Down And Dirty

"How do you know so much about Croyd?"

A smile. "I keep my ear to the ground, mon."

"What's he look like?" Modular Man intended to avoid him.

"I ca

"In that case the emergency's over, right?"

"Guess so. There is still the gang war going on, though."

"I don't want to hear about it."

"And the elections. Even I don't believe who's ru

"Hiram's not doing well."

"I thought he seemed different."

"Business is way off, mon. Aces are not as fashionable as once we were. The Wild Card Day massacres were a real black eye for all wild talents. And then there was violence all over the bloody place on the WHO tour, a real cock-up, and Hiram took part… beg pardon, mon, that's something else you probably don't know about."

"Never mind," said the android.

"Okay. And now, the Croyd buggering up and dealing jokers and Black Queens all over town, a big reaction is going on. Soon it may not be… politically astute… to be seen in aces' company."

"I'm not an ace. I'm a machine."

"You fly, mon! You are abnormally strong, and you shoot energy bolts. Try and tell someone the difference."

"I suppose."

Someone walked into the bar. The radar image was strange enough that Modular Man turned his head to pick up on him visually.

The man's brown hair and beard hung almost to his ankles. He had a crucifix on a chain around his neck, outside the hair, and otherwise wore a dirty T-shirt, blue jean cutoffs, and was barefoot.

None of this was sufficiently abnormal to do more than suggest a wild card, but as the man ambled closer, Modular Man saw the different-colored irises, orange-yellow-green, set one within the other like target symbols. His hands were deformed, the fingers thin and hairy. He held a six-ounce bottle of Coke in one hand.

"This is the man I need to see," Wall Walker said. "If you'll pardon me."

"See you later maybe." Modular Man stood up.

The hairy stranger walked up to the table and looked at Wall Walker and said, " I know you."

"You know me, Flattop."

Modular Man made his way to the bar and ordered another zombie. Hiram appeared and ejected Flattop for lacking proper footwear. When he left with Wall Walker, the android noticed that he had plugged the Coke bottle into the inside of his elbow joint, as if the bottle were a hypodermic needle, and left it there.

The bar was empty. Hiram seemed fretful and depressed, and the bartender echoed his boss's mood. The android made excuses and left.

He wouldn't drink zombies ever again. The associations were just too depressing.

"Yah. Gotta get us some money, right, food processor?" Maxim Travnicek was rooting through a pile of notes he'd written to himself during Modular Man's assemblage. "I want you to get to the patent office tomorrow. Get some forms. Shit, my foot itches." He rubbed the toe of his left shoe against his right calf.

"I could try to get on Peregrine's Perch tomorrow. Let everyone know I'm back. She only pays scale, but…"

"The bitch is pregnant, you know. Go

Something else I hadn't heard about, the android thought. Wonderful. Next he would discover that France had changed its name to Fredonia and moved to Asia.

"But you should see her tits! If you thought they were good before, you should see them now! Fantastic!"

"I'll fly over and visit her producer."

"Bosonic strings," Travnicek said. He had one of his notes in his hand but didn't seem to be looking at it. "Minus one to the Nth is minus one for the massless vector, so epsilon equals one." His eyes had glazed over. His body swayed back and forth. He seemed to have fallen into some kind of trance. "For superstrings," he went on, "minus one to the Nth is plus one for the massless vector, so epsilon equals minus one… All of the n times n antihermitian matrices taken together represent U(n) in the complex case… Potential clash with unitarity…"

Cold terror washed over the android. He had never seen his creator do this before.

Travnicek went on in this mode for several minutes. Then he seemed to jerk awake. He turned to Modular Man. "Did I say something?" he asked.

The android repeated it word for word. Travnicek listened with a frown. "That's open strings, okay," he said. "It's the ghost string operator that's the bitch. Did I say anything about Sigma sub plus one over two?"

"Sorry," said the android.

"Damn it." Travnicek shook his head. "I'm a physicist, not a mathematician. I've been working too hard. And my fucking foot keeps itching." He hopped to his camp bed, sat down, took off his shoe and sock. He began scratching between his toes.

"If I could get a handle on the fucking fermion-emission vertex I could solve that power-drain problem you have when you rotate out of the normal spectrum. Massless particles are easy, it's the…"

He stopped talking and stared at his foot.

Two of his toes had come off in his hand. Bluish ooze dripped deliberately from the wounds.

The android stared in disbelief. Travnicek began to scream.

"The operators in question," said Travnicek, "are fermionic only in a two-dimensional world-sheet sense and not in the space-time D-dimensional sense." Lying on a gurney in the Rensselaer Clinic E-room, Travnicek had lapsed into a trance again. Modular Man wondered if this had anything to do with the 'ghost operator' his creator had mentioned earlier.

"Truncating the spectrum to an even G parity sector… eliminates the tachyon from the spectrum…"

"It's wild card," Dr. Fi

"Ghost-free light-cone gauge… Lorentz invariance is valid…"

"I've informed Tachyon," said Fi

"I can't sign legal documents. I'm not a person, I'm a sixth-generation machine intelligence."

Fi

Tachyon recovered quickly from his surprise. He waved his hand carelessly. "There has been… harassment. We are coping, however, I am pleased to see you have been reassembled."

"Thank you. I've brought in a patient."

Tachyon took the printouts from the centaur and began glancing through them. "This is the first appearance of the wild card in three days," he remarked. "If we can discover where the patient was infected, we might be able to trace Croyd."