#17 SAFARI ON JUPITER
I sometimes wondered which curious thoughts may have invaded Galileo’s mind when he discovered the rings of Saturn through his telescope; or Christiaan Huygens after listing Titan for the first time in 1655. Could these prestigious astronomers already dream of a possible life on these bright uncharted worlds? As a Dutchman himself, did Huygens imagine the VOC—reassembled as the “Galactic Trade Company”—operating on these virgin territories? Who knows…
It took humankind hundreds of years to reach Saturn VI yet barely a decade to make it habitable. The last thermonuclear charge hadn’t detonated over Shangri-La’s islands, that the first towers of Neo-Babylon already stood above the austere colonial shacks. I still remember the acerbic rain turning black as coal because of the carbon fallout. Back in the day, a sense of dread used to invade me when gazing upon the sorry sapiens-made clouds.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
Firmly tied to his chair by squeaky rubber hoses, Rocker Willie brought me back to reality before spitting a phlegm of blood on my snoot. This brown-haired sad sack struggled to articulate appropriately. The firefighting android had almost crushed his jaw. Next time, I’d try to hack into a slightly more delicate iron bodyguard.
Dodging the vermilion droplets hovering in low gravity, I leaped from the knees of this copy of Jimmy McShane towards my makeshift office. For I had assembled a desk using two former jerrycans of New Coke and a stained placard from the George H. W. Bush’s Techno-campaign. It barely held up an old Apple rudely connected to the cerebral implant of my prisoner, who changed his career path from music idol to freelance data-carrier.
“I’m monologuing because I’m weary!” I replied, initiating the hacking of his cranial hard drive.
The burning dust smell emanating from my overheating computer slightly covered the stench of the cubic room made of six rusted grates. There, like in the three hundred others constituting the recycling facility, heaped up nearly twenty tons of reeking waste. Under the scanty glow of the still-functional white LEDs shone emerald-colored nutrigel remains on filthy clothes and obsolete food processors. A perfect crib for alley cats, indeed, but not for a Main Coon with a pedigree.
“We tracked you down to that stinking dump to get crucial information from you, Willie! But you’re unbearably blinkered!”
Hidden for at least two rotations among the cloud of garbage filling Ijiraq’s orbit, Willie showed again an inconvenient determination as his barriers repulsed my third incursion attempt. “This bloody broker of Mancéphalius has lost his digital mind! Does he know who I’m working for?” he dribbled on his red leather jacket. “Numpty-ball will antagonize half the Martian corpos and the whole Technocracy. The Black Haven won’t let idiots mess around with its data!”
I rolled my eyes. “I already told you Mancéphalius isn’t involved! Truly, we had worked for him in the past few months, but this time we’re trying to find a person close to my partner. This is vital to her—and by extension, to me. Alas, you had upset the both of us by standing us up on Uranus!”
“Give me a break with your social calls, psychotic raccoon! I had that bloody Kamirov on my arse!”
I raised an eyebrow’s whisker. “Kamirov, you say?” Rasputin being added to the equation appeared to be interesting. Willie had decidedly entangled himself into a prodigious mess by carrying so much data in such a narrowed mind. Since the defeat of the Hemingwest Clan in Oberon’s orbit, the Soviet remained nowhere to be found.
Alas, time was running out. Like Tarzan Boy, the Kitty wasn’t welcome into Ijiraq’s orbital landfills as the Cronian recycling corporation hated looters and a patrol was already on its way.
Trying a pass with another virus of my creation, I furiously tapped the mechanical keys. My program roamed Willie’s brain-forest of information, raising the library-humus in search of the right root. Once the root identified, going up to the trunk then to the first branches was child’s play. But once more, my pirate program got caught in the thick foliage and its firewall.
The eyes of my captive became tinged with gold as his implant’s emergency protocol restarted the hard drive and recalibrated the cryptic algorithm. “Xiao’s bane, my arse!” the cyborg laughed. Regaining his senses, he lost himself in sizzling curses before resuming his incessant provocations “Melters like you are just good to zero punks by accident. Your skills as data-thieves are capped below average.”
