Jack Acid, Freelance Priest

By Miracle Jones

I thought Jack took it pretty well when my sister finally showed up and instead of returning my hello, immediately stuck her hand down my pants and started excavating for buried treasure in my esophagus with her tongue. His eyes made little popping noises, but I don’t think he fractured anything in his brain. I guess I should have clarified the word sister better.

Veronica and Zeke arrived together. Zeke had a bottle of sparkling cider and a bust of William Gaines in his giant paws, and out of my peripheral vision I could see him give them to Jack as what could only be housewarming gifts. Hell of a guy, that Zeke. My hearing was working at about half – Veronica’s idle hand was plugging up one of my ears, and all the blood from the other ear was filling up my penis like a balloon chinchilla - but I could still hear Jack give Zeke a warm, but shocked, thanks. Then I could feel his stare on my back.

I prized myself loose.

“Give me fifteen minutes, Jack, and then I’ll explain everything. This isn’t as sordid as it looks.”

“Don’t worry,” said Zeke, “They do this all the time.”

Veronica was wearing black, as usual. She wore a black bustier with ties down the middle, but which I knew from experience easily unclasped in the back and came off like the chitinous shell of a sexy cockroach. She wore a black miniskirt with Catholic pleats, pink and black socks, and black Wicked Witch of the West boots, that weren’t so much black as the color shiny. Her long black hair was rolled up in tight buns on the side of her head like bumblebee eyes, and, as always, her incredibly diminutive size (five feet with the boots) went unnoticed in the overwhelming assault of her graveyard beauty. Maybe it enhanced it. That’s kind of sexist - the whole little woman thing - but she turned it into power. Black lipstick, black eyes, and black fingernail polish. Various piercings and tattoos that made a bold, definitive statement about her lack of political values. Black purse. Black eyeliner. Black jacket. But I knew where her pink parts were.

“Five minutes, actually. Maybe just five minutes.”

“Jones, if you can’t give me at least ten, I’m going to start spreading the word around town that you are fresh with the ladies. You’ll never go out for phosphates with Bobby Sue again, and fuck pot luck at the VFW hall.”

She grabbed me by my Uncle Sam (I want you!) and away we went.

Twenty minutes later we returned, disheveled and our hair filled with pine straw and spiders. We did it under the stars, like savage topiary. I tripped over a log on the way out and kneecapped myself, but I was too excited to feel it until after my exertions reached their shocking sticky conclusion. We were both all red in the face when we sheepishly stepped back into the dumpster. I’m sure I looked like a sanguinary senator judging a sorority hot dog-eating competition, but Veronica looked even prettier with a touch of color to her pale.

“Sorry about that, guys. It’s just that I haven’t seen this bastard in months,” said Veronica.

“Jack, this is my sister. Another Jones for you to adopt. I guess you and Zeke have already gotten to know one another, eh?”

Jack and Zeke had put the twenty minute life-hiatus to good use. They were both stoned as shit, probably from Jack’s private special-occasion stash, and looked like they had bonded. They were both sipping sparkling cider out of plastic champagne glasses; Jack in his Sleazy Chair and Zeke in a piece of ropy collapsible lawn furniture that always folded up on me whenever I tried to use it. I was a natural born fidgeteer, but Zeke was as implacable as a stack of Lincoln Continentals. I noticed for the first time he was wearing a bright green T-shirt that said CHOOSE DETERMINISM.

“Jack was just telling me about how you guys get electricity in this place. Fascinating stuff. You truly don’t know what you don’t know. You interested, Veronica?” asked Zeke.

“Not particularly. But this is a thoroughly dignified pad, Jones. I think I am going to be visiting a lot.”

“I take it you won’t be requiring your own bed?” poked Jack.

“There’s no need to insinuate so foppishly,” I said back, grinning. “For all you know we were having a grand, chaste old time watching a meteor shower.”

“Do you always demand that meteor showers give it to you harder in the name of fucking Christ Jesus Oh God Oh God, Ms. Jones?”

Zeke sprayed cider all over himself in dopy giggles.

