Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

The Irishman shrugged. “What were yer expecting?”

“I was expecting something monstrous.”

“Ah, but we are monstrous.” The Irishman laughed. “Monstrously successful.”

The Scotsman glowered in my direction. “Leviathan Corporation is by far the largest and most successful archive and storage business in the knoon universe.”

“Archive and storage?” I said. “You’re not serious?”

“Storage is a universal problem, laddie.”

“So?”

The Englishman smiled. “Leviathan offers the solution. We find a planet with the right kind of environment, where the indigenous population has physiognomies capable of sustaining our kind of information, and we simply download it into their systems. Most planets in this part of the galaxy are annexed to the needs of Leviathan.”

I stared at them in horrified disbelief. “That’s what all this has been about? You’re storing information in people? You’re using human beings as living files?”

The Englishman smiled. “You hew down trees for paper. The principle is the same.”

“How can you be a party to this? You’re the same as us. You’re human beings.”

The Scotsman shrugged. “Just between you and me, Mr. Lamb, there’s nae much of us that you could really call human any more.”

Why should we apologize? We were simply supplying a need. If we had not offered the service, if we had not transformed planets into filing cabinets, then you may be sure that someone else would have done the same, and almost certainly at considerably less reasonable rates. Such are the demands of business.

For the first time since I had entered the room, Joe Streater spoke up, his voice weedy and pathetic. “You said you’d make me a hero. You promised me you’d set me up amongst the gods.”

I couldn’t help myself at this, couldn’t stop myself from laughing.

Joe turned his sharp little face in my direction. “What’s so funny?”

“You won’t be a god,” I gasped. “You’ll be a filing clerk.”

The Scotsman shook his head. “You’ve let us doon, Joseph. The prince has nae been persuaded tae our way of thinkin’.”

“He was getting help!” Streater protested. “Course I see that now.”

Just to add to the sense that this was a peculiar dream, packed with people you haven’t thought about in years and face you half recognize from the telly, the door behind me was thrown open and the heir to the throne strode thunderously in.

The Englishman spread his hands in oleaginous welcome. “Good afternoon, sir. We’re delighted you could join us.”

The prince scarcely looked at the men behind the desk. His wrath was directed toward an old friend. “Streater!”

“All right, chief?” For an instant, there was a flash of the old Joe, a little of the cocky opportunist who must once have dazzled my poor Abbey.

Never yours, Henry Lamb. Have you still not understood that? She was never yours.

A surge of pink crossed Streater’s face, a flush of scarlet. He dropped the teacup, which splintered on the floor.

The Scotsman looked up at him. “We’re going to have to let ye go, son.”

Streater squealed. “Come on, lads. Fair’s fair. I don’t deserve this. I’ve served you faithfully.”

He was evidently in a great deal of pain and I strongly suspected that he was soon to be in receipt of a good deal more. The floor around his feet began to liquefy, melting into sludge around his shoes. He looked up at us with horror in his eyes.

“Please…” he stuttered. “Please help me.”

I stared at him, appalled, immobile. But the prince was actually shaking his head.

“No,” he said. “Not any more. Got a bit of steel in me now.”

Joe looked imploringly at the prince and let out a feeble moan.

“Finally,” Arthur purred. “I’ve been blooded.”

A tentacle, bristling with protuberances, slithered out of the wall, clamped itself against Streater’s mouth and forced its way inside — wriggling into his throat, pumping him with alien words and figures, filling him up with an unbearable volume of information. Streater’s eyes seemed impossibly large. Bucking against the horror of it all, his mind snapped.

The floor around his feet had opened like a quagmire. It sucked at poor Joe’s legs, heaved at his thighs, genitals and torso, dragging him down, still screaming into the depths.

Arthur barely seemed to have noticed all this. He turned to the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. “I wish to revoke the deal made by my great-great-great-grandmother.”

“Terribly sorry,” said the Englishman. “Afraid that can’t be done. We drew up the contract, after all. Naturally, it’s absolutely watertight.”

“I refuse to parlay with footmen. Fetch me the manager.”

The Irishman: “You want ter speak to the boss?”

Arthur nodded.

The Scotsman grinned and gestured toward the jade door. “Through that duir, sairr, if you’d like a were wuid.”

The Irishman reached across the desk and pressed a button on his intercom. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but is dare nay chance of the prince havin’ a quick ward?”

The sound that came from that machine was wholly indecipherable. It had no business being heard on Earth. An awful, piercing roar, the ululating cry of something born billions of light years from the South Bank.

Our manager, as it happens. The most successful CEO Leviathan has ever been lucky enough to have at its helm. Lamb should feel honored even to have been allowed an audience.

“He says you can go in now,” the Englishman said smoothly, evidently long fluent in whatever evil language that creature spoke. “I don’t recommend you dilly-dally. I know from painful experience that he doesn’t care to be kept waiting.”

“May I bring my friend?” Arthur asked nonchalantly.

The Scotsman shrugged. “Yuid better get a move on.”

The prince approached the jade door and beckoned for me to follow.

“You want me to go with you?” I asked, hoping more than anything that he’d say no. The prince nodded. Reluctantly, I drew near.

From the other side of the door we could hear the movements of the CEO. We could hear its creeps and slithers, the rattling hiss of its breath, the swish of its tails, the wheezing, sipping noise it made in preparation for our arrival.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t make me go inside.”

“You have to.”

Everything within me screamed at me not to go beyond that door — the same atavistic fear of the Neanderthal who stares into the dark as, behind him, his fire gutters and dies.

“I can’t.”

“Henry, this is what you were born for.”

Behind us, the Englishman stood up. “Wait a moment. May I ask the name of that young man?”

“Aye.” The Scotsman rose to his feet. “Guid question.”

Inevitably, the Irishman did the same. “Tell us.”

Slowly, the prince turned to face them, his arm outstretched to protect me. “Go,” he snapped. Smiling, he addressed himself to the legal firm of Wholeworm, Quillinane and Killbreath, to those wretched refugees from a joke my granddad never finished. “His name is Henry Lamb,” he said. “And he is the engine of your destruction.”

Suddenly, the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman were upon us, moving faster than any human being should be able, hissing out their rage, teeth ripping, nails rending, reaching past the prince and toward me like hounds deprived of their kill.

The Scotsman had been right — there was very little left of those creatures which anyone would call human anymore.

A little changed, perhaps. A few pro bono augmentations.

But make no mistake — those men were grateful to us, happy to be employed in the service of Leviathan, all too eager for the perks and bonuses which come with long and faithful service.