The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter I

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When I was a little boy, sometimes we used to print out important messages and pay to have the physical papers delivered, instead of just mailing them. There was a complicated ritual. You couldn't just go and pay to have your message sent; you had to pay in advance, and then you got a little square of paper called a stamp that you glued onto your message to show that you had paid the delivery fee. My office is a little bigger than one of those stamps. It's a tad excessive now that the agency is a one-man operation. I feel lost in all this empty space.

The space I really feel lost in is the one before my name. We've got, okay, I've got gold leaf letters on the frosted glass of the door, "Ploughman Private Detective Agency", and then it says it again in Japanese, and underneath that it says "No seru cases accepted" and it says that again also, in a humorously bad translation that set me back more than I care to think about because the prima donna translator's union rules classified it as "poetic", but what can you do, it's the fashion and everyone expects it, and I've added "This means you!" in felt marker along the bottom margin in my own cheap and correct Japanese.

But the thing is, on the first line where it says "Ploughman" it says it all squeezed over at the right-hand edge, left when you view it backwards from inside the office, with a big space in front like when you got a tooth knocked out just a week before. You still keep putting your tongue in the space because you feel like it should still be there, the tooth not the space, and that's how I feel when I sit behind my desk and look up at the glass door and see that space. So I don't look up much.

The handle of the door was just at the top of my vision and I had a bad feeling as soon as I saw it turn. Don't get me wrong, clients are always welcome to drop by at any time, but it's sort of polite to call first unless it's, you know, an emergency. If someone is going to show up who's paying me money, I like to drag a razor blade across my face and maybe hide the whiskey. Make them feel they're dealing with a respectable outfit. If someone is coming to demand money from me, I like to be somewhere else when they arrive. People coming to demand money are what I usually get. Clients come frequently enough that I can sort of survive. I never get social callers.

My bad feeling was confirmed when the door opened to reveal a girl in a short skirt and not really enough else, with flowing purple hair, brown eyes five sizes too big for her face, and eyelashes two sizes too big for her eyes. She was carrying a large red handbag. At the top of my form I could probably have named her high school, her division and class, extracurricular clubs, grade point average, last three boyfriends' names, and maybe even her blood type just by reading the bar code plaid stripes woven into her skirt, even without checking a book.

But I wasn't exactly at the top of my form, and I didn't have a field guide handy. My copy of Kenkyusha's Bishoujo no Hikkei (the Tokyo edition for 2042) was resting comfortably on the shelf on the far wall; my cerebellum was resting comfortably at the bottom of a bottle of 80-proof preservative in my desk drawer next to my automatic; and my feet were resting comfortably on the top of my desk, the rest of me slouched back into the tension of the elderly spring that supported the back of my chair. Actually, my feet were falling asleep in that uncomfortable position, but I didn't feel up to organising my leg muscles to move them quite yet.

I hadn't felt up to (nor felt up) a whole lot of anything, and I'd been going through an awful lot of those bottles of preservative, ever since the day I'd had to scrape the gold-leaf letters "Singh" and the ampersand off my frosted glass door. I cut myself with the razor blade doing that, bled all over, and the forensics boys would probably still be able to smear a good sample of my DNA off that glass if they ever bothered. It was only a couple days later that I called up the translator for the new agency motto, and now this underage dame had to walk in without paying any attention to the lettering on the door, and bring with her a big dark cloud of memories.

I waited silently as she stepped daintily into the room and closed the door behind her, and just as her perfectly formed bottom made contact with the cushion of the chair in front of my desk, I barked, "It says on the door, no seru cases." The girl wilted, but to her credit, only for a moment. She blurted "Puraouman-san, you've got to help me!"

Seru, strike one, seru dame, strike two, seru dame in trouble, the pitcher was hot tonight and the little umpire in the back of my head was making his call in no uncertain terms. My feet were complaining loudly now, too, so I swung them off the desk, straightened in my chair, leaned forward more or less steadily, and breathed fumes at her. They can't stand any alcohol stronger than beer, you know - because it's a solvent. I said, "Maybe you need to study harder in school, jailbait, and come back when you can read better, except don't, because this agency does not accept seru cases."

