Rick Shafter blew out another stream of smoke through his clenched teeth and studied the gray concrete wall of the room through the resulting abstract, curling, haze. The room was quiet except for the buzzing of the old fluorescent tubes that cast a ghoulish green light on the chrome and stainless steel fixtures scattered around. It was the light of death. Death the way it came packaged in the foetid places; Africa, southeast Asia, places Rick didn't much like to remember, not because of the death, but because of the un-manly shape it took: squat, dark, craven, and stained with the failure of those blighted continents where the bright light of honor and plain dealing had gone out so long ago.
The room had been the morgue, and it was the last place left the nannies who ran things now let people smoke, because it had the powerful ventilation system that had once been needed to clear out the formaldehyde and the damp of decomposing bodies. Rick usually had it to himself, as he did now, seeing as he was about the last person left in the service who smoked. Smoking was a solitary pursuit now, stripped of the camaraderie and fellowship it had once enjoyed. Even after the hysteria over so-called "second-hand smoke" drove the smokers outdoors, they had still had each other. Most of them were gone now, quit or died, and Rick had to make no small sacrifice to carry the torch of that glowing ember that once spoke so much about the man whose face it illuminated. He glanced down at the cigarette in his hand. He knew what he'd see, but it comforted him nonetheless. Hand-rolled, as they all were now that the big manufacturers had all shut down. Off-white, three gold bands near one end, a little thicker than they'd used to be -- Rick had a favorite joke about how that could be said of a certain part of his anatomy that he liked to use when the time and company were right. Neither was right now.
The cost of the cigarettes and the extra insurance premium he had to pay had forced him to give up his penthouse suite and move an unfashionable number of floors down and over to the side of the building with the undesirable view. It had hurt, especially when that bitch in personnel -- "Human Resources" they called it now, that's what he was: a human resource -- had suggested that he wouldn't have to endure the shame for long, given the amount he smoked. Fuck that; he'd rather die at sixty with a cigarette in his fingers and his fingers in a blonde, than die at ninety with a mouthful of tofu for comfort.
Rick stubbed out his cigarette and thought about the man he was going to kill. It seemed like such a waste: to kill a man just for making women into huge-breasted submissives. Rick didn't even believe that last part. The bosses said they were brainwashed -- mind control. What proof did they have? The "victims" all said they were perfectly happy. His boss had given him a speech full of "human rights", "dignity", and "gender sensitivity" when he'd objected to the assignment, but the dossier was perfectly clear.
Doctor Ernest Piatzo had developed a miraculous process by which dreams became reality, and now he had to die for it. Dozens of women, including two undercover operatives sent to infiltrate Piatzo's operation, had been turned into young, fit, leggy babes with huge jugs and an allergy to clothes, and no one could prove they hadn't asked for it -- what woman wouldn't? The Director, maybe, but Rick had long harbored doubts about "her"...
Naturally, the politically correct crowd responsible for so much of the pall of blandness that had fallen over the world recently had decided that Piatzo posed a dire threat, and had to be controlled. When Piatzo had refused, the order had come down. No one could be allowed to threaten the integrity of society by making it a nice goddamn place to live again. Piatzo was to go, and Rick Shafter was the one who had to send him.
But, not before his date. He was meeting Noel -- one of the last true redheads left, which about said it all in Rick's mind -- for drinks at a black-market club Rick knew. The club was a last evanescence of that larger, better world that so few allowed themselves to remember any more -- because if they did, the pain would be unbearable. Rick felt like a comet: a fragment of an alien world blazing across the sky of this one like a portent, frightening the natives, beautiful and doomed.
He left the old morgue. Noel would be waiting...
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Sun Jan 26 00:06:43 2014
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