Lord Parrington's Promotion
by Peter S. Drang
Hellfire consumes my flesh... Lord Parrington laughs... I choke... the world becomes an indigo swirl of partial differentials....
"Snap out of it, lady."
"What?"
"There you are. You're back."
"Where did...?"
"That doesn't matter. What matters is, you're here again."
But this place seemed wrong even to my half-focused eyes. The hexangular rocks. The wind's persistent buzz. The swirl of golden clouds and echoing chords of distant guitars. A sharp pebble tormented my back. A wild expanse of saguaro towered to my right.
"How long?" I asked.
"Long enough." He grinned unnaturally, revealing a toothless maw. He offered me a hand devoid of fingers.
I wriggled to a sitting position without the aid of his mutilated paw, feeling befuddled by the high tally of my limbs. "You're... Simmon. Is that right?"
"Aha! Polly wolly, back full and ready for work." He squatted next to me, brushed the sharp rock off my back. It had dug its way into my flesh and stung me into reality more effectively than Simmon's inane words. But it wasn't a rock, after all, trailing as it was a blue wire.
"Just call me Polly please, sans wolly." I then recalled my position in the hierarchy. "Or better yet, call me Boss."
He disconnected a rainbow snarl of coiling wires from the parajector, peeling numerous contacts off my scalp, which felt waxy smooth. Had someone shaved my head? Or had I ever even had hair?
"How was your experience, Boss?"
I recalled the acrid smell of burning flesh. "It was... awful. Quite hideous."
"Come now, not all of it. I was watching, you know. What about that steamy tryst with Sir McDougal? Don't judge the whole life-ride by that last little business."
"That last little business?" I glared at his blurry head. He seemed to have fragments of food stuck in his ropy green beard. "They fucking burned me at the stake. Jesus!"
"There's no Jesus here, nor any fucking," he reminded me.
I was disoriented, mixing up reality with elements of the para-lifetime I'd just lived, still sorting it all out. I blinked rapidly several times and my eyes finally cleared, bringing everything into better focus. The saguaro cactuses opened their huge, spikey eyes and blinked at me. Beguiling, yes, but I didn't want to be pollinated today.
"Which programming team is responsible?" I asked. "I'd like to ring all their necks."
"We don't have necks, Boss."
I raised a hand--or rather a tentacle--to my head, which smoothly transitioned to my torso, indeed without a neck. I'd spent fifty years of experiential time--just a few hours of real time--as a queen in the mythical paraworld Earth, game sector Europe, and had spectacularly failed to navigate court politics. Outmaneuvered by Lord Parrington, convicted of witchcraft, sentenced to a ghastly death. "I want a meeting with the whole team. Heads will roll."
"But without necks, heads cannot--"
"Enough!" Fifty years of speech patterns would take some time to break.
He slithered a soothing tentacle over mine. "Now Boss, I was in the design meetings. You wanted, and I quote, 'gritty realism with a dose of irony.'"
I ripped away from his touch, causing his suction cups to audibly pop. "The team sure got the gritty part right, but realism? A society that worships a pacifist god, who offers his 'other cheek' when slapped, while they simultaneously prosecute bloody wars and burn innocents in His name. How is that realistic?"
"I believe that bit tallies toward the 'dose of irony' part." He finished packing cables into their compartments.
