Unstable Prototypes (14 page)

"Uh... could you turn around?" he said.

"For what reason?" she asked.

"Remember back when we first met? When you
were watching me and I couldn't pee? Same reason."

"You are planning to urinate in the
shower?"

"No. It's... It's just a privacy thing,
okay?"

"The observation of your physiology and its
functionality is a far greater concern for you than it is for
Karter," she observed, turning around.

"Okay, I'm taking the thing out of my ear, so
if there's something I should know about, just bark."

The creature nodded once. Six freezing
minutes later, he'd had all he could stand of the shower. He
finished rinsing off and snagged his fresh clothes to get dressed
in the stall when he heard the short, sharp yip of his
overqualified watchdog. He managed to get his pants on and opened
the stall. Two of the shady looking individuals from the hallway, a
man and a woman, had decided to pay him a visit. Now that he got a
closer look, the effects of a low gravity lifestyle became
astoundingly clear. It was somewhere between grotesque and
cartoonish, normal-sized hands and heads connected to frail looking
wrists and pencil necks. The man, a vaguely Asian looking fellow a
few years younger than Lex, even had the sleeves of his blue
coveralls rolled up. This presented a fine view of tattoos received
pre-shrivel which were now squeezed and distorted. His female
cohort, someone with the build and features of an Eastern European
ballerina, was even younger, perhaps not even twenty. Despite this,
each had a posture of intimidation, as though there was no question
that
they
were the ones to be feared. Each of them looked to
have an obvious bulge in a side pocket. Lex remembered what Garotte
had said about projectile weapons being a bad choice in a pressure
controlled environment, but this pair didn't look like they were
known for their good decisions. Best to play it cool.

"You're new here," remarked the woman, chin
turned up and lips turned down at the corners.

"Uh, yeah. Just passing through," Lex said,
eying the man as he circled around him.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!" the
woman snapped, slapping the back of one hand against her upturned
palm to draw his attention, "We don't
like
newcomers."

"Well, like I said, I'm just passing through.
Was the shower off limits?" he asked.

Ma barked. Lex turned to see the male half of
the welcoming committee with his hand in the pocket of the dirty
pair of jeans, where Lex had evidently forgotten that he'd still
had a handful of poker chips.

"Hey, hands off!" Lex said, shoving the
pickpocket.

The intention had been a light shove, and it
would have been, if this had been a planet a bit closer Earth's
size. On the not-quite-planet deGrasse, in a confrontation between
a hale and hearty Lex and a low gravity stick figure, it was enough
to knock himself off balance and send the thief flying backwards,
where he smashed into the far wall, busting open an eyebrow and
crumbling to the ground.

"Oh-my-God-I-am-so-sorry!" Lex gasped as one
continuous word.

Ma started yapping madly when Lex tried to
help the injured party. At the sound of the barking, he whipped
around again to see the woman at the door holding a buzzing, hand
held stun gun. Despite some smaller, higher tech,
safer
models, the good old-fashion version still had a strong following.
The one in her hand looked like an oversized electric shaver with
an evil blue spark jumping across a gap in the front.

"What did you do to Chong! You
heavy-worlders, you always think you can push us around! You come
to our territory and you attack us! You disrespect us!" she cried,
stomping her bird legs forward and jabbing with the stun gun.

'Whoa, hey," he said, backing out of range
with his hands held forward in the universal gesture for 'take it
easy,' "First of all, that was an accident. And second, that guy
was trying to rob me!"

"Yeah, well that's nothing compared to what
I'm gonna do to you now. Let's teach this heavy some manners,
Darla," slurred Chong, who now was holding a switchblade.

"Come on, do you two really want to do this?
You saw what I did to stabby here by
mistake
. Just think
about what I could do on purpose. Look at those arms. Could you
even stab through meringue?"

