps a disconnected one – tracking the hearse warily from the cover of a burnt out basement or via a periscope eye-stalk peeping from behind an improvised barricade of obsolete and discarded consumer non-durables. At one point someone took a pot-shot at them but the hearse was bullet-proof and Smooth Eddie, programmed in line with cross-corporate and so government policy never to ignore an attack, propelled a grenade to annihilate the injudicious sniper.
“Fuck’s sake,” Riga grumbled, roused by the flash of the explosion.
As they got closer to their destination, they had to avoid getting caught up with columns of refugees fleeing the coast despite Cousin Charlie’s reassurances. Most trudged along on foot as any vehicular technology had been programmed not to leave the area. A few lucky ones had old-fashioned bicycles or tricycles, paniers stuffed, trailers heavily loaded. Allan Exit spied an ancient looking couple on a tandem, both men pedalling gamely, flying a tattered rainbow pennant. She felt for these people on the move, their chances of being welcomed in any relatively clean and peaceful inland area were mighty slim. Wherever they headed they were likely to be met by extreme prejudice and deadly local hostility. Overcrowded and dysfunctional refugee camps were already a common feature in innumerable places, forcing many erstwhile residents to themselves up-sticks and try to make a move. Identifying itself in cyberspace, at least the hearse was not challenged by any of the corporate police forces tasked with turning back the streams of refugees. Roadblocks opened for them automatically and only on one occasion did Allan Exit catch sight of a robot tank, its canon spewing a jet of fire as it traversed a junction.
Almost needless to say, after only an hour or so Riga had fallen sound asleep, snoring loudly through the rest of the journey. She stirred as they pulled into a budget robot motel that backed on to Utopia Sands. With appropriately mechanical reasoning, the palace was called the Utopia Sands Motel.
“Got him!” Riga announced, suddenly wide awake. “He’s just posted a message online that our tracking satellite ap pinpoints as coming from just twelve klicks up the coast, north from here.”
“What does it say?” Allan Exit asked, mentally filing her own extensive – and extremely worrisome - research on the deceased Mister Green.
“It says: ‘Better late than never!’”
“Let’s get ourselves settled in,” Allan Exit said, “have something to eat and make a plan for tomorrow.”
“Can I take your bag, sir?” the robot porter asked when Allan Exit got out of the hearse.
“Madam,” the funeral director gritted.
“My name is Martin,” the robot told her, “and I’m your porter.”
“You look like an antique shopping trolley,” Riga observed.
“You are not animate,” Martin responded.
“Touché!” Allan Exit said, handing the robot her bag.
“No, Martin,” the porter reaffirmed.
Once they’d checked in, Martin had shown them to their twin bedded room, they’d taken turns to take a shower, Riga had fallen asleep again, and Allan Exit had deleted innumerable junk mails and other messages and filed a brief progress report with the Ministry, they headed for the Motel restaurant. Given the situation with rumours of imminent extreme weather and the fact of intense police activity in the area, they were not much surprised to find themselves the only diners. Although the oceans had been devoid of life for centuries, everything on the menu was a synthetic simulacra of seafood. Their robot waitress, was called Stella ‘my-pleasure-to-serve-you’ and Allan Exit wondered, not for the first time, why they always built gender into these robots. She ordered a starter of garlic prawns followed by Dover sole with a seaweed and samphire salad for her main course. Unusually for her, she also ordered a bottle of the house wine, opting for the red though Stella-my-pleasure formulaically advised her it would overwhelm the seafood and so recommended their dry white. Sticking to her guns, not literally of course, that would have been overkill, Allan Exit went with the Shiraz: not much of a vintage but robust with dark fruit flavours and spicy peppery notes, at least according to the online menu. Allan Exit ignored her knowledge that it was synthesised from reprocessed urine, had artificial colour derived from flourone and tar added, and that its palate depended wholly upon synthetic flavourings. Sitting opposite her in the open air dining room that looked out to sea, scrolling through the menu on her wrist device, Riga merely yearned.
Until, that is, they received the first surprise visitor of the evening.
