“Stay focused, Bill… stuff got tricky!” she concluded before resuming her story.

  Gold Coast Suites in North Callisto City (Callisto/Jupiter IV) - A month ago

  I woke up from my quick nap in the armchair near the window, my legs on the backrest and my forehead taped to the room’s orange carpet. Straightening resurrected my headache. My twenty-first birthday already appeared to be the final death knell for my barely initiated drinking habits. And it wasn’t even 6 p.m.

  Sliding on the floor, I grabbed a pair of crumpled gym shorts left under the bed. Once I was up, I slipped into my father’s old Callisto Bulls hoodie before stumbling towards the kitchen area of the suite. On the other side of the corridor’s window on my right, the Kisugi—Zéphyr’s ship—was anchored horizontally.

  “Z?” I grumbled in the gloom. “Why is it so dark?”

  “In the beginning, it is always dark.”

  Ordering the home automation system to turn on the lights, I found her sitting cross-legged on the living room’s Formica table. Without a holosuit, Zéphyr sported her inky metallic skin and silver hair. Her eyes were filled with red and blue static. Judging by the many wires connecting her temples to the data-core lying on the Coloniawful couch, she was processing the info mailed by July—wait. August? She was processing the info sent by Speedy Gonzalez or whatever.

  I poured the contents of two bags of Swiss Miss directly into my mouth. “You dug up a bone on the Radio Freaks yet?” I managed to pronounce through the small mallows.

  I got no answers and decided to sit on the couch. Snatching the remote from the faux-leather holder, I turned on the TV.

  “Yes,” Zéphyr replied through the laugh track as she logged off.

  I coughed up a chocolate cloud. “’bout time.”

  She spun to me. “Apologies. You may grab your jacket and gun. I’ll page June. It’s time to run for some birthday troubles.”

  “As if! Shower first!”

  “No need for a shower where we’re going, Ali-love,” she said, stretching her rubber ligaments. “I’ll set up the Kisugi.”

  “You. Me. Shower!” I insisted, throwing my hoodie across the room. “Adventure is gonna wait for the X-rated commercial break!”

  To be continued…

  つづく…

  #16 RADIO FREAK II: A Concrete Conclusion

  第16話 ラジオフリーク II - 具体的な結論

  Roof of the Palmer House Hotel in Downtown Callisto City (Callisto/Jupiter IV) - Present day

  “Weren’t you afraid of getting in trouble with the Bureau dorks?” Bill Murray asked.

  “Cops or Military Police don’t scare us, y’know!” Ali replied as she drew her .50 and spun it like a space cowboy.

  “I see…” the actor reacted by replacing the safety that had popped off. “I too made fun of the MP during my service.”

  I jumped into my partner’s arms. With a flick of my paw, I woke up her wrist computer to check the time. We’d been stuck in the water tank for twelve hours. The stench of sweat and grease—mixed with pot, fried nutri-chicken and boredom—gave birth to a cough-inducing scent loaded with carbon dioxide.

  “You’re confusing real life with Stripes…” I said to our guest as Ali opened the door to let in a draft.

  “Anyway, have you reached the reporter? Damn. I’d like to play a news correspondent someday.”

  “You sure will,” Ali declared.

  “Since I watched Chinatown, I’ve wanted to be in a movie,” I intoned, switching places with my partner. It was her turn to watch the roof of the building across the street.

  “Can’t you help Lee with his career, Bill?” she joked.

  Bill Murray pondered. “A film where I’m a journalist. And a hairball, too. I’ll ask Ramis—but go ahead with your story, Ali. Please.”

  “Can you keep telling it while on the watch, partner?”

  “I’m multitasking, grumpy groundhog.”

  I began my grooming. “You can indeed eat in your sleep. But that’s about it.”

  Deep Loop District in Callisto City (Callisto/Jupiter IV) - A month ago

  “You’re late,” grumbled Miss Roger, the reporter we had met hours before. She was standing against a railing surrounding one of the many dangerous sinkholes in Windy City’s industrial zone.

