Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

“Good morning, madame,” the Kafka said, peering out from behind the refrigerator. “Would we care for an egg?”

Speechless, half-blinded by a rush of blood to her brain, Kay stopped on one foot (the uninjured one) and stared through squinted eyes at the gleaming kitchenette. One of her failings, she was prepared to admit, and certainly one of Elwood’s, was to let the conapt pile up ever grungier with unwashed plates and cups and glasses, half-empty containers from the classiest takeoutlets in Maryland, a dead imported wine bottle or two from the Rhone Valley in Germany or the Illawarra in Australia abandoned on its side under the couch. The help were meant to deal with it, one day a week, but since Big Mac’s punitive expulsions of the wetbacks it was impossible to get any help at all, let alone the good kind. Yet now everything in sight was redeemed, renewed, polished. Had the roach been bending its many elbows to the task?

“No egg,” she said weakly. “Just bring me a cup of coffee and that muffin. I’ll be in my study.”

The creature turned away obediently, no hint of the saucy impudence of last night, but as Kay left the room she caught a glimpse of something horrible and disturbing. A kind of pulsing puce-hued bag protruded from the Kaf’s hindquarters. An egg case? Dear Christ, was the thing enceinte? Was it about to give birth in the kitchen? She couldn’t handle it. Her mind shifted sideways to the problem Sheikh Khalifa posed to the Free World from his seat of power in the United Arab Emirates. If only she had been able to make the Egyptians see that the Emirates were as much a threat to them as to the West—

In the hallway, her bare toes came down on something hard and sharp, something that scattered and rattled. White, stripped bones, with a quite largish crunched skull, as big as a—

Kay screamed at the top of her lungs, and ran for her iPhone, punched Elwood’s direct link. “Get back here this minute ,” she shrieked. “Your fucking sex toy has eaten the cat .”

With the surname Stoner, a man was doomed from birth to a certain fate. Nominative determinism was a potent cosmic force, creating a Filipino Roman Catholic Cardinal named Sin, not to mention that top Harley Street neurologist, Lord Brain, Fellow of the Royal Society. So no-one among Jayant Vishnu Stoner’s co-workers aboard Google PowerSat #9 was surprised at Jay’s penchant for ingesting, smoking, injecting, popping, perfusing, snorting, or transcranially/magnetically inducing any illicit stimulant that fell to his questing hand. They regarded as just another workplace perk his amusing propensity for chatting with amiable hallucinations, a luser’s gag, they assumed, meant to entertain them during their endless orbital days.

With his long funky dreads and his migratory subdermal flock of CGI tattoos, his fascination with jam-band music (his iQuant held 10,000 Phish tracks alone) and his slacker work habits, Jay surfed leisurely through his duties as solar-panel installer like a toasted postmodern peon of the space age. Only Jay’s bosses were ignorant of his potentially dangerous non-compliance with management-approved modalities of employment. They were too busy surveying their stock options and charting the exact moment when they could prematurely retire.

Google’s network of PowerSats was nearing the edge of critical mass, the ability to produce a quantity of non-petroleum energy able to rival—and eventually displace—old dirty sources like gas and soft coal, the bountiful curse that had contributed so much pollution to China. These megawatts of clean power beamed by microwave to lacy terrestrial rectenna farms had already brought down the price of a barrel of oil from $250 to $200! Of course, as pointy-headed economists had warned, that cost reduction immediately led to an outburst of SUV purchases burning this cheaper fuel—but every solution has its drawbacks. Soon, the new paradigm of carbon-free power would be a reality, and the global economy would surge forward on a solid footing, no longer indebted to tyrants and dictators or greedy CEOs.

Not that Jay subscribed to any such high-minded idealism. It wasn’t as if he had yearned or studied for this position. He had lucked into this job as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement. Google had failed to defend its search hog adequately against all the latest viruses, and the rogue program SnapDragon had snared the name and stats of Jayant Vishnu Stoner, and the randomly selected names and stats of several hundred other innocents. Their photos and full details immediately popped out whenever the search-term “FBI most wanted” was entered. In return for this gross defamation (and several false arrests, plus one fatal shooting), the victims were offered a choice: a job with Google, or a cash settlement. In a moment of sober practicality, Jay had taken the employment and training option.

So here he was, geared up in a nifty, sleek Dava Newman BioSuit against the unforgiving cargo bay vacuum of Google PowerSat #9, helping to unload the Virgin Galactic Ship Victoria Beckham , out of Quito Skyhook and now a good part of the way around the planet. In the satellite’s microgravity, the bulky waffle-patterned organo-plastic crates were easy to shift and slot, allowing Jay to focus on the Widespread Panic tune pumping through his earbuds, and the low-level buzz created by his consumption of a morning fetal-cell-and-absinthe cocktail. Floating in a lazy haze, Jay was only a little surprised when Mr. Mxyzptlk showed up. The derby-wearing imp from the fifth dimension was a welcome confidante. Jay paused his iQuant and greeted him happily.

“Mxy, my man! What’s down?”

Speaking around his cigar, Mr. Mxyzptlk told him, “Feast your peepers on the crate with the pliss scabbed on.”

Jay focused blearily through the distortions of his merry high. Sure enough, one crate packaged as solar cell panels also featured an attached Portable Life-Support System. Weirdness! Why would dead power mechanisms engineered for the nullity of high-orbit require livestock temperature and atmosphere regulation? This shit had to be contraband! The PowerSat crew enjoyed frequent illicit shipments of porn, pets, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and transfats, and this had to be one such—although the usually reliable grapevine had not alerted Jay in advance.

“Think I’ll just skim a little off the top, Mxy! Thanks for the heads-up!”

“No grind,” Mxy said. With a shouted “Kltpzyxm!” the imp vanished.

Exhibiting a druggie’s exaggerated slyness, Jay guided the selected crate out of sight of his busy co-workers, through an airlock, and into the adjacent shirtsleeves environment of the large room where Manned Manoeuvering Units were repaired. The workspace, festooned with spare parts, was luckily unoccupied, sparing him any need to blurt out an absurd excuse for his presence. Still in his suit, Jay cracked the seals of the crate with fumbling eagerness, anticipating familiar goodies.

For a full ninety seconds, his fogged brain failed to register what he was seeing, actually seeing in external reality. As far as he could tell. “They’re immature bugs!” the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants whispered in his ear. “Giant fucking larvae, dude!”

He tore at his eyes, but sure enough, the crate was filled with squirming featureless maggots the size of microwave ovens. Several had begun to pupate, enclosing themselves in the shells that would crack to discharge the adults of whatever the hell gruesome species they were.

One of his rare bad trips kicked in. The wriggling flesh hassocks creeped him out. A powerful vision seized him: roaches expanding, multiplying, filling the station from wall to wall. “Yaargh! Gotta get rid of the suckers!”