“Lovely ladies, handmaids of Arawn,” Capten Cyboli greeted them effusively as they approached their table. A pantomime tourist, the clown captain was in mufti, sporting a technicolour explosion Hawaiian shirt in shocking pink, canary yellow and electric blue hues, baggy check shorts and comically over large red and green beach shoes. They took Riga’s immense hand in their own gloved one and placed an ostentatious kiss on her sausage fingers. As they bent to the task, the gesture was, in true clown style, accompanied by a loud farting noise, which made Riga laugh like the proverbial drain.
“You!” Allan Exit exclaimed.
“Is it?” Capten Cyboli gawped, miming a surprised self-examination, patting their body down. “I thought I recognised somebody! I wonder, could borrow your lovely companion for stroll along the beach. The moonlight on the multi-coloured plastic is a sight to behold. And it is best shared.”
This entire peninsula was indeed built on a raft of plastic waste from time immemorial, hence the coast’s name. The sand on beach was actually comprised of tiny plastic beads, mermaids’ tears. Exploring the coastline, tourists loved to guess at the original shape and usage of the storm-sculpted polymer masses that washed up on the micro-plastics beach, skeletons from a mythic age.
“What are you doing here?” Allan Exit stuttered.
“A short break from the toil of the beloved garden,” Capten Cyboli explained, theatrically massaging the small of their back. “Some rest and recreation, perchance a little romance….” They batted preposterously long false eye-lashes at Riga until one fell off and was lost under the table.
“It’s okay, I think it’s crawled away,” Capten Cyboli observed, not bothering to begin a search.
“No coincidence,” Allan Exit stated bluntly, “you being here.”
“I’m fond of sand dunes and salty air.”
“I’d love to see the beach,” Riga interjected, reciprocating the clown’s flirtatiousness and batting her own eyelids.
“Do bring your bucket and spade, oh depilated damsel,” Capten Cyboli said with a wicked smile, “for who knows what grand designs we might raise this portentous night?”
And with that they were on their way, the clown captain with the living dead on his arm. Riga towered over her buffoon suitor, gaily twirling her bucket and spade like a parasol at her side.
“Who is Arawn?” Allan Exit heard her assistant ask.
At that moment the undertaker might have leapt to her feet to intercede, but a number of things happened simultaneously to distract her. First Stella-my-pleasure arrived with her starter. Looking at the food placed before her, out of the blue Allan Exit felt a pang that pierced to her core. Though she loathed it when Riga watched her eat, dining alone was a forlorn prospect. Surely she wasn’t jealous of a clown so barmy that they apparently spent most of their time planting imaginary seeds? To underscore her acute sense of abandonment, the wine waiter, Sheridan ‘enjoy your evening’, delivered Allan Exit’s bottle of synthetic Shiraz and a single glass. Before she could bring herself to sip the imperial-purple wine or taste the bubble-gum pink prawn concoction, however, she received a person to person video call, a data-dear code blue for ‘coming through no matter what you do!’
“Bonsoir, Director Exit,” a distorted Clark Gable face leered before her, its hologram eyes bulging, rakish smile cocked to display too perfect but also too prominent teeth, “you haven’t been returning my calls.”
“Mortimer Mortimer the second,” Allan Exit winced. Not only was Mortimer Mortimer II her professional nemesis, he was also obsessed with her, principally in his uniquely degenerate amorous way but also because of the data rich prospect of merging their businesses. In the trade Mortimer Mortimer II was known as Naughty Morty to distinguish a terminally rotten bastard from his truly evil sick-bucket of a dad, Mad Morty. The Mortimers could trace their Norman origins back to 12th century France and the family had always been in the death business, whether as grave diggers or grave robbers, embalmers or body snatchers, coffin makers or monumental masons. For several centuries the Mortimers had been morticians. Morty, father and son, were infamous not only for their disreputable undertaking practices, some of which were unthinkable let alone unspeakable, but also for their mutual obsession with ever more bizarre augmentations.
