PLANETARY STATUS REPORT!

I saw a green wire princess holding court at Trey’s Knock-up Saloon. She wore a black and white dress, and red lipstick, and her eyes stared at your crotch all the time. She’d only see the PACKAGE and not the MAN, and her killers stalked her all night long.

She was the midnight syren, and her madness was on display to every 3 bob Charlie in London.

I kept watch for women like her, because this was the black heart of living and those who wandered the streets were worse than vampires – they were humans.

I left Trey’s and went onward to OLD SHIMBLY’S off of Puxton Street, not far from where KING LEOPOLD raped and killed that Christian nun 700 years ago – it was sacred ground to the poncy types that strolled like vicars from place to place.

“Killed and raped”, not in the that order, from what I can ascertain …

At Shimbly’s I met Firona Devastonia, she was well known in GRIKEN TOWN for her “beef eater style boovula festies” and other orgiastic adventures involving gorilla tape and vodka. She asked me if I wanted to “see the King” and I said “that old QUEEN?” … and we laughed. She made her bang selling smack to the dandies of London Town and the finance freaks and the politicos. They all knew her, and she had dead man switches with half the barristers in England, just to protect herself.

“How you doing JACK?”, she asked, leering at me, nursing a gin and tonic in that badly lit pub.

“I’ve been okay, just got back from Syria.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Nothing … just vacation.”

Firona threw back her head, rolled her eyes, and let out an ape laugh.

I couldn’t tell Firona the truth …

“Hey honey, I just got done cleaning up a mess for the USAF … they accidentally killed 50 children at a school because one of their drone pilots was high on meth … so it was a ‘cleanup’ job … janitorial work.” – I couldn’t tell her that. She’d seen ugly things. She told me once she met a guy who said he “worked the job” that led to Princess Diana’s death – and now that the person who paid the contract was King of England? – what the fuck do you do with that info … remember what happened to the nurse that leaked info about a royal birth several years ago … you just end up dead.

I said a bit more to Firona, but I had a meeting in Chelsea, and I couldn’t be late.

I grabbed a car and took the ride out to the smelter where my new client was – he owned the place, he owned several places that provided specialized castings and metals for the aerospace industry.

In 2012, his company had been contracted by a major airline to provide replacement turbine blades, but it was a “budget thing” and they couldn’t really afford to pay top dollar. My new client, Marvin Till, told the company that these blades would cost less, but last half as long. The buyer heard “cost less”, he didn’t hear the rest.

At the smelter I tipped the driver, and he drove off. I wandered into the warehouse and Marvin was there, with two well dressed bodyguards.

“JACK my BOY … it’s been a while.”

Marvin looked drunk, but I never had an issue with drunken sots … as long as they paid.

“Jack, I have a problem.”

It turns out the airline company had planes falling out of the sky, and even though they blamed the “avionics”, the real truth was that the blades on the engines were burning out at altitude – and this was not supposed to become public. A young and eager reporter with Air and Space Weekly had interviewed Marvin, wanting to know if there was anything else to report – and one of his engineers overheard the interview.

Making a long story short, the engineer met with the journalist, and she, Nikki Wallstrom, was going to break the story in a few days. She hadn’t turned in anything to her editor yet, not even a draft. But she was going to meet with him for breakfast.

“Jack, I already have the job done, they’re at a place not far from Avon … you know … where Shakespeare did his thing.”

I needed to drive out there, clean the place, dispose of the bodies. Basic janitorial work.

I got to the house near Avon at around 3 AM. The lights were off, and luckily the nearest neighbor lived about a half mile away.

The cleaning went fine, by the book – but there was something weird about the bodies.

The engineer had been dead for an hour, but his flesh was still supple and his eyes were bloodshot and green.

The journalist, Nikki, had a similar look – but despite having no pulse, she twitched, periodically.

All of these troubling issues went away, after I chopped them up and let them dissolve in the tank of nitric acid. I looked like a grounds keeper, for this job – and the “water tank” I towed behind my lorry was the actual dissolution tank for the body parts.

