Interview

“Oh shit”, Jake thought, “it wasn’t a metaphor.”

A six-armed minotaur stared down at Jake. The torso of the minotaur grafted seamlessly at the midriff into the body of a thick python as thick around as a sewer pipe. The six fists of the minotaur dripped blood. Two of the fists carried maces.

Deep red glints tracked Jack. Other than the angle of the huge bull head as it followed Jake and the deep breathing of the creature’s massive lungs, it didn’t move at all, just stared with an unknowable, animal thought process.

The head of the corporation said that as part of the interview process, Jake would have to outrun the beast. The other applicants ahead of him had gone first. Jake was the last one. He had assumed that ‘outrun the beast’ was some sort of Donald Trump turn of phrase. A pretty way of saying that Jake would have to stay one step ahead of what was going to be a harsh interview process.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Thick breathing from the beast made the air dank. It had exerted itself. Jake could see smashed bodies, surprised faces and broken limbs in a pile behind it. A blackberry chirruped there in the dark corridor, underneath the bodies.

One of the dead people had mail, Jake guessed.

The beep from the blackberry seemed to startle the beast into action. With a snorting blast of air that sounded like an angry sneeze, it shook its huge, shaggy head.

Its horns caught the light when it did that. Jake wet his pants.

The beast ducked down suddenly with a terrifying amount of speed and opened its arms wide like a spider going in for a hug. It tightened its grip on the maces, curled around in an S shape, coiled back, cocked a swing, and lunged forward.

The beast screamed. Jake joined in.

The rest was a blur. The minotaur thing had hit him, he knew that much. Jake felt a concussive shock and then he was airborne for a brief time before the door that had locked behind him stopped his momentum very efficiently. He felt a few things go wrong inside him. He hung there like a cartoon for half a second before the floor jumped up at him and smacked him in the face.

Jake made kitten noises for a while on the floor.

Outrun the beast, thought Jake, outrun the beast. He tasted blood. How could he outrun the beast?

The beast prodded Jake’s shoulder with a fingertip as big as a stereo speaker, checking to see if there was any life left in him. It brought one of the maces down softly and poked at Jake. It was a light poke by the beast's standards but Jake felt another rib go.

Jake summoned up all his strength and made a grab for the handle of the mace. It was like grabbing onto a telephone pole. He wrapped his arms around it, pressed his face up against the metal of the top of the weapon, and gave it a bear hug.

Shocked, the beast drew back. Jake hung on, dangling from the mace. The beast jiggled the mace a little, trying to free Jake for a killing blow.

Enraged, the beast swung the mace, adding momentum with a twisting corkscrew motion from its snake half below.

Jake couldn’t hang on. At the apogee of the swing, Jake slipped off the mace.

He could hear his clothes snapping in the wind as he sailed over and past the bodies piled up on the floor. He landed beyond them and slid along the polished floor.

A door at the end of the corridor opened up and Jake slid through it into a nicely decorated office. Friction kicked in on the rug and he rolled six times before coming to a stop. The door slid shut.

The Beast yelled his displeasure from the other side.

Jake's new boss leaned down from behind the huge desk.

“Oh shit,” she said with a little pout, “you made it.”

She made a little check mark on one of the papers on her desk and looked at her long nails.

“I guess that means you got the job, then. Let’s get you cleaned up.”



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Guiness Dot

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Crime Scene

It’s late. I’m smoking a cigarette in the ruins of a burned-down orphanage.

I’m standing in what used to be a room full of cradles. The scorched floor is cluttered with little black bones and black charcoal cribs.

It’s all I can do to stand there. The dome’s supports make a spider web in the starry sky above. Black ribs miles above this city cutting the sky into pie slices down to the horizon. I haven’t seen the sun since I got here.

I remember Earth. I remember blue sky. I remember not living in domes. I haven’t been back to Earth in over twenty years now. I hate this place.

I hate the ignorant asteroid miners and their ignorant lives. I hate their aversion to learning anything not needed to run the machines. I hate their lack of imagination and lack of originality. They’re augmented slightly to see better in the dark and withstand a few more seconds of vacuum in case of a decomp. All physical. Nothing mental.

I’m a cop. I pissed off my boss and caught a transfer out here to the gulag. The boondocks. Long time ago now. The only way I’m going back to Earth is after I retire which is in five years. Five long years.

I have the standard cop upgrades: total recall, overextended acuity, critical stat sensitivity that makes me into a human lie detector, and bumped-up lateral reasoning.

It all just adds to the torture. Time doesn’t ‘fly’ for me. With my photographic memory, I’m aware of every second going by exactly as long as a second is supposed to take. I hate it. Drinking does nothing to mute it. Believe me, I’ve tried.

And for a lie detector to be useful, perpetrators have to be careful about the evidence they leave at crime scenes or at least passably devious during an interview. I swear, almost all of the population here is legally retarded.

For instance, I’m staring down at a wallet and a gas can right now. It looks like maybe the arsonist must have squatted down to light the fire and dropped his wallet out of his back pocket.

And he’ll be shocked when I trace it back to him.

I look at my partner. He has the glowing eyes and strong, thick skin of a miner’s son.

“Don’t you hate it here, son?” I ask him.

Completely stoic about my non-sequitur, he answers, “I grew up here, Sarge. Don’t know no different.”

I keep standing and staring down at the wallet. My partner stands with me, still as a statue, endlessly patient as only the truly stupid or enlightened can be.

I sigh and pick up the wallet.




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