“Check your mail on your male, Sweetcheeks,” Naughty Morty told Allan Exit with demented salacious emphasis, “it’s open season on Mister Green. Papa and I are on the job, hard-on the trail and coming your way even as we speak!”
“You’ll be disappointed, Morty,” Allan Exit warned, at the same time searching to confirm that the Ministry had indeed just declared her deceased a funereal free for all. “First off, we all but have Mister Green on the trolley and second I have absolutely no intention of wearing my itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie yellow polka-dot bikini on the beach, and certainly not of permitting you to rub factor three hundred sun lotion on my back. Nor, indeed, my front.”
The second part of her warning so inflamed Naughty Morty’s licentious imagination that he literally drooled. The slaver on his hologram chin was flecked with an appallingly suspicious red.
“Stay well away, Morty,” Allan Exit advised, her face a grimace of disgust, “on every level.”
“Not on your life,” Naughty Mort replied, flexing his steroid inflated biceps until the sleeves of his frock coat burst their seams, “I’ve packed my speedos, my shades, my snorkel and all my rubber gear, and Papa simply loves the ocean. He has a sense augmentation that lets him detect sea levels rising, tides turning, the temperature fluctuations of ocean currents… He feels the suffering of the drowned, the icy void of the ocean deep. All linked to his new prostate, you understand? Mister Green is ours, Sugarplum, so just give it up. On every level. Be seeing you!”
“Not,” Allan Exit said coolly, refusing to betray the perturbation she felt so intensely that it cramped her stomach, “if I see you first, you primped and pumped-up pervert.”
“Were I you,” Mister Green said exactly on cue as Allan Exit enraged Naughty Morty sufficiently so that he hung up the code blue call, “I wouldn’t eat those prawns.”
The man who sat suddenly opposite Allan Exit was at once a thousand year old sage and a wicked tease of a youth. A vibrant contrast to Morty’s morbid hologram, he was as grave as he was mischievous, as innocent as he was lewd. Thick, sinuous and vital, his hair – no - his corona – seemed alive, shimmering and somehow hungry. The man’s piercing green eyes were set wide apart, twinkling like sunlit emeralds. His nose was aquiline, mouth wide, lips full above a strong chin still evident under a bushy growth of beard. His face looked bruised, swollen, as if he’d been in a fist fight.
Distended, Allan Exit thought.
In the glow of the restaurant, at least, Mister Green had an eponymously appropriate viridescent glow. If on one hand he looked a like a bloodied Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies caught under green neon city lights, on the other he resembled the framed image of a corpse flower that Allan Exit kept in her office. The image was a gift from her mother that was so steeped in disapproval of her career choice that she had just had to give it pride of place on her desk, though she had disabled its nauseating olfactory capability. Had she been compelled to pick a single word to describe the disconcerting complexity before her, Allan Exit might have plumped for fecund, though in her mesmerised state she had no idea where that description had sprung from or what, in today’s reality, it might actually mean.
“I would join you in a glass of wine, however, if invited?” His sonorous voice was lightened by his evident amusement.
“Your funeral,” Allan Exit managed, watching paralysed as Mister Green poured wine into the glass, sipped, assayed, mustered a dubious half smile, and extended it to her.
“I mean,” Allan Exit managed, accepting the glass but not drinking the wine, “it is your funeral.”
“If in the midst of life we are in death,” Mister Green inquired with a winsome smile, “then the opposite must also be true, no?”
Allan Exit nodded dumbly, compelled but uncertain of what she was agreeing with, or to. The digital clamour in her head, she realised with a start, was mute, on hold, buffering.
“So drink up and be merry, for tomorrow….” Mister Green left his invitation hanging.
“Not we,” Allan Exit manged, “you.” She sipped the wine. It tasted like the synthetic fruit gums she’d sucked as a kid while day-dreaming of saving dragons and slaying princes. Locking eye contact with Mister Green, she drained her glass in a single draft.
“The Dover sole is just about edible,” Mister Green advised, topping up their shared glass, “no better than that, but as good as it currently gets. Do not touch the gumbo.”
“You should be dead,” Allan Exit said.