  Deep mines had been dug in the chondrite crust during the colonization. Martian engineers had injected an immense quantity of iron oxides brought from the main belt into the moon’s heart. Coupled with giant turbines consuming a lot of power, the “filling” of Jupiter IV had endowed it with a substantial gravitational force almost similar to Earth. Thus, the satellite had been able to acquire an atmosphere. Or something like that—it’s science!

  “Ali is used to long showers,” explained Zéphyr as we hopped off a taxicab. “What does our evening look like?”

  “Gloomy and drafty,” replied the Freak as she pulled up the zipper of her yellow jumpsuit to her chin.

  The walls of the narrow chasm were covered with coral oozing a disgusting red liquid. From the top to the unfathomable depths, the curiously inverted edifice had no apparent entrance and looked more like the gaping throat of a titanic cosmic entity.

  “Should we really go down?” I asked, searching with the tip of my foot for the first rungs of a ladder in the silt surrounding the edge.

  “Those are magnetic walls leading to the safety hatch a little further down,” Zéphyr replied. “Do you have boots, June?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t!” I uttered. I was still wearing my gym shorts and hoodie. “Besides, the flamethrower wouldn’t have been a luxury now!”

  “I’ll carry you on my back,” Zéphyr said, ignoring my remark.

  Not very reassured, the journalist took the first step. Her magnetic sole fixed, she found herself perpendicular to the wall, before escaping a sigh of relief.

  Our slow progress required us to clear the moss mats and the rows of dry coral with the tip of our feet. Clinging to my cyborg’s neck, I tried to think of more pleasant moments. Like our gaming nights, or The Land Before Time—no, wait. That’s the one where the little dinosaur’s mother dies, right? Ouch.

  Unfortunately, walls covered with filth weren’t the only danger. Not being a ’borg with superhuman faculties, the Freak struggled against the nauseating winds rising from the depths. Several times, she had to turn around to absorb the gusts. It was as if the iron monster residing at the planet’s heart snored in its sleep.

  “You ok, September?” I asked.

  “Not what I’m called!” she cried out to us. “I—”

  Her last unsteady step went through a barrier of dehydrated reef, and she disappeared behind it. My girlfriend leaped forward in reflex, and we both tumbled headlong into the seeping gorge.

  A second later, I was caught by the collar by the giant mouse, which pulled us through the wall. The next thing we knew, we were on top of each other in a stinky, dark stairwell.

  “My—my apologies…” the Freak stammered as she awkwardly straightened before massaging her shoulders.

  “Interesting. We seem to have fallen through the parched turf covering that crack,” Zéphyr explained.

  “This is indeed really interestin’…” I coughed. “...not.”

  While massaging my bruised throat, I examined the large strain in the steel wall. It didn’t look accidental nor natural.

  The reporter replied probed with her freshly lit flashlight the clawed footprints leading into the abyss. “We’re in the old filling network. Converted into heat-sewers. A geothermal heating system.”

  “Ugh! I hate sewers… Got clowns roaming around…” With my Desert Eagle on alert, I summoned enough courage to conduct the group down a grimy concrete stairwell.

  During this endless descent, several door remnants appeared along the walls. None of them yielded to my shoulder thrusts. The dry heat had stiffened the hinges and sealed the place, forcing us to continue deeper into the colonial complex. The same heat made my cyborg’s holosuit sizzle. She must’ve been roasting in that mirror-suit.

  “The wireless signal wanes too,” she whispered to me when the reporter was away.

  The final spiral steps led to immense Plexiglas doors slowly collapsing under their own weight. Behind them, a vast round room was bathed in halos of reddish glow emanating from huge skylights dotting the walls. They must have been invisible from the outside because of the dry lichen.

  “Check this out. Turbines…” explained the Freak, hastening her pace. “Abandoned for at least 40 years.”

  The entirety of the place was indeed occupied by steel engines climbing into the heights. These dozens of magnetic pillars were as wide as the Kitty.

  “If the area has been neglected for decades, why is there a Macintosh IIcx on this desk?” asked Zéphyr. She diverged to a workbench barely concealed under a tarp.

  “Because someone’s hiding here,” I concluded, revealing a second computer and a handset. “There are claw marks on the modem. You think the Radio Freaks are having LAN parties?”

