LK7
From The Encyclopaedia Expurgatia
The seventh novel, written in AD1998, of The Sector Ninety-seven Saga
It begins something like this....
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Chapter One: The Bravo Company
Squish.
Charlie Bravo, President and CEO of the Bravo Company, stopped walking, glancing at his shoe and the squishy substance fighting to steal it with abject reproach. The substance was, as he understood it, called mud. The shoe, as he recalled, was fifty thousand dollars; both shoes together had been six figures. ‘Shit.’
Delta Zulu, his coffeechick, stopped walking, coming to rest at his left. ‘That would be nature,’ she told him.
‘Can we lobby against it?’ he asked, apparently seriously.
‘You already do,’ she said, ‘You’re fighting the EPA over that thing in Wyoming.’
‘Is it working?’ he asked.
‘Depending who you ask? Not really. Though your loyal opposition and their lobbyists would have you believe that you’ve already destroyed the whole starsystem seventeen times.’
Charlie wriggled his foot, and the shoe containing it, free of the nature. ‘Always good to have fans,’ he said, ‘Now, about this thing....’
‘This thing is the Hotel Foxtrot,’ Delta reminded.
‘Good,’ he told his shoe, hoping to spook the residual bits of nature into going away from it, ‘Great. Excellent.’
‘You’re here to buy it,’ she added.
‘Am I?’ he asked her and not his shoe or its acquired nature, ‘Good for me.’
She pulled out her mobilephone, which was also her computer, which did everything any computer had ever done to date, ten times as quickly, depleting its battery ten times more slowly, with little bingy noises ten times more pleasant; it binged pleasantly as she touchscreened her way to its calendar. ‘April the ninth, twenty ninety-two,’ she read aloud [the phone could have read the entry aloud to her, and obscenely pleasantly; but that threatened to make her and her career entirely redundant]; she read on: ‘Aspiria, England, UK, Earth: View and acquire Hotel Foxtrot; repurpose into intimidatingly expensive resort; reneg [mumble mutter grumble].’
‘Reneg what?’
‘[mumble mutter grumble].’
‘Gi’me that.’ He snatched the phone away from her, reading its screen. ‘What the hell,’ he mumblemuttergrumbled.
‘Caveat,’ she admitted, ‘After purchasing, you maintain environment agreeable to...ghosts.’
‘Why the hell would I want to do that, even if ghosts existed, which they don’t, making this even stupider.’ Accenting his point, he thrust her phone back into her hands like a thing possessed.
Turning her phone in her hand to reorientate the screen, she brought up the hotel’s website: a relic approaching the age of the Foxtrot itself. ‘The Hotel Foxtrot is, among its other splendid qualities, home to a collection of the previously alive—’
‘For fuck’s sake....’
‘—a phantasmagorical phalanx—’
‘Oh wow; really?’
‘—treasure, and testament—’
‘I don’t want it anymore.’
‘—the—you don’t?’
‘I dunno; depends: why did I want it. Originally.’
She returned to her calendar. ‘Repurpose into intimidatingly expensive—’
‘Oh right. There’s that, I suppose.’
‘Maybe we could go in and look it over before making any decisions based solely on reports of hauntings,’ she suggested.
He began walking again. ‘I’m not making any decisions based solely on reports of hauntings,’ he denied, ‘I’m rethinking the whole thing based solely on reports of some heretofore unknown Spectre Preservation Society.’
‘Those are different things?’
‘For two reasons,’ he said, ‘First: ghosts still don’t exist; second: I wouldn’t care if they did exist, but for selfimportant little morons trying to make ghosts—real or not—somehow critical enough to get in my way. What was that thing a couple years ago, with the graveyard or whatever.’
‘That’s Wyoming again,’ she said, ‘Apart from just the EPA, there are those silly little purists who’d rather you didn’t obliterate Native American Burial Grounds, developing the state into a waterpark.’
‘Like it’s good for anything else.’
‘Have you even looked at Wyoming in the winter?’ she asked.