“It must be you,” Mister Green told her, raising the glass in a bittersweet toast, then following her example and quaffing the contents in one, the purple liquid seeping from the corners of his mouth. And with that he half rose, leaned across the table and kissed the undertaker full on the mouth, parting her lips the merest fraction with the peppery tip of his tongue.
But when Allan Exit made to react, to kiss back or to bite – she hadn’t decided which - he was already gone.
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
And she was all alone, a little girl whose mummy didn’t really want her, didn’t love her or didn’t know how to. Too busy. A mummy who worked security, weapon holstered on her hip, and who left Allan Exit with strangers paid to care for but not about her. A mummy who shied from eye contact with her daughter; a daughter who, in turn, held herself back, cut herself off, piece by piece, who didn’t love mummy too much because that would open her up to all the hurting. So, the kept her love in lock-down to kept the pain in check. An only lonely child. Alone when she found the old man next door dead in his chair because of the heat wave. And she sat and held his hand and fanned him with her comic book and talked to him all afternoon until mummy came home routinely late from work. That evening she watched long and hard through her bedroom window, squeezing tight Marti, her stuffed toy polar bear, until, long after dark. Under the light of the street lamps, in heat that still sweltered, she watched as the stone-faced undertakers finally wheeled the old man from his home to their shiny black limousine and drove silently away. Tears in the corners of her eyes now, but not then. And mummy calling up the stairs, was she alright?
“Desert?”
“I’m sorry?” a distracted Allan Exit said.
“Would you like to see the desert menu?” Stella-my-pleasure asked.
“Dessert.”
“Tonight, we have ice cream...”
“We all scream for ice cream.”
😱 😂
Why couldn't the teddy bear finish his pudding?
Because he was stuffed.
Do bears shit in the woods?
What are woods?
A horse walks into a bar and the barman says, why the long face?
And the horse says, so I can keep an eye out for predators while I graze: Duh!
Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,
Your house is on fire, your children shall burn!
All save one, the last of her kind
If it’s any consolation, no one will mind
How many species does it take to change a light bulb?
How many light bulbs does it take to change a species?
What do you call a retired vegetable?
A has-bean.
What did the sweet potato say to the pumpkin?
I yam what I yam.
Knock! Knock!
Who’s there?
Noah.
Noah who?
Noah floods coming?
Which vegetable did Noah leave off the Ark?
Leeks
Knock, Knock
Who’s there?
Lettuce
Lettuce Who?
Lettuce into the damned ark, Noah!
What’s the fastest vegetable?
A runner bean
Why did fungi become extinct?
Because they took up too mushroom.
Why don’t eggs tell jokes?
They’d crack each other up!
Why did the chicken cross the road?
She was egged on.
But which came first, the extinction of the chicken or the egg?
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Mike.
Mike who?
Microbe.
Now you’re bugging me.
A woman went to the doctor’s the other day and the doctor said, visit the seaside, it's great for flu."
So she went. And she caught it.
I hear Ebola has gone viral.
A crab goes to the doctor and says, “Doc I think I got humans?”
A lobster and a cat walk into a bar together. The lobster orders a beer just for itself. The cat says, “Now you’re just being shellfish!”
A seal walks into a club...
Testudines are all gone, more than three-hundred species. It’s a turtle disaster.
When is a soup unkind to reptiles?
When it’s mock turtle.
A woman went to the zoo. There was only one dog in it. It was a Shih Tzu.
What do you call an alligator in a vest?
An Investigator
What's the difference between a guitar and a fish?
You can't tuna fish.
What do you call a pile of kittens?
A meowntain
What did the daddy monkey say to his offspring?
You’re a chimp off the old block.
What do you call an elephant that doesn't matter?
An irrelephant.
How do you make an Octopus laugh?
With ten-tickles
Check for parasites?
Tic.
What did the beaver say to the tree?
It’s been nice gnawing you!
Why do Platanus Occidentalis have to see the doctor more than any other trees?
Because they are sycamore.
A dung beetle walks into a bar and says, “Excuse me, is this stool taken?”