Veronica threw her purse at Jack. He ducked. The purse smacked the bust of William Gaines that Zeke had brought, and instead of knocking it over, Veronica’s dollar store handbag simply exploded, impaled on his toothy grin – discharging, among other random bits of female necessity (Kleenex and mints), a shitload of exciting underwear and condoms.

We all laughed until we couldn’t anymore.

“You got us, Jack. Although, to be fair, Veronica is my sister in name only. We were both adopted. So we are only violating social taboos, not genetic ones.”

“Come on, I’m not a complete idiot. Zeke already clued me in. But you’ve still never told me about where and how you grew up,” said Jack. “There’s a story in there somewhere.”

“You got that right,” said Zeke.

“We’re even, then,” I riposted, shooting Zeke a shut-the-hell-up look. My past was just that, Veronica notwithstanding. I had been putting Jack on a tight and fast regimen of strictly need-to-know. He had been doing the same for me. Close quarters sometimes demand it until absolute trust can be established. We weren’t quite there.

“But tonight isn’t about shared revelation,” I said, “Tonight is about celebrating the first bit of permanence I’ve had in a long while. Brand new digs without ropes and chains, and good friends to fill it. Until the CIA storm troopers burst in and take us away for not sufficiently respecting the War on Terror, Drugs, and Poverty, I suggest we embrace all three and party like loons and buffoons, getting to know one another through the time-honored tradition of insane, uninhibited free sex, drugs, and conversation. It’s either that, or we fall back on plan B and have a dinner party. Which would require one of us to cook.”

“Not bloody likely,” said Jack, “I’ve been stealing for my supper ever since I read Thomas Aquinas, and, as far as I can tell, you subsist entirely on lentils, prayer, caffeine, poetry, and Raisin Bran.”

“A long night of debauchery sounds absolutely delightful,” said Zeke. “As long as you first answer one of my many questions, Jack, before you become overwhelmed by the vapors of sweet existence and can no longer respond with anything but pointing and guffaws.”

“Alright, but Miracle first. How does one become physically involved with a relative, even a nominal one, under the watchful eye of a state custodian?”

Zeke and I both looked at the ground. This was a touchy subject for Veronica. I was pretty good at overcoming trauma, or so I told myself, but she still had some open wounds. However, even the grooviest Bohemian aesthete has a difficult time swallowing incest – even if it is only on paper - so I couldn’t fault Jack’s curiosity, and I had honestly been spending the better part of the weekend trying to come up with a good way to explain things.

As usual, Veronica beat me to the punch. If she were a deadly weapon, she would be a blunt one. Like a sack of waffle irons.

“It’s simple,” she said, “Our parents were absolute scum. They were beyond scum. They were pay-toilet menstrual crust. They were bird shit spread thinly on stale American cheese slices given to the dog to make him puke up your Christmas poinsettia. They whored me out, and when they weren’t beating my brother here, they were having him deliver drugs to local thugs and white trash. We weren’t the only kids they bought either – there’s a whole big group of us and we did what any people living in absolute squalor will do to stay sane. We fucked ourselves silly. I guess it’s kind of an unbreakable habit, now.”

“Cheers,” I said, to cut the resultant absolute silence.

It didn’t take long for Jack’s curiosity to overcome the room’s tension.

“What do you mean you weren’t the only kids they bought? Are we talking a child slavery ring?” asked Jack.

“Oh, it was all above board. They didn’t call it buying and selling children. But if you are paying off the state, that’s what it amounts to. They waived their federal funding for taking care of us, and even lined the right underpaid social worker’s pockets with extra cash. It was of no consequence to them financially and they turned a tremendous profit. You can make a killing off of free child labor. We never thought to complain then – we wouldn’t have even known who to complain to since our surrogate father was already a school teacher - and it wasn’t until our parents finally got themselves gunned down and after Miracle here got us emancipated with his silver tongue and a little legal research that we found out what we had been missing and what the normal world was like. Our minds were institutionalized, and Stockholm Syndrome had set in, you know?”

Jack nodded.

“I wish they were still alive so that I could give them about forty hits of blotter and then give them the slow, synaesthetic deaths they deserve. All I’d need is a hot glue gun and about thirty mouse traps.”

“Easy, Veronica…” I said, “Let’s think about something else. Forgive and forget, eh?”