‘I’m willing to add, like, a thermostat; we can heat it to whatever—seventy degrees. Well, sixty, anyway.
‘Let’s look at the Foxtrot first.’
‘It’s why I’m here.’
At that moment, they happened to reach the drawbridge. And they crossed it to the massive doors. And they went inside, to the massive foyer. And they stopped walking again.
‘Not seeing a lot of ghosts yet,’ Charlie said, smirking, ‘Think I should have one of those ghostbusting things? That little zhlurpy thing with the little lighty things on the sides? The hell was that thing; it wasn’t the unlicensed nuclear accelerator thing; it was that other thing—that...zhlurpy thing. You know.’
‘I get it. I have no idea what it was called; but I get it. And they’re not real; you can’t have one.’
‘Ghosts aren’t real either,’ he said, ‘But apparently I can have those, if I promise to feed them and take them out for walks, or something.’
On those words, the Foxtrot’s butler approached from wherever butlers lay in wait to approach from without making it remotely evident from whence they always approach. ‘Good afternoon,’ he bade, butlerishly, ‘Whom may I—’
‘Charlie Bravo, Bravo Company,’ Charlie told him, ‘And Delta Zulu. Also Bravo Company.’
‘Oh yes,’ the butler agreed, ‘You are expected, of course. May I offer to take your, ah....’
Charlie had pressed a button near his beltline, and the coat he’d appeared to have been wearing over his suit zhlurped neatly up into his collar. ‘We make these,’ he announced, ‘The Bravo Company.’
‘How exciting for you,’ the butler agreed, blandly, ‘Shall I show you to the study?’
‘Okay,’ Charlie said, more to Delta, who shrugged.
Creak...thud; clunk. And the heavy door to the study was closed, leaving Charlie and Delta in a room with more books than the Library of Congress contained.
‘See any ghosts in here?’ Charlie asked.
Delta smirked, scanning about, her eyes locking on the contents of one of the shelves. She pulled down a first edition of A Christmas Carol, brandishing its spine at him.
‘Humbug,’ he told the spine.
She put the book back on the shelf.
Falling into what was possibly the comfiest chair sunward from Jupiter, Charlie tripoded onto the reading table before it, chin in hands. ‘Can I point out that I’m now making more in interest, just sitting here pointlessly, than I’m bidding to buy this dump for? Or are there lobbyists against that too.’
‘Both may well be true,’ she said.
‘Is it still illegal to buy activists?’ he asked.
‘They’re selfdefeating that way.’
‘Their loss.’ He sat up, and back, making the comfy chair comfier. ‘I’m buying the hell outta this chair, whatever else happens. Think the chair is purported to be haunted?’
‘Beset upon, you mean.’
He grinned massively at the reading table.
Clunk; clack; creak.... And the door opened again, revealing the butler, who announced: ‘Presenting Lord and Lady Dragonsworth....’
Charlie sat respectfully up in no particularly evident manner. ‘Hey,’ he greeted, as formally as he could be bothered to, which was zilch.
‘Oh yes: the Americans,’ Lord Dragonsworth stated in much the way he might have stated oh yes: the bacteria, had he meant to insult bacteria, ‘I trust your voyage hither was uneventful?’
‘If by that you mean “boring and timewasting”,’ Charlie said, slumping more casually into the comfy chair, ‘then totally: “uneventful”.’
Dragonsworth stiffened, to whatever extent he could have become stiffer without traversing some quantum boundary into galacticidal paradox. ‘Perhaps you’d care to dispense with the pleasantries,’ he offered, as though there’d been any pleasantries to date, ‘and come to the matter at hand.’
‘Perhaps I would,’ Charlie acknowledged, pointing to Delta, whose purpose apart from reading things out of a phone itself perfectly capable of reading things out of itself was to alleviate him of the need to speak to people he didn’t like, which were most if not all of them.
