“If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be
running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive
electronic music.”
(from a poster in
the IT Crib, PEPAC Head Office)
*
There is a good reason why Clarissa’s laptop is acting
up. And that’s down to the fact that the
trusty IT Crew has, as its members would say, “wired that motherfucker good.”
As a matter of course, the Crew has installed fresh
super-strength spyware onto Clarissa’s laptop during her last tech
upgrade. That’s why it’s running
slowly.
And Richard’s entire new office is next in line for
the bugging treatment.
“Maggot?
Maggot!” Blinky, the young Head
of IT, strains to be heard over the booming gangsta rap that plays 24/7 in the
Crib.
Maggot is nowhere to be seen. This is no surprise, as the subterranean
domain of the Crew is always dark.
Light, like personal hygiene, is limited here. Illumination comes from scattered lava lamps
and the glow from clusters of monitors.
Occupying what used to be the orientation area for the
entire nuclear bunker system, the Crib feels like a cellar nightclub; it is
intimate, almost urban-glamorous with its sci-fi lighting and perpetual dance
music, but would be revealed as grubby urban-shithole if you ever switched the
big lights on. Not that the IT Crew has
ever been to a nightclub, since that
would involve leaving the Crib, and they rarely summon the courage to go
upstairs, let alone Outside. Living and
sleeping are generally confined to the Ready Room which, judging by the glacial
creep of man-crap half-blocking its door, is ready only for industrial
cleaning.
Outside the transparent transit chamber of the
airlock, where Crew members stand briefly to leave or enter the room, stands a
life-size model of a Stormtrooper from Star Wars. Maggot revealed once that this plastic
sentinel from a fictional world made him feel safe. Which was disappointing
from the point of view of mental health assessment.
In comparison, what would make Blinky feel safe would be to eject the Stormtrooper into outer
space along with all the other sci-fi shit littering the Crib (including the
surprised-looking silicon Yoda apparently fused into the wall above the Pacman
Quote poster) and fill it with real
Stormtroopers, high on Crystal and low on tolerance for the slightest threat to
the good, honest, paranoid routine of the Crib.
But that ain’t gonna happen.
What is going
to happen is that soldiers don’t patrol without escort, period; you can’t be
too careful who saying what to who, that
for sure. Especially with that
motormouth little fuck Maggot. He needs
a close eye on him and his talking-machine out on the ground.
And that, by a short process of elimination, means
ZX.
The only other member of the Crew is Indian Boy, who
will be in the bowels of the Crib on the Holodeck (home to PEEPAC’s servers)
doing his “Quantum Computer shit”, fused into the hardware like a cyborg.
Indian Boy has never, as far as the rest of the Crew
can work out, left the Crib at all.
Ever. Nobody can actually say for
sure that he ever came into the Crib,
let alone left. Indian Boy is a
valuable, if mysterious, fixture and, like most valuable fixtures and fittings,
likely to break if removed from situ. ZX, on the other hand, being in his own
little world, can wander with impunity, enjoying the insulatory comforts of a
reality created exclusively by his own imagination as he goes; he might even
muster the concentration to do what he’s supposed to and keep Maggot out of
trouble.
“ZX!” Blinky calls patiently, still typing
away. “ZX, I need you.” Without moving his eyes from his screen, he
changes the music.
Abruptly the martial lyrics of “I’m gonna cum on you,
gun on you, and then I’m gonna bounce” are replaced by the more wistful
sentiments of “Knights in White Satin.”
This is a summons.
This is often the only stimulus that will bring ZX back to the land of
the living.
He in cryo-fucking-stasis right now, thinks Blinky, laid
out under his desk like a dead-drunk nigger on the street. But he’s on the floor on purpose, he
thinks he’s some feudal knight waiting to be called from eternal slumber or
some fairytale shit like that. He some
drunk-ass, weird old man, that for sure.
But he a soldier, that for sure too, ZX one brave man when he get on it
and he know his shit; shit, he should do, he old enough to know the
ZX Spectrum, the first damn computer ever made, and every other nigger’s
dead that saw that motherfucker have its day — dead or damn
re-incarnated and dead again, that how long ZX been alive. He pickled real good.
“Come on, old man,” says Blinky encouragingly. “Camelot needs yo’ ass.”
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