Oddjobs 2: This Time It's Personnel Page 12

  While Marco the orderly took delivery of pizzas under the screen at the door, Barbara Gudge tore into her lunch of 3D-printed face (a young woman of possibly Japanese descent). Nina, who was exploring the settings on the 3D printer, was impressed at the strength with which the old biddy attacked her food. She didn’t use a knife and fork but simply ripped shreds from it with teeth and fingers. Her hands were red with blood, as was the heavy napkin she had tucked into her collar.

  “I wonder who it is?” said the newcomer Angie faintly.

  “Who?” said Nina.

  Angie nodded toward the face.

  “There’s a database of images,” said Eunice. “That’s someone’s actual face.”

  Nina was scrolling through the database of body parts on the printer’s screen. The interface seemed fairly straightforward. There were settings for importing and exporting data files. And the library was subdivided into easily navigable categories.

  “Barbara!” said Nina, pretending to be scandalised.

  “What is it, dear?” asked the ancient one, around a mouthful of cheek.

  Nina had set the printer to work and, moments later, presented the results to all. It was unexpectedly heavy, must have been at least eight inches long and sat in Nina’s hands with a surprising sense of life and warmth.

  “What?” said Barbara. “Don’t look at me like that, dear. You can’t tell me you’ve never wanted to nibble a bit of sausage.”

  “You dirty old lady,” said Nina, smiling. “Catch, Paula.”

  She tossed it and it wriggled in the air like a leaping salmon before landing in Paula’s lap. Paula squealed. It was a squeal that couldn’t decide if it wanted to turn into laughter or tears. Fortunately, Paula opted for laughter.

  “Who ordered pepperoni on their pizza?” asked Marco, opening the boxes.

  “Eat up,” said Nina. “I’ve just had an idea that will save us all.”

  Eunice frowned. “Does it involve penises?”

  “Not unless you want it to,” said Nina. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  The first Cattress casualty might have been an accident. The second was not.

  Perhaps a harsh word had been said. Perhaps the favourite mistress had been mentioned again. Perhaps the cause was a mere slighting glance between men who did not get along. Whatever his reason, one of the Cattresses gave another a shove. This was far from fatal in itself but, unluckily, the shoved man brushed up against the small but well-named Unapproachable Stone of Msgoto. As soon as his hand touched its cracked surface, that Cattress was doomed. The only glimmer of consolation was that the vampiric stone had been exceedingly hungry and the man died from blood loss and shock before he could complain.

  While others cowered or shouted in fear, some Cattresses took the man’s death as a challenge for supremacy, a drawing of battle lines. Before Pigtails Morag could attempt to intervene, there were shouts of, “What the hell did you do that for?” and “I saw that!” and, less explicably, “So, that’s how it’s going to be, is it?”

  “Now, just wait…” began Right Sleeve Morag loudly.

  There was more shoving, a feeble attempt at a punch and then improvised weapons appeared. The Cattress who pulled down a long Shus’vinah mask from the wall had second thoughts when its wooden eyes turned to look at him: the fire extinguisher hanging next to it would have been a wiser choice. The Cattress now swinging that extinguisher was either stronger than he looked or the Cattress he struck was far feebler – the latter went down with a scream, clutching his face.

  And so that violent and deadly skirmish began, the most personal of civil wars, not even brother against brother but man against himself.

  The video cameras Nina had asked for were hastily ordered from the electrical superstore just down the road in Selly Oak and were set up on tripods around Barbara’s side ward.

  “Don’t You (Forget About Me), the TV show, take one,” said Nina as she started the first camera recording.

  “What are we supposed to do?” said Angie.

  “Nothing. Anything,” said Nina. “It’s just recording us.”

  “Am I going to be on telly?” asked Barbara.

  “We all are,” said Nina. “It’s going to be a new TV channel.”

  “24/7 rolling coverage,” said Marco.