Delta stepped forward, redundantly consulting her phone: ‘On the matter of purchasing said premises for the sum agreed upon previously, the Bravo Company are prepared to proceed; on the matter of, ah, “availing resources unto said premises’ previously corporeal”...we’re a bit iffy on keeping the Foxtrot ghostfriendly.’
‘Ah,’ Dragonsworth declared as though there were nothing more to say, then saying more anyway, ‘On that matter, we remain I’m afraid intractable: the residing ancestry dates back some eleven hundred years, and must not be displaced by this transaction.’
Delta opened her mouth to retort, but Charlie’s voice replaced hers: ‘You don’t want your imaginary friends to be formless and homeless.’
‘Certainly not,’ Dragonsworth spat, impulsively, adding: ‘And this lineage of ancestry are in no way imaginary, as you’ll see for yourselves in due course.’
‘“Due course”,’ Charlie echoed, unconvincingly approximating Dragonsworth’s accent, making no effort to conceal his amusement, but making Delta give up and drop the hand holding her phone to her side, ‘Is that British for “never”, or more for “once we get the holograms off the blink”.’
‘I assure you,’ Dragonsworth assured, reminding Charlie far too greatly of any given dozen characters played during the twentieth century by Christopher Lee, ‘no trickery is required; the departed are every bit as real as any of us, but for their unfortunate lack of physical substance.’
‘So are lasers,’ Charlie said, ‘So fire them up, and we’ll get through meeting the ghosts; then we can talk renegotiation, and what kickbacks it’ll cost me to buy the joint without the bonus homegame inclusion of Beetlejuice.’
Dragonsworth stiffened yet more; the fibres of timespace bore the strain, for the moment. ‘As you wish,’ he said, sadly and shortly.
Chapter Two: The Pararchaeologist
Skreeoink.
Flump. Thud. Creak.
Creak, creak...creak.
Juliet Sierra stopped moving, scanning the darkness, seeing nothing in it. Of course, since it was darkness, that was likely to be the case either way. She hit a button on the side of her watch, activating a small but powerful torch, turning the empty darkness into leaping shadows and inanimate objects. She was alone. Apparently.
That was good for her, since Juliet Sierra was a cat burglar. Though her profession had nothing to do with burgling cats; in fact, so far as the majority of the human race were concerned, as of 9th April 2092, cats weren’t worth burgling; those few who might have known otherwise hadn’t let the burglable out of the bag.
Juliet’s bag, which actually contained no cats, contained instead various instruments instrumental to burglary: screwdrivers and spanners and whatever; if things went well, the bag would also by the end of the night contain a percentage of what the flat currently contained, which was currently located here and there between her watch and the leaping shadows. She aimed the light quickly into the bag, causing the whole thing to glow ethereally, and seized upon her infrared glasses, sliding them on and darkening her watch again. Now she could see, and no one else could, though, apparently, no one else was around anyway.
The flat was in Knightsbridge—a posh neighbourhood abreast Hyde Park in Central London. Its contents were posh as well: hung upon the far wall was a telebrowser which couldn’t have been more than several hours old. Finding its keyboard on the coffeetable, she flipped the telebrowser on with one hand, lowering her infrared shades with the other.
As was customary, the guide was the first address preinstalled into the Bookmarks pulldown; she moused down to highlight it and hit Enter, bringing up a screen from which she could choose from any of fifty thousand hardlined channels in addition to the internet itself. Score.
The screen itself had to be five or six metres in width, that being two point thirty-five times its height; fortunately, that worked out to be a little over a metre by possibly a foot in diameter once she’d taken it down, folded it over, and rolled it up; the keyboard would fit nicely next to the scroll within her bag.
A quick glance for anything better than the telebrowser revealing no such obvious animal, she turned off the screen, replaced her infrared glasses, and strode toward the massive plastic poster on the wall.
Beep; beep, beep; beep, beep, beep; beep. Boip.
Juliet froze, which wasn’t the best tactic, since she’d already got the telebrowser off the wall and got it folded over and halfway rolled up.