Exhausted and nauseous because of the foolish atmosphere, I heaved a sigh. “You’re tickling a melting thermo-core, Willie. Patience isn’t my partner’s forte and—”
A loud thud suddenly reverberated over our heads and startled the two of us. Through the cage’s tight meshes, I perceived a shadow. With a heavy step, it moved slowly towards the spiral staircase plunged into darkness. The bass of an intimidating pop music resounded within the metal structure. Drum noises covered the first footsteps on the iron rungs behind me. Guided by the lesser gravity conquered by her weighted boots, my eccentric human descended on the quavering chorus of Sunglasses at Night. Besides her heavy boombox on her left shoulder, she held an electric chainsaw depicting a unicorn. It produced almost no sound, but the dance of her rainbow-colored teeth managed to frighten Rocker Willie.
“What is going on here—stop acting the maggot!” implored the data carrier while he tried to get rid of his strong ties.
Humming, Ali slowly advanced towards our hostage, gracefully spanning the wires connected to the cyborg. She placed the massive cassette player on the security android’s corroded back before juggling with the chainsaw. Behind her dark sunglasses, my silent partner openly ignored Willie’s pleas and, a second later, our captive had the sharp-toothed revolving blade a few centimeters away from his still organic family jewels. Wetting his ripped jeans, he broke down in tears.
“Want her to stop?” I asked, unperturbed. “Stop grizzling and take down your ICE to conclude with a happy ending our crusade through the shattered rings of Saturn!” From behind the computer monitor, I gave my partner the green light for another round of her improvised bullying phase.
“We—we need to sort this out some other way! I can’t—I can’t have a second chance! If I grant you access, we gonna push up the daisies—ugh!”
The following screams of the rocker boy made me jump over my color screen. “Ali?” I inquired. “What’s going—”
Horror! This psychopathic glucophage was Scarfacing the poor man! Embedded in the cyborg’s thigh, the chainsaw was filling the room with a pink mist.
“Fuck me!” she uttered, struggling with the jammed emergency stop button. “I’m so sorry! I slipped!” Swearing like never, my sapiens brutally removed the bloody guide from the torn limb under the furious—but justified—insults of our captive.
I was livid. Since Oberon, she has become even more sloppy on the job. “Slipped? A whole gallon of blood sprayed the ceiling!”
“I said I was sorry!” she insisted. Looking daggers at me, she put the sunglasses on her pocket and threw the chainsaw over a cluster of rubbish.
It was a total failure. Willie’s implant had shut down at the same time he passed out. The extraction program automatically closed and sent me back to the main menu. The situation was hopeless, unless we managed to bring back Willie to the Kitty and use the control computer. A dangerous option as the cyborg was possibly concealing a beacon.
“This is getting out of paw!” I panicked as Ali tried to straighten Willie’s head before slapping him. “The security will show up anytime soon!”
“Dude’s got the drive inside his brain, right?” she asked. From Willie’s wound flowed a discontinuous stream. Seizing crumpled pages of TV programs, Ali managed to contain the bleeding.
“Affirmative,” I replied, browsing the security cameras’ feed. The armed patrol had already docked. “Yet we can’t physically remove it. We’re not talking about a diskette—strictly speaking—but sheets of silica entangled within its cortex.” Ali’s stained index tapped on the top of Willie’s skull and followed the silver engravings down to his carotid. She had an idea and when her sordid plan had ended in my mind, I immediately jumped from behind my monitor to prevent her from grabbing the chainsaw. “Don’t! If his brain is no longer irrigated with blood, the hard drive might overheat! We need him alive!”
An alarm suddenly sounded across the salvaging center. A red light replaced the one provided by the white LEDs. We could hear all the main exit doors being barred.
“We have to motor or we will be recycled into a Cadillac!” I reacted as the old alarm went out and remained nothing more than a very unpleasant shrill for my deafened hearing.
“Ain’t going anywhere yet!” Ali replied. Resolute, my partner grabbed the chainsaw and pressed the front lever. The chain began to spin as it slowly approached Rocker Willie’s neck.
“Adieu Willie…” I sighed before a foul damp noise could be heard. It was followed by a moist screeching then a violent cracking.
“Get ready, Lee! We gotta bounce and put him in the fridge before dusting off! Destroy the computer! We can’t leave a trace!”
My despondent yet judgmental gaze passed successively from her face dotted with blood droplets to the immense crimson bubble forming around the body still tied to the chair spinning upside down.
“You understood what I meant!” Ali roared before grabbing the floating head by the ear.
Following her orders, I removed all the content of the Apple’s limited data-core at once. “Don’t forget the FID! Rocker Willie’s wanted on Las Pallas,” I warned my partner before opening the garbage chute.
My copilot nodded as she stuffed Willie into an old StarMart plastic bag. Five seconds later we dived head on into the shaft.
