Free Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) by Justin Robinson Page B

one of the busiest ports in the world. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you might miss it. It looked like a stack of shipping containers, and the two giants outside smoking could have been there loitering.
    They were dressed awful nice, though. And I had spent enough time around people with guns to be able to know when someone was packing a Desert Eagle under his armpit because some hooker laughed at his junk one time. These guys would tell you to fuck off unless you knew the password, which I did. Problem is, I also knew them. Sasha Feldman and Mike “the Microwave” Mikhailovich. They knew me as Nicky Z, and if they recognized me, they might just decide to do Vassily Zhukovsky a little favor and drop my body in the bay.
    I kept my head down a little, so both guys would be looking mostly at the haircut and the gauze duckbill. “Horrorshow,” I mumbled at them. The password was a corruption of the Russian word for “good” courtesy of Anthony “Don’t Call Me Tony” Burgess, though I doubted that when Vassily thought it up he’d had British literature in mind.
    Sasha waved me past because I lacked a vagina and thus was not something Sasha wanted to waste his time with. I took a step forward.
    Microwave looked at me, running a thumb over wiry stubble he probably had to trim with gardening shears. “Wait a minute.”
    Crap. I stopped.
    “I know you, yes?” Microwave said.
    “Don’t think so,” I said, putting a little more nose into my voice.
    “No, I know you. Where do I know you?”
    I had a little hope here. See, the human mind is three things. First and foremost, it’s a miracle of evolution. A biological computer capable of astounding feats of cognition, like painting the Mona Lisa, putting a man on the moon, or writing those ID cards that used to come on the backs of G.I. Joes. The problem is, doing all this stuff takes a lot of space, and the human brain needs to be small enough at one time to pass through a pelvis without breaking literally everything, which accounts for the other two qualities of the human brain: it is stupid and lazy.
    In order to do all those amazing things, the brain is filled with ridiculous shortcuts and workarounds. So while you occasionally get something incredible like The Wire or the pastrami burger, you also have fun little hacks to exploit when things get dicey. I learned every one of them in my years working as gofer for the Information Underground, for situations exactly like these.
    Memories can be made up on the spot. The brain hates to feel like an idiot, so if it can’t actually summon what it needs, you can supply it with anything plausible and it’ll fill in the blanks.
    “You watch a lot of Comedy Central?” I knew for a fact Microwave did. He was always quoting someone he’d seen and inevitably screwed up the punchlines. I watched him turn a harmless and hilarious Patton Oswalt bit about Star Wars into a shockingly racist polemic.
    “Yeah...?” he said hopefully.
    “I was on Standup Showcase last week. Albert Hall.”
    He snapped his fingers at me, “Albert Hall! You had that joke about...”
    “Clowns lining up outside a party store like day laborers outside Home Depot.”
    Microwave laughed. “I knew I knew you! Why you here, Al?”
    “I play cards. A friend of mine referred me.”
    “Oh, okay. You want to see the show later, you come find me. I get you in.”
    The show he was talking about was the dog fights. The psychos around here liked that sort of thing, but because they were insane, it wasn’t always dogs fighting each other. They liked to catch the giant rats that lived under the city and pit those against each other or some other poor animal. I gave him a smile I hoped he thought was even slightly sincere.
    “Have a good night,” Microwave said, waving me through. As I opened the door, I heard him say to Sasha, “Can you believe it? Albert Hall. Here!”
    “I know of no such person.”
    Microwave had a rejoinder prepared,