Twisted Moose Magic

Twisted

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

In a hospital room with a sterile muted color palette, an ECG kept its own time in a corner of the room.

On a clipboard at the foot of the bed, worrying words such as "car accident" and "tetraplegia" were written. Along with a small note filled in the blank space provided as if trying to hide from the world it read: "Recovery unlikely."

Something appeared in the room. It was hard to remember what it looked like, even when looking directly at it. The best we can do here is "humanoid."

It looked at the figure lying on the bed and waited.

The figure on the bed rolled its eyes to look at the... Something, whatever it was. He was unable to make any other move.

"What do you want?" He grunted out in a hoarse voice.

"To give you a gift. A new lease on life. All I ask in return is your service on a certain matter." It was hard to pin down a voice for the Something: anything from a snake to a desert breeze.

"What kind of 'service?'" He asked suspiciously.

"Oh nothing beyond what you can do, at least not when I give you your legs back."

That held the man's attention, enough to take the risk--any risk.

After all, what did he have to lose?

Rodger Walton was annoyed.  Rodger had many many reasons to be annoyed; after all, as the head of GBGE, he was working--successfully--to control most of the civilized world through sheer industrial force. People always asked him 'What does GBGE actually stand for?' and this annoyed him as well.  But right now, he was annoyed because somebody was late.

Just then, the person he was annoyed at stepped into the room silently.  He was dressed like a man you wouldn't want following you home, with a duster and an ever-present pair of silvered glasses and a wide-brimmed fedora*.

“Sorry sir I was… arranging things.”

Rodger’s frown turned into a scowl.  That was one thing that annoyed him greatly: While the Grand Vizier(A self-given title) was indeed his second in command, he never actually told Rodger a great deal of what he did to ensure things continued as normal. Rodger suspected. He suspected a great many things, as it was his job, but as long as he--and, more importantly, the press--never heard about it, and things continued as normal, he wasn’t going to do anything about it.

“We don’t have time for that now. We’re about to make oil companies obsolete.  Nothing is more important, at the moment.”

After they boarded the VTOL to the test site, the Grand Vizier brought out a folder of reports and handed it to Rodger.  As Rodger idly flipped through it, he began listing off instructions in a businesslike tone.

“Research department needs to speed up work on deciphering the neural network designs.”

“Ah they actually mentioned something about that; they said it couldn’t be done.  It’s too complicated to decipher.”  Rodger frowned.  “However, they say they can build the entirety of the robot design without actually understanding the intricacies of the neural network itself.”

“If that is our only choice, then I guess we’ll have to. But I don’t want to be bitten on the ass because of something Gerald hid in the neural network. Can they guarantee he never slipped anything in there? A personality? Some kind of backdoor code?” Rodger glared at the Grand Vizier for a moment. “Inbuilt morals?”

“As much as can be guaranteed… sir… with our current knowledge.” The Grand Vizier said, trading a glare for a sneer made of plausible deniability.

Rodger glanced back at the report.  “And tell those hotheaded ambassadors that the next time they incur more than twenty-five parking tickets in a day, we will execute them by gunpoint.”

The Grand Vizier looked a little shocked at this, after all, those countries were some major customers.

“Are you su-“

“Yes, if they want to take offense at us telling their ambassadors to act inside the law, then they can try and invent anything we make.”  Rodger smiled. “Remember when the Americans tried to replicate the Mark-3’s?  It broke the operator’s spine and the power supply needed a separate truck.”

“Yes. An unfortunate press and public relations disaster for their military. They had some people Inquire about ‘licensing’ the Mark-3’s just last month, in return I offered them that neural reconstructive formula R&D’s been working on, contingent on their full licensing of the ...Mark-4’s.” The Grand Vizier smiled for a moment, like a man who didn’t know what smiling was. “Gave them a free truck too, since they spent so very much more than they had budgeted. I felt it was good business.”

The rest of the trip was uneventful until they actually came into sight of the GBGE aircraft carrier.

“This is a big day for us. Renewable antimatter is within our grasp.”

“Yes, sir.” The Grand Vizier said in a way that only people who knew him well would call sarcastic. It always annoyed Rodger because he knew The Grand Vizier well enough to catch that, even though often he felt that wasn’t very well at all.

Inside of the GBGE aircraft carrier, they stopped in a makeshift lab near the carrier’s current, and possibly obsolete, nuclear power source.  There it was: Hooked up to many monstrous wires and inside a massively shielded black ball about four feet across, sat the future of infinite renewable energy.

“Start it up.”

None of them heard something large and definitely organic land on the deck above.

Rodger was lying trapped. Groggily, he tried to remember what had happened to put him in this situation.  An unreal light brought him back to the present. He looked at the portal to another universe. Its ragged edges flowed and wavered around it like fire.

He couldn’t see all of it, because there was a figure standing, facing away from him. The unworldly wind made the room go cold.

In the horrible light from the portal, Rodger could see the Grand Vizier’s Frankenstein of a device. Something he had latched onto the antimatter generator that clicked and made unpleasant organic sounds. All the while spilling a caustic paste onto the floor.

Rodger began to claw at the ground, but he was trapped very thoroughly. He looked up at the figure and called out to him.

“Why?”

It wasn’t apparent if The Vizier had heard him, so Rodger crackled his voice into a shout.

“WHY?”

The Grand Vizier turned slowly and walked over to Rodger slowly savoring the moment, his every movement as menacing as a drawn sword. Rodger could swear he saw something large and insectoid scuttle out of sight over his… its shoulder.

Rodger flinched back as the Grand Vizier crouched down in front of him.  He was staring at Rodger through silvered glasses.  He took them off and looked Rodger directly in the eye.

Rodger had never seen the Grand Vizier take his glasses off before, he had never actually seen… Its eyes before.

The eyes looked dead, but that wasn’t the worst part about them. The worst part was that there was something growing into them… the growth that actually seemed to be watching him.

It wasn’t even human anymore; it was an inhuman parasite that had acquired human shape.

A dead man.

Rodger could almost feel the intelligence behind those corrupted eyes coldly ticking away, inching between a stay of execution and what it truly wanted to do.  Icily weighing options with regards to effort, rather than a moral standpoint.

Rodger had met people who would set the world ablaze for the sake of watching it burn, and he had assassins to deal with that kind of person.  Rodger had met people who would set countries into war over a petty insult, and he had diplomats and contingency plans for such people.  But he had never looked into the eyes of a man for whom the world meant nothing, a man who would thoughtlessly cast it into the void without even gratifying it with the title of garbage.

Rodger would rather stare into the eyes of death itself than even glance into those empty, soulless orbs.

Just then the Dead Man replaced his glasses and pulled a gun out of his duster.  He pressed it up against Rodger's temple and answered him very quietly.

“Because I can.”

Rodger could see his face reflected in those silvered lenses.  The Dead Man showed no expression as he pulled the trigger.

*CLICK*

“Oh,” The dead man was grinning now, as if he had just told a joke. “It looks like I'm out of ammo.”

And he turned and walked through the portal, which soundlessly closed behind him like a healing wound.

*It is important to note that a fedora is different from a trilby--and you're probably thinking of a trilby when you say “fedora.”