PEPAC novel: excerpt: "Stormtrooper"

“A leader is a dealer in hope.”
(Napoleon Bonaparte)

*

Blinky has been watching the entire exchange between Donna and Maggot on Monitor 3. 

In disbelief, he has stopped typing, and is chewing his gum with ponderous, exaggerated clunks of his jaw. 

Now that ZX has left, he switches the music from that ballad shit to some extremely hard trance, the Department-Approved soundtrack to Extreme Measures. 

He juices the volume.  He stops chewing his gum altogether.

Retribution is going to be sweet, yes sir!  Maggot is going to wish that he hadn’t been born, let alone shown his face back in the Crib.  Not after that little interlude with Donna from the Post Room.  Blab-ass motherfucker!  This is fucking precisely what he had predicted would happen! 

What the fuck did Maggot say to her?  Via CCTV Monitor 1 in the Crib, Blinky couldn’t hear what had been said.  And nor could Maggot, apparently, when Blinky had said to him DON’T TALK TO ANYONE!  Do y’hear?  ESPECIALLY NOT THE FUCKING ENEMY!  

And where was ZX to keep an eye on him?  Probably wandered into a supplies cupboard somewhere, chatting to the ghost of King Fucking Arthur.

Well that’s it then.  Time for the Ultimate Sanction.  That nigger’s gonna pay the price.  It’s a tough deal, and he gonna hate it.  He gonna hate this like nothing else.

But, thinks Blinky solemnly, I am going to ban that motherfucker from playing Doom.

That’s right.

Straight to the line.   No participation, for a whole week, in the Crib’s most sacred activity — Frag Night. 

Every night is Frag Night.  Every evening begins with the Crew immersing themselves in a hyper-violent virtual reality of terrifying intensity in which each tries to “Frag” (kill) the other.

And that Judas-motherfucker just going to have to sit it out.  Like a goddamn leper.  Till the end of time, it gonna feel like.   What do you think of that?

“These are not the droids you are looking for.” A voice declares, strident and terrifying above the boom-boom-boom of the music, scaring the shit out of Blinky. 

Gets him every time.   

That fucking Stormtrooper.   Makes him seize up like a gun’s gone off every time it opens its mouth.  

If only he had real Stormtroopers to work with, there’d be no need to send out delicate Code Freaks like Maggot on what-you-gotta-call military business — the IT Crew would be the military and know what the fuck to do and he’d be Darth Fucking Schwarzenegger, there’d be muffins and MaccyDees in the canteen for breakfast, hot tail clamouring to work with computers and C++, and martial law for every other nigger in the whole damn place, including Francesco the crazy, cat-burgling Mexicano and Clarissa, Queen of the Free World and Curse of the Crib.

And as for those white-trash, gym-bunny Fucks from the Post Room, they’d be jamming those damn earpieces of theirs where Stormtroopers fear to tread, that for sure.