  “The beasts aren’t the ones playing with the latest electronic equipment on the market. Come and see,” replied the Freak-mouse. Her voice got lost in its own echo.

  Zéphyr and I walked around a weathered turbine to find a makeshift camp. Tents and tarps clumsily concealed a ransacked field lab. On most of the metal crates stored against a water recycler, appeared a curious symbol with three helices.

  “Mendel Genomics…” Zéphyr whispered, tapping the same symbol on a curled notepad. “Jovian corpos.”

  “Knowing their core business, they should be linked to the mutants,” the Freak reacted, pointing her flashlight at some blood trails.

  From the blue halo, she stumbled upon a pile of lifeless bodies. Still wearing their white lab suits and gas masks, the Mendel envoys have been gruesomely chopped up and impaled on a coral tree.

  “Captain Bosch,” I read on an identity card. I had to hold my nose because of the mummification smell. “More like Captain Butchered.”

  “Mendel didn’t just send the Geek Squad…” the Freak responded, looting the bodies. Behind one of them, she found a half-eaten electric club. “But mercs too—or a security team.”

  Zéphyr snatched the ID from my fingers. “It’s definitely a monitoring station. The computers and servers correlate the energy spike detected in your data, June. These people wanted to hide their monkey business in the middle of the filling turbines. They certainly fell victim to the monsters. But did they really create them? We—”

  “Mendel Genomics specializes in genetic manipulation,” the Freak interjected, trying to turn on a water-cooled Mac. “Shoot! They’re fried. We need to get the main data-core to find out more. We’ve got a scoop!”

  Zéphyr also searched the tables and tents but uncovered no servers. “This is odd. It had to be someplace.”

  “Can’t the data be directly sent wirelessly?” I asked before remembering Zéphyr losing her signal minutes ago.

  “Impossible,” she confirmed. “There is too much concrete. The only solution would be to—”

  “Fuck!” I had toppled forward when my foot got caught on something. A huge cable hidden under a tarp. “What’s this?”

  “Some intraweb line. Let’s follow it!” Zéphyr proposed.

  The exploration continued in the greatest silence. Weapon still in hand, I progressed up the trail to the other end of the room, where a corridor led off. The access to the latter had been… nibbled away.

  “How many mutagenic underground dwellers are roaming around here, October?” I asked the reporter who crouched to remove a tooth stuck in a leaking lead pipe.

  “There are paths in every direction…” she replied, glancing at the footprints.

  “The answer you’re probably looking for is ‘a lot’,” my cyber-girlfriend went on, jumping across the hot water. On the other side of the steamy tunnel, she started tightrope walking on a narrow gas pipe to avoid stepping into the water.

  I complained halfway down the gray torrent where a silver trickle floated. “Ew! What are we wading in? This is the worst birthday ever, Z…” I took the lead on the pipe.

  We arrived after a long mountaineering to a sluice gate. On the other side, its concrete supports barely stuck out of a deep moat circling an anarchic dune invading the center of another wide moon-round hall. Connected to the cable emerging from the polluted water—and various others leading to the heights—a black monolithic as tall as a spaceport vending machine occupied the summit of Mount Garbage. Concrete powder covered it almost completely. This block of steel, rusted in places, appeared to be the receptacle of the nose-itching silvery liquid trickling from an opening at least a hundred meters above us. I finally broke the silence at the bottom of the rickety stairs leading to the ominous fridge: “What the fuck is this?”

  “The data-core, no?” the Freak reacted, climbing the first steps covered with StarMart plastic bags. “Connected to the city.”

  Once on the top, we closely inspected our discovery. After clearing the silvery tinted sediment, a small spherical glass appeared to be embedded on the nearest side. Inside, we discovered a tiny ball of pink flesh floating in a liquid with a curious resinous aspect.

  The never-born had no eyes. We could discern every blood vessel and cartilage of this miserable cadaverous body. His mouth was a simple slit sewn around the blackened mouthpiece of an artificial respirator. From there, a continuous stream of red froths escaped, and his cracked chest threatened to break at each breath. Wires also provided a connection to the monolith through a plastic placenta fixed at the back of the globe.

