"Giddog, get me another dry sponge."
The Dalmatian wagged its tail in response, ran away and used its teeth to pick up a fresh sponge from the dispenser in the corner of the plaza. The dog then carried it back to Gus, as it had been trained to.
"Good Giddog." Gus smiled, and tossed the large dog a small snack - it leaped up on its hind legs and snapped it up. The Dalmatian's tail wagged hard enough to knock over passing pedestrians.
As Gus attached the sponge to his mop handle and dipped it in the bucket, he began talking to Giddog. Some of his work mates found it odd that he talked to a dumb animal, instead of to a synthetic pet that could actually converse. Gus simply assumed that Giddog liked to listen, because the dog looked at him with rapt attention when Gus spoke in his slow, steady voice.
"You know, Giddog, I'm probably not going to do any more ring-fighting after the gym closes down. It's not... hell, I don't know. What do you think?"
Giddog sat down on the street, and let his black tail and ears droop.
"Hey, don't be sad. This only means I'll have more time for you. Maybe... maybe we'll move in with Benazir... permanently, settle down and have a baby, eh?"
Giddog looked up and barked eagerly; Gus grinned and gave his canine friend a nod.
"Yes, Giddog, we'll find a nice female Dalmatian for you. It's not that easy, you know. Real dogs, the old-fashioned kind, are rare. I have to travel into the outback, Australia or Tasmania maybe, to find one that fits you."
The dog barked again, raised its front paws and wagged its tail, as if expecting another treat.
"You know," Gus said, half to himself, "I really miss my family. And your mother, Laura, she was my best childhood friend. You resemble her a lot - well, except for the little bits."
He took his last doggie treat and tossed it to Giddog. He climbed up on a ladder platform, one of the several which stood among the clusters of elevated solar panels, and began to clean the panels. A workmate from across town entered the plaza, and shouted hello to Gus; the man was of medium height and build, and wore the same type of work-clothes as Gus did. On the back of his shirt, the electronic print showed an unending stream of animated commercials.
"Hi, Chris! What's new?"
"Oh, nothing... I had my new liver fitted today. Doctor told me not to drink so hard."
"Well, are you?" Gus said, not sure whether he was joking with Chris - the man did spend too much money on drink, plus the regular cheap patch-up jobs on his internal organs. Chris led a lifestyle that would have killed any man in a previous century.
"What's a poor panel-cleaner to do?" Chris exclaimed laconically. "I ain't never racking up more PP's than any of us losers. Booze is cheap and reliable."
"Have you tried making your own alcohol?" Gus joked.
Chris began working another set of solar panel twenty meters away, and carried on the conversation in a half-shouting fashion.
"Are you kidding, Gus?"
"When I grew up in Australia, my grandfather used to make his own booze out in the desert. He used a rusty old thing called a 'distiller'. It's still out there, I guess - desert's dry, it'll last long."
"You talk about Australia more and more," Chris remarked. "Why don't you go back there someday? Place is absolutely splattered with solar panels. You could get a lot of work down under. I mean, if it's so great as you always describe it, what're you doing here?"
"I don't wanna talk about it," Gus responded, and cast a nervous glance about himself. In the 22nd century cameras were everywhere, and privacy a fiction.
"No, you never do, do you?" Chris shouted; his attention drifted toward a camera-bot that flew past them in search of more interesting events. "Your hit count ain't never going up, unless you start to be more open about yourself. Secrets ain't worth shit until others can hear them. That is, if your secrets really are all that exciting..."
Gus did not get angered by the remark. He had heard it before, and had grown weary of trying to explain why he refused to reveal his entire life - except to his dog. There was an old word for it, that Gus kept forgetting... "-grity" something...
Chris kept ranting out loud in his persistent hope of being noticed by a roving camera and scoring some extra PP. Gus glanced up into the night sky. The holographic commercials blocked out the stars; only a few planets were visible to the naked eye.
And the Moon. The dark half of the Moon was scattered with the lights of cities, centers of pleasure, sports and leisure, both legal and illegal. Gus had never been to the Moon, not with his low hit count. One day, if he somehow could gather a million PP, he could take Giddog and Benazir on a trip there... or to Mars. Maybe boxing was still popular there, he thought, on that frontier-world where two good fists counted for something...
***
Colonel Haruman Clarke's personal transport craft flew toward Kuwait City's spaceport, escorted by two small automatic fighter-pods. Each pod resembled a huge, gray, stiff-winged mosquito. Inside the craft, Clarke sat watching the outside view, thinking about his future.
This is my last day watching Mother Earth with living eyes, he thought. But it'll be worth it. For when Boulder Pi and his engineers have remade me, the perfect woman shall be mine. Clarke had never met her, only seen and heard the recordings the Kansler had shown. And yet, it seemed as if he had known her for a long time.
