#24.5 LAST ACTION LEGEND
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Mel coughed. The wall urinal splashed a blue fluid on the tips of his toes before he could even turn around. Dragging his flip-flops on the tiled floor, he tried to button his Hawaiian shirt, but ended up leaving open both his collar—from which thick black chest hair poked out, and the bottom—where a wooly beer belly dropped over his cargo shorts. Without washing his hands, he passed his fingers in his bushy horseshoe mustache where he found a small peanut. The latter concluded its capillary adventure in his bourbon-reeking throat.
The sleazy man left the silent karaoke bar’s toilets by adjusting his sunglasses. Staggering until the stereo system next to the stage and the pay phone. Fumbling through the compact disks, he quickly lost patience after another greatest hits album of Martiandance followed by ten interchangeable sets of Belter boy bands. But his blurry gaze ultimately fell on an eye-catching cassette collecting dust on the jukebox. Still of the Night from Whitesnake appeared to be the last tune of the mixtape.
The bass shook the rattling assortment of grimy Jack Daniel’s bottles lined up over the closed armored windows. Happy to disturb the quiet night of a couple of poker-faced Chinese corpos and half a dozen local patrons wearing colorful tech overalls, Mel headed for the stool closest to the 3D printer for salty appetizers and the TV where a trailer for G.I. Jane flashed in low definition. Sitting down at the counter, burping and then stretching his shoulders, he waved at the little robot on wheels—an old OMS Dingbot, slaloming between the beer taps.
“Hey! R.O.B. or whatever the fuck is your name…” Mel coughed through the music, feeling the greasy rim of his plastic cup. “You’re failing in your duty.”
“Mr. Mel. You blew your monthly credit,” retorted the polite Dingbot as he slid the drunkard’s cup to the other side of the bar, where it fell into the automated crushing trash. “Besides, my name is Tomy.”
“Already?” the man responded. He opened his large faux-leather wallet from which slipped his flying license. Aside from a battered photo of Linda Gray and some holo-business cards from the Venusian cloud-city’s shadiest Hook’n’Tacos, it contained nothing else. “Fuck…”
“Sorry. Another time, perhaps.”
“Wait! Chillax… okay?” Mel turned awkwardly, making his stool creak as he swung around. Despite his bathroom break, the previous drinks had neither been purged through his system nor mopped up by the lethal dose of nutrigel peanuts and pistachios. “Don’t you move… I’ll courteously ask for an extension of my boozing warranty…”
Mel plunged his hand into his sweaty shirt, gripping his firearm tucked into a discrete holster under his armpit. But by jerkingly taking his Beretta 92F out, its safety remained stuck in a fold of fabric. When he insisted on pulling it even more violently, his huge platinum watch ripped off a button. The latter flew across the room and bounced against a screen listing the planet’s monthly production reports. Thrown off balance, Mel fell backwards, knocking over a warm mojito left unattended. The heavy glass smashed against his skull as a gunshot rang out.
Laughing, the two Chinese suits left, throwing a few casino chips on the table as a tip for the lousy show while browsing their bulky flip phones. Because of the late hour, the other customers quickly followed them. Most had to go to work in the automated factories in the morning. As they slammed the establishment’s doors, the music stopped.
Tomy slowly approached the edge of the counter, squeaking his tiny wheels. His irreverent guest was sitting between two stools, his back arched and his stoutness lying on his thighs. Blood dripped from his temple to get lost in his cheap rum-soaked mustache. His glasses had landed a little way off, between his revoked piloting license and a strained rubber whose expiration dated from Bill Clinton’s second Techno-nomination.
“I need a drink, Tomy…” the miserable boozer groaned, slowly picking up his gun and the rest of his stuff from the dust. Sobbing discreetly, he folded his glasses to slip them into his shirt pocket.
The robot heaved in binary, returning to his columns of plastic cups and bottles under the TV set.
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Mel straightened up, wiping the blood that had already dried on his cheek from the sweltering heat of the cloud-city. Despite the air-conditioned casinos and cryo-walls, the floating havens of the Inner System remained orbital hell. Meka-Cao was certainly the worst, with the Usinor and Wuhan-IS foundries below spitting out enough Venusian steel per day to build a new Techno-fleet; if the latter hadn’t been almost entirely replaced by the Gaellic Chrome Guard of Lunapolis.
