So, I Had a Beef with Some Geezers
by Kevin Harkness
Is this thing on? What? That little red light? Ok, guess I’ll start then. My name’s Bull. What? I told you I don’t use my real name on account of me being famous enough already. Hey, it’s true! I got tourists coming in my bar all the time, looking at me like I’m a caged gorilla. Just put me down as one of those anonymous sources you cops always make up. It don’t change what happened, and it don’t make it normal.
So, this lady walks into my bar, but, geez, thinking of all the trouble she got me in, I should have turned down the two hundred bucks and tossed her right out again. Yeah, I know. I can’t toss anyone anywhere cause of this ENV, that “Enforced Non-Violence,” that I got in my head, like a chip or something. One of your pet judges got it put it in when I was convicted for killing my kid sister, only I didn’t, and I proved it, but then they said they couldn’t take it out without scrambling my brains.
Pipe down! I’m starting again. My name is . . .Ok, everybody calls me Bull, cause I’m big and stubborn. You guys know I run a bar in a bad part of town, but I don’t mind it. It’s familiar, you could say. I get by because I serve cheap booze and you cops make sure nobody bothers me. Yeah, I’d say thanks, but the way you kind of adopted me is humiliating for a guy like me. Also, I figure it’s only because you’re scared if anybody slaps me around the press will start squawking about how ENV is cruel and unusual-which it is! There’s a lot I can’t do no more. I can’t step on an ant, even if it’s in my sandwich!
So, what happened? She comes into my bar real late a few nights ago when I’m cleaning up. What did I think of her? I don’t know, short, Asian, kinda intense. One thing, she’s too high class for my place, not that it’s a dive or anything. I mean, I keep it up real nice. Yeah, roll them eyes. I was mopping the floor when she comes in. I ain’t bragging or nothing, but I was almost down to the linoleum when she interrupts me and tosses out her name, Charlotte Ozawa, like I should know it. When I don’t bite, she shows me the news site she writes for on her phone. It was nice, a bunch of headlines about people dying, and AR pictures of car crashes that kinda jumped out at you, like a comic book without the superheroes. Then she makes her pitch.
“Would you like to make two hundred dollars?” she says. I guess I smiled, which made her step back cause some people say it looks like I’m gonna’ eat them or something.
“Sure,” I tell her, cause it’s not like I’m rolling in dough, “but I can’t break no legs anymore, just so you know.” She nods her head and says that’s okay, cause she doesn’t want me to hurt nobody, cause she was afraid the place she worked for would get sued and she’d get canned. The way she laid it out, she needed somebody big and mean-looking to throw a scare into some guys in case she asks the wrong question and gets the bum’s rush. Sure, it sounded sketchy, but I wanted the dough, and she seemed like a legit reporter.
How did I know? Look, I seen enough of them after my brother-in-law got poisoned just before he could murder me. Yeah, you cops were wrong about that too. The guys in them lab coats said it was a glitch. Even the governor said if you got ENV, you can’t kill nobody, so it wasn’t my fault when I did.
Yeah, yeah, back to business. She comes back the next morning, and we take a ride in her car out to the suburbs. I never came out there much when I was collecting for bookies, cause it always seemed kind of wrong to hold somebody upside down and shake ‘em if there weren’t no alley to do it in. All them green lawns was pretty, though. While the car’s driving, I ask Miss Ozawa about where we were going, and she says to a place where people can talk to their grandparents. I ask if she’s talking about an old geezers’ home, and she tells me off and says it was ‘ageism’ to talk like I did, and I shouldn’t look down on old people, which ain’t true, cause I talk to a lot of grandpas and grandmas at my bar, but only during happy hour cause the older you get, the harder you squeeze that nickel.
Anyway, she says no, it ain’t that kinda place, and when I scratch my head, she gives me another look and says the old people are different where we’re going. How, I ask, and she just tells me to forget it and do my job.
Did she know? You mean about what was going on at that Permaffection place? To tell you the truth, I ain’t got no idea. All them reporters are tricky.
