The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter II

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Chun Wing tells everybody that he was exiled from Hong Kong for political reasons during the Deconstruction, and he gives a nod and a wink to show that he is someone of great importance, an esteemed radical, who should be welcomed in the finest circles. My theory is that it wasn't raving postmodernists who chased him here - it was outraged husbands, humiliated chefs, and jealous tailors. Or maybe just disgruntled customers. You don't have to be a private detective to imagine the kinds of enemies a person like Wing will tend to accumulate, based on the eccentricities revealed in the way he runs his establishment.

There wasn't much for it, though, if I wanted to have clean clothes tomorrow. The zoning rules make it difficult to run a laundromat in this district unless you're also going to feed people. That's why every wash at Wing's comes with a meal. Whether you want it or not. And you want it, sir, oh yes, you do. No, you don't understand, you want a meal. Really. Eat! I downed an extra shot of stomach steadier and wobbled down the two flights of stairs to street level.

I paused in the lobby to catch my breath and Shinobu shrieked "Oh, sir, you're dripping on the carpet, you shouldn't -" "Yeah, and whose fault is that?" I demanded. I shouldn't have to be chewed out for wetting the carpet by the woman who'd pulled the trigger on the fire extinguisher. She shrugged. "Like, why'd you set fire to your desk anyway, Flank? Difficult client?" "Yes. Very difficult. Crazy seru was trying to threaten me." The receptionist's eyes grew wide. "So you set your desk on fire? Sugoi! I bet that scared her!" I took a deep breath, wondered if I should bother. "No, see, the crazy seru set the fire. She was the one trying to threaten me, see?"

Nice girl, Shinobu, but not really the brightest pixel on the display, you know? As she was puzzling out what had been set fire to by whom, I spotted a card on the counter in front of her and remembered that the seru had said she'd leave another card. That must be it. I scooped it up, glanced at it. It said "Murasaki Kitsuko, Producer/Franchisee, WOMT Studio", and gave a phone number, an address, and a physical location in the Quarter. Hentai, I figured, almost certainly.

Along the bottom of the card was a line of very small print, and after a bit of squinting I made it out as "Copyright 2020 Morita-Tsuda Associates". Which would make her, what, 23? A few years, well, more than a few, older than I had thought. I wasn't sure what "Franchisee" meant, but "Producer" was a surprise - I had had Kitsuko-chan pegged as one of the girls who, well, you know. Of course, she probably did that too. You don't meet very many very nice girls in my line of work. I had half a mind to throw the card away, after all I don't take seru cases, but something made my tuck it into my pocket instead.

"I'm going to Wing's. And probably home after that, you can tell anyone who shows up." Shinobu shook her head. "Oh, Mr. Ploughman, you said last time that if you ever told me you were going to Wing's again, I was supposed to -" "Yeah, yeah," I cut in, "But I can't ride the subway home in these clothes, can I?" "Gee, sir, that is a problem. Ordinarily I'd offer to take your clothes to the laundromat myself and you could wait in your office, but, well..." But, well. We know what happens to women at Wing's, so that's the end of that idea. "Just let me go get it over with. My fault I guess for not stopping her in time. Damn seru." So I squelched out the door and up the street to the laundromat.

A foul odour of scorched grease greeted me as I opened the door of Wing's. I took a step inside and was immediately jerked off my feet, landing on my butt as the floor turned into a conveyor belt and started pulling me deeper into the establishment. That was a new feature he'd added since the last time I'd been desperate enough to visit. As I thrashed around on the moving floor, laser beams from ceiling-mounted turrets painted a crazy-quilt positioning grid over my body, and then my ordeal began for real, as the conveyor drew me between four floor-mounted industrial robot arms. One of them ground to life, reached into my pocket, and retrieved my wallet, which it fed through a trapdoor on the floor. For such a big, heavy machine it sure moved fast; and although its touch felt gentle, I couldn't help imagining the amount of power it must take to move that much bulk at such speed. If one of the arms should go out of control - but it was too late for second thoughts now.

The lasers flashed and danced and the robots grabbed and yanked and in less than a minute, they had stripped me naked, folded my clothing more or less neatly, and stacked it on a motorised pallet. I jumped up and ran for the door with the flashing neon sign saying "PLEASE STOPING HERE", because although I haven't heard any actual reports of it happening, I'm always afraid that maybe the vision system will fail and the robots will continue trying to remove clothing even after there's no clothing left to remove, and I don't want to find out what that feels like. As the door of the "dining room" closed behind me, I could hear tormented screams from the direction of the entrance; evidently another customer had arrived, possibly even a female.

The room was furnished with a table and a chair. A simple light fixture hung from the ceiling, two snake-like robot arms hanging limply on either side of it. On the table was a cup of tea and a dish of something claimed to be food. It did not look or smell like food. But I sat down, picked up the chopsticks, and began to eat it anyway.