I was driving to the coast, to a friend, to take the remains of what was left and dump it in a cesspool he had, after the acid had neutralized.

It was weird.

About 30 minutes from my pals place, there was noise coming from the hitch between my truck and the tank, so I pulled over … must have been almost 5 AM, and the sun was still below the horizon.

I inspected the hitch, and it looked fine – all except for this bluish goo, it glowed.

I don’t know why, but I touched it, and it stuck to me – it burned into me.

And then, I heard it:

“YOU ARE THE STOOGE BUDDY …”

It was in me, yelling, screaming …

“YOU ARE THE DUMMY … DUMMY.”

I had a flask of whiskey and some Xanax in the glove compartment, so I grabbed 5 pills and took a swig …. hoping some basic pharmacology would help.

“YOU CAN’T STOP ME THAT WAY …”

“What do you want?”

“I want you buddy.”

I thought I was going insane. You do this work too long, you go crazy, you see things. I had this friend once, a “cleaner” from Detroit. He’d been doing the work for 30 years, and then he just snapped. He went to the police, told them everything, gave them locations and even some evidence he’d kept, as insurance. The cops took his statement, his evidence, and burned it. Then he was committed to a private institution in Canada – where later he “committed suicide”, which was convenient for his former clients and partners. I didn’t want to go crazy, but I’m not sure I have a choice.

“Buddy, you think you’re crazy, BUT YOU ARE NOT …”

The voice went on to describe the 7 dimensional war between the JOOG-BEINGS and the KLEPHITES …

For 2 million years they’d been at war, an overlapping time war, and all of HISTORY had become unstable.

ZEGON, the Klephite, has a basic job – when some temporal event goes awry, “clean things up”, make it look like nothing happened … ZEGON was a cleaner, just like me. But unlike me, his technology was more advanced.

Funny thing – the hit on the journalist and the engineer? – it was a botched thing, in a way. Originally the story was going to be about corrupt business practices in the airline/aerospace industries and the deaths of hundreds that resulted, but then the story changed.

The engineer had been working on a new kind of black box, one that utilized quantum entanglement to share data, instantly, anywhere in the world.

Remember that plane that disappeared in 2014? Over the Indian Ocean? – no one knew what happened. Zegon knew … and if that black box had existed then? – others would have known too, and Zegon couldn’t have that.

Zegon cleaned history …

If something was supposed to happen – it would.

If something was the result of a time traveler or “fractor” committing a “causality error”, it would be sanitized.

If a black box existed that allowed recording, remotely, instantaneously, no matter WHERE (or WHEN) the plane was? – this would impact Zegon’s employers and the Klephites generally, and this would be “bad BUDDY”.

“Buddy …”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe me buddy?”

“I don’t know … where are you?”

“Well, that goop you touched contained regenerative nanites … these here nanites contain self-organizing capabilities for tracking and recording … similar to what that OTHER DUDE was working on … I don’t really understand it, I just clean shit. Any who, you are not talking to me, but I’m 34 minutes in the future, at your pal’s place, where you’re headed.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Cleaning.”

“YOU KILLED HIM?”

“Nah … he’s been transported out of this timeline, we like to study you turds.”

“Study?”

“Yeah, not my work … but the really smart GUYS and their AI slaves, they love studying you and the other hairless monkeys.”

At that moment I could feel my heart beating faster …

“Just go with it Buddy, they say it’s painless.”

“What is?”

“Death … this kind of death doesn’t hurt … once the nanites reach your brain stem, it will be DONE … but before you go, I just got to say I love your work BUDDY …”

My body collapsed underneath me as the sun began to rise.

I had nothing worthwhile to remark upon, to remember, no wise words to say. No “life passing before my eyes”, I had 2 failed marriages, an unpaid mortgage, and a house filled with dust and bad memories. It wasn’t much to say goodbye to.

I could feel the parts of me being torn apart, as my body dissolved around me.

But I felt no pain.

I just hoped Zegon would clean up the mess, and do a good job.

THE END