  Vivian watched Professor Omar’s marker pen produce sigil after ward after glyph in a long arc across the floor at the boundary between worlds. He wrote with economic speed and admirable accuracy. There were a number of devices, particularly certain Venislarn ideograms, that Vivian did not recognise and she made a mental note to ask him about those later. In a few short minutes, his barrier was complete.

  “What now?” said the Morag waiting on the other side.

  “Well, my dear,” said the professor, getting to his feet with a slight click of his knees, “all I have accomplished here is curtailing the outward limit of the effect.”

  “Eh?”

  “The effect is sealed in a bubble. The real world is on this side and the fake iterations are on your side.”

  “Can I cross over?”

  “Ah,” he smiled, “therein lies the rub. This side is real, aggressively so now. And now, any of the Berry Mound vase’s facsimiles that cross over will instantly cease to exist.”

  “You mean me?”

  “If that’s what you are. But perhaps the greater concern is that, in there somewhere, the vase is continuing to produce new realities, yes?”

  “How do we stop it?”

  Professor Omar gave her a reproachful look.

  “You’re not a stupid woman, Morag. Think. I should imagine smashing the vase entirely would do the trick.”

  Morag nodded tersely and hurried off.

  Omar turned to Vivian.

  “Now, shall we discuss the fee for my services?”

  “We can,” said Vivian, “but I can assure you it will be a very short conversation.”

  Rod sat with laptop and phone in the Restricted Ward admin office. On the other end of the phone line was Leandra, part of the consular mission’s PR department. Her work entailed building up the wealth of marketing, advertising and ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ collateral that would be needed on the day the Venislarn were publicly unveiled. Rod frequently found communication with her a struggle as she seemed to be in permanent orbit around Planet Bullshit.

  “I need some video material editing,” he explained.

  “Gonna have to put that in the ‘love to later’ box, Rod,” said Leandra. “We’re very much mid-stroke on the current project. We are focussing on outreach and mutual fact-pooling with the local Venislarn community.”

  “Really? I just need some video editing and jazzing up. It’s for Nina.”

  “Oh?” said Leandra, interested. “Is it more material for the Tentacular project? We are very buzzed by that.”

  Tentacular was the name for a boy band Nina had invented in a marketing brainstorming session some weeks earlier. Rod was about sixty percent certain she had only said it as a joke but these millennial youths were so bloody self-absorbed and ironic that perhaps Nina herself couldn’t even say whether it had been a sarcastic suggestion or not. Whatever, it was looking increasingly likely that there would soon be a government-funded boy band to be the cute and teen-friendly face of the Venislarn occupation.

  “No, it’s just some footage of people talking. Some straight-to-camera pieces. It just needs a polish to make it a bit more TV-friendly.”

  “Guerrilla filmmaking,” said Leandra approvingly. “I’ve always been a fan of Dogme. If only we could marry it to a client-centric virtualisation ethos.”

  “Aye?” said Rod who had no idea what that meant.

  “I think Nina is wasted in the response team. We could really use someone who understands premier cloud-ready technology niches like she does.”

  “Oh, aye. That’s what I’m always saying. So, can you do it?”

  Leandra ummed and ahhed on the line.

  “Well, I do thin
k we should champion superior best practices, particularly in parallel tasking,” she said.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Send it over and I’ll see what I can get done by end of play.”

  “Ta,” he said and killed the call.

  Kathy Kaur had entered the room. She held a large framed picture.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  Nina’s photograph of Marco the orderly had been blown up to four times actual size. Along the bottom of the photograph were the words, “Hi, I’m Marco Richards” in case anyone might forget who he was.

  “Well, it’s hardly art but it is him, yes,” said Rod.

  “But shall we do the others like this?”

  “Quickly,” he said.

  Ponytail Morag stopped for a breather in the small anteroom that was colloquially known as the Library of Ignorance. After the Cattresses had taken exception to themselves, there had been bloodshed and chaos and the opening, breaking and touching of items that were not opened, broken or touched by the wise. Ponytail and No Jacket Morag had run after the Cattress who had taken hold of and been immediately possessed by the Shus’vinah mask. In the pursuit, No Jacket had fallen and tumbled down into a world that was growing at forty-five degrees to this one and Ponytail had run on and now stood in a quiet room surrounded by volumes of Venislarn scholarship that were judged to be utterly harmless nonsense. The Library of Ignorance was indecipherable but no one cared.

