That comment caught Jack off guard. No way — this was the Rat, from back in Melbourne? He stared at the ape-like character for a few seconds, and then spoke again.
“Give it up, okay? You’ve done enough damage.”
“Damage…? Whoa! Why so serious, man? This is all — everything, y’know — a joke, you know that, don’t you?” The giant staggered out a few steps. “Lighten up! So where’re these freakin’ free drinks you promis—”
An extra eye, a bright red one, suddenly appeared between his other two.
Crosshairs froze, frowned, and then reeled backwards onto the cement with a dull thud. Half his grey matter was spattered over the glowing girl and her stockings.
Jack stared, aghast.
“Fuck—!”
MARVELL0US MELB0URNE
#173
“—it easy there.”
He found himself sitting up, tottering anyway, dizzy, violently shaking, and a fevered perspiration covering most of his naked form.
Naked —What kind of hateful gag was this?
Not only trapped inside a room the size of the closet, but no suit, no costume, just wiring and electrodes aplenty — scattered all over a tiny, skinny white body with freckles and very little in the way of muscles. This was like being Steve Rogers in reverse. Of course he started to panic.
“Take deep breaths,” the same voice commanded in his right ear. “Come on. Calm down. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe…breathe. Steady, now. There’s a lad.”
“I…What—? Bloody hell, what is this shit?” shouted out Jacob, in a higher pitch than he was used to, while he yanked at the wires and his fingers became entangled in their net.
“Take it easy! Stop that! You’ll break them.”
Strong hands grabbed his wrists. Then again, maybe they weren’t so strong — more likely he was now weak. Jacob found himself looking at Gonzo with the long green hair, wearing another of his Ralph Steadman tees and a bent pair of thick-frame glasses.
The man had started to tenderly remove each and every electrode from his charge’s body.
“Thataboy. We need this gear,” he was saying, focused on the task, “combined with amino acid therapy, a proteolytic inhibiter and the standard iconometric-frammistat, so your muscles don’t atrophy. For every person here we use an eight-channel FES device that cultivates hundreds of these little surface electrodes and cables, two interconnected four-channel stimulators, and a reconfigured Mitt-Mate for stimulator programming and processing compliance data. They don’t come cheap or grow on trees. Automated and extensive training of eight muscle groups of the upper and lower extremities is performed six hours a day, with one second on and two off tetanic contractions, at twenty to thirty percent of maximum tetanic muscle force. We need to take loving care of these things.”
Jacob blinked several times, his thoughts confused and his eyes partly out of focus. No amount of waffling was ever going to get this information to make sense, but the boy got the feeling it wasn’t intended to — Gonzo was more trying to bring him back to the here and now, perhaps by boring him stupid with outlandish jargon.
“What…reeks?” the boy asked.
“You do. Pfew!” Gonzo grinned, as first he fanned himself, and then wiped Jacob’s brow with a filthy rag. “I’m used to it, but otherwise you gave me a scare. Had enough of those lately. Now I’m all done with the electrodes, I’ll just unhook the colostomy bag — let’s keep the drip in for a bit.”
There was a rusted steel pole beside the cot, dangling a half-empty IV pouch.
“Reckon you can stand, Jacob?”
“I think so.” His voice sounded shrill, distant. “Don’t know. I feel dizzy.”
“That’s normal, agonize not. You should see how people react after months of downtime — you were in Heropa only two weeks. C’mon. Try it.”
With Gonzo’s assistance, Jacob pushed up and, while he found his body lighter than expected, the legs felt like jelly. Once on his feet, he tottered, but Gonzo gave additional support.
“Problem with standing, or are you playing drunk?”
“Not drunk. Someone shot me.”
“Ow! What the hell is going on down there?” Gonzo appraised things anew. “It takes time to get used to the fact this all happened in your noggin, that in actual fact you have no injury at all. Give it twenty-four hours, more or less. Incidentally — how’d you get out of Heropa?”
Thinking took effort. “I swore,” recalled the boy.
“No kidding? Cool. Glad to hear the cuss-words work again, though it means an auto two-day penalization — not that you’ll care.”