Anyway, that killed the conversation, so we go past some swell houses until we get to a big building in the middle of a real clean parking lot. You could smell the money all over that place, or maybe it was the flowers they stuck everywhere. Anyway, I unfold myself from that car, straightened my suit, which is what you might call my all-purpose marrying and burying outfit, and, since I’m getting paid, I help Miss Ozawa out and set her down on the sidewalk. She didn’t like it much and said a lot of things she shouldn’t have, even though I was just trying to be polite. While she was cursing me out, I look around and saw a lot of security for such a nice neighbourhood. Tbere was cameras all over, plus a couple of guards getting pulled around by dogs that looked like they had opinions.
When Miss Ozawa finally stops swearing, she says, “Bull, I’m going to talk to the CEO, the boss, I mean. I don’t think he’ll try to throw me out, but if he does, just stand behind me and loom.” Then she got the nerve to ask me if I’m carrying.
What? I wasn’t. You guys know I don’t like guns, not even back in the old days when they was normal. Now, you got guns that can pick off a guy in the middle of a crowd from a mile out. You got guns that can shoot around corners and over cars. I bet they got a gun that follows a guy home, taps him on the shoulder and apologizes before murdering him. So no, I didn’t have no piece to flash. Never had one, never needed one, maybe because I can tie most guys in a knot before they get it outta their pockets. Yeah, I mean I could, back in the day.
The look she gives me, I didn’t know if she’s disappointed or happy, but we go inside. I ain’t never seen so much chrome and glass, not even in a casino. The whole place was shiny: the walls, the floor, the desk, even the receptionist. Yeah, she was shiny, but not too friendly. She tries to look down at both of us but gets a crick in her neck on my account and ignores me to give my boss the stink eye.
“I’m not sure Mr. Zelancy has time to see you today, Ms. Ozawa,” she sneers at her. “He’s running late and might have to reschedule.”
Since this seems like the beginning of the bum’s rush I was hired to take care of, I put on the ‘collecting’ face I used to use in the old days and give her my ‘pay up now’ glare. When I was just starting out, I used to practice it in a mirror, until my ma told me to stop scaring the cat. The shiny receptionist goes all pale and makes a phone call. A minute later, an even shinier guy shows up and takes us past the desk.
I think that was when I asked Miss Ozawa about that company’s name, Permaffection, though that might have been when we came in the front door, and she says that’s what we were there for, to find out. Geez, I guess the muscle don’t need to know much, right? Just shut up and loom.
What happened next? Let’s see, we go all the way through that fancy lobby and up the escalator which was way cleaner than the one in the subway. While we was escalating, I studied on what to do if a hard look wasn’t enough for the next set of shiny people. Before, I only had to get personal now and then, but, since them days are gone, I kinda settle on grunting and maybe fist pounding on a desk or something. We come into a waiting room and cut through it to this long corridor. There’s little rooms on each side, lots of them, all with big glass windows you could look through. Inside, each one had people in them. After the first dozen or so, I kinda noticed a pattern, a geezer sitting down with some regular people.
I looked at Miss Ozawa then and see she has one of those ring cameras pointing at those rooms. Pretty sneaky, right? Why didn’t she just ask them nicely if she could take pictures? I guess it’s a reporter thing, but the next time one comes into the bar, I’m checking all their fingers!
There must have been over fifty rooms. They was all the same except one. It was halfway down, and giving out with some noise that made us stop and take a gander. An old guy inside is swinging his cane around like he’s knight in shiny armor, not some ninety-year old in a bathrobe. A woman and two kids are in there too, hiding behind some chairs, so I go inside and get between them and the homicidal geezer. I tell the lady to take her kids and beat it while the old guy whacks me with his cane. You’d have thought somebody that old couldn’t do much, but I felt every one of them, so when the coast is clear, I back out quick and say, “Good arm, Pops!” just to be polite, and the old geezer stops right away. “Thanks, Sonny,” he says. “See you next week!” and sits he sits back down in his chair and starts humming some old-timey song.
Weird, right? It takes Miss Ozawa a while, but she finally stops pointing the ring around and asks if I’m okay. I was, though you should see the bruises on my back!
What, you want a picture? Forget it, I don’t do stuff like that. Besides, it ain’t pretty. That guy could have given Benny the Bat, my old collecting partner, a run for his money. Anyway, that’s when a bunch of skinny guys in lab coats come running up. One of them has a clipboard. Maybe you don’t know this, but if you ever see a guy in a lab coat running with a clipboard, it’s trouble. Believe me, I got experience with that.
