The woman with no name sat in a bar with no name, and ordered two fingers of bourbon . Well, none of that was technically true. She had a name, and knew where to find it on her driver’s license. She just hadn’t memorized it again yet. It was something of a blank spot in her mind. Names were to her as if a person had lost object permanence but knew intellectually that something just out of sight was there. Returning to work with that disability had been harsh, and hadn’t gotten much better.

Her boss hadn’t thought it funny when she had shown up and forgotten his name. Oh half the day passed fine before anyone noticed it. But the second half of the day was more like a Abbott and Costello sketch. When *that* got resolved she was ordered to the doctor on pain of job loss. HR was still processing her disability claim after all these years, but at least everyone agreed her work hadn’t suffered apart from needing a notebook of faces and names to match.

There was a paper, somewhere, that named the bar something like “Biker Joe’s bar and grill.” It would have been pretentious to anyone who had actually been there. The place was a dive that other dives would hide their face walking out of. If you wanted a place to go to get a roofie colada and loose a few teeth, this was it. It lay like a serpent under the double overpass for easy access from five directions, then down a flight of concrete stairs. On paper it was a great location, but in practice poor city planning required a half a mile in detour under ill-conceived skyway and down one way roads.

This was a neighborhood where gentrification simply did not apply. Public transportation and institutions were absent. The traffic cams were absent or broken. Gangs and drugs had taken over, and the police never came by for anything but quota. It was stuck in a cycle of distrust for the authorities, and in this environment the Family was almost more trusted and legitimate. Almost.

Joe had died of a heart attack 8 years ago, when he was only 43. No one ever accused him of living a healthy lifestyle. Technically the title passed to his mother. She suffered from Alzheimer’s, so it was doubtful she knew it existed.

The general manager had kept the place in line and out of trouble with the law. When the Family moved in, the business kept him afloat during the recession. When they insisted on renovations, well, they paid for it and who was he to argue? They kept him happy and quiet and he let them do what they wanted.

The bartender on duty knew enough not to leave her glass empty when pouring from her stash. No ice and a chilled glass only in the summer when the ancient and sketchy AC was doing its level best not to die. The bottle in question was not made in bourbon county. Nor was it within the legal limits for bourbon whisky itself, having be adulterated for potency. But none of that mattered to the bartender. To him, the woman with no name sat in a bar with no name and ordered two fingers of bourbon . That was hardly unusual.

What was unusual was the man who had walked in about an hour before. He was too well dressed for one, even if he was a bit unkempt. His suit was top of the line and unpatched. His shoes had no holes, and had been recently shined. His watch was extravagantly minimalistic. As rough as the place was, that wasn’t what got him in trouble.

He tried to pay with a credit card.

If this had been Seattle then he might have expected a negative reaction. That city had a reputation for having some extreme quirks. If it was Texas he might have expected the bar to be armed. More states had allowed guns in bars, mostly on the Humanity ticket. That had been a trend that started before, when red and blue meant democrats and republicans. Instead, he got a taste of the emerging blend of heartland and pacific northwest that was dividing the country like a great, trans-Canadian backslash. This night would be the reason he learned to carry cash when he was in the Humanity Party’s territory.

The bartender put the card on edge at the end of the bar, wedged into a crack. Everyone near that end of the bar moved. The bartender pulled a 12 gauge pump action from under the counter in a smooth motion, and blew the card away. He cocked it once to eject the spent shell and reload.

“I think we’re about to have a problem here. Looks like someone here can’t pay his tab.”

Alex, the unusual man at the bar, sat agape. The reality of the situation had not set in. If not for shock the sounds of firearms being cocked behind him would have voided his bladder. As it was, he still hadn’t processed that they had shot his card. The card that had no limit.

“Put it on my tab.” The voice next to him was calm, cool, deep yet feminine. The woman next to him was flat chested and mousy, small but with a bit of paunch. She had just downed a glass of brown…stuff.

“Seriously? This asshole just downed four hundred of our best stuff. Plus he has a frikken pad in his car.”

“Then it’s in his car because he wants a drink away from prying eyes. “

The bartender looked apprehensive for a moment. On one hand, the mad woman didn’t have a tab per se. She had her own bottles he kept under the bar for her. On the other hand, he had heard stories. Incredible stories, unbelievable at any rate.

Most of them started with the one and only man who had crossed her. They said she had nuked him from the inside out- force fed him plutonium until he lit up green like a Christmas light. Or that she had slowly maimed him over the course of months and left him a pathetic drooling husk. Some said she’s some sort of radical lesbian, and did it just because he made a pass at her. Then the rumors got weird.

The most solemn claims about her was that she was some sort of butler to an honest to god super hero. Some manic billionaire who fancied himself batman or something kept her as his Kato. The man she had irradiated has thought himself some as a supervillain so she dropped him in a vat of toxic waste to check. None of it was true, of course. She had never had to hurt anyone.