  Once she had regained her breath and she could hear something other than the blood pounding in her ears, she realised that there were sounds coming from nearby: a dull tapping and intermittent grunts.

  She stepped out of the anteroom and took two corners before finding the source of the noise. The mask-possessed Cattress knelt on the floor, his hands wrapped around the throat of the Morag beneath him. Her feet kicked ineffectually. A tongue, longer than any human’s and entirely the wrong colour, poked out of the mouth slit of the oval mask and quivered with excitement.

  Ponytail ran at him and gave him a boot in the shoulder that sent the possessed man rolling away.

  “Fuck off, you cuda’nih hellbeast!” she snarled.

  The Morag on the floor coughed.

  The masked man came to his feet.

  “Hoh’ch ap rhu-ket Yoth-Thorani,” the mask lisped threateningly in a voice that wasn’t Cattress’s.

  “Yeah?” said Ponytail. “Well, you run to mummy and when she gets here I’ll wallop her creosoted arse an’ all!”

  “And that goes double from me,” said the assaulted Morag, standing up.

  The masked man hissed angrily and ran off. Ponytail was about to give chase but the other Morag put a hand on her arm.

  “We need to find the vase.”

  Ponytail looked her up and down. “Which one are you?”

  The other Morag frowned. She didn’t understand the question.

  “You’re a new one,” said Ponytail.

  “We’ve got to destroy the vase. Sheikh Omar’s instructions.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Vivian invited him.”

  “Things must be bad.” Ponytail thought for a moment. “I think we’re only a bit down from where we last saw the vase.”

  “You lead,” said the new Morag.

  Rod texted Nina while Marco and Eunice were putting up the final photograph.

  Barbara’s room now had five large and ever-so-slightly obtrusive new pictures on the wall.

  “Oh, that’s a nice one of you, Ange,” said Barbara (who had finished off her face-shaped lunch, leaving only the ears which she wasn’t a big fan of).

  “Thank you,” said Angie.

  “Shall we see what’s on TV?” said Nina, wielding the remote. She clicked it on. “Oh, my favourite. It’s Paula reads a book or something.”

  On the screen, Paula the administrator opened a large print Catherine Cookson and began reading.

  “Is that you on the telly, Paula?” Barbara asked.

  “It is, Barbara,” said Paula.

  “Oh, you are clever,” said the old biddy and then almost instantly, “Is there anything else on?”

  Nina tsked. “Hospital cuts, Barbara, I’m afraid. We’re down to just one channel. Nina-Paula-Angie-Marco-Eunice TV. 24/7 rolling programmes.”

  “Fair enough,” said Barbara, unfussed. “We didn’t have telly in my day, you know.”

  Her day? Was that in Barbara’s day or in the early years of the life of the Koloba parasite that lived within her? She couldn’t imagine the Venislarn, wherever they were from, having television. Maybe that was why they were such miserable jackasses all the time.

  The world, Morag knew, was a mad and incomprehensible place. A whole spawning pool of worlds was madder still. As she and the ponytailed other Morag closed in on the Berry Mound vase of multiplication, worlds bunched together and the madness intensified, any sense of reality, of here, lost its meaning. She could not see the vase ahead; she could only assume they were close because the worlds were packed so densely.

  Morag watched only where she placed her feet. Off to both sides, ceilings and tiles and doorways boiled away into their own created spaces.

  The Morags slowed as they approached. Shifting to single file, they clasped hands as though they were climbing up a steep slope together.

  Worlds crowded in from above. Morag felt the tug of misaligned gravities on her hair. Her ears popped. A warm, dusty friction filled the air.

  “This is worse than being drunk,” she said.

  “A lot of things are,” said the other Morag.

