“Maybe it thinks you’ve got a cold?” Huw asks. “Hey, you’re not subscribing to a Plague of the Month club?” There are some aspects of historic reenactment that are too gross even for Huw.
“No. A-choo!” Bonnie rubs at her nose. “Oh dear.”
“It’s probably hay fever.”
“I’ll have to get my immune system tweaked again. Ech. Do you feel like peeling some spuds?”
So it is that Huw is up to his armpits in cold water, scrubbing (he doesn’t hold with that peeling fetish) a bunch of wholesome organic home-grown potatoes when the doorbell rings.
“I’ll get it—” Bonnie is off while Huw is still dripping. “—you, you fucker!”
“Wotcher, chick,” says a cheery, familiar, and utterly unwelcome voice. “Is His Ambassadorship available?”
Huw palms a couple of oversized pink fir apples in one hand and grabs the cast-iron poker from its spot by the stove. “Ade,” he says as he heads for the front hall, “the embassy is closed. Go away.”
“You what? And here was I, thinking you’d like your bike back!” Ade is leaning against the inside of the front door, one arm wrapped around Bonnie’s shoulders: Bonnie’s expression suggests that she can’t make up her mind whether to kiss him or bite him. Huw can just discern, behind them, the frame of a long-lost friend.
“My bike? That’d be good. But the embassy is still closed.” Huw leans against the passage wall, the poker lowered. He has Ade’s number: knows how to deal with him. No violence needed, just a reinforced concrete wall. “You are an absolute arse, Ade. Every time I have run into you, you have comprehensively fucked up my life while making out that it was my fault, and the one time I needed you to get off your behind and do something for all our sakes, you cocked it up. There’s an old saying about never attributing to a conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. So I hope you can understand that, while you’re welcome to stop by for a cup of tea, I am out of your emergent factional whatsits now and forevermore. Clear?”
“You don’t have to be like that,” Ade says. He sounds wounded. Bonnie punches him on one shoulder: he lets go of her. “I just wanted to thank you for your work, what did you think I’m about? I’m not some kinda supervillain, mate! And look at you, don’t you think it turned out for the best? We’re still here. The Authority didn’t deliver the Big Zap, the cloudie fundamentalists didn’t dismantle the—”
A shadow moves behind Ade, and there is a noise like an old-style electric door buzzer. Ade drops, twitching in the grip of a full-on Taser spazz-out.
“Gettir, Sam.”
“Oh fu—” Huw freezes. Bonnie turns and aims a punch at Sam’s face, simultaneously trying a vicious stomp and a disabling knee to the groin—none of which stop the man-mountain from placidly grabbing her fist and twisting her arm behind her back.
Huw tries to move, but his voluntary control of his musculature seems to have clocked off for the day: he can’t seem to do anything except stand there like a wallflower, cast-iron poker dangling limply from one hand.
I’ve been rooted! Horrified realization dawns as Doc steps over Ade’s prone form, pointing his baby blue Taser shotgun at Huw’s midriff.
“Greetings, heretic.” Doc’s smile—more of a carnivorous grin—doesn’t reach his eyes. “Where is she?”
“What? Who?”
“Don’t play the innocent with me.” Doc’s glare is positively deranged. Behind him, Sam stands impassive as a golem, holding Bonnie, whose struggles are clearly diminishing. Just how Doc has reasserted his control over Sam’s wetware puzzles Huw for a fraction of a second until the coin drops. If Doc has rooted him, then obviously Doc rooted Sam first, and probably everybody else he’s been able to get close to. Sam is, in fact, probably just as much a puppet in this show as Huw. “Her. The fountainhead, the one who brought the True Knowledge to Earth. The Prophet says she’s reincarnated here in this town, preaching. Where is she?” His voice rises to a ragged screech.
“Whoa!” Huw boggles at him. “I don’t know whom you’re—” He stops in midsentence and backtracks before Doc can wind up to another tirade. “—huh. You’re looking for Ayn Rand?”
Behind Doc, Bonnie stops struggling and emits a sound like a stifled, frightened giggle.
Huw rolls his eyes. “Bonnie? Did she tell you where—?”
Ade groans. Doc’s head whips around: “Be silent, heretic!”
“Let me get this straight?” Huw asks. “You reincarnated and came here because you heard that your Thought-Leader has returned and is preaching the rapture of the uploaded? And if you get her, you’ll take her back to Jesusland and do the whole storming heaven thing and leave us alone?”
“Don’t push your luck,” Doc says, his finger whitening on the trigger—just as the doorbell rings again.
“Hello, is Bonnie here? Would like to resume our discussion of the Sing— Oh!”
The skinny, dark-haired, intense-looking woman stares up at Sam. “Who is this?” Then she sees Doc’s shotgun, realizes Sam has Bonnie in a half nelson: “This will not do at all! You disgusting coercive thugs!” She lights up, incandescent with rage: “Coercive violence is an abomination! You should be ashamed of yourselves!”
Doc falls to his knees before her: “Holiness!” he says. “You have returned at last to lead us to the promised land!”
“I’ve what? No no no, that won’t do at all!” Her hair is almost standing on end, crackling with indignation: “What priest-ridden nonsense is this?” She grabs Doc by one ear and lifts. “Put that disgusting thing down right this instant, I say!” He lets go of the Taser shotgun as he rises, perforce to a stoop (for the Thought-Leader is not a tall person in this reincarnate body). “Do you call yourself an Objectivist? You aren’t fit to shine Alan Greenspan’s boots! And what’s this I hear about this bizarre superstitious plan to bring about a universal theocracy? Your illogic disgusts me! Truly pathological. Feh. You and I, we are going to have an open-minded discussion about the meaning of hypocrisy in the context of rational thought grounded on Aristotelian axioms. Here is a hint: You are going to lose. ...”
Ade groans again and clutches his head as Rand drags Doc through the door, groveling and scraping all the way out to the street beyond. “Whut?” he vocalizes, rolling on his back and gazing up at Sam, whose grip on Bonnie is slackening.
“Help,” Sam says.
“Me too,” adds Huw. “Been rooted.”
“Rooted.” Bonnie steps backwards nervously, looking around the three of them. “By Doc, I assume?”
“Yeah ...” Huw swallows.
“Okay, I’ll send you the security patch your mum gave me. Stand by. ...” She turns to Sam. “Doc dragged you here, did he?” Sam nods. “Do you want to be free?” Sam nods again. “Well, then you came to the right place. ...” But Huw doesn’t hear what she says next, as for a couple of seconds later everything goes blurry and fuzzy and a progress bar appears in front of his field of vision, crawling from left to right.