In retrospect, attempting to reason with them
by appealing to his physical dominance may not have been the proper
application of psychology with this particular pair. Both
aggressors made their move. Lex darted back toward the showers. At
least, he tried to. One of the effects of low gravity was that the
friction between his feet and the ground wasn't quite up to the
task of facilitating his usual level of acceleration. For a few
steps his feet slipped on the ground like a race car peeling out.
When they finally managed to get him moving, he tipped over
backwards, his arms flailing wildly. Chong, more accustomed to the
quirks of the planet, smoothly sidestepped Lex as he fell to the
ground, which was taking much longer than it should have. By the
time he hit, Chong was standing over him, ready to drive the knife
home. Not a moment too soon, Lex managed to catch him by the
wrist.

"Okay, now you tried to kill me," Lex
growled, grabbing Chong by the coveralls, "You earned this."

Using his average weight and build, which was
comparatively superhuman to the locals, Lex rolled to the side,
heaving Chong as hard as he could. The bony thug was launched
halfway up the wall, where he collided and ricocheted nearly to the
ceiling. His knife flew out of his hand and rattled dangerously
around the room, prompting Lex to shield his face.

Darla sprung into the air, stun gun raised,
and shrieked, "You son of a b-"

Before she could finish her sentiment, a
furry black and white cannonball rocketed into her midsection. The
collision sent the pair of them tumbling out the door, where woman
and funk tangled in a mass of scratching, screeching, and growling.
Lex scrambled to his feet and rushed out after them, but there were
a dozen more thugs waiting for him, most armed with stun guns of
their own. If even one of them managed to make contact, there was
no way Lex would be able to recover before somebody managed to
knife him. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't even have a shirt on.
The first attacker charged, and Lex met him with a panicked kick to
the ribs, sending him tumbling end over end down the hall. A
ten-to-one strength advantage? That he had.

The rumble started in earnest. Unlike crowd
battles so popular in the movies, the gang didn't have the decency
to attack one at a time. Lex grabbed the nearest one by the arm and
heaved him around in a circle, disarming a few of his partners and
clearing out some room. Three men who had lost their weapons dove
onto him, but he was able to hoist them all easily and hurl them
aside. Unfortunately, most of the people he tossed got back on
their feet and back into the fray with little damage, except for
those unfortunate enough to hit support beams. Things rolled
hectically forward, with Lex trying desperately to avoid
electrocution. A larger part of his mind than he would have liked
to admit was reveling in super-heroic glee in the pitched battle,
so much so that he had to consciously avoid flinging people at the
flimsy outer wall. After a minute or two, most of the gang members
decided that discretion was the better part of valor, but some were
stubbornly refusing to back down. A knife or two had managed to
graze Lex, and a stun gun had gotten close enough to stand his hair
on end, but he was still on his feet when he heard the sound; a
crackling discharge, followed by a yelp of pain.

Lex turned to see Ma slide to a stop on the
catwalk, tongue lolled out of her mouth and one leg twitching.
Darla was just getting to her feet, the stunner in her hand still
recharging. Before he knew what he was doing, Lex had rushed to
her, wrenched the weapon from her grip, and hoisted her
effortlessly into the air with one hand.

"I..." he said, his voice shaking with anger,
"I swore I would never hit a woman, but if you hurt her..."

"It is just a damn dog!" she squealed,
struggling in his grip, "Somebody kill this heavy!"

The three remaining gang members had gotten a
knife and stun gun each, and were stalking toward him. Lex turned
his options over in his mind. If something didn't happen soon, he
was going to have to do something that he really didn't want to do.
As if on cue, a familiar, British-accented voice filled the
hall.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please!" called
Garotte, approaching down the poorly lit hallway, "You are all
acting like children! Shame on you, deGrasseans. We are visitors on
your world. You may not feel inclined to offer hospitality, but you
can at least offer civility! And Lex, my boy, where precisely is
the sport in pummeling a gaggle of scarecrows?"

"They tried to rob me! And kill me! And they
zapped Ma!" Lex objected.

"What's that? Attempted theft, attempted
murder,
and
animal cruelty? I dare say that the balance of
moral impropriety has shifted against our hosts," Garotte said with
a shake of his head.

"What are you going to do about it?" jabbed
one of the none-too-bright gang members.

As an answer, Garotte revealed the energy
pistol taken from the guard.