The dish seemed to be rice drenched in some kind of liquid rubber containing lumps of brown clay. Maybe it was food meant for seru. Some of the rice was burnt. The sauce actually did not taste so bad, but the texture was difficult. When I had finished about one third of it, a soft gong sounded and a cheery female voice informed me that my clothing had finished its wash cycle and was now second in line for vacuum drying. Just as well it wasn't first - that would give me a little more time to eat - but I was still behind and would have to hurry. There was a banging and clanking noise from above, but I glanced upward and saw that it was only one of the arms deploying a teapot to refill my cup. I ignored it and set about shovelling rice and the other material into my mouth. No time for social graces - I tilted up the plate in one hand and used the chopsticks to stuff the contents into my mouth, swallowing it in large gulps.

The buzzer sounded for the end of the dryer cycle. Damn! Despite my best efforts, I hadn't made it. I braced myself for what came next. One of the robot arms came spooling down on my left, then darted in, wedging its gripper between my teeth, forcing my jaws open. Then the other arm, holding a spoonlike contrivance, began scooping up globs of the stuff on the plate and pushing them into my mouth, ramming them right to the back and into my throat. There was nothing to do except swallow and try not to inhale at the wrong moment. Fortunately, there wasn't much left - I had come close to finishing under my own power - so the ordeal didn't last as long as it might have.

When the arms released me, a slot in the wall opened up and my clothing was tossed in. It had no doubt been abused, but at least it was clean and dry and warm. My shoes had been nicely shined, but the lace of the left one was missing. When I got my pants on, I noticed that the one leg was a couple centimetres shorter than the other, and I'm quite sure that had not been the case when I arrived. On the whole, though, I'd had worse experiences at Wing's.

I dressed as fast as I could, stomach churning, then rattled the door handle. After a pause, it unlocked with a soft click and I dashed out and narrowly missed stepping into the operating range of the arms, which were busily stripping an unlucky young man. A laser-flashed arrow on the floor pointed to a side door leading out of the building into the alley. I ran out the door, braced myself against the alley wall with one hand, and vomited up all I'd eaten, trying to avoid getting any on my shoes or clothing. There was a sort of crust on the pavement from previous customers doing the same; although the cleaning robots came through regularly, this was obviously replenished too often for them to ever really get it clean.

I turned and made for the light at the mouth of the alley, thinking I would find a bar and get something to take the taste out of my mouth. The brightly-lit street gleamed and beckoned. As I was two steps away from that brilliant world, it exploded into blinding white. It shattered like glass and fell to the floor. Little Flank in the back of my skull had to pick up all the pieces of the world and put them back together properly, and I never was much good at jigsaw puzzles.

The green-white mercury lights were a memory washed by the waters of time when I woke up in a different alley that smelled a little better than the one next to Wing's. I was lying propped up against a big rusty dumpster, and even in the knife-edge shadow of the mercury light I could see my hand silhouetted against the glow of the fluorescent biohazard symbol painted on the dumpster. There was a steady drip-drip-dripping noise of some kind of effluent seeping out of the dumpster, dribbling along the alley, and into a storm sewer. I was sitting in a pool of the stuff; it felt pleasantly warm. I felt a certain ineffable regret that my clothing had gotten dirty again. It was a moment suited to the writing of a poem, but I had left my syllable-counting computer among the bamboos. It would be necessary to find another laundromat, not Wing's, one with a computer and an attendant who could suggest poetic wordings and hold my parasol. Maybe I could ask the four other gentlemen in this compartment for a recommendation.

I took another look and realised there were only two other gentlemen sharing the alley with me, and that that might not be the most appropriate term for them. They were a pair of seru goons in speckless black suits that reflected not a photon of the harsh mercury light, squatting in front of me waiting for me to come to. You know the type - mirror sunglasses, black ties, chins sharp enough to split hairs with, the whole bit. One had a sleek handgun trained on me; the other was absently snapping the magazine in and out of his. When he saw I had regained consciousness, he snapped the magazine in for the last time, pointed the piece at me too, and got straight to the point. "Forget about the Murasaki case, Ploughman."

I had no idea what he was talking about. "You mean like a briefcase?" The one goon looked at the other, the second goon nodded, and then the first goon carefully set down his weapon, leaned forward, and punched me hard in the chest. He sat back on his heels. I coughed painfully.

"That bit of purple fluff who visited you this afternoon at your office. Forget her." The second goon spoke:

"She was not there, it
did not happen. Do not take
the case. Understand?"

I told him, "Worst haiku ever. It's lacking the seasonal reference." The first goon said to his companion, "It's no use, we hit him too hard. I keep telling you humans are fragile." "Huh. I guess you're right. Well, he hates seru anyway. Our persuasion may be unnecessary, no?" They stood, the first one kicked me in the stomach out of sheer nastiness, then they moved off down the alley. I heard the soft purr of an expensive engine, and they were gone.

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