“Never. You should know me better than that. Anyway, to make a long story short, we became physically involved because it’s a good kind of love to have, when you don’t believe in any other. And now we are both love artists. Miracle writes about it and I live it.”

I shrugged.

“Why even call yourselves brother and sister?” asked Jack.

“It makes things much kinkier. I’ve got kinks,” said Veronica.

“Every writer has a muse,” I said. “Veronica’s mine.”

Nobody said anything for awhile. We all kind of stared at empty places, making sure not to infringe on each other’s chosen private voids with our gazes.

“So what kind of profession lives love, the way that you say? I’ve read Miracle’s writing, and if you are his muse, you must be…flexible,” said Jack, finally. His long blue hair and pockets of unkemptness made him seem like he was much coarser than he actually was. Deep down, Jack was a barrel of sympathy and discretion.

“I’m not a whore, if that’s what you mean. I’m a sex researcher. My particular field of expertise is adult video game simulation. Computer science is still a long way off from viable, Turing-test grade AI, but sexual AI is still incredibly doable, in my opinion. I spend a great deal of time and private donations on experiments with a blue screen and neural net mapping, trying to pinpoint the exact parts of the brain responsible for orgiastic transcendence. My staff and I are having some of the greatest sex that science and art can produce, and we do it all with the ultimate intent of allowing the whole world to someday join us. Expect big things. Even for those with little ones.”

Jack grinned like a wolf in a cathouse. “You’ll have to invite me over sometime. I would love to lend a hand. Perhaps there is something key I can grip.”

“Perhaps so,” said Veronica. As always, she herself was a panther among hyenas. “I’m actually trying to raise a little capital by implementing an idea I’ve had that seems worth its weight in lawsuits. Private porno. Anybody interested can come into the studio and finance a private pornographic shoot, starring themselves and a model of their choice that consents and is adequately compensated, in a favorite fantasy setting. We use the tapes as research into the sexual unconscious of the common American intellectual median. And the patron gets a copy for their home enjoyment, of course. Totally legal in Texas, totally satisfying for all my interns who like the extra attention, and totally lucrative in the radical extreme. Puritans make great marks.”

“So you are a whore,” I said, earning me a slap in the back of the head.

“I’d love to help you with your calling,” said Jack, “But as you can see by my current choice of domicile, financing anything at all – even a ham sandwich - is a bit beyond my means.”

Veronica pulled down her skirt to cover up her milky thighs, which had begun to reveal the bottoms of her red panties. An old trick. It seems like a coy stab at modesty, but it only serves to accentuate the bust by tightening the fabric around it. The three of us gave a synchronized swallow.

“Come by anyway,” she said, “I like having as many people on file as I can. Miracle gets freebies all the time, the lucky son of a bitch.”

She picked up one of her cards from the pile of her junk on the floor and handed it to Jack. I stuck my tongue out at her.

“It’s my turn to play inquisitor now,” said Zeke, “My question is a philosophical one for you, Jack, to mix things up. Miracle has told me that - among other peculiarities - you have a severe internal moral proscription against violence of any sort. I admire that, and I admire your integrity for keeping to it. My question is simple. Why?”

I groaned. I had told Zeke not to ask about Jack’s pacifism, but keeping a philosophy student away from people’s adamantine absolute values is like keeping a puppy out of the diaper pail. I knew what was coming. If there was one subject that Jack could wax rhapsodic about until your ears overran their lobes with blood and impacted tears, it was the inherent goodness of human nature, typified by his own unimpeachable ethical stance. And nothing kills an evening like bullshit dialectic.

Jack had actually taken off his jacket, gotten a stool out from under a stack of books, and was standing on it like Herr Zarathustra about to crap lightning, when the double doors burst open.

“WHERE’S THE SHIRT, YOU GODDAMNED SQUATTERS? I thought I’d turn a blind eye, but now yer gonna feel some wrath and reckoning! Hands in the air, the whole damned lot of you!”