  “That’s a gnarly Freak-bubblegum…” I commented.

  The reporter scoffed. “Not every odd-looking creature is a Freak, hunter…”

  I felt my cyber-girlfriend’s hand gripping my arm. “By—by the rings of Saturn!” she stuttered, petrified. “This is the Monsutā Supācomputā!”

  Roof of the Palmer House Hotel in Downtown Callisto City (Callisto/Jupiter IV) - Present day

  “A Monsutā-what?” Bill Murray asked, picking his nose.

  “Z’s main quest for a while, but we’ll get to it after another commercial break!” Ali chided, before turning around. “Take over, Lee! I gotta pee!”

  I looked daggers at her. In response, she stuck her tongue out, and bolted out towards our ship, parked next to the staircase.

  “Dealing with federal agents, wading through steamy sewers, fumbling upon monsters…” the actor listed. “Your life isn’t summer camp…”

  I stretched from head to tail before going back to my spot. “Life in the cosmos is indeed not as sweet as in Meatballs, but the Kitty is doing pretty well nonetheless.”

  “Spending the whole day in a tank wouldn’t be ‘pretty well’ according to my standards.”

  Before I could answer this privileged brat, the door creaked open. “Voila!” Ali uttered. She had brought a snack from the ship, namely a bag of Gatorade bubblegums.

  “That was incredibly fast…” Bill Murray noted, shuffling a pile of garbage for my partner to sit cozily.

  “Yep! What were you talking about?”

  “Summer camps,” I replied, lighting a cigarette.

  “Oh!” she reacted, loudly closing the hatch with her foot. “I sneaked into one back on Titan. Dad made a mountain out of a molehill about it.”

  “It wasn’t a summer camp, Ali… but a militia boot camp—but get on with your story!” I insisted, resigning from the spotter role. “My sixth sense is telling me we’re not going to see our friends the feds this afternoon!”

  My human agreed. Clearing her sugar-soaked throat, she resumed: “Once upon a time, there were three idiots somewhere in the city’s steam pipes…”

  Somewhere in the city’s steam pipes beneath Callisto City (Callisto/Jupiter IV) - A month ago

  “A Monsutā Supācomputā…” Mickey Mouse marveled. “The cursed supercomputer of Noboru Monsutā!”

  “I thought you didn’t know shit about that stuff…”

  “It’s an urban legend—a piece of Japanese technology dating back to the Third World War…” She brushed the surface of the orange glass globe before resuming: “These machines were coupled with…”

  “A symbio-fetus,” Zéphyr completed, stepping closer to give a look at the never-born. “Like an Orgue Macabre, using an organic matrix as both a fuel cell and storage system. However, a Supācomputā is a sentient computer. Powerful enough to bring bio-machines to life…”

  “Xiao sold it to Mendel?” I asked Z.

  “Xiao never had one. Remember what he said on Europa?”

  I remembered.

  “If he did, he would have never sold it anyway.” Zéphyr went on. “Their utilization was banned under Techno-President Pompidou. Only three were made. This is the last prototype.”

  I gagged again, almost dropping my gun into the silver pool tickling my nose and surrounding the giant tin can.

  Zéphyr stepped back, nearly hitting the cooling device pumping the water below thanks to another large pipe buried under the filth. “It’s surprising, though,” she said. “To find an MS-unit here, for a simple data inquisition. They remain ten times more powerful than today’s Intel processors. I must buzz my contact on Io. Our quest is over.”

  The symbio-fetus swirled in its preservative fluid when the reporter discovered the life support console embedded in the metallic frame next to the globe. “We’ll learn how it got here once we extract it and analyze its data in a safe place.” One of her claws ran along the tiny interstice between the globe and its rubber joint. “Do you know how to safely retrieve it?” she asked.

  “I can try…” Zéphyr went on, blowing away the dust from the support’s large Japanese mechanical keyboard. An old black and white monitor lit up above it, displaying weird kanji.

  “The city thrives atop this monstrous secret, blind to its existence,” I remarked, before sneezing. “I bet we’re right under the Circle K and the mall. All that silver liquid comes from a salon. It’s hairspray for perms giving birth to all this weird coral.”