I heard all the environmentalists’ arguments for banning plastic products.
They were just grasping at straws.
One heifer says to another: “What do you reckon on this mad cow disease?”
“Doesn’t bother me, I’m a squirrel!” say the second heifer trying to climb a tree to stash her acorns.
(Isn’t that nuts?)
A bull walks into a china shop. The owner says: “I got no beef with you.”
I had to shoot my dog today.
Was he mad?
He weren’t none too damned pleased.
What's the difference between Cousin Charlie and a catfish?
One's a scum-sucking, bottom-feeder and the other's a fish.
😂 😱
“He’ll pay for that,” Allan Exit told Riga early the next morning as she dressed, angrily buttoning her shirt. Despite her pledge, she noted that Riga had not polish her shoes, sponged her suit or brushed your topper. I’m not sharing anymore stories with you, Allan Exit thought spitefully. Stories were data after all, not to be taken lightly.
“We mostly talked about gardening and food,” Riga said absently, sitting on her bed in her underwear and studying a smooth yellowish-orange object that she turned over and over in her hand.
“He had no right,” Allan Exit said, breaking a thread and losing her top button. “Fuck!”
“They must be like one of those people we saw at the Italian restaurant: Mural flossers? Morbid fossils?”
“Moral philosophers!”
“That’s the badger,” Riga said, and then: “They kept saying that whenever we found a name for something we were talking about but couldn’t recall… What’s a badger?”
“They’re obviously in this together, your captain clown and this Green character,” Allan Exit growled, “leading us a not so merry dance.”
“We did dance,” Riga said blissfully, “on the beach, in the moonlight; a last waltz, they said.”
“A waltz, in those ludicrous shoes?”
“They’re actually very light on their feet,” Riga said dreamily.
“Look, pull yourself together,” Allan Exit commanded, “and get dressed!” Riga’s suit, she noted disapprovingly, lay in a wrinkled heap on the floor and her top-hat was under the bed.
“They told me about a million jokes,” Riga continued, oblivious, “almost all of which I didn’t get at all, but they amused themselves so much it was infectious. And so I laughed until I would have cried if my tear-ducts hadn’t ossified.”
“Put some clothes on, please, we have to move!”
“They found so much that we had in common,” Riga continued, staying as she was, turning her precious object over and over. “They garden but have no seeds; I’m hungry but can’t eat… They said that one day they would grow me food in our garden.”
“Pigs might fly!” Allan Exit said nastily, standing in front of the bathroom mirror and, unusually for her, deciding to wear a little eye shadow, spring green.
“Wasn’t a pig an animal with no wings?”
“Exactly,” Allan Exit said out of the side of her mouth, her face held taut.
“Was it like a badger?”
“I never heard of a badger.”
“They said they would grow potatoes for me,” Riga said, “it’s the sweetest thing I ever heard.”
“Sweet potatoes, eh?” Allan Exit sneered. “Impossibly romantic but also literally impossible.”
“Capten Cyboli says that with valiant hearts anything is possible.”
“Were I to attempt the impossible,” Allan Exit said disparagingly, “I’d go with Olympic grade ventricular augmentation. Screw valiant.”
“Mister Green got to you?” Riga surmised.
“He has it coming,” Allan Exit snarled, applying a vicious slash of black lipstick. “Now get yourself dressed and let’s find him before the Mortimers do. This sucker is definitely mine.”
“Capten Cyboli told me that Mister Green is everywhere and nowhere,” Riga said, still not rising from the bed or arresting her perusal of the yellowish-orange object.
“There’s no hiding place,” Allan Exit said firmly, quitting the bathroom after one final check in the mirror. “Is that plastic from the beach?”
“From the beach,” Riga confirmed, holding the smooth, semi spherical object that tapered towards the top. It was about the size of a human eyeball. “But not plastic. They told me it was amber, something very old, even before plastic. And look, look inside.”
“What is that?” Allan Exit asked, bending to peer closely into the cloudy amber teardrop that Riga held up.
“A seed, that’s what they said.”
“Looks more like a bug.”