  Morag reached forward. Her hand entered other universes but did not disappear into them. There was nothing to feel in those spaces but the cool, conditioned air of other Vaults in other libraries. And then her fingertips touched the smoothness of pottery, invisible beneath the torrent of growing worlds.

  “I’ve got it!”

  “Then smash it!”

  “With what? There’s nothing here. Just mad shit.”

  “It’s got to be standing on something! Just… just smash it, you eejit!”

  Morag grasped the vase by what felt like its fluted neck and waved it about as hard and as fast as she could. It struck something solid; Morag felt the blow through her hand. She struck it again and shards of the vase gave way beneath her grip.

  Nothing happened immediately. Nothing really happened at all except… The worlds around them no longer boiled, no longer pressed and squeezed against each other. Everything simply… drifted.

  “Did we do it?” asked the other Morag.

  “I think so,” said Morag cautiously.

  “What now?”

  “Now, I think we go and find out if any of us is going to be fired.”

  Vivian watched the two women approach the border between worlds.

  “Two more,” she said simply.

  Professor Sheikh Omar, who was seated upon a fold-out camping stool and nursing the third cup of tea, looked up from the Vault inventory notes Maurice had compiled for him. Vivian watched him underline an item in red pen before closing the notepad and she made her own note, a mental one, to question him about that later.

  One of the Morags had bruises down the side of her neck. The other, the one with the ponytail, appeared unharmed, although both looked tired and less than jolly.

  “It’s done,” said the bruised one.

  “The vase is destroyed?” said Vivian.

  The Morag nodded. Vivian looked to Professor Omar.

  “Then we are done for the time being,” he said.

  “We do nothing about these aberrant realities?” Vivian asked.

  Omar stood and straightened his jacket.

  “We are in new territories here,” he said smoothly. “If, as I suspect, the Berry Mound vase is part of a Mexk’nah stone ship then this is a tair mz’riz ihssen effect. The various realities will need to find their balance, align in pressure. When I’m appointed to the position of Vault custodian –”

  “If, professor,
” said Vivian.

  Omar gave her a cold little look and then smiled.

  “We can leave it for a day or two. Put up some barriers in the meantime. Some yellow tape.”

  “Oh!” said the bruised Morag in surprise.

  She had just noticed Cattress, sat on the floor against a bookcase only feet from her, inside the bubble. His blood-soaked arms hugged his knees. His eyes gazed at nothing. His lips mouthed silent words.

  “He’s been there for a while,” said Vivian.

  “The blood…”

  “It’s his,” said Vivian. “And when I say it’s his…”

  The Morags were already nodding.

  “Only the original version of each of you can cross back over,” said Omar. “You are not the first Morags to make it this far. None have crossed, not successfully.”

  “Mr Cattress here is the first of his incarnations to get here,” said Vivian. “We suspect he’s the only one left.”

  “Had to,” Cattress murmured faintly. “Jennifer.”

  “Yes,” said Omar. “Jennifer?”

  “His girlfriend,” explained Morag with the ponytail. “So, if we both cross, what happens?”

  “One of you will vanish in the wink of an eye,” said Omar. “At least one of you.”

  “Painlessly?”

  “Our observations of your previous attempts suggest so,” said Vivian.

  The Morags looked at each other, thoughts synchronised.

  They each took one of Cattress’s arms and hauled him to his feet.

  “But…” he said softly, too shell-shocked to resist.

  “No one wants to stay down here forever,” said one Morag.

  “There are people waiting for us on the other side,” said the other.

  “We just step?” Morag asked Omar.

  “Just step over,” said the professor.

  The Morags looked at each other one last time and then, carrying Cattress between them, they stepped.

  Plaits Morag, armed with the two glass daggers she had used to scare off a rogue Cattress, poked her head around the corner in time to see two Morags and a Cattress step forward arm in arm. One of the Morags abruptly winked out of existence, like a light projection simply turned off. Cattress, suddenly unsupported on one side, slumped to the ground. The remaining Morag let him fall.