He dimly recalled some sort of court case, where she had been publicly humiliated on legal technicalities. Clarke promised himself to restore her reputation - once he became Argus-A, the new Adam to the new Eve. Colonel Clarke found it funny that she had been the first, and he merely a development of the original. And he wondered how the Fleet had managed to keep her away from the public eye so efficiently. Maybe with the new top-secret "info-busting" weapons he'd only heard rumors about...
"Venix," he whispered to himself... and his reveries were aborted when the human pilot sent a message over the loudspeakers.
"We're being pursued, sir. Four unidentified auto-pods just took off from the ground and are approaching fast. They're too small for our escorts to hit."
"Take us down to land," Clarke said quickly. "Anywhere. Now."
"There's only the open plaza there," the pilot replied.
"Do it."
The thirty feet long aircraft began to dive while using its airbrakes to slow down; the pursuing pods closed in on it. Just a hundred meters from the plaza, the first pod attacked and hit Clarke's ship.
***
A thundering explosion interrupted Gus as he was standing on a ladder-platform, mopping up solar panels. He looked up and saw an oblong aircraft careening toward the plaza, its nose pointed straight at Gus.
He jumped down from the platform, landed on the ground four feet below, and scrambled for cover. His dog followed him closely.
"Giddog - follow me! Chris, call for help!" Chris dropped his mop and ran away from the plaza, punching signal buttons in the palm of his hand.
The aircraft drew a thick trail of smoke between two buildings, its jet thrusters braking with an ear-piercing screech... but it was too damaged to stop entirely. It plowed through the grove of brittle solar panel trees on the plaza, and crash-landed in a shrubbery eighty feet farther away. The craft did not explode - its fuel had been automatically jettisoned before impact. Instead it broke up into several sections, twisting like some enormous gleaming worm, and settled with a squeal of bent and scraped metal.
Gus peeked out from the concrete doorway where he had taken shelter, and saw the smoking wreckage but no people - and no news pods or robot cameras came flying, which struck him as weird. He shrugged off his misgivings and ran the twenty feet to the wreckage.
"Hello! Is anyone alive in there?" Through one of the cracked, wide porthole panels, he could discern movements inside; he stepped up on the toppled solar panels and searched for the emergency door, still shouting at the passengers inside. "Don't panic! Help is on the way... I think..."
Before he could reach one of the nearest doors, it burst open from inside the wreck. A uniformed man, about his own height, climbed down from the opening with a gun in his hand. Gus backed away; at the sound of his feet, the man spun and aimed his gun at Gus's chest.
"Halt!" the officer croaked.
Gus raised his hands over his head, staring at the other man's face. The label on his uniform read "CLARKE" - but his face, height, and age seemed exactly similar to Gus. Except Clarke's nose wasn't broken. The extensive safety mechanisms in his aircraft seat had rendered him practically unharmed in the crash; traces of chemical foam clung to his uniform.
Colonel Clarke froze; also he spotted the likeness. The spell lasted only a few seconds. He thought: Has to be another fad. Facial makeovers in the likeness of famous people are so old hat. I haven't licensed my face. Gotta get my lawyer on it. Someone owes me royalties.
"Get me a car," he growled into the small headset that hung from his cap. "Hello? Hello? Damn, I just get static." He still kept the gun aimed at Gus. "The Jovian rebels. A murder plot against me. You! Get me to a car-pod. Now!"
Gus swallowed and replied rapidly: "Don't shoot. Any other survivors? The pilot?"
"Shut up and show the way," Clarke ordered, making a movement with his head to indicate directions.
Still holding his hands up in the air, wondering what the hell was going on, Gus skipped down from the wreck and began to walk toward the nearest parked rental car. His dog, growling and snarling, came running up toward them.
"No, Giddog! Stay put! Please don't shoot my..."
The dog refused to listen; Gus knew it might put itself at risk to protect him. Then, as he faced away from Clarke and the wreckage, a sharp whistling noise came from above - then another noise, and something dark hit Gus from all sides, faster than he could possibly dodge it. A loud explosion shook the very air around him, very close, and Gus felt the air being squeezed out of his lungs. He blacked out.
Giddog?
Giddog?
Giddog?
Giddog?
***
Darkness.
Gus opened his eyes, and found he could not move; his entire body seemed caught in a stiff mold. He understood that he lay in some sort of stasis-bed, the kind used as life-support system for patients in critical condition. Only a small face-plate allowed him to peer outside the bed. For a moment, the place vibrated with the rumble of a jet or rocket engine. He could dimly see the red-lit chamber in which he lay. A door marked COCKPIT opened a few feet away. A figure ambled closer, and looked at Gus.
"Rest easy, Colonel," said the figure. "We can't restore your old body, but you'll get something far, far better."
"Mmmff!"
The tightly fitted breathing mask over Gus's mouth muffled his objection. The figure touched a control panel near Gus's head, and the boxer passed out again.
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