Free Atom by Steve Aylett Page B

geodesics, diagnostics. A Lusa Palmtop. A Tantrum gun. A Penrose rifle, automatic as mother nature. A roid rod - bad gun, he’d hallucinated behind it. A squidgrenade resembling a sea urchin. A tetanus missile. A Liberty Bell. Calico seeds. Murex ammo. A gun of blown glass which evaporated when fired once. Cryo ice bullets. A patented eyelash hammer. Steak throwknives. And here, an Eschaton rifle with a gull-wing chamber and fruitwood inlay grip. Draw a bead and speed the victim to his cosmic conclusion, be it ashes or glory. Metaphysical roulette, loaded to the ashes. Its designer, Johnny Pilot Fish, had theorized that the weight of the soul was the difference between a person’s weight before death and after. To determine this he had to know when certain deaths were going to occur and got on the grapevine with the city shooters - it got so that when Johnny turned up to weigh someone, they knew they were about to get hit. Johnny was baffled when he found that the victims weighed the same before and after. It was Rex Camp the Coroner who pointed out that the victim’s body now included a bullet. Johnny PF’s Equaliser Theory - how the soul weighs the same as the bullet that evicts it - was born to please its parents. But as everyone’s favourite gun guru Brute Parker said, a theory’s only as good as the speed it can leave a Weatherby Mark V.
    ‘Well,’ said Neck, ‘these bullets aint gonna fire theirselves.’ It would be six years before the first gun became fully sentient. He hefted the Eschaton, breathing hard in the dumb air.
     
    ‘There’s no such thing as a normal angel,’ Atom whispered, looking down at the city. ‘It’s never done that way.’
    Madison stuck her head out the window, smoking a cigarette. ‘Don’t do this to me Taff. We need to talk.’
    Atom crawled along the ledge and climbed into the office. ‘How was Fiasco - boastful and disappointing as a hacker?’
    ‘Don’t be such a heel. Fiasco’s kinda honest. Confused and outside the dollars, he just grabbed like a monkey.’
    ‘Sounds dumb.’
    ‘Great things can sound dumb. Anything sound dumber than the hammering of a nail?’
    ‘Nail in his own coffin.’
    ‘Simmer down, Taff. Come to that you and me are two sides of the same lid.’
    Atom looked on with chuffed awe as she related the brain deal. Maddy was so deep he needed a U-boat to visit her.
    ‘There’s something strange about the gent, Taff,’ she was saying. The desk light flashed an intruder. ‘He’s been ... modified.’
    ‘Jackfitted?’
    ‘No but he’s been worked on, I can feel it. Like he’s out by remote control.’
    ‘So who’s at the switch - Harpo Marx?’
    Turow slammed in looking all squeezed out. ‘Atom! I’ve had more than I could ever hope to take!’
    ‘I took you for an all-terrain toady, Turow. Capable o’ drinkin’ milk if you had to. Now you’re claimin’ to be small pyjamas?’
    Turow appeared to be losing ground in his fight against insanity. He fiddled with a string of translucent plastic flakes.
    ‘It’ll be orange walls and shuffleboard, Turow. What you got there?’
    ‘They used to be worry beads.’ Turow shot a nervous glance at Madison, then shuffled up to Atom. ‘I need to talk to you.’
    ‘Go ahead.’
    ‘Is there some other place?’
    ‘Millions. That all you wanted to know?’
    ‘What game is it you are playing?’
    ‘You see my game every time you visit my office, Turow. Siddown.’
    Turow sat in the client seat, and looked aside at the towering Madison.
    ‘You’re eighty percent sebum, honey,’ she said.
    ‘Where is your sea monster?’
    ‘Body shop,’ said Atom, sitting opposite the desk.
    ‘Thank goodness,’ muttered Turow, wiping his brow with a silk kerchief. ‘I must say it is most difficult to conduct one’s affairs with that antisocial moray chewing the scenery.’
    ‘Less distracting than a windchime.’
    ‘What is that on the desk.’
    ‘Just a raisin.’
    ‘I thought it was a