Mel grabbed the bourbon Tomy handed him from his tiny red clamps. He burped, as on the screen, a stupid Taco Bell commercial featuring a talking Chihuahua ended. Right after, the colorful MTV logo appeared alongside a pop music jingle. “Please. Turn that shit off,” he said, sipping his drink directly from the bottle.
“Go home, Mr. Mel…” the Dingbot ordered him, printing the bill from a module at the base of his stomach, just above the alcohol-sticky wheels. With the neverending inflation, the round sum turned out to be astronomical.
Just as the man crushed the exorbitant credit summary written in Chinese between his fingers, the dusty pay phone near the jukebox rang, startling him. “What the hell?” Mel reacted, eternally in a bad mood. He spun his ice-blue eyes to Tomy, busy cleaning the bulgy remote of the TV. “Are the new public terminals working both ways now?”
“Can’t stop the progress, I guess…” The robot answered, shrugging his small shoulders. Meanwhile, the shrill buzzing of the phone continued.
Annoyed, Mel jumped from his stool then approached the ringing phone. Leaning against the jukebox where he left his bottle on, he picked up the heavy brown receiver. At that moment, the modest cathode ray screen to the right of the numeric keypad—which until now had featured the twirling Solarian Telecom logo, filled with black and white static.
“Hello?” Mel barked.
“Mel Silverstone?” a voice crackled. It belonged to a young woman with a slight accent from former Eastern Europe. She appeared on the small monitor a few seconds later, the visor of her baseball cap hiding her face in shadow.
“Who’s talking?” the startled drunk man replied, nervously dusting off the screen with a flick of his sleeve. “Who’s this?”
“Just a big fan of your show.”
“Fuck you!”
Mel hung up the receiver so hard that half the keys fell off and bounced on the floor.
Tomy tried to swap through different channels on the television. Quickly bludgeoning the universal remote, the little robot also shut down the AC and opened the louvers by mistake. On the other side of the windows, the red cloudy shroud of Venus sprayed to infinity and beyond.
“I told you to turn that off, damn it! Tomy!” shouted Mel as rock music began to dust off the speakers scattered across the room.
“I can’t!” Tomy cried. “Someone hacked the TV—or the entire network!”
“Turn it off!” The phone rang anew behind Mel’s back—even louder than before, causing him to jump and swear again. The drunk picked the receiver as violently as he had hung it up. “What’s going on? Is this a fucking joke?”
The woman’s grinning face reappeared, this time more clearly through interference. A thin but long scar ran from her left temple to her right jawline. “Have you ever heard of the Stellar Patriots? Or the Graves siblings?” she asked.
“No… Should I?” Mel retorted.
“What about the Lunar Metacaste of the Awen?”
The man raised an eyebrow. He discreetly ducked inside the brown transparent plastic dome protecting the booth as the room’s lights flickered. “The Moon? What do you want from those toff assholes?”
Mel glanced towards the closed front door, then the counter. On the CRT screen above, the ultra-violent open credits of a corny reality TV show rerun began, blasting Kickstart My Heart. Its has-been main character, Cyber Macho, jumped on a two-decade-old Thunderbolt CanaryBike, wearing a studded leather jacket and wielding a smart shotgun. Behind him, a gigantic explosion turned a famous Cronian skyscraper to ashes—alongside numerous well-armed and wired thugs from local boostergangs.
“Tomy!” Mel shouted, slamming his hand on the bottom of the handset.
The Dingbot bartender whined: “I’m doing what I can, Mr. Mel!”
“I need you…” the mysterious woman went on.
“What for?” Mel yelled through the very loud rock music. He put his head out of the plastic shell. Sweat was beading on his forehead. “Tomy! I’m going to snap your rubbery neck if you don’t cut the fucking wire!”
On TV, the raffish credits ended on a close up of the stuntman hero, taking off his large sunglasses and his helmet to reveal his voluminous outmoded perm. His ice blue eyes stared at the late-night half-asleep viewers; but a grin of victory lifted his thick black horseshoe mustache.
“We need you, Cyber Macho,” the young woman concluded. “The entire Solar System needs you back to blow up the Moon once and for all.”