Darla's eyes opened wide. "You can't shoot
that in here! You'll blow a hole in the wall!"

"Only if I miss, my dear. It is thus in all
of our best interests that you hold very still," he said, closing
one eye and taking aim.

The remnants of the ambush wisely chose to
withdraw. Lex released Darla, who wasted no time in joining them.
He dropped the stun gun and knelt down next to Ma. The twitching
had stopped and she was beginning to move her head in a bewildered
manner, tongue still dangling from her mouth.

"Ma, you okay?" he asked, snapping his
fingers.

"It was a stun gun, Lex, not a shotgun,"
Garotte reminded.

"Yeah, but it was a people-sized dose of
electricity, and she's not people-sized," he said, nervously
looking back to her, "Say something, Ma. Come on."

Garotte glanced up and down the hall, wary of
a retaliatory strike. "I'm beginning to think you may be more of a
liability than an asset, my boy."

"Oh, right, the hands-free. Hang on!" Lex
realized, dashing into the bathroom as quickly as physics would
allow. He returned with his clothes under one arm and his other
hand forcing the hands-free device into his ear.

"I would suggest you join me in the room
before our territorial friends return, and in greater numbers.
Amusing though it would be to pick on a slew of ruffians half our
size, the potential for catastrophic mishap is a just a bit too
high," said Garotte.

Lex picked up Ma and followed Garotte to the
room. Once the door was locked behind him, he propped the slowly
recovering AI up on a box and continued to try to rouse her from
her daze. She was managing to remain relatively upright, but her
eyes were still half lidded and an involuntary tremor in her right
leg periodically threatened to knock her down.

"Do you know anything about how to treat
electrocution?" Lex asked, nervously.

"As I understand it, the two concerns are
severe burns and fibrillation, neither of which appears to be the
case."

"How many fingers am I holding up, Ma?" Lex
asked, waving a hand in front of her face.

"That is for concussions, Lex," Garotte
remarked.

"Okay, you're not helping."

"My boy, if a computer malfunctions or an
animal is injured, those events are inconvenient and unfortunate,
respectively. This is thus at best an unfortunate inconvenience,
which makes your level of concern vastly beyond what is called
for."

Lex turned to Garotte, cupping his hand to
his forehead and squeezing his eyes shut.

"Garotte, listen. I know you think she's just
a fancy calculator that opens doors and gets information, but if
you actually bothered to take the time to get to know her, and to
treat her with some respect, you'd find out that she is a person.
Maybe not in the technical sense, but in every way that counts.
This whole mission is her idea. She's doing it because she doesn't
want Karter to get hurt, and because she doesn't want him to help
hurt other people. She is the
only
reason I'm here, and the
only
reason you aren't rotting in a jail cell right now. How
about some goddamn gratitude?
And,
even if she
was
nothing more than a sequence of zeroes and ones, I would still
trust her infinitely more than I trust you at the moment. She's the
one who knows what's going on! If she's not okay, I'm going to feel
an awful lot less comfortable about this whole situation."

"... I did just prevent you from
electrocuting an atrophied gang leader while surrounded by armed
members of her crew, you realize."

"Darla was the leader?"

"Indeed. One would hope that would have built
some measure of trust."

"Well Ma prevented the atrophied gang leader
from electrocuting
me
before you even showed up! So you'll
understand if I feel somewhat responsible for what happened to
her!"

Lex turned back to the funk, to find the
little creature staring at him evenly, evidently recovered.

"Ma, thank god. Say something, would
you?"

She continued to stare.

"Ma?"

The creature furrowed her brow, confusion in
her expression.

"Something wrong, Ma?"

The funk's eyes drifted vaguely downward, as
through she was distracted by a particularly challenging thought.
Suddenly her eyes opened wide and her ears drooped. She lowered her
head, reaching back and pawing at the back of her neck. The
slightly oversized paws tapped at the glass marble nestled in the
fur there. As she did, Lex heard a few faint clicks and stutters of
her voice over the earpiece, a faint red flicker flashing weakly in
the glass.