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The Punchline
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what’s this festival all about?” asked Fish. He’d
been thawed out a few days earlier to provide aid quelling the low
level riots which were erupting among some of the plate bases. Tonight
the whole city seemed to be celebrating something that Fish had missed
during cryosleep and which no one had yet mentioned in the few days
he’d been working.
“Short
story shorter; A politician made a moving speech for which he was later
murdered,” said Takagi.
“Ah. Martyr.”
“Yeah. The cool part is that his supporters like
to party.”
Two enormous, elaborate cocktails appeared before
them on
the bar. Unseen, the establishment’s core AI automatically
scanned, debited and credit-checked one of Takagi’s active
finance chits. Seconds later a tab was created for it’s owner in
the business’ data reserves.
“This drink has an umbrella in it,” said Fish,
dubiously.
“Don’t worry. The umbrella is significant.”
Takagi assured him. “The drink itself was invented in honour of
our martyr. He was apparently always seen carrying a black umbrella,
even in summer. People would often ask him, ‘why do you always
carry that umbrella?’ He always replied, ‘you never know
when it’ll come in handy.’”
“Sensible,” said Fish. The riots hadn’t been too
severe – there were very few casualties, none of them what Fish
would consider ‘innocents’. Nevertheless, it was nice to
have inanities like this to take his mind off the topic of social
unrest. In the past he had witnessed lighter situations than rioting
escalate into holocaust.
The pub the
two were visiting was an enormous multiplex offering twenty-four hour
attractions including shops, cinemas, food stalls, drug booths and
gambling outlets. Dozens of bars and dance floors were strategically
situated throughout the massive structure. The first three floors, the
largest, were open to everyone; The upper stories were a type of hotel
resort with similar, though more discerning, facilities aimed at a much
wealthier clientele. Takagi and Fish preferred the public domain.
What happened next could have involved any man as far as
Fish
was concerned. Any fellow at all. Just as easily, it could have been a
woman, or one of those ‘Neithers’, the type of genderless
individual which there seemed to be increasing numbers of these days.
Who it was was irrelevant. The fact that it happened was what mattered.
As it turned out, it was a heavyset man
wearing a vest embroidered with the logo of the firm that employed him.
Fish recognised the Deltabank symbol. A shaved head disguised the onset
of middle-age baldness.
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| “The hell are
you doing in here, mutie?”
sneered the man. He
had wandered over from a table of his colleagues to come and harass the
hybrid he’d seen sitting at the bar as though he was welcome here. |
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