'23kpc' Chapter 38: Recipe for Excitement

A closetful of Durwoods

[This is probably the best guess an image-generating AI has yet come up with, to any of my prompts, ever. (Either that, or the stupid things are training me to come up with clearer prompts.) Early iterations were genuinely creepy: the “Pooches” all had big identical saucer eyes, and identical body types, and identical demonic “smiles.” Finally, it occurred to me to drop the word “toy” from the phrase “toy dogs”… As for which of these is closest to the Durwood of my imagination? Umm… maybe the top row, third from the right. Or maybe Durwood normally occupies the empty top left cubicle.]

Reminders:
(1) The complete ‘23kpc’ story, to date
(2) The ‘23kpc’ Reader’s Guide

Last week:

Needing to learn more about Pooches — their limits, what they can and can’t do — and not incidentally, to find out what might be wrong with his and Missy’s Pooch, Durwood — Guy turned to a personally distasteful source. Dr. Nathan Swarthout, a “Pooch neuropsychiatrist,” was an acquaintance from back on Earth, and now an occasional tennis rival of Guy’s. You might call him a nemesis, except that Swarthout doesn’t know he is. He’s just a knowledgeable but arrogant upper-class boor with whom Guy and Missy have sometimes consulted when Durwood has needed his professional attentions.

Guy typically wins their tennis matches, but for this occasion he decided he needed to lose; after all, some of their questions will challenge Swarthout’s few shreds of ethical behavior. Losing after a hard-fought match would put Swarthout in a patronizing, generous frame of mind.

Further to grease the skids, so to speak, Guy took Swarthout to Al Morton’s Jellyroll bar/restaurant. There he pumped Swarthout for some basic information…

…but also turned him over, for the trickiest questions, to someone even more likely to lure him into cooperation. i.e., Guy and Missy’s alluring reboot friend: Mercy Bacall. She (at Missy’s secret request) “just happened to be” sitting at the far end of the bar, and inserted herself into the conversation when she got Guy’s signal.

Our hero then eased his way out of Jellyroll — not incidentally leaving behind Durwood, and Durwood’s remote.

His narration continues, below…

Chapter 38: Safety (and Chaos) in Large Numbers

Missy and I opt that evening to eat something light in our room, rather than go out somewhere (even our old suits-all-appetites place, the Midship). We’ve both hit our booze ration max, anyhow. And even though we know where Durwood is — it's with Mercy, and with Swarthout, too, if all has gone well — we wouldn’t look forward to a postprandial stroll back to our digs without The Pooch adrift nearby. I call up a salad and sandwich for each of us, and we polish them off in short order while watching, for the umpteenth time, an old-but-restored noir from the mid-20th century called Detour.

The flick’s production values must have been on vacation during the week it took it took to write, rehearse, shoot, and edit it before sending it out to the theaters. Dialogue is ham-handed, you know, and woodenly delivered even when a scene seems to call for high emotion. Still, it’s satisfyingly bleak and doesn’t make any cheap concessions to what the audience might wish for the sad-sack couple at the heart of the tale.

The big ending scene, when the main guy discovers he’s inadvertently strangled his femme fatale lover — it’s just filled the wallscreen when our doorbell rings. I hit the Pause switch and get up to check the peephole.

It’s Mercy, as I hoped. She’s got Durwood tucked under one arm. And, natch, a cocktail in her free hand.