Yeah, that’s when the shiny guy who’s guiding us pushes us out of there. He pushes Ms. Ozawa, that is, and I follow along. We go up more escalator and end up in the shiniest place yet, with the shiniest guy standing in the middle of it, making with a thousand-watt smile. If I’d known, I would have brought sunglasses. At least you guys ain’t shiny. You’re kinda dull. It’s refreshing.
What’s with the looks? It’s a compliment!
So, this new guy introduces himself as Zelancy, the head honcho of Permaffection. He’s in his forties maybe, medium height and letting himself go. If he didn’t have a real expensive suit on and that smile, you’d pass him on the street without having to turn your head. After the introductions, we all sit down civilized-like on some chrome and leather couches that probably cost more than my bar, and the reporter starts with the questions. Like, lots of them. Most of them are about how he got to be so big, which he enjoys, but the answers were too slick, like a guy reciting his marriage vows while he was eyeing the bridesmaid, but the next bunch of questions got him real steamed. She starts asking him about the kind of stuff we saw in that little room. He went off on her then, like she hit a real big nerve.
He says, “Permaffection’s proprietary techniques are light-years ahead of anyone else in the industry. However, cutting-edge science needs to be . . .fine-tuned. I hope you won’t base an entire story on such an isolated incident. I’d hate to think that people might wonder if you were trying to sabotage our upcoming IPO to help our competitors. That might mean investigations and unwelcome media attention, Ms. Ozawa. It would be ironic, and potentially costly.”
He used a lot of big words, but I got a great memory. Plus, I looked at Miss Ozawa’s report while I was waiting for you guys to find the coffee machine.
What do you mean? I’m saying how I remember what happened. Look, you cops should be nicer to me, considering how you screwed me over before.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Miss Ozawa goes after him like a cat after a bird, saying that she and her bosses ain’t got no financial interest for or against Permaffection. Then she gives him the same look she’s been giving me and says his only real competitors are funeral parlours. Funeral parlours! That kinda’ shook me. I mean sure, there was a bunch of old people there, but none of them looked ready to bury, and the old geezer with the cane was a little too lively, if you know what I mean.
Zelancy ain’t taking it, so he starts squawking. Let me read you Ozawa’s transcript here: “Listen,” he says, “that’s slander. Our patients are not dead, technically. Legally, they are in an indeterminate state, like someone cryogenically preserved. So, if the government hasn’t ruled them deceased, I don’t see why you think you have the right to. Besides, just based on their interactions with our clients, their loved ones, you can see they have all the indications of life.”
Ozawa ain’t backing down either. “Brain activity,” she says back to him, “sure, at least according to your promotional material. Maybe even an emotional response, if what we saw can be believed, but what about basic biological processes like breathing, blood circulation and . . .”
That’s when he cuts her off, shoving his face at her and getting less shiny all the time. His voice gets nasty too. Look, here’s where he says, “Those processes are replaced by our proprietary cell support system. A solution of nutrients and preservatives permeates each cell, allowing it to function without the usual biological support.”
I had to ask what that permeation was when it was all over. From what the lab coat guys said, it’s like what happens to my customers when they been holding down a bar stool too long. They get so permeated I gotta put them in a cab. Wait, there’s some more. “To aid nerve function, microscopic filaments, similar to the ones used to connect a full-function prothesis to the human body, are used. Many more, I agree, than usual, but remember, the brain itself is reconnected and invigorated by these special filaments, again, proprietary tech.”
Zelancy takes a breath then and leans back into them soft cushions. He says, “Miss Ozawa, our clients pay to have their relatives’ lives preserved and extended out of love, a permanent affection that we make possible. Going public means we can spread Permaffection facilities across the country. I’m sure your viewers will appreciate the benefits, Ms. Ozawa. Think how many grateful grandchildren will have the chance to spend more time with their grandparents and benefit from their wisdom?”
“Or maybe just get a cane cracked over their heads?” I ask, which made both of them jump like it was the couch talking. I get that sometimes.
That’s when Ozawa reaches into her bag and pulls out a whole list of reports about the permeated geezers attacking them grateful grandkids, the nurses, even a janitor, who quit after he had to use his mop to pry a granny off his leg. From the way my boss tells it, reading off the poor guy’s hospital report, it’s a good thing the old lady’s teeth fell out before she got a good grip on his ankle. By now, Zelancy’s got no shine left. He stands up, all angry like, and I stand up too, wondering if I should start grunting and slapping the table, when a guy in a lab coat, carrying a clipboard runs in, all frazzled-like.
