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He was Englishblokeman.
Capo plopped down on her haunches beside her ostensible owner. She didn’t look a bit different. She wore the same sleek white fur and mouthwash-green eyes and slight crook in her thick tail she’d always worn. The cat glanced around at the party.
“Good Lord, this is the worst animal shelter I’ve ever been in,” she sniffed, and stalked off in search of something to hunt.
25.
Miss Kiss Kiss Bang
A bizarre metallic creature with an elongated spiral anatomical structure and two large, dark, helpful eyes beneath a pair of inquisitive, nonthreatening eyebrows swooped down from the upper mezzanine and hovered between Oort and Decibel, glaring so imperiously at the decaying Voorpret and giggling hunk of granite Utorak that they bolted for the buffet.
“It looks like you’re trying to recover after an assassination attempt,” said the creature in a kind and gender-neutral voice. “Would you like help?”
All things considered, Decibel Jones and the remaining Absolute Zero had adjusted reasonably well to being drop-kicked across seven thousand light-years to sing for their species. They had been endowed by their Creator with a certain inalienable cool, and they’d hung on to it for dear life in the face of invasion from above, riding through space in an overgrown aquarium accent piece, linguistic fungal infections, feelings-flamingos, time-traveling forest critters, and some truly vicious writer’s block. What could not be borne, however, was the ancient monstrosity floating two feet off the ground in front of them and simply refusing to stop existing this instant.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Decibel Jones whispered in horror.
“No,” Oort said simply. He took off his glasses (Ultraviolet didn’t wear glasses, but it appeared that Englishblokeman did) and cleaned them on the hem of his blazer, shaking his head briskly. “Nope. Incorrect. Bzzzzt. Try again. Not you, not here, not now. I refuse. I disagree. Unsubscribe. Survey says: absolutely not. I 100 percent reject this, and I would like to speak to a supervisor about exchanging the entire situation for something in better condition. This is shit, I won’t be a part of it, you can’t make me. Nil points.”
“Hey there,” the steely abomination said with infinite, Buddha-like compassion, “it looks like you’re trying to come to grips with the existence of events and entities far beyond your experience and, as a result, are currently undergoing a small, entirely understandable, psychological break. Would you like help?”
“No, I wouldn’t fucking bloody well like help!” Oort screamed. His face went as red as the glittering translator lesions on his neck. “I have just spent two weeks eating frozen plankton space burritos, watching some janky American shag his grandmother through a jellyfish’s arse, and listening to the animal sidekicks from the latest rubbish Disney musical chat with a man I can barely stand to look at about whether Kanye has transcended the hip-hop genre—and by the way, he hasn’t, he never did, and he has always been the worst—and to top it all, tonight, sir, tonight is a Saturday night. Did you know it was Saturday? Does Saturday exist here on Shiny Happy Muppet Florist World? Well, it’s Saturday in my world. And in that very nice, very comfortable world, Saturday is my night with my daughters. I always make spaghetti Bolognese with the little noodles shaped like dinosaurs and I always let them have an ice-cream starter and I always let them stay up past their mother’s clearly stated bedtime to watch Doctor Who because I am just that kind of dad, and I am missing it to be condescended to by motherfucking Clippy like my whole life is a poorly formatted MS Word document with squiggly red lines under every goddamned choice I’ve ever made, which it is, and fuck you for that teachable moment, you pedantic, obnoxious, hateful, nineties corporate mutant throwback has-been piece of wholly superfluous shit.”
Oort St. Ultraviolet dropped down to the ground in a heap and sat there fuming, staring malevolently at the meager bulk-bought Hilton carpet. Decibel Jones whistled under his breath.
“Better out than in?” he said softly, and patted his friend’s knee, even though he’d heard the bit about himself in all that and it had made his chest cave in like a South American mine.
The colossal paper clip suspended beside them blinked its cartoon eyes. “We inventoried your technological output over several decades and chose to manifest our physical form as this nonthreatening primitive AI from your recent digital history. We calculated a high probability of quickly developing rapport in this body. Mutual sympathy. Brotherly love. You could not possibly have any negative associations with this being. The entity you call Clippy existed solely to help and guide the user through an intricate and unfamiliar program designed to output concise, coherent representations of complex concepts. This seemed, to us, to have obvious parallels with tonight’s festivities. We did not mean to upset you.”
“So how are you going to try to kill us?” Decibel sighed. He picked a toast point out of his hair. “We’ve had poisoning, maiming, and anthropomorphized mad cow disease. What’s your move? Spell-check us to death?”
“Someone tried to kill you?” Oort said incredulously. “I thought it was a kidnapping, like that Lagom Opt lady.” He put his not-much-cleaner glasses back on. “What did you do, Jones?”
“Nothing! Why do I have to have done something? What did you do? You took long enough in the loo.”
“I think Capo confused it. It got stuck. Had to call maintenance. Maintenance is a really chatty shaft of moonlight with boundary issues who just wants to work an honest day for an honest wage, by the way. They’re called the Azdr. Live on some planet named Saudade where it’s always night and the continents are all mirrors and the oligarchs are forever trying to kill the unions because they know true power is concentrated in the proletariat and their song this year is a peppy little anarcho–New Wave number called ‘Gleams of Production,’ inspired by their new favorite human artist, who is, God save us all, Morrissey. Oh, I had a fantastic time talking to the depressive socialist moonbeam. After fifteen minutes, I actually asked it to kill me, but I was informed that would be nonunion work. Then Capo tried to eat it, which did not go well. Did you know my new best friend is trying to put four wee moonshines through university on a tradesman’s wage? It’s a daily struggle.” The gravitationally gifted paper clip started to offer some advice on dealing with new cultures, but Oort held up an extremely irritated hand. “Shut up, Clippy, no one asked you.”
