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 The Night Shift  (26 ratings)by Paul A. Ogilvie Page 4 of 10 [Warning: Adult content. Do not read if you are under 18 and/or if it is illegal in your area to do so] A steady rain of snowballs began thumping onto the rear window, thrown by the kids. I sat in the seat, waiting for the car to sort itself out, burning - do you really want to know this? - burning to open the window and spray the little bastards down with non-lethal ammunition from my non-lethal gun. Fashions in ammunition change as quickly as fashions anywhere else. The new types keep arriving in pale blue plastic crates at work, complete with a disc explaining how awesomely sophisticated and yet morally acceptable the ammunition is. The most fashionable ammunition at the moment, and the type I had in my gun, was gel-darts of genoformed jellyfish toxin, which caused, according to the manual, 'debilitating physical discomfort'. They hurt like fuck, basically, hurt so much all you can do is lie of the floor, twitching and moaning, pissing your pants. That's what I wanted to spray the kids down with. But I didn't, because I would be arrested, and jailed, and then what chance would I have of getting another job? The car sorted itself out and I drove away through the snow. Work was across the river, in Clydebank. The road and the tunnel were busy. The road and the tunnel always are. I got the stereo to search out some classical music. It knows what I like, and plucked out some Rachmaninov from a cheap Argentinean site. Music today, it does nothing for me. I know that's hardly original, and I'm pretty sure some old bastard said much the same about Mozart, but music today, it does nothing for me. All that fuck-rock and corpse-jazz, the shuggie-wap and ultra-fi. Of course, some of that's because I'm not implanted, and don't get all the emotive kicks and sexual perks they sneak into the code, but still. It just sounds like shit to me, I can't help it. I stopped at the entrance to the car park. The laser-scanner zipped over my face, and my car's ID chip was interrogated. The wire gates rolled back and I rolled in. Zidian Astrosystems said the sign on the gate, just a small sign, black on white. Work. # "I've got a head in a box I got for a tenner," Jackie said to me in the staff room. I turned this over in my own head for a couple of seconds. "Eh?" "A porcelain head - d'you no mind me telling you I was after those? Winston Churchill. Circa 1960. Some bloke in Calgary's sending it across. Poor mug's got no idea what it's worth." "Oh." Jackie was my partner for the night. He was all right, was Jackie, though sometimes I did wish he'd just shut up. Jackie claimed, however unlikely it was, that he was a pure-blood celt, that despite the waves of invasion and settlement, and the millennia of close commercial ties with the continent and England - despite all that, he was convinced that somehow in whatever wee Cairngorm hick town it was that he was from, one line bred true. He looked the part, right enough, squat and black-haired, blue-eyed. It was always the next pay-packet, or the next after that, or the next after that, that he was going to take a sample to a genetic genealogist and find out for sure. I didn't think he ever would. Because the answer would be 'no', and he must have known it. But still, he claimed to be a pure-blood celt. Not a Celt, mind you, god forbid; he had Rangers FC Forever tattooed on the back on one hand, and his prize possession was a nine inch black-market hologram from the early 21st century, showing Ally McCoist taking Billy MacNeil up the arse. When you pressed a button on the base of the thing, Ally sang "Fuck the Pope". Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 Paul A. Ogilvie, sffworld.com. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author. The author has submitted the work in accordance with and in agreement with the following Submission Guidelines. |
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