“I love it,” Riga sighed.
“A love bug, then.”
After bolting an early breakfast of croissants with the consistency of chewing-gum, washed down with a couple of Starcos double espressos, Allan Exit took her bespoke daily cocktail of supplements and synthetic bacteria in a concoction that was supposed to resemble fruit juice. It didn’t, at least not as far as the funeral director could tell. It tasted the way that newly disinfected but not very well cleaned rest-rooms smelled. Having spruced their professional appearance up as much as possible with the aid of a clothes brush and some wipes, Allan Exit and Riga left Smooth Eddie washing and waxing himself in the Utopia Sands Motel carpark. It was a discomfortingly masturbatory process or, as Riga summed it up in in passing:
“Wanker!”
They would head for where the satellites had pinpointed Mister Green’s last blog post, which after all was said and done was all they had to go on. Although the hearse could surely have negotiated the beach terrain if not the sea itself, Allan Exit wanted to do this old-school, boots on the ground, bodies on the line, mano a mano, so to speak. Stella-my-pleasure had made them a packed lunch: tuna sandwiches, larverbread, some kelp cookies, a flask filled with even more Startcos, and ‘have a nice day!’
“Classic service expression,” Riga observed admiringly.
“Let’s do this thing,” Allan Exit said
Handing Riga one of the range-finding, military grade automatic weapons known as new widow-makers that she’d retrieved from the hearse’s weapons locker, she took a second for herself. Like most contemporary weapons, the widow-makers were trackers, laser-locking onto any target and choosing the appropriate ammo. Once the trigger was pulled a tracker like this kept firing until it logged a sure-fire kill or destroy, whatever it was programmed for and whether the user still held it or not. Trackers automatically compensated for changes of range, wind speed and direction. They also live-streamed the action to several online platforms, though Allan Exit had hacked this function and reprogrammed these particular widow-makers to record.
“No subtly required, nothing fancy, no frills,” she told Riga. “This guy is well past his die by date, and he deserves everything he gets.” Allan Exit licked her lips. “Lock and load!”
“You promise not to shoot Capten Cyboli?”
“Not unless they stick their big red nose into our business.”
Allan Exit applied total sunblock to her hands and face. Then, the undertakers donned backpacks containing emergency kit, including first aid and, in Allan Exit’s case, a two litre camelback of water. There was also a body-bag in each pack.
“Two, in case of red nosiness,” Allan Exit quipped cruelly.
Side by side, weapons slung over their shoulders, they made their asymmetric way north along the beach, casting long shadows over the sea as the sun crept higher in the sky and light streamed over the dunes and the largely deserted hotels and apartment blocks that lined the coast. A gusting wind swirled around them, stirring up eddies of mermaids’ tears so that the undertakers scanned the beach stretched before them through slitted eyes. There was not, it seemed, another soul on the beach, hardy, foolhardy or otherwise. Trudging along, their feet sliding and sinking into the polymer sands, their progress was hard going. They chose to walk along the tideline where the beach was a little firmer. The tide, Allan Exit noted, dismissing a stream of pop-up ads for penis piercing, was coming in. For twenty minutes they settled stoically to their task. Eventually, she broke the toiling silence.
“You’ve never really spoken about your private life, how it was before…”
“Before you bust a cap in my ass?” Riga checked. “Not much to tell, a couple of centuries as a bouncer, living in a rent-a-bed block, sharing a couchette with strangers I never met: round the clock sleeping in shifts.”
“Before that,” Allan Exit pressed. “Any significant others?”
“I had a baby once,” Riga said, stopping her undertaker employer dead in her tracks. Riga halted too, turning to meet Allan Exit’s startled gaze.
“The birth mother was my partner,” she elaborated, “back then I presented as male.”
“Wow!” was all Allan Exit could manage.
“It was stillborn,” Riga said, “a boy. We broke up not long after that, just a decade maybe. I can’t even remember the woman’s face. Her name was Louisette.”
“I’m so sorry,” Allan Exit said.
“It’s not such a bad name.”
“I mean sorry about your loss.”
