Free Budayeen Nights by George Alec Effinger Page B

“What’s all this?”
    “Found something useful for you to do.” Hajjar was about two years younger than me, and it gave him a kick to boss me around.
    I looked in the box. There were a couple hundred blue cobalt-alloy plates. It looked like another really tedious job. “You want me to sort these?”
    “I want you to log ‘em all into the daily record.”
    I swore under my breath. Every cop carries an electronic log book to make notes on the day’s tour: where he went, what he saw, what he said, what he did. At the end of the day, he turns in the book’s cell-memory plate to his sergeant. Now Hajjar wanted me to collate all the plates from the station’s roster. “This isn’t the kind of work Papa had in mind for me,” I said.
    “What the hell. You got any complaints, take ‘em to Friedlander Bey. In the meantime, do what I tell you.”
    “Yeah, you right,” I said. I glared at Hajjar’s back as he walked out.
    “By the way,” he said, turning toward me again, “I got someone for you to meet later. It may be a nice surprise.”
    I doubted that. “Uh huh,” I said.
    “Yeah, well, get movin’ on those plates. I want ‘em finished by lunchtime.”
    I turned back to my desk, shaking my head. Hajjar annoyed the hell out of me. What was worse, he knew it. I didn’t like giving him the satisfaction of seeing me irked.
    I selected a productivity moddy from my rack and chipped it onto my posterior plug. The rear implant functions the same as everybody else’s. It lets me chip in a moddy and six daddies. The anterior plug, however, is my own little claim to fame. This is the one that taps into my hypothalamus and lets me chip in my special daddies. As far as I know, no one else has ever been given a second implant. I’m glad I hadn’t known that Friedlander Bey told my doctors to try something experimental and insanely dangerous. I guess he didn’t want me to worry. Now that the frightening part is over, though, I’m glad I went through it. It’s made me a more productive member of society and all that.
    When I had boring police work to do, which was almost every clay, I chipped in an orange moddy that Hajjar had given me. It had a label that said it was manufactured in Helvetia. The Swiss, I suppose, have a high regard for efficiency. Their moddy could take the most energetic, inspired person in the world and transform him instantly into a drudge.
    Not into a stupid drudge, like what the Half-Hajj’s dumbing-down hardware did to me, but into a mindless worker who isn’t aware enough to be distracted before the whole assignment is in the Out box. It’s the greatest gift to the office menial since conjugal coffee breaks.
    I sighed and took the moddy, then reached up and chipped it in.
     

    The immediate sensation was as if the whole world had lurched and then caught its balance. There was an odd, metallic taste in Audran’s mouth and a high-pitched ringing in his ears. He felt a touch of nausea, but he tried to ignore it because it wouldn’t go away until he popped the moddy out. The moddy had trimmed down his personality, like the wick of a lamp, until there was only a vague and ineffectual vestige of his true self left.
    Audran wasn’t conscious enough even to be resentful. He remembered only that he had work to do, and he pulled a double handful of cobalt-alloy plates out of the box. He slotted six of them into the adit ports beneath the battered data deck’s comp screen. Audran touched the control pad and said, “Copy ports one, two, three, four, five, six.” Then he stared blankly while the deck recorded the contents of the plates. When the run was finished, he removed the plates, stacked them on one side of the desk, and loaded in six more. He barely noticed the morning pass as he logged in the records.
    “Audran.” Someone was saying his name .
    He stopped what he was doing and glanced over his shoulder. Lieutenant Hajjar and a uniformed patrolman were standing in the entrance to his