“They’re out of control!” he yells. The guy’s shaking like he’s his own earthquake. Zelancy grabs him and shakes him some more, which ain’t a great way to make somebody calm down. Every time his head jerks forward, he makes with another word.
“We. Have. To. Evac. Uate. Immediate. Ly,” he gets out, and then his boss is kind enough to drop him so he can rest a bit on the floor. Zelancy runs out into the hall, and my boss run after him, holding up her ring cam. Since I’m getting paid, I grab her bag and follow her, after I get the lab coat guy off the floor and onto a couch. Look, I don’t like lab rats. They done a lot to me, but I ain’t gonna leave one where he can be stepped on, either. I left the clipboard where he dropped it. I told you those things are bad luck.
The fire alarm starts ringing and there’s a lot of running and yelling going on down the escalator where them little rooms were. I crouched down to look and saw a young guy with a chair holding off an old lady with a walker. It’s gonna surprise you, but it looked like an even match, cause every time the guy took a whack at her, she just smiled and kept coming. Some of the geezers were breaking windows, others were throwing stuff around like they was training for the geezer Olympics or something.
“Tell your bodyguard to get us down to the basement,” Zelancy says. He’s shiny again, but that’s cause of the sweat pouring down his face. Ozawa didn’t look too good either. I guess being a reporter ain’t as easy as I thought.
“Forget it,” I say, before she can answer him. “I got ENV, so I can’t bounce any of those old people out of the way.” Yeah, that’s how it is. Even if I just acted like a shield or something, I’d still knock a few of them down, and they might break a hip or something. So, I couldn’t do that, because of the sparks.
The sparks? That’s what happens if I try to hurt somebody. It’s like sparks going off in my head. I can’t move a finger, let alone a fist, and that’s why I couldn’t plough through them geezers.
Zelancy gives me a look like I should be embarrassed that I can’t run over a bunch of old people. Then he heads off down a hallway. Miss Ozawa grabs my arm, and we take off after him. “I have to switch off the . . .I have to switch off something to fix this,” he yells over his shoulder. We catch up with him at a back staircase and down we go, four levels down to the basement. I guess the geezers was all waiting for the elevator, cause we didn’t see any of them on the stairs. When we get to the basement, it’s just a regular place, not shiny like up above. Zelancy goes through an empty lunch room with a bunch of vending machines. Nobody’s around, so I guess everybody scrammed when things went to hell upstairs. He goes to the end and opens this glass door. Inside there’s a line of computers, real big ones like you see in the movies. He stares at them for a while and then starts grabbing binders off a shelf, flipping through the pages, looking for something, but I don’t know what.
There’s a noise behind us, and I see a mob of geezers comes running into the lunch room, well, kinda running. More like walking real slow. I get the door closed, but I can’t lock it, cause it’s got a key pad, and Zelancy’s too busy flipping pages and swearing to come over, so I’m stuck holding it closed. I look outside and all I can see is about a hundred faces pushing so hard against the glass their wrinkles are getting smoothed out.
My boss is swearing too, at Zelancy this time, asking him what he’s trying to do. I can see why she’s all worked up. There ain’t no other way out, and even though I’m pretty strong, in an hour or two a hundred geezers are gonna pry this door open, then I can’t do nothing about nothing.
Zelancy is screaming back at her. He says he just needs time. She stares at him and then switches to me. “What are we going to do, Bull?” she asks like it’s all my fault. “I don’t want to die down here!”
Zelancy’s on his third binder now and flipping faster than ever. “We aren’t going to die!” he shouts, then stops his fingers to stare past me and Ozawa. So, we take a gander too.
It’s the cane geezer from before. He’s gone and climbed on the table in the lunch room, howling like a guy who just won the trifecta. Then he tears off his bathrobe, and Miss Ozawa and me start making noises. Not because he’s got nothing on, though that was kinda disgusting, but because we could see a big cut down the middle his chest and stomach held together with about a hundred stitches. Miss Ozawa turns kinda green and I have to hold her up with one hand while I push the door shut with the other. I was kinda wishing for a third hand when I see Zelancy looking at all those stitches like he wasn’t surprised.