‘Welcome home,’ a voice began synthetically, concluding with: ‘Doctor November.’
Juliet unfroze, hurrying to roll the telebrowser into a manageable cylindre, moving with it to the bag she’d left on the floor by the window.
Zhrum, the front door reported, its servomotors pulling it aside, Vorsh.
She froze again.
Vorsh, the door repeated, Zhrum...cloink.
She wasn’t alone anymore. The telebrowser in her bag, and the bag in her fist, and her leg through the window, she escaped into the night beyond.
And down the drainpipe and to the street and the bag left her grasp. Because a guy in a trenchcoat was holding it above his head and behind his back and out of her reach.
‘Did you know,’ he began, without any evident malice, as though he were relating an absurdly banal fact to an old friend who probably did know, but the fact would facilitate equally banal a conversation from which the two could deviate into something more interesting, ‘that the new telebrowsers,’ he added, shaking the bag slightly while reaching into his internal pocket, ‘have as standard a motiondetecting artificial intelligence—’ he pulled from his pocket his mobilephone, displaying it to her ‘—which does one the service of calling ahead—’ he thumbed to the last call received, displaying its transcription to text ‘—to alert one to the presence in proximity to itself of any person not preapproved through facial recognition?’
Juilet shook her head, fearfully and stupidly.
‘Neither had I,’ he admitted, ‘Cool though, isn’t it.’
She nodded, stupidly and fearfully.
‘I probably paid extra for that. Who knows.’ He stuffed the phone back into his pocket and thrust his empty hand toward her, greetingly. ‘Mike November.’
She took it, fearfully and stupidly getting as far as ‘Jew’ before remembering that remembering who she was wasn’t the best idea just now.
‘With blonde hair?’ he asked seriously, ‘Extraordinary. That said: you’re caught, and I don’t care; so, who are you, theology aside.’
‘You don’t care that I stole your telebrowser?’
‘I don’t care that you didn’t,’ he said, shaking the bag again; ‘If you had stolen it, I’d care inasmuch as I’d have had to have worked out a way to replace it without having had it to get online to order a replacement. Apparently, it would be clever to have two of them. So, thanks for making that obvious.’
‘Who the hell are you,’ she asked.
He blinked at her. ‘I already told you that; what we have yet to establish is who you are. But not here; not out in the street; maybe back up there where you can also help me get this back onto the wall—’ he shook the bag one more time ‘—without having it end up all crooked.’
‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ she denied.
‘In point of fact,’ he said, shaking the bag yet one more last time, ‘you are. Bits of you, anyway. Your genotype itself. From which the rest of you can be identified and upgraded to “wanted” if you’re really in that large a hurry to run away now. Might as well have some tea first; and that’s upstairs where the telebrowser belongs.’
A burst of thought, and she lunged, grabbing for the bag, and not getting it. November had to be close to two metres in height and, despite his casual stance toward her crimes to date, pretty quick at shifting the thing further out of her reach. ‘In any case,’ he said, backing away toward the corner of the building, around which was the main entrance, ‘you know where I, and bits of you, and the tea, will be.’ And he turned and walked away.
‘Damnit,’ she spat, hurrying to follow.
‘Milk and honey?’ he asked.
‘You never answered my question,’ she said as he opened the door and held it to let her through.
‘Yes I did. Before you’d asked it, in fact. Is that the problem? Some people can’t handle nonlinear events: causes following effects, and all that.’
‘I just want you to tell me who you are,’ she said, standing in the lobby as he approached and let the door swing shut again. Streetlevel doors were, for some nostalgic reason, not yet automated and sidesliding.
‘And, if I were narcissistic, I’d want to tell you again.’
‘“Mike November” doesn’t tell me anything,’ she said.
‘Doesn’t it?’ he asked, seriously, ‘Narcissistic after all, I guess. I’m the world’s leading pararchaeologist.’
‘The what?’
‘The world’s leading pararchaeologist.’