It was the Salamander Technologies security guard. Mr. Beer himself, or so said his nametag. He smelled pretty beered up. The seams of his uniform were bulging with his rage, and his few wisps of auburn hair were snarled in quivering brambles of unhinged head icing. At first I thought he was holding a gun, but he was just wiggling a heavy black Maglight at us. His over-exerted gasps sent his handlebar mustache in and out of his gulping mouth, and I wanted to offer him a bean bag chair, but it seemed like he was at the far point of agitation where anything I said would have just gotten me cracked in the face.

The dumpster was definitely a fire hazard now, and the squeeze made the startled four of us keenly attuned to one another’s physical proximity. Almost psychically so. Jack and I went for the corners, and Zeke stood up in all of his six-foot-forever glory for a Right S 32 Blast charge. There is a certain sort of white Texan for whom large, muscled black men represent nothing less than God’s fiery vengeance for all the crimes of their pale race since the Three-Fifth’s Compromise, and Beer must have been one of these. Veronica was able to calmly pluck the flashlight out of his limp hand before I could even reach for a good, bashing croquet mallet. We all heaved mighty sighs of relief. He never even got a chance to draw his walkie-talkie.

“Slow down, partner,” said Zeke, “Wrath? Reckoning? Shirt? You are going to have to enlighten me as to the connection between all of these abstractions, because I cannot quite perceive the ideal form of your rambling thread. There had better be a good one, though, because you have quite rudely interrupted our private tête-à-tête.”

Miserable, Beer sunk into a seat I provided for him, which made me feel strangely hospitable. He seemed about to cry. I gave him a box of Ritz crackers.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hello,” said Jack.

“I ain’t really all that tough, particularly. No use pretendin’ to be.”

“Probably smart.”

“I didn’t mean to bust in here and roo’in yer party,” he said. “This is private damn property, but a party’s a party.”

He sighed, and shook his head.

“Don’t think I don’t know about ya’ll, now, though. Ya’ll are noisy as all get out this evening. Especially her when she’s being loved on, I reckon,” he pointed to Veronica, humbly averting his eyes with a look of painful desperation. “But look: when I first found out awhile ago that there were people living back here, I figgered I’d keep my mouth shut and we’d get along. Bet you think I’m dim, but I’m quicker than a two dollar bill in a titty bar, and I knew you surely wasn’t up to any real crime. At least I thought I did. I check in on you fellers periodically, and I’ve never had any reason to force the issue of yer serial trespassin. Lord knows I’ve been in a tough time or two myself, and I thought livin’ in a dumpster was a pretty inventive way to go about things, truth be told. Ya’ll have decorated this place pretty good, too. Feels like a real home.”

He suddenly became angry once more, flaring up and flinging his half empty roll of crackers around like a lead sap.

“But then you folks have to go and violate my sacred trust and just piss right all over my gennerosty and graciousness. If I’d known you was miserable sneak-thieves I would have come in and busted you proper with some help from the law, and we’d see how funny yew find yer teet-awl-teet.”

He crossed his arms and pouted like petulant four-year-old. Or like a writer being told his eight page digression into anarchist political theory detracts from the double penetration / dominated milkmaid scene, and that it will have to be cut if it he wants it published. I felt twisty pangs of empathy and understanding and patted him on the shoulder. Nobody wants to be wrong about anything, especially people. And this guy had even been in our corner until something abraded his potato.

“I give you my word as a vagrant and as a citizen that whatever has been stolen, we are not the transgressors responsible,” said Jack, in all seriousness, “And I want to thank you from the very bottom of my nougat center for your silence regarding our decision to live here without permission. If there is any way we can help you, just let us know. I guess we will be gone by the morning.”

Veronica laughed, and then quickly covered her mouth with her hand. Zeke sat back down in his seat with an intentionally incendiary I-don’t-believe-this-civil-horsehit-when-we’ve-got-the-upper-hand groan. I calmly ate a cracker that had flown out of the pack.

Jack and Beer eyeballed each other like restless steers trying to figure out which one had mounting privileges, and which one was the bitch lieutenant. They were testing each other’s souls.

It was finally Beer who balked.

“Nah, come on, now. I didn’t mean you guys had to leave. Look, hold on.”

He spit into his palm, and held it out to Jack.

“My name is Bernard O’Leary. Beer O’Leary to those with feelins of poetry and friendship. Let’s start this goddamn thing over.”

