The Escapist | Page 6

holding up his remaining hand as if it
could provide some kind of protection.
"I may not kill you", I answered, lying. "But it would help if you tell me why COSI is
trying to kill me before I permanently rid you of your weight problem."
I had to make some decisions fast. There was a dead student nurse and a gravely injured
COSI employee lying on the floor and this would be hard to explain away as an accident.
Who wanted me dead? It was unlikely to be COSI. I figured this could have been my first
contact with the organisation behind the Mind Invasion kidnaps. The other hospital staff
would be outside the door very soon, and the chances were they would find this situation
a little odd for a research neuropsychologist. Chucky's gun was silenced, but mine had
made a big noise, and a larger mess.
Chucky grimaced with pain and tried to speak again. "Not COSI...", he whimpered, and
passed out. I reached down and took the security card for the moon vehicle from
Chucky's breast pocket where I'd seen him put it earlier. His severed arm still held his
gun. I decided not to pick it up. I forced my gun into Sophie's hand and blew Chucky's
brains out. A quick fumble undid his trousers and I pulled out his scrawny male
appendage. That would keep them guessing, at least until their security group arrived. It
took a minute to get dressed and collect up my equipment, some of which had a few
dubious flecks of blood to incriminate me. There wasn't much point in trying to cover
anything up, anyway. It would take a brain scarcely larger than a baby Chihuahua's to
work out that what had really been going on was not a suicidal love session between two
fat people. For one thing, student nurses didn't usually carry explosive flechette handguns,
except perhaps when they believed very strongly in euthanasia.
What a mess. My first comparatively honest job in years and it seemed like it was over
already. I hadn't expected this kind of contact so soon. I slipped out of the Nexus-7 clinic
as quickly as possible and into the late Chucky's balloon-tired moon vehicle, a
piezoelectric craft made by Siemens that was powered by a bio-gravitational process. The
Siemens was fun to drive, because the moon's low g's and the vehicle's large carbon-fibre
tyres made an accident almost impossible. I could fling the vehicle about like a Thai jet
scooter taxi but without the fear of injury. Tuning the radio transponder to a Sri-Lankan
station playing loud neuro-spunk, I had an exhilaratingly bouncy ride across the dunes to
Armstrong, the Moon's largest city. Then I took a magneto-bus to Buzztown, the once
prestigious and expensive residential area near the old spacepad. Real estate investors had
made the now classic mistake of thinking that people would commute to work from a
home in a neighbourhood where nothing ever happened. They'd had to sell the buildings

off for far less than expected. Since then the development had become somewhat seedy
and a law unto itself. Perhaps now that there was some life there, people could be
persuaded to leave Earth. But investors had given up totally in disgust and cut their losses
by selling out to any shady buyer with the money up front.
Buzztown was well constructed, so the dust was in general kept out. But the atmosphere
had become a bit smelly, because the climate control equipment was badly maintained.
The whole moral atmosphere was rank, too. You could get some really sickening VR
chips here with tongue-in-cheek titles like "Make Love To Me and Tear Off My Limbs,
I'm Swedish". You knew the title wasn't an exaggeration of the content, either. If you
were truly obsessed and had a lot of money you could re-enact the simulation for real
with the specially-grown clone-bot of your choice. Sixteen storeys underground I found
my favourite hangout, Dirty Sara's. A potent glass of TechnoJuice in front of me, I
commanded my PDA to retrieve the Moon's latest local news items. There was nothing
about a vicious dual murder at Nexus-7. Carefully disguising my call-sign via an
anonymous Maori re-router in New Zealand, I surfed the COSI network and scoured the
files of a few key intelligence employees, including myself. I did not come up as under
surveillance. I was not registered as missing. In fact, I had apparently made a report only
three minutes previously about similarities between cases of Reagan's Aphasia and the
problems encountered with von Kühnert. I sat back in my floating bar-chair and finished
off my drink, wondering who my benevolent angel could be.
I was halfway through my second Juice when I was approached by the waiter, dressed in