Archive for May, 2010
Gunfight Over an 8-Bit Rhythm Two-Step Skank at the O.K. Corral
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
Was all over in a fraction of a second, but then again ain’t everything?
You come here with your big city ways, all clean and shiny. Think we’re dumb radheads. Maybe. Don’t matter: our land, our rules. Truth is – if the truth matters – there’s rules when you can carry a gun. And there’s rules when you can dance – particularly when you can’t. Matters who shot first, who shot true, and who bit the dust.
Dangerous outlaws? They stole shit, raised some hell, but they wasn’t evil or nothing.
Another truth: they was all top of the line. Best defense bots in Arizona. After the bombs, after the meatbags died, after the rise of the New West, there was plenty of defenders and no entertainers. After hackabilly-modding some old 8-bit chips in for behavior units, ain’t no wonder we ended up with cowboys.
You want to know about Zi. I called him Robbie cuz it amused him. Big, crazy tank of a bot with one of them ridiculous clear brain pans, y’know? Not that you coulda saw his brain through the dust. Not that you woulda wanted to – robot of little brain don’t come close.
What started it? Robbie limped up to that stagecoach, opened the door, let out one hell of a high-pitched note. I thought the bots inside was gonna jump through the roof. He says, “I have 256 values to assign. That’s one.”
Then he danced. Just a quick rhythm two-step, then he was running. Did he know it was illegal for a bot to dance in town? Yep. Did he know the 8088 boys was in the stage, waiting for some action? Prolly.
No one says he was bright, but damn that bot could dance. Sometimes you just gotta share.
Not really into 8-bit myself. Fits with the “Now spin your partner till her servos groan” scene, that kinda junk. Me? Drop-d, grinding heavy metal. It’s all about the power chords. But this was special.
Course, the boys caught up to him. He was laying down a full track at 1000 beats per minute. Don’t think that speed woulda been allowed pre-war neither. And he danced, mixing all kinda styles – even some ska skankin’ – with three other Zi mods backing him up.
The boys watched, stunned, then fired. If one Zi had been a nanosecond faster draw, I guess they’d be on top now. Who knows what new styles they’d invented in the seconds that followed. In the eternity after. But 8088s, they can shoot.
In his last moments, Robbie mastered the Rhythm Two-Step Skank with one bad leg while running a Z80. Makes you wonder. Maybe us robots can do anything. Course, just because you can don’t mean you should.
One more truth: it happened right there off Fremont Street and took a fraction of a second.
Not that I expect the truth matters much.
Suite
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
The bellhop swung open the door to suite with a grand gesture. On the other side was a vast, cold expanse of stars. “God damn it!” the bellhop said. “They were supposed to fix that!”
“What?” said Claire. She was exhausted beyond belief, having flown to Los Angeles from Paris via Newfoundland, after a marathon 9-hour sales presentation, following three hours of sleep. Why is the … ?” she waved her hand vaguely at the door.
“Dimensional disjunction,” sighed the bellhop, slumping to the floor. “It’s this hallway. It’s been broken since the ’96 Curse War. They said they fixed it!”
The bellhop looked to be about 17, with kinky blonde hair and wide blue eyes that somehow gave him a rabbity look. He was skinny and short, with long, elegant fingers that looked out of place on a person so young. Claire herself was thirty-eight, compact and dark-skinned, curvy, expensively dressed, rumpled from the flight. She thought they probably looked ridiculous together.
“How long?” she said.
“About three years. But don’t worry–they say you don’t remember anything afterward. I never do. I’ve had four of these so far, but it was like blinking when I was done.”
Dimensional disjunctions canceled hunger, thirst, aging, and all biological needs except two. One was sleep.
After the first few awkward hours, they talked–and talked, and kept talking. They played charades. They made up stories, sang camp songs, made up elaborate skits and played them out together. They had lots and lots and lots of sex–increasingly creative, revealing, vulnerable, and acrobatic sex, over time. Whatever Claire’s reservations about Lawrence were, there were advantages, she soon saw, in his being 17. And eventually her reservations about him went away completely, because he wasn’t there for her to accept or reject: he was just there. He was just Lawrence.
They grew to love each other more than either one of them could possibly express. They talked about it for hours, days, weeks on end. They talked about how they would recognize their kinship even when the disjunction was over, how they would be together, what their life would be like.
Claire woke up one “morning” (“morning” was what they called the time when they woke up) with a sudden, cold fear that the three years were over. She put her hand on Lawrence’s shoulder. “Sweetheart?” she said, “Do you think–”
#
The bellhop swung open the door to suite with a grand gesture. Beautiful furniture, Claire remembered thinking, and then she walked inside and fell face-down on the bed, exhausted. She didn’t even remember to tip.