A Toaster on Mars (2 page)

On the top ledge of his bookshelf sat his hat—a scarlet fedora. Blake took it down and put it on. He and this hat had been through a lot.

‘Don't forget your breakfast,' his refrigerator reminded him. ‘It's the most important meal of the day.'

Blake took out a bottle of pink pills. On the side it read
Bacon and Eggs
. He shook two into his hand.

‘Watch your weight,' his fridge said.

Rolling his eyes, Blake ate them, grabbed a second bottle and stuffed them into his pocket.

The hallway outside his apartment was a cramped, gloomy corridor shared by a hundred other residents, most of them off-worlders. A family from Baxhill Six—a small marsupial race—shoved past without speaking to Blake. He'd been on their bad side since they first moved in, after chasing them with a chair, thinking they were mutant rats. No amount of apologising had mended the rift.

Some species just aren't forgiving.

The day outside was humid and gloomy, the air thick with smog—but this passed for sunny in Neo City.

Blake sighed. He lived on the 701st level, on the east side of town. There were better places to live, but a PBI agent didn't make enough money to live in them.

He joined the crowded footpath. A man passed by wearing a T-shirt with bright words flashing
Don't Buy Stuff!
Following him came a woman walking a pair of Labrador-giraffes, and then a girl zoomed past on a
tricycle-copter with a choir of dolls singing Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy' in a basket.

Robots were everywhere. The League of Planets Charter forbade them resembling sentient life forms, including humans, but most were bipedal, with two arms, a torso and head. Many others had one leg, three legs, four legs—or more. Some even glided. They were every colour imaginable and made of plexy-plastic or hydro-metal, and all were equipped with AI brains, their intelligence ranging from that of a goldfish to an Einstein, Hawking or Slugmeyer.

Blake gazed about the street. Advertisements pulsated and gyrated on walls and windows, selling everything from diapers to holidays on the moon. This part of town had every building style imaginable: Art Deco, Greek Aluminium, Romanesque and Platinum Gothic, Rubber Classical, Tin Byzantium. Most of the apartments had small balconies with flowerboxes of balloon azaleas, which were all the rage this year.

Endless lines of flying cars, buses, taxi-gondolas and helium-cyclists moved around the city. Another advertising blimp floated past promoting
Al's Doughnut Burgers: Lo Cal Centres!
Teenagers on skateboards jumped off walkways, dropped a dozen floors and activated rockets to land safely below.

Blake took a deep breath, inhaling something that tasted like a cross between burnt plastic and toffee apple.

Neo City
, he thought.
Home, sweet home.

2

‘Must you continue this madness?'

It was the first thing Sally—his red and white replica 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air—said to Blake as he approached.

She was parked in a narrow alley adjacent to the building. Blake had only owned the car for six weeks and she hadn't done anything for his stress levels.

‘What madness?' Blake asked as he slid behind the wheel.

Sally's interior was also a replica of the original, except for some additional switches set into the dash. A nuclear fission propulsion system sat under the bonnet.

‘This
driving
madness.'

‘Everyone drives. That's not crazy at all.'

‘No,' Sally said. ‘The car does the driving. You should be watching television or cruising the Hypernet.'

‘I'm an old-fashioned guy. And what's it to you, anyway?'

‘I've a right to be worried about my safety.'

‘I'm a good driver.'

‘Did you tell that to the other twelve cars, too?'

Blake didn't reply. He
had
said that to his previous cars, but they had still all met unfortunate ends.
Well
, he reasoned.
Thirteen's a lucky number, isn't it?

‘Being a PBI agent is a dangerous job,' he said.

‘I worry about you, Blake.'

‘You can't worry. You're an AI—an artificial intelligence.'

Blake started the engine and, within seconds, had joined a line of cars. He flew towards PBI headquarters.

Everyone had replica cars these days, but most of them were in better shape than Blake's Bel Air. While most people sat in the driver's seat and read books or surfed the Hypernet, Blake focused on keeping Sally between the floating lane buoys. He liked driving. It made him feel like he was still in control, instead of surrendering to technology.

The early-morning traffic was worse than the Battle of the Bulge, and it took him half an hour to reach headquarters.

Despite having worked there for fifteen years, the view still took Blake's breath away.

Blake parked Sally in the underground car park and headed to the main concourse, which was an enormous dome-shaped chamber. Dozens of PBI agents sat on one side of the bookings desk, patiently trying to determine if crimes needed investigating, ridiculing or ignoring, while the public, queued on the other side of the desk, screamed and cried as they waved paperwork clenched
in hands, tentacles or gluggy things. Everyone wanted justice, or their version of it.

Message robots weaved through the crowd, passing beneath the B-class security scanners. A new desk opened for business and one robot was knocked over and trampled in the frenzy to be served.

Blake pushed through the crowd to the security entrance at the far end, pausing at the barriers. The detectors on either side fired x-rays, ultraviolet light, alpha waves and enough energy to power a cloned AC/DC concert. He was amazed anyone survived the experience without glowing in the dark.