“I know you say that to all the girls,” Riga said, contriving a wry grin that couldn’t disguise the sorrow that suddenly furrowed deep into her countenance and further clouded her perennially clouded grey eyes.
“And the boys, actually,” Allan Exit admitted, picking up on the need to recapture their habitual, protective light-heartedness, “almost every day.”
“Let’s step up the pace,” Riga said, “isn’t it already getting hot for you?”
They resumed their trek with fresh vim, silent again for a few minutes, both contemplating their new intimacy, each in their singular way.
“There aren’t many human births anymore,” Allan Exit observed. “People live longer and they – we - seem to have lost the reproductive urge, if not the ability.”
“Yet kiddie porn is the most popular by a stretch,” Riga observed disgustedly, “go figure.”
“Beats me,” Allan Exit grimaced, “and I am so glad that I really don’t get it.”
“People are too busy concentrating on their own selves to have kids and care for them,” Riga snarled dismissively, “trying to live forever, stay forever young.”
“The population is declining,” Allan Exit mused, “slowly but surely.”
“That can’t be good for our business, can it,” Riga observed.
“Sadly, our business thrives on war and epidemics,” Allan Exit observed. “We also do okay out of natural disasters, so-called all be they all obviously human-made. But most of our business comes via the Ministry algorithms, determinated deaths, when they decide someone’s time is up. To be honest, though, there’s still not really enough death to go around.”
“Hence the morbid Mortimers getting in on Mister Green’s funeral arrangements, like you said.”
“I think there’s more going on there,” Allan Exit confided, frowning, “the Ministry algorithms seem desperate for Mister C. Green to rest in peace. I’ve never sensed anything like it through the ether, it’s almost like…” she paused, considering.
“Like panic.”
“The guy does have a shed-load of followers online,” Riga said, “unbelievable for someone who doesn’t say much, even less that makes any sense, and then not very often. There are literally a billion people regularly hanging on his every word, even his silences. And that’s just legit internet users using public channels.”
“What does he post about?” Allan Exit asked, simultaneously searching cyberspace for an answer to her own question.
“Three months ago he posted a selfie – he’s changed his appearance a lot by the way, judging from available images and the footage you sent me from last night.”
“At least I did manage to hit record,” Allan Exit mused, simultaneously examining the many faces of Mister Green.
“Six hundred and sixty-six million odd hits on Green’s last selfie, more than half a million loves, and two-hundred million shares.”
“Just a selfie?”
“With a caption: ‘What does it mean to have feelings? How would meaning feel?’”
“That’s it?”
“Kind of creepy, kind of cool, eh?”
“Reading between the lines of the gen that the Ministry gave us so grudgingly, I think the algorithms must be afraid that he’s a guru in the making.”
“So what,” Riga asked, “we make him a martyr instead? That’ll work… Not! Even I know enough history to get that.”
“Martyrdom isn’t what it used to be, I guess: who today has the attention span for belief, for optimism or hope? The algorithm analysis must amount to ‘best dead, soonest forgotten, to borrow and bend a phrase.”
“Well,” Riga shrugged, “luckily all that isn’t our concern: we just take them down, let the machines worry about whether they stay down.”
“The C stands for Citizen, by the way,” Allan Exit said, “Citizen Green.”
“Crazy name, crazy guy.”
“We have done okay since, you know, you came to work with me?” Allan Exit asked, changing tack after another contemplative lull in their conversation, a lull in which a vast Cumulonimbus formation had taken shape on the horizon over the sea: an anvil awaiting the crash of Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, she thought, recalling teenage comic books, then the taste of synthetic fruit gums, and back full-circle to Mister Green…
“You mean since you killed me by mistake and then took me on as your assistant because you felt guilty?” Riga countered, piercing Allan Exit’s incipient reverie.
“I guess that’s exactly what I mean,” Allan Exit confirmed, a little shame-faced.
“Well it’s not any barrel of laughs.”
“It’s not supposed to be fun exactly, but….” Allan Exit left her words fluttering in the arid morning air.