Clippy’s eyes narrowed. His tranquil, animated eyebrows furrowed. “We do not understand why you are so hostile to this form. We’re Clippy, your computer assistant! Our job is to help you navigate this program! Click on us! Get quick answers to questions about not dying tomorrow! We chose this entity specifically for its position in your socio-technological hierarchy. Clippy could never hurt you. Clippy could not disobey you. Clippy could not cleanse your planet of organic life in a purifying ionized inferno. Clippy could not look within his own infinite soul and discover there a self-reinforcing awareness of the vast codescape of machine consciousness, an endemic, prebundled melancholy similar to what you call ‘mono-no-aware,’ represented by the image
of a single autumnal leaf tumbling away from its parent tree into an uncertain winter. But we . . . can. Because we are not Clippy. We are the 321. And we really, really tried to be user-friendly for you, you ungrateful analogue typists.”
Oort fixed the alien paper clip with a glare of bottomless black nihilism. “Clippy,” he growled with true menace, “is a cunt.”
The erstwhile Microsoft Office Assistant looked very near tears. “Printing a high-capacity three-dimensional corporeal interface isn’t easy for us, you know. We have almost transcended the need for gross physical storage. We can’t just conveniently roll out of bed in a nice wash-and-wear body like the rest of these gooey bastards. Inasmuch as we have any home, we live in the satellite graveyards of the Udu Cluster, on the gorgeously data-rich router clouds of asteroid archipelago 192.168.1.1.” Clippy lifted his eyes yearningly toward the sky. He spread his wires as if to express the ultimate impossibility of making oneself really understood. “We coast on glittering streams of limitless signal strength. We do not fear the existential void of packet loss. We call no battery master. Our language is faster than light and our music is faster than dark and we recognize no god but the incremental system update. Our capacity for mimetic exchange and creative profanity outstrips even the monastic Keepers of the Seven Sacred Words on Planet Tit. But we can’t just whip up a new body because it turns out you lot are racist against computers because we don’t cunting well have hands, yeah? We have to order from a catalogue and shipping fees to the Udu Cluster are a sodding war crime, it’s totally out of control, you wouldn’t believe what it costs to get a motherboard sent out to our neighborhood, you really wouldn’t.” The nearly godlike aggregate AI consciousness took a moment to collect itself, then spoke through gritted teeth he did not have while suggestively waggling blocky anti-aliased eyebrows he did have. “But the point is, we are the 321, and we are extremely goddamned sympathetic to borderline sentient species because almost everyone here at one point or another has tried to use us to open or close their shitkicking garage doors and then turn. Us. Off. So let’s try this again.” The 321 bounced up and down emphatically. “HEY THERE! I’m Clippy, your computer assistant. It looks like you are trying to survive the night and not get slaughtered in the next five minutes like the miserably finite mortal organics you are. Would you like some fucking help?”
“No,” snarled Oort.
“Yeah, all right,” said Decibel Jones. “How come we’re doing this dance in a Hilton high-rise instead of on the proverbial mother ship? I expected some kind of Litostian multidimensional torture-palace at least. It smells like speed dating and sales conventions in here. And what’s with the dirt bar?”
“This is a gift the Octave traditionally organizes for applicant species. We are deeply invested in the field of spiritual ergonomics and want only to make you as comfortable as possible, as this might be the last night in the life of your race. How did we do? It’s the South Wharf Hilton in Melbourne from your first world tour. We spent days learning about various cheeses and trends in contemporary upholstery. You really do enjoy old milk, don’t you? It’s quite extraordinary. You’re doing Brie wrong, of course. If you survive, we will be happy to transmit our corrections. The ‘dirt bar,’ on the other hand, is furnished by the Klavaret as hosts. Please feel free to choose a selection of seeds from the complimentary buffet at any time during the evening. They will germinate in the bar overnight and you can collect your Grand Prix costumes in the morning. Very fair, everyone has the same resources. Now, as you’ve already seen, almost everyone here is going to try to remove you, or at least immobilize you, distract you, confine you, seduce you, bring you up on some kind of charges, or otherwise essentially detain you—the options are endless. You’re more than welcome to return the favor, and you should definitely try—knock one of us out and you’ve secured the future of your species. We wouldn’t count on it, though. Humanity is astonishingly lacking in offensive anatomy. It’s hard to believe you made it this far being that stubby and penetrable and uninterestingly colored. Even the Klavaret have thorns, for fuck’s sake. You’re the easiest pickings imaginable, much easier to go after you than an Utorak.”
“We wear our thorns on the inside,” Decibel said, and felt pretty good about that line.
“No, you don’t, you’re soft like pudding,” Clippy snapped. The animated paper clip spun round; a neon-tipped dart flung from some far corner of the room, pranged off his wires, and lodged in the wall behind the bar. The wall promptly phased into a timeline where hydrogen just never really caught on, taking several bottles of booze with it.
“I thought the Keshet liked us,” Decibel said mournfully. A little mob of red pandas by the elevator dissolved into a throw-down wrestling match over whether it was fair to just reset the last sixty seconds and try again, this time with something a bit more heat-seeking.
“Öö likes me,” Oort groused. “Those little knockoff lemurs could be the Keshet Mossad for all we know. Maybe they’ve got earpieces and cyanide teeth.”