"You have got to help me," she said again, "because the police refuse to take an interest and I don't want them to take too much of an interest. My business isn't illegal but it's, ah, not exactly socially popular," and she whapped a card down on my desk. I glanced at it but it was sideways to me, I couldn't read it at this angle, and I didn't want to make a move to pick it up. I figured I could read it later. I think she thought I had read it, because she said defensively, "If I didn't do it someone else would, I don't create the demand!" Not exactly reassuring. "One of my, ah, performers has been murdered." There were tears in her eyes, too - her "performers" were obviously valued resources, although I couldn't really feel a whole lot of sympathy for what her business probably was. "I don't want to lose anybody else. Hell, I don't want to be next myself." That meant she had a reason to think she might be next.

"I'll pay you a hundred thousand a day plus expenses." "I don't take seru cases." "A hundred thousand a day plus expenses - all right, you bastard, one-twenty-five." I kept quiet. "One-fifty?" That would be the figure she'd had in mind from the start. I told her again that I didn't take seru cases and I didn't sell life insurance either - for that, she ought to be talking to the Mob, or that slimeball in the office next door.

She breathed deeply, leaned forward and batted her eyelashes at me. "Aw, come on, Ploughman, it's good money, and maybe I can sweeten the deal a little more, too. You're a good man, you don't really want to be a jerk about seru. Cut me, I bleed, and I can do a lot of other things too. I will do anything to bring these murderers to justice. What do you say?" That kind of sweetening the deal was the last thing I needed, and I told her so. I could tell by the conventional symbols that appeared on her face that she was moving from "pushy" to "belligerent", but I had five shots head start on her there; she'd have a long way to catch up.

"You don't come from around here, sir, you've got a foreign name even if you do speak the language, and you expect everyone to treat you just the same as anyone else, because, hey, you're a human being, your DNA is a little different but you've still got DNA just like any human being. There used to be people who hated other human beings who didn't look like them, and the word for those people isn't even a word most humans know anymore. They were called 'racists', did you know that?" Wonderful. A random philosophy lecture. No matter how long I live in this crazy place, I never get used to these. "But it's not a problem anymore, you don't have racists who hate other humans nowadays. It is a memory washed by the waters of time. The ripples fade and are forgotten."

She rummaged around in her handbag and pulled out what looked like a water bottle. "Do you know what I have here? Let me give you a clue." She set the bottle on my desk, carefully unscrewed the cap, waited. I could smell the contents almost immediately. "This is ether, Mr. Ploughman. Seru kids sniff it to get high. I've often wondered how that feels." "It's very bad for you. I don't recommend it." "Oh, of course, of course. Don't worry, I'm not planning on going that way any time soon. Ether is very bad for seru. It's bad for humans, too, but not quite so much, because, well, you just aren't the same as us. Your biology's totally different. What's bad for you can be instant death for me, and vice versa." Her hand swept forward, upsetting the bottle, and the liquid glugged out all over the bare wood, pooling under the phone and sloshing over the edge onto the floor. The smell of the ether filled the room. She giggled, and said, "Clumsy!"

"Back in the old days there was a sort of club for these 'racists', Mr. Ploughman, do you know what they used to do? They used to burn their symbol on people's front lawns." I could barely hear her over the alarm bells going off in my head by that point, of course, and I was in the act of opening my desk drawer to grab my automatic, but the seru moved way too fast for me. Before my fingers even touched that comforting piece of cold titanium, she had whipped a cigarette lighter out of her handbag and set fire to my goddamn desk. Of all the stupid things.

I found myself standing with my back against the wall behind the desk, pointing my automatic at her while the desk burned between us. She sat composedly, staring at me, her lips twisted into an odd, unpleasant smile. After a few moments I lowered the gun. It didn't seem like any problems could be solved by shooting her, nice as the idea might be, and I'd get in trouble.

I watched as the seru girl reached into the midst of the flames with her hand made of highly inflammable cellulose acetate, picked up my phone, punched zero on the keypad, and brought it to her face. She hadn't flinched when the flames licked only centimetres from her outline. She said into the phone, "Shinobu, please come up here with the fire extinguisher. I'm afraid Mr. Ploughman has set fire to his desk." Then she dropped the phone to the floor, stood, and glared at me. "As I told you, I will do anything to see these murderers brought to justice. I'll leave another copy of my card with your secretary because the one I gave you seems to have been burnt. It's funny how that happens sometimes. I hope you will contact me soon, because it would be unfortunate if you were to have another, more serious, accident."

She left. Moments later Shinobu arrived with the fire extinguisher, and enthusiastically sprayed a thick layer of foam all over everything in sight, including me.

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