“What’s up with that,” I ask Zelancy. “You said they ain’t dead, but it sure looks like you pulled that guy off a slab.”
He starting to look like he was the one ready for the body bag, but he says, “It’s the permeation unit for the cells. That’s where it goes. Inside. Since the biological processes are replaced, we put the canisters and pumps inside, after removing some non-essential organs.”
Yeah, that’s what he said. Exactly. Now, I don’t know what kinda history you got, but I’ve been in a lot of fights and seen a lot of guys sent to the hospital, and I can tell you for sure, there ain’t no non-essential organs. Go ahead. You lose a lung or a kidney and laugh it off.
Zelancy picks up a new binder, but he doesn’t seem no closer to finding that off switch, and the mob of old people is getting bigger. Since I figure I can’t hold out much longer, I tell Zelancy to hurry up whatever the heck he’s trying to do. Miss Ozawa’d gotten back on her feet by then, and she’s staring at Zelancy like she was a cop and he was a drunk making out with a street light.
“That’s it,” she says. “You’re trying to switch off their brains! But it’s not really their brains, is it? It’s a computer program that’s operating them. Puppets on strings, you bastard! How do you do it? You embalm them with that cell permeation so they don’t rot, then you scrape their social media and come up with all their cute nicknames and funny family stories to spit out for the grandkids when they come to visit those animated corpses? What happened, Zelancy? Why are they running amok? You might as well tell us. You’ll never take Permaffection public now.”
Zelancy’s still flipping through binders like a starving guy checking the menu. “Alright, alright,” he says. “It’s a very complex algorithm. I . . . we acquired it from a gaming company. It was supposed to be used in one of those huge, multi-player, VR fantasy games. You know, swords and magic, that crap. But it was cutting edge, especially the non-player characters. They were amazing, so life-like, so . . .emotional, that I . . .the company decided to use the program to . . .simulate affection, to make it permanent!” After that speech, he throws down the binder and raises his hands like he’s appealing to the judge. “Is it so wrong to want to keep people alive in more than memory?” he says. “Don’t people do all sorts of things when a person dies. They listen to the music they liked, read their old texts and postings, even keep their clothes and . . .we’re just doing that . . .only better!”
I could see Ozawa wasn’t buying it, but I guess I got what he was selling. There’s guys I knew in my line of work that passed away, some with a lot of help, and I think about them now and then. For most of them, that’s all I need, a thought. Like, whenever I see a ball game on tv, I think about Benny the Bat for a couple of minutes. For a few others, I might go by their favourite corner once a year and pour out some cheap whiskey on the sidewalk to kinda say hello. Yeah, there’s even a couple that I go out to the cemetery for just to make sure they’re still buried. Remembering is important.
So maybe Zelancy wasn’t wrong about this whole permanent affection thing. I mean, if the grandkids liked it, why not? But he still hadn’t explained why the geezers were going nuts instead of pinching kids’ cheeks and handing out hard candy. Since I was holding back about a hundred of them, I left that to my boss to ask.
“That doesn’t tell me why they’re trying to kill us,” she says to him, and he stops looking for more binders long enough to answer, but first he hems and haws like he’s about to own up to emptying the collection plate Sunday morning.
“Well, look,” he finally says, taking time we don’t got. “We took the algorithm as is, without much modification. I mean, we were a start-up with very little capital, so we couldn’t afford the tech support to re-code it. We just kind of added the response instructions we needed and tried to turn off all the fantasy NPC stuff. It seems we didn’t find everything.”
“You think!” Miss Ozawa yells back at him. She’s got a big voice for the size of her. “So, let me get this straight,” she says, holding up her ring, calm-like now. “These zombies are running on an artificial intelligence from some hack and slash VR game, and it’s mixing up your grandparent response algorithms with some kind of combat code. What the hell triggers it, the kids not coming to visit?”
I take a quick look at Zelancy, who was saying yes with everything but his mouth, and I tell them both, “Look, I can’t hold this door forever. That cell permeation thing you stuffed in them must be full of vitamins, cause they’re strong as . . .un-geezers. If they get in here, you should maybe remember I can’t protect you two cause I can’t hurt people.”