He headed to the briefing room on the 300th floor, a huge hall with standing room only.
The last time I saw this many agents was at the last Christmas party
, he thought.
And most of them were drunk or comatose
.

A man pushed through the crowd to a stage at the front.

Sprot! That's Cecil Pomphrey.

The assistant director only left the office for one of three reasons: hard drinking, football and delivering bad news. Blake doubted he was here to share a drink or toss a ball around.

Those who hadn't yet had the pleasure of meeting Cecil Pomphrey always received a shock. The name Cecil tended to conjure up the image of a skinny man with glasses, dressed in a slightly too large suit. A man who, possibly, lived with his elderly mother, watching
old movies each night while eating shortbread biscuits and drinking cups of watery tea.

Cecil Pomphrey looked like a wrestler. He was bald, with ears that looked as beaten as a pair of shoes trampled by a herd of Tradian elephants. His hands were so large that more than one subordinate had suggested calling the
Galactic Book of Records
to make a claim. His voice was a growl, as if he spent his spare time gargling lava.

‘PBI agents,' Pomphrey's booming voice cut through the chatter of the assembled throng, ‘thank you for your prompt attendance.'

The room fell silent.

‘At 10pm last night, a weapon of unimaginable destruction was stolen from the Ministry of Defence. It was a Super-EMP device—the most powerful ever developed.'

An agent near Blake frowned. ‘What's a Super-EMP?' he asked.

‘It can wipe out all electrical devices on Earth,' Blake
explained. ‘Hospitals, transportation, water recycling, food distribution—they'd all fail. Billions of lives would be lost, plunging Earth into a new Dark Age.'

‘What about television?'

‘There would be no television.'

‘No television,' the agent muttered. ‘That's serious.'

A loud buzz had broken out. Pomphrey held up his hands for quiet.

‘The perpetrator of the crime has demanded a ransom of 100 billion credits. If the money is not paid within five days to an off-planet account, he'll use the weapon.'

Another agent held up her hand. ‘You're saying
he
,' she said. ‘Do you know who's responsible?'

‘The perpetrator is Bartholomew Badde,' Pomphrey said, his eyes sweeping the room to eventually settle on Blake.

Bartholomew Badde.

Blake's vision swam. The criminal mastermind was famous throughout the galaxy and aspired to be remembered as history's greatest villain.

Badde had evaded the law for so many years that most departments had given up on trying to catch him—he had changed his face more than a dozen times so that no one now knew what he looked like. The assignment had been handed over to Blake and his partner, Bailey Jones. Following Badde to Venus, they had been crossing a volcanic plain when—

Blake shook his head. The memory was too painful.

Pomphrey had started talking again. ‘One of our agents has been following up on Badde for years,' he said, ‘and his research will be distributed shortly. This will be our number one priority until this crisis is over. Badde must be stopped.'

Blake caught sight of his section commander, Senior Agent Capelli, who had come marching over. She was Tyrinian, a reptilian race: short and thickset with a cobra-like face and flared neck.

‘Looks like you're the man of the hour,' Capelli said.

‘Looks like it.'

Capelli took Blake down to her office on the 221st floor. It was a small room with a billboard outside the window flashing
Holidays to Neptune—Bring your woollies!

Blake had always liked Capelli. She was a no-nonsense agent with a good arrest record. Her wall was decorated with citations for meritorious conduct. She had won Agent of the Year three years running.

Capelli stopped at her desk, reached in and pulled out a snack box. She caught the rat as it leapt out.

‘I suppose you still want me heading up the Badde investigation,' Blake said, trying to ignore the squirming rodent. ‘I've got some ideas about how to find him.'

‘That's great,' she said, biting off the rat's head and wolfing it down. ‘We'll need all the help we can get.' She tossed the rest of the rat into her mouth and swallowed.

Blake leant forward. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Just that—it'll be a team effort.'

‘But surely you want me in charge? I'm the expert on Badde.'

Capelli sighed. ‘We appreciate the work you've done, Blake,' she said. ‘But this is straight from Pomphrey: I'll be taking over from here.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘We need a team player heading up this investigation,' Capelli said. She took out another rat, which gave Blake a desperate look before it disappeared into Capelli's mouth. ‘And you're the only agent in the PBI who works alone.'

‘I work better alone.'

‘We've taken the liberty of transferring your files to the server.'

‘But those are my private files!'

‘This is the PBI,' she said, her steely eyes fixing on Blake. ‘Nothing's private here.'

Woodenly, Blake made his way to the door. ‘I should be heading up this investigation,' he said. ‘I know how Badde thinks. I'm the only one who can catch him.'

Capelli put down her snack box and scowled. ‘It's that sort of thinking that's kept you off this case,' she said.

Making his way to the lift, Blake checked the main server on his wristcomm.

Sprot!

Capelli had been right: his files had now been shared with the entire bureau. A few passing agents gave him a brief nod. Blake could read their expressions: they knew
the case had been taken away from him.