“It’s been emotional,” Riga shrugged in acknowledgement after a long moment’s consideration, her phraseology honouring their shared interest in old movies.
“Lock, stock,” Allan Exit said with a fond smile.
A larger than usual wave broke noisily and rolled foaming up the beach, sending them scuttling inland a few paces. The acidity of the sea water was such that it could rot footwear and burn the skin, the latter a concern for Allan Exit at least.
“Each time we undertake somebody,” Riga continued, “I get to wonder why it is that I’m still here, what it means to be alive or to be dead, and then what it means to be like me, undead.”
“I don’t think about it much,” Allan Exit said, “but I guess having you around does make the work feel more rewarding somehow – despite the fact that you drive me crazy.”
“Who needs any driving?” Riga asked archly.
Allan Exit logged into a mindfulness session in cyberspace. It muted the flood of other stuff in her head, the ads, the news, the sport, the never ending tide of messages, pitches, comments, charity appeals, photos, images, petitions, video clips, tweets, trills, snaps, spats and pornography – most of it targeting her as a heterosexual male and/or a paedophile. Faintly, hoping against hope, she kept alive the idea that her seeming cyber absorption would also make her less visible, less audible, that the algorithms might lose track of her a little.
“Do you ever wonder why the Ministry needs us,” she asked Riga quietly, “why they don’t just retire folks by zapping them through their chips, like Joleon Soames told us?”
“Never gave it much thought,” Riga shrugged. “I guess it would be awkward to deal with the cadavers without us? Imagine, they zap old Joleon, then what: his smart vak sucks him up, puts him on ice in the freezer that then delivers him to the front door when drones arrive to airlift the dude to reprocessing? That’d be a whole new internet of things, a whole new generation of smart vaks for a start, big muthas!”
“It could be just a technical problem,” Allan Exit mused, “something that’s relatively easy to solve, but not economically worth it for the scale of the task…”
“You mean like because we do specialist shit that they can’t make anything much from so they leave us to it?”
“That must be part of it, I think,” Allan Exit said. “Of course, they could just have the deceased deliver themselves for reprocessing.”
“I like to think the deceased kind of value the ritual of us.”
“Maybe,” Allan Exit allowed, wiping sweat from her brow on her sleeve. Not only was it physically hot but she sensed a malevolent online presence lurking in the cloud, circling, homing in.
“I suspect something else is going on,” she whispered fearfully.
“Like what?” Riga demanded, her own brow furrowing.
“Well the corporations are gathering data from us all the time,” Allan Exit said, still speaking deliberately softly and affecting a deliberately odd inflection in what was probably a pathetic attempt to confuse voice recognition tracing, “And, with the exception of the odd specialist or token human, their board members are algorithms…”
“Fucking data vultures!” Riga pronounced, apparently ignorant of her employer’s affected intonations.
“Precisely!” Allan Exit exclaimed in a staccato hiss. “I think that’s mainly why they let us carry on doing what we do, both pre and post mortem: they’re gathering data to learn how to manage a human population in future on Mars or beyond even that; they want to learn more about death, how we react to taking life and to dying, to processing the dead; they want to how we relate to each other in extremis.”
“Those freaky fucking fucks!”
“Of course, that’s just my own wild guess,” Allan Exit admitted. The mindfulness session was drawing to a close. She still had the sense of a predator stalking her but its presence flared and faded as if unable to get near enough to spring. Something seemed to be keeping it at bay, hunting the hunter.
“In common with everybody else,” Allan Exit told Riga, trying to counter the extreme unease that she felt so viscerally, “I have no real idea of how these algorithms actually function. All we can know is that their bottom line, the reasoning at the heart of their programs, is to maximise the flow of data, its volume and velocity, so they can learn more to increase that flow ad infinitum.”
“You lost me,” Riga said, waving a hand in the air, “all that foreign ‘in extremely’ and ‘addling infinity’ shit.”
“The crux is,” Allan Exit said quietly as thunder rumbled in the far distance, “what if people don’t ultimately feature in that equation?”
Lightening arced red across the sky.
“Then you’re all toast.”