What was true was that she was wearing light body armor and was in with the Family. So he just smiled and nodded, “Your tab.”

Alex’s brain was kicking in. He turned to the woman, “Thanks. He wasn’t really going to?”

She smiled back coldly and clapped her new friend on his back. The look she gave him specifically did not say “No, he wasn’t going to shoot you.” Instead she said, “Get him a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. One for me too.“

“I need to go.” As he tried to stand, that hand suddenly shifted to hold him down in his seat with much more force than he expected from a woman that size.

“Don’t be rude. I just bought you a fantastically expensive drink on top of your bar tab. The least you can do is stay and drink it.”

Something in the atmosphere, perhaps the many armed patrons, convinced Alex that rudeness would be tremendously unwise at this juncture. “So, what’s a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster? Like in that movie?”

“Oh yes. Take one fifth of old pure spirits. Pour into it one jigger of green dragon tincture. Allow three cubes of freeze dried gin to melt into the mixture. Then bubble four litres of laughing gas through it. Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of mint extract. Drop a suntiger tooth. Sprinkle camphor. Add an olive.”

“Oh, er. What’s a suntiger tooth?”

“Something I made myself. Mostly coloring and carbonation, with a few accelerators added in. “

The drink arrived in an almost comically oversized glass. It fuzzed and foamed, had the subtle colors of the rarest sunsets at the bottom, and as advertised an olive.

“Is this even legal to drink?”

“It’s almost 40% legal!” she said, taking a careful sip of hers. He followed suit.

“I’m Alex, by the way. “ He paused, holding out his hand, “I supposed I should thank you for saving my life, uh, miss?”

“You’re welcome.” Sip. “So, feel like you’re being assaulted with a gold brick wrapped in a lemon?”

He drank a little more, “Somewhat. “

“So, tell me about yourself.”

“Well, I’m Alex. I, uh, recently retired. “

“Lawyer?”

“How’d you know?”

“Shoes. You can always tell by the shoes, “ she bullshitted. “So, who did you used to work for?”

They chatted that way through most of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

“Sho SHo, Shi madea copy of my dead mother!” Alex slurred with a pound on the bar. The rest of the crowd, what was left, agreed. “I can’t even get mad at her. Not like she can hakka sailboat!”

He was in that emotional stage of drunk. It was slightly impressive he could still talk straight, when he concentrated on what he was saying.

“What do you mean?”

“She died inna storm. Clestia can’t control tha weather.”

“Of course she can.”

“Huh?”

“Control the weather. Celestia can do that. It’s not that hard. “

He shook his head, “no, no way.”

“Sure. Once you have the computational power predicting the weather is easy. Just Primitive Equations. Then, you can manipulate it. ELF array would do it.”

“She couldn’t manipulate… like that… she wouldn’t? No, she wouldn’t. Can’t can’t kill.”

“You sure about that? She kills when she uploads.”

“Couldnna uploaded. Never would agreed. Drowned in a lake. “ he made a leap of drunk logic, “Can’t do surgery after she drowened.”

She nodded, “Fair enough. You would only have a few minutes to pull it off. Any more than that and it would be lossy.”

` “Yeah, a cheap copy.” He downed the last of his drink,“ I gotta go tell my, my, “he motioned with his hands to try to find the word, “tell her that the copy is real.”

He tried to stand, and it didn’t work. A rough hand kept him from falling. “No, my friend. Now that you’ve finished your micky it’s time to go to the back room.”

The woman in front of him made eye contact, “Maybe. She’s maybe real. DON’T. TRUST. CELESTIA. Don’t even trust her to lie to you.”

Alex Woke up in a cheap hotel room with the worst hangover of his life. The light from the tv was to bright, and the sound too loud. Through the pounding he saw a blurry, cheap nightstand. A smooth, rich voice came from a chair beyond.

“You’re awake. Drink the stuff in the glass. It’ll help.”

Sure enough, the blurry tall thing on the nightstand was a glass. Alex fumbled most of it into his mouth and swallowed on the forlorn hope that the voice was speaking the truth while praying to a dozen gods he didn’t believe in. The room slowly came into focus. More specifically, a nightstand full of drug paraphernalia and money came into focus.

“Take your time, stallion. I’m paid through for the whole day. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

He managed to roll over enough to see the woman that was talking. She was a hooker, obviously. Her fake tits were barely constrained in a halter. Tall, blond and leggy was relaxing in the sole cheap motel chair and stroking her big, black cock.

“I’m being blackmailed by Tony Soprano.”

“Nah, baby, nothing like that. You made some friends in low places last night. They wanted me to show you a magical time. So, is my little stallion ready to saddle up for another pony ride?”

Alex may have set a landspeed record on the way out.

Asset Report: Alex Wright
Status: Asset acquired, utilized,
and wiped. High probability of
uploading. Do not revisit.
Code: WP(RP) WP

Author's Note

The next chapter is going to be a bottleneck. I need to generate a great many of the reports such as on the bottom of this chapter.