Since the Sci-Fi-London challenge seems to be the theme of the week, I though I’d present you with my entry from last year. This is exactly what was written in the 48 hours, and I haven’t modified it in the slightest, even though I’ll be the first to admit it’s not perfect.
Last year only had two instructions, title and dialogue. My luck got me:
Title: Bar Fly
Dialogue: You know there’s an app for that?.. an app… app
So, here it is:
Bar Fly
You walk into a bar, what do you see? I see opportunity. A man once told me that the more one drinks, the wiser one becomes. I highly doubt that. Of course, he was stone drunk at the time. Maybe the wiser one is, the more one drinks. Yeah, I could believe that.
So I’m in this bar and I’m looking for someone. Someone in particular. He’s a regular at this joint, a true barfly. Keep him in drink and he’ll sell you his mother’s soul. Not that it’s worth anything, mind. I knew his mother.
This guy I’m looking for, his name is Randall. We have business. He hates being called Randall, and prefers the vulgar Randy, so naturally I call him Randall. It’s good to know which foot you stand on, and I prefer to stand on both.
I say looking for, but that’s just a figure of speech. I know exactly where he is. He always sits in the same seat, at the bar, two seats from the right-hand end. He’s got his name carved into the stool. I heard a rumour, don’t know if it’s true, that he found someone else sitting there once, before his name was carved in, and he told the guy that it was his seat, to which came the predictable reply of ‘I don’t see your name written on it’. Basically it ended up where Randall carved his name on the stool with a shard of the guy’s broken femur and shouted ‘it’s on there now, bitch!’
Like I said, don’t know if it’s true. But this isn’t the kind of bar where things like that don’t happen, if you catch my drift.
Anyway, Randall’s sitting on his stool, just as I was expecting. I take the stool beside him and patiently wait for him to acknowledge me. I know for a fact he knows I’m here – despite what you might think about barflies, Randall pays a surprising amount of attention to what goes on around him.
Eventually when, I notice, his current drink is getting low, he turns to me.
“Parker,” he says. I was unlucky enough to be given the name ‘Parker’. Seriously, try to say it without a sneer, and without any sexual innuendo, and you will fail. But when Randall says it, it’s like the aural equivalent of toxic waste.
“Randall.” I cannot tell you how much pleasure I get from the way he winces as I say his name.
“It’s Randy.”
“Sure it is. How’s business?”
“Dry.”
I take the hint and buy him another drink. Some sort of ale, I think, or perhaps strained vomit. Certainly smells like it.
“I hear you’ve been selling secrets again.”
Randall laughs. He has a… most unique laugh. Imagine the most cynical person you’ve ever met, combined with a kookaburra, combined with the sound of a t-rex choking on a velociraptor while driving a minivan that was old when your grandfather was dating. Now you’re somewhere in the right ballpark.
“Someone’s been telling you lies,” he says.
“You know the rules, Randall.”
He says nothing, just scoffs.
Another guy comes over to join us. This guy… you can’t imagine it. He is huge. If he stood next to an elephant, you might get a sense of scale. You’d think that the scale was broken. Unfortunately, as is the inevitable outcome when a person is genetically imbued with fifteen generations of rhino-wrestling tree trunk limbs and a neck so thick you’d mistake it for anybody else’s torso, he lacked in certain, shall we say, intellectual areas.
“Randall,” I say, as the big lad joins us, “this is Brock. Brock, this is Randall. Don’t shake his hand if you want to keep yours,” I add. I don’t make it clear who I’m talking to.
“Me… Brock,” says Brock, doing a little wave that still manages to knock over three people.
“Uh… me, I mean, I’m Randy,” says Randall.
“Randall,” I correct.
“Randall,” repeats Brock.
Randall turns back to his drink. You can see on his face that he’s trying to forget Brock. As a bona fide barfly, he has a particular talent for forgetting things. Then again, a lot of people try to forget Brock. The fact that someone like him exists can shake your faith in things, such as reality. But Brock isn’t the most easily forgotten person in the world, and after a decent attempt, Randall clearly gives up by finishing his drink with a quick scull and ordering another, with a not-so-subtle glance at me. I pay for this one too. He doesn’t say anything until it’s sitting on the mahogany in front of him.
“Parker,” he says to me, “why do you need a walking, talking mountain?”
“Brock watches my back.”
Randall shudders and downs another few gulps of his drink.
“You know there’s an app for that? An app… app…”
He starts to drift away, so I give him a nudge.
“An app?”
“Yeah.” He takes another swig. “An app. Add it to your cortex… lets you see everything behind you in a little picture here, in your eye. Activate by blinking twice, or something. Three times maybe…”
He stares off into space for a moment, then laughs his cynical laugh.
“Amazing what they can do with the human brain these days, isn’t it?” he says.
I refrain from comment.
“Here, hold that thought,” he continues, raising his hand as if it was important. “I gotta take a piss.”
He stumbles out of his chair and staggers across the room. He’s unsteady on his feet, but I assure you, not because of the movement of the ship. He reached the far side, shockingly without falling or knocking anyone else over (though on reflection he probably had a lot of practice) and pushes his way into the men’s room.
That’s one benefit of alcohol in my line of work. Those that imbibe need to use the bathroom quite regularly, and since my work, by and large, requires privacy, this tends to be quite fortuitous. On the flip side, bathrooms tend not to be the most pleasant setting for my work. You win some you lose some.
After waiting a decent length of time, I signal to Brock, who has been staring at a wall while waiting for his next instruction (or possibly his next thought – it’s hard to tell, sometimes) and we follow Randall into the bathroom.
He’s in a stall, but he’s left the door open. Brock is too big to fit in the stall (what he does when he needs to use one I’ve no idea, but to be perfectly honest, it’s not something I’d like to think about) so it comes down to me.
I step up behind Randall and break his neck. It’s the easiest neck I ever broke. Maybe it’s because he’s not human – I’ve not dealt with his species too much. Or maybe drinking too much makes your spine brittle. I’ll have to look into that.
“You caused the deaths of fifteen people,” I say to the body, “including six children. Maybe you should have drunk a little more and sold out your species a little less.”
Normally I wouldn’t say anything, but this was a special case. Randall was a friend, in a sense.
We leave his body in the toilets. There’s a spare ‘out of order’ sign sitting beside the sink, so I hang it on the door. It’ll be some time before they find him. We go back out to the bar and find a table. It’s a while before our stop, so we have a few drinks. They don’t do much, since I’ve trained myself not to be affected by alcohol and Brock, well… alcohol thins the blood going to your brain, but there’s not a whole lot of blood going to his head in the first place.
Eventually the bar lands on Europa. We get out there. There’s a strong market for ice on Europa. Might be fun.
Brock insists that we wait to watch the bar take off. Of course I agree, because I’m quite attached to my arms and would hate to lose them over something so trivial as a couple of hours or the high probability of being arrested for somebody’s murder, just because I happened to be in the vicinity and happen to have a record and happen to know the victim and happen to have been seen with him right before his death and happen to have his DNA under my fingerprints it’s all just a coincidence your honour, I swear.
But Brock isn’t the kind of person you don’t indulge. Not, like I said, if you value your limbs. The Leaky Drum takes off and shoots away up into the stars. Brock waves it goodbye.
“Bar… fly,” he says.
“That’s right, buddy,” I reply. “Bar fly.”
Oh yeah, so you walked into the bar and what did you see? Stars, you moron. You should watch where you’re going.