slick n' dirty | story blog from dr. menlo

Black Box Revolution

He was just walking down the street head immersed in effluvia when a man bumped into him. “Oh, I’m sorry about that!” the man said, smiling broadly. He had such a wide smile you tended to take him for his word, so Joel did, but thinking so, he heard a clatter to his right. He turned to look and there his umbrella had gone down the steps in the scuffle.

Joel turned back to the man who had interceded him: “Oh, that’s quite all right, no harm done.”

The man with the wide smile tipped his hat and walked on. Joel looked after him for a minute before walking down the steps to retrieve his rain shield. As he bent over to pick it up the door there opened and a hand reached out, grabbed him by his lapels and pulled him in, slamming the door shut behind him.

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Of all the bars in the universe, mine was closest to the edge of unmapped space. Berynek’s – in cold blue neon hung over the door. It was an expansive space, being a former starship hangar, but you couldn’t see how big it was when you first walked in. First there was the velvet anteroom. Then there was the dive.

Hi, I’m Berynek. Welcome to my saloon.

Of course, when I started it was just a one-man outfit and I only operated the dive part. Who visited the last bar at the edge of the known universe? A combination of the most courageous humans and those most in need of social or mental lubrication. Being so far off the center of things lent a certain ‘wild west’ atmosphere. I did not shy away from this image. My place beat out a bar in Dutch Harbor, Alaska for being the toughest drinking hole in existence according to Space Pod, inching out the Aleutian island spot’s twenty year record. Dutch Harbor wasn’t the wild west anymore. It was bedside service and satin slippers.

It was on one of these slow days in the early days when I was wiping down the counter and she walked in. Fackin’ black-haired beauties. With long legs and no-fat curves.

She came right up to the bar and ordered a Venusian smoothie. I would have to chisel the small talk out of her, it seemed. Boy, was I lonely. A goddess is not what I needed. A fat chick always does in a pinch. But a goddess is what sat in front of me then. Hamada hamada.
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“You are here for the post, yes?” She looked him up and down. He didn’t think she was scrutinizing him, because nobody wanted this job, and they would take anybody.

He had already been hesitated through. “Yes,” he said. Fuck it all and yes. Fuck everything including your life and yes. You are headed to the last outpost in the known universe, a place which has seen more horror . . .

She smiled, a pretty Asian lady. She whisked her hands downward and then came up fanning forms, which she laid out in front of him. “Please take a seat and fill these out.”

He took the forms and a clipboard and a pen and went to the seating area, nervously looking out the front door. It was his aim to get on the next ship out to the last post before his landlord caught up with him. He thought he had taken all the geobugs off his stuff but you can never be too sure. These days they can build the things the size of pubic hair. His landlord would blow him away where he sat. His landlord was one mean motherfucker.

Cody hastily filled out the forms and brought them up to the desk. “When does the next reefer leave?” (Reefer, of course, is the term they use on boats for ‘refrigeration systems’ – taking a ship out to the last outpost meant that you, too, went popsicle-stick.)

The nice Asian lady with the beguiling smile looked over the forms and showed him her dimples: “In ten minutes, Mr. Cody.”

“Ah, Cody is my first name.”

“Yes, of course.”

As he was looking at her a red light flashed across her left eyelid, causing her eyes to immediately flit to another place on her desk which he could not see. “This man a friend of yours?” she asked. She toggled a switch and on the screen behind her a man appeared walking up the stairs with a shotgun in his hands; apparently this was live video taken via surveillance camera.

Cody laughed nervously. “Wha–? Ha ha no.” He rubbed his chin. “He does look a little familiar.”

The lady motioned with her fingers and on each side of her a dark door slid open and two oversized armed guards stepped out. Cody stepped away from the desk, panic-stricken. “Whoah! Whoah! Whoah!” he said. “I’ll leave, I’ll leave!”

The lady looked at him with an eyebrow arched. “These men aren’t for you, Mister Sebastien. These men are for him.” She looked ahead as Cody’s previous landlord stepped through the door. He saw the two guards and muttered, “The fuck–” before they both shot him simultaneously, blowing his head clean off.
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