Yesterday’s heroes. He is wearing magazine face, chomping on a Reef-Ital bar while Billy Boy sits in the back in superman doobie land, sucking on a huge blunt. The Hydroponic City is patrolled by Rastafari, flies a Jamaican flag, and does not like undercovers, which they still suspect him of being. He is pumping a clockwork heart on a pianola dial, and his smile is disconnection ratcheted, like a couple of notches too tight. Panic oozes here when you are being given the hairy eyeball, because a no-pass equates with concrete footwear and naptime amongst the piscean denizens of the Thrush’s murky depths.
Soldier of Sticky Icky steps close to the vehicle, man-handling his disintegrator’s barrel in through the window. He smiles, because this isn’t any kind of morality trip; this is pure business … Wrench understands that, has dealt with this shit before. His hands are loaded, he holds his trapdoor palm flat in front of the man and knows he knows what to do, and the sprung trapdoor pops a sweetener in the palming. Everyone in it for themselves – that’s how it rolls; despite the holy war bullshit PR line he knows he can buy anyone with a well targeted bribe.
Back home Mama is sat there monitoring fifty screens, all her boys spread out like seeds to the wind; all of them on dangerous jobs. She cuts the umbilicus and Wrench feels the line go dead. Time to wing it on your own boy. He’s been here before – and he has ridden this wave. Fingertip deafblind codes are exchanged because the local sp-EARS are tuning in for any possible give-away tell-tale sign that these guys are not what they say they are.
Billy Boy is sporting a dope grin you could feed a twelve inch into – no sweat. Beefy is sat there leaking body fluids into his hazmat leisurewear; he smells like a fat kid who’s run up a hill on a hot day; that or a bucket of piss. This trio is going to take down Elibus Lobster? Sure, why the fuck not?
Under the skin they are sporting some top of the range upgrades – Nietzsche Dissociation Drives to make them cool calm killers; Pollock Randomity Curve Balletic Gyroscopes for navigating those complicated fourspace kung-fu battles; Warhol Integrators for siege situations; Basquiat Initiators for thinking outside the box; Tungsten Tip Kerouac Fingers for excessive typing of reports and also for working in coordination with Bruce Lee One Inch Punch Actuators. These guys can fight, and they can think. With Einsteinian Cloud Neural Nets they operate in unison at speeds that defy logic. Wrench read the brochure. Beefy and Billy Boy are still fuck ups though, and can find multiple ways to screw up.
He finds the motel, cheap and nasty and perfect for what they need it for – a base of operations with its own camouflage. He walks the perimeter, dropping the Edge-hogs – watches them burrow, gets notified of the spatio-temporal spike they have just generated, and notes that this place is now looping through a chrono-exclusion zone temporal pinch. The denizens of this place are going to be Ground Hog Daying it for a while. Him and his crew are going to move around freely with a bunch of people operating on the memory span of gold fishes.
He gives them their room keys and he is off to catch some shut-eye.
loopquit 