Tech Noir

Inveterate unemployment.

The story of my life. I fish in my coat and take a S shaped cigarette from my crushed pack of Farbolos. I hurl smoke rings in the bare room. The phone silently accuses me from my beat desk. Maybe I forgot to pay the bill? My feet are on the desk and I gaze at the raggedy clouds that pull themselves across the small rectangle of visibility my window (income) affords me.

It’s a grey day, and it’s a great day to drink. I take my feet off the desk and daub the cigarette in the ashtray, pour myself a Clown’s Smile Rum. I knock back a slug and grimace. Clown’s smile, indeed. I pour myself another couple fingers. Days like this rum is the best medicine, I muse. From the pack I take a Y shaped—how the hell did that happen?—cigarette and as I light it, a knock thuds on the door.

Another knock.

There is a shatter of glass, and I find my plate glass window—I had just stenciled in my name—resting in pieces on the grimy floor. A dame, in a tight black skirt, with legs all the way to her chin, wearing an expression of astonishment.

Quite literally, in fact.

A mechanoid DAME-X003, a model especially prone to the extremes of human emotion. There is an apologetic whir of optics, the clank of badly greased bearings. I sigh. These were an especially kvetchy sort, if you could believe it. The majority of business down my way, it’s them… Say, I can’t seem to tell whether it’s the always the same robot or a series of ’em. Either way, business is business.

I wave the robot in.

Blue Dreams

“When I bring up his father, he becomes very upset and says he is nothing like his father and goes home to drink, which makes him very much like his father.”

He snapped awake in the frigid night, chest heaving. Moonlight poured through the window into his small room, splashing silver light on his narrow bed, the bottle of rum on a single chair, jacket on the coat hanger. His breath steamed cold blue picture-scenes and in all of them he died. He shivered. “I’ve been in the reality game too long. I need a vacation,” he muttered and turned in bed, throwing the blanket over his shoulders.

“Poor chap. Got his head in the sand. Liable to rip it out, if he tried, and he’d be running ’round like a headless chicken.”

“He’s been through enough. He’s been—well, is—everybody. I wish we could cut him a break.”

“Discovered morality, haven’t you? You and your fads. Besides, he’s been broken. He can’t change anything.”

“Remember it’s also yourself you’re talking about.”

This time the Time Traveller woke to the sepulchral fog that flooded the countryside to drown the town square, and from his window he watched a cat on a ledge paw the condensation. The fog swirled and eddied: he could empathize. The moon, a grinning half dollar, lay low in the sky. In the silver scene he pulled his jeans on, slipped into a shirt, took his jacket, and went out of the door.

On second thought he came back for the rum.