That’s when my boss pipes up again and says, “Yes you can, Bull! You can hurt them. They aren’t people. They’re glorified NPC’s.”
I must have looked confused, cause she explains, “Non-player characters. You know, like in computer games where the program makes a character for you to talk to, to get something from, or just to fight.”
That kinda clicked cause my niece lets me play a game with her on her pad. There’s this frog there you gotta shine up to get stuff. You ain’t nice to the frog, you ain’t gonna get no pixie dust. Still, I could feel the sparks starting even when I thought about hitting them old folks. I guess that made me lose my concentration, cause the door pushed open a bit, and an old lady squeezed through and came at me with knitting needles.
“You never visit me,” she yells and jabs a needle in my arm.
“Lady,” I yell back, “I don’t even know you!” I can barely move, and this sweet old lady is trying to push the thing right through my arm. If there hadn’t been half a sweater on it, she might have made it, too.
What? Yeah, of course I was shook! She wasn’t like any grandma I ever seen. She had these dead eyes and her wig’s hanging off, showing even more stitches going around the top of her noggin. I mean, what did they put in there? And what kind of non-essential stuff did they scoop out, for God’s sake. Scuze my French, but what was even left of these old geezers after Zelancy got through with them? I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, cause the old lady is right in front of me, and there’s a hundred more behind her.
“You’re a very naughty boy,” she says, and goes for my eye with the other needle. I pop her one out of instinct, I guess, and she goes back through the door, taking out geezers like ten pins.. And I got no more sparks! I guess deep down in my sub-continent, I didn’t believe they was alive.
What’re you laughing at? Anyway, that broke the ice, so I pull out the needle and start popping geezers right and left. They go down complaining about the food, the job I got, who I married, and a whole bunch of other stuff that don’t apply to me and was probably why they never got visited in the first place.
Maybe I should of felt guilty about it, but it was kinda nice to get in a fight again, if you don’t take into account who I was mangling.
Since it looks like Zelancy’s binders are a bust, I yell at Miss Ozawa and Zelancy to follow me outta the computer room. We make it through the door into that lunch room, and I see the cane guy is still jumping up and down on the table like maybe he thinks he’s that frog in the other game. So, I grab him by the ankles and start swinging him back and forth to make a path back to the stairwell. It works, but the noises it makes are kinda disgusting. Ozawa comes up with a crutch she uses to push them back, and Zelancy is flinging binders at any geezer that looked like they want to make his acquaintance.
Behind us, they was tearing up the place, but with me and cane guy working together, sort of, we get to the stairs, where I say goodbye to my frog buddy, and we all start climbing. One flight up, there’s a door that goes outside, but we get stuck because Zelancy’s having a hard time punching numbers, trying to remember the door code since I guess all the exits were locked when the geezers took over. I look down and they’re coming up the stairs after us, complaining like crazy, and everyone I knock down gets replaced by a couple more. I’m starting to get tired when the door opens and we stumble out into the arms of the you guys. I guess every cop for a hundred miles was there cause you got about a million calls from people wondering why grandpa and grandma was suddenly trying to murder them.
Everybody’s screaming when they see them following us out, and I try to tell you guys killing them wasn’t no good, since they was already dead, but nobody believes me until you use up all your bullets. Geez, I have to stuff them geezers back inside while you guys are scratching your heads. Then Zelancy gets the fire department to park a truck against the door and cut the power to the whole building. After which, he tells everybody to wait for the batteries stuffed inside the geezers to wind down.
Hey, how long did it finally take? Three days? I guess they must have made some mess by then. At least nobody died, I mean who wasn’t dead already.
Yeah, I heard Zelancy skipped town with a bag full of cash. He’ll be on a beach somewhere, sipping a drink and complaining about the service. Guys like that always come out on top. I seen Miss Ozawa on the news on tv. People are calling her a hero for exposing that scam. She kept me out of it, which was nice. She called me a video technician, which is like calling somebody a nobody. Fine by me. I got enough to deal with without even more tourists coming to see the tame gorilla.
Look, if you ain’t got no more questions, I’m leaving. I got to open my bar and make some money, cause I don’t want to take no more side jobs if I can avoid it. Yeah, I know the life of a barkeep ain’t glamorous, and some of my clientele gets rowdy like them geezers, but even if I can’t hit them, I’ll take the plastered over the passed on any day.