‘I know seventy-five percent of those words,’ she said, ‘What’s the last one mean.’
‘In essence that I hold doctorates both in archaeology and in parapsychology.’
‘What’s the last one mean that time.’
‘That I’m something of a ghostbuster.’
‘Right,’ she said, slowly and sarcastically.
He shrugged, hitting the button to call the lift.
‘You’re serious?’ she asked.
‘As a heart attack,’ he said, stepping into the car and turning around as the door slid open, ‘Which incidentally I understand to be fairly serious a thing, as reported by those who didn’t survive it.’ He thumped the button for his private floor at the top of the building. With some trepidation, she joined him before the door slid closed again.
‘So, you bust ghosts.’
He shrugged again. ‘Not really. That’s a trademarked term relating to a fictional group. But I do hunt and catch and otherwise interact with them.’
‘And that pays well?’
‘Again: I’m the best there is. Also, I’m one of very few of us. Supply and demand.’
‘There’s a demand.’
‘Oddly enough. Or maybe not. If you think about it: people are on average pretty stupid, unable to figure out basic things like doors and entranceramps with any statistical regularity; factor then that the doorway into any given afterlife is more complex to figure out than which stickfigure represents the men’s room over the the women’s, while considering that more people are currently dead than alive, and...yeah: there’s a demand.’
‘So, ghosts are real.’
‘They’re as real as Thursday is. Not very. You can’t weigh one; but they do occur in a measurable form.’
‘They occur,’ she said.
‘Within timespace, most things only occur,’ he said, ‘Few things truly exist; and, those which do are usually just the sum total of smaller extant elements, like atoms. Living people only exist because the carbon atoms themselves have substance. The good bits—thoughts and personalities and philosophies—only occur. And, in the end, if they still occur, they’re maintained by equally incorporeal instances of former people.’ The car stopped, he punched in his code, the door opened, and he gestured to her to go back into his flat, this time with something resembling an invitation.
‘So, unless people become ghosts,’ she asked, ‘they stop having thoughts and philosophies?’
The door zhrummed shut behind them. ‘No idea. Whatever else they become beyond becoming ghosts, they become unavailable for comment.’ He tapped a key in the lift’s keypad, preventing the car from being called without another code, and strode with the bag to the spot on the wall not containing a telebrowser anymore.
She followed him. ‘Everyone becomes a ghost? And then maybe something else after that?’
He shrugged, pulling the telebrowser out of the bag and flattening it against the wall. ‘All the ones I’ve met were ghosts. Well, and the occasional zombie, and vampire; there’s been a mummy or two. So, all the ghosts I’ve met have been ghosts; but I haven’t really met enough billions of them to conclude that all people become ghosts. Is this straight like this?’
‘It’s lower on the left.’
‘Mine or yours.’
‘Ours: we’re both facing the same wall.’
‘Right. Now?’
‘Higher on the left.’
‘Okay....’
‘Stop; damn; a little higher on the left. No! Make it higher on the le—stop; lower now, a little—st—higher; stop. Yeah: stop; that’s good; that’s perfect.’
‘That’s straight?’
‘Yeah. Of course. Hence: “that’s perfect”.’
‘Right.’
‘Right,’ she said.
He pulled the keyboard out of the bag and thumped it on, then cycled through menus on the screen.
‘You’ve got mail,’ she said, seeing the big, friendly, infuriatingly happily throbbing icon. He thumped it.
The EMail buffered quickly. Then:
‘Doctor November. My name’s Charlie Bravo, of the Bravo Company. I’m up in Aspiria, buying the Hotel Foxtrot. Which apparently is haunted. So, I’d like to bring you in to...exorcise it, or something. Partly because word has it that you’re the best in your field, and partly because word has it that Aspiria is driving distance from London. So, you know: Reply S’il Vous PrettyPlease, or whatever you people do.’
The video ended; the screen returned to its default set of desktop icons.
‘So,’ Mike said to Juliet, ‘Tea?’