Jack shook.

“Jonathan Acid. We fight crime.”

Beer looked at me. I shrugged.

“Well, John…”

“Jack.”

“Well, Jack, I’ve got a crime to report and I was wonderin’ what you knew about it, and how you kin help me. Maybe we kin work together here to reach a conclusion that benefits us all. If you aren’t the miserable jizz-tangled ass hairs who robbed my charge, then I don’t know what I’m gonna do. And I kin believe you ain’t. Come morning and my boss figgers out what’s happened, though, I might just be moving in here right alongside ya. An’ it feels pretty crowded already.”

“Tell your story,” I said, “Jack’s got something of a fetish for doing things the difficult way, and he’ll try to guess what’s wrong all night just to prove a point about intuition. I think everybody else will agree that we should get to the bottom of this as soon as possible, so we can spend more time getting to know one another without awkward loose ends casting infertile conversational shadows.”

“A hit?” asked Zeke, passing him the pipe.

“Why not?” said Beer, taking it.

We all took up comfortable positions. Jack crossed his legs and started doing what he told me was definitely not meditation. Beer coughed out a vile black chunk of what must have been lung, took a snoot from a hip flask, and then he began.

“The shirt that’s been stolen is a scientific breakthrough that my superiors tell me is gonna be singlehandedly responsible fer changin’ the world. Hopefully fer the better. Ordinarily, we don’t handle actual equipment at SalTech, but this shirt was awaiting transfer out to our affillyate labs in California, and we were doing some testing. Most of the time I guard an empty building, and that’s how I like it. But tonight I was supposed to be at my tippest toppest and my most sober an’ sanitary so as to avoid this piece of ordinance falling into the hands of the corp’rate competition.”

“What’s so great about this shirt?” asked Veronica.

“Ha! That’s the meat of it. We don’t know ‘cause we didn’t even make the damn thing. SalTech themselves stole it from a couple of college kids who were taking turns staying up nights guardin’ it with a shotgun. We were just running tests on it to see if the claims they made fer it were true. It was their senior thesis, and they didn’t know what the crap they were getting themselves into. Goddamn college kids. I got a library card for free, but they pay 10 grand a piece to have somebody tell them which way their asshole is and what goes in there. Me, I read westerns, and that’s that.”

“I’m a college kid,” said Zeke.

“Sure you are,” said Beer, giving him an eyebrow, “Anyhow, that ain’t the point. They lost it fair and square, and they should have played ball in the first place and not held out for snivellated reespect like professional laboratory fart sniffers.”

“So what did they claim the shirt did?” asked Veronica through gritted teeth, patience quickly leaking out of her skull like helium from a grocery store balloon.

“Supposedly,” he grinned, letting us know that to him the following was complete and utter intellectual flatulence, “The shirt is filled with billions of tiny little robots woven into the fabric that clean odor and stains automatically. Supposedly they are able to turn whatever the stain is made of into sweet smelling deodorant, too, making whoever wears it as perpetuarally fresh as your granny’s douche. It’s got something to do about bananas. Nannertechnology. It’s about as plausible as glass bottles full of pussy you can rent from the convenience store and then take home and fuck, if you ask me. That’s actually not bad. Why ain’t college kids working on my ideas?”

“Nanotechnology? Man, you are right,” I said, baiting my sister. “I thought this shirt maybe traveled through time, or did something useful like that. Nanotechnology is bullshit utopian snake oil.”

“The hell it is!” said Veronica, jumping to her feet, “While a self-cleaning shirt is possibly the worst application I’ve ever heard of for something so immensely powerful, if they’ve really managed to do it, this is the beginning of a scientific revolution with literally no discernible end! My god…think of it!”

“Think of what? What is nannertechnology?” asked Zeke.

“Just Veronica’s favorite childhood wet dream,” I said, “Go ahead: bore us all.”

“Women don’t have wet dreams…do they?” asked Zeke

“Nanotechnology is the technology of the very small,” said Veronica. “The crux of modern theory is that we can use microscopic self-replicating molecular assemblers to reconfigure the structure of matter itself, utilizing the power of incredibly stable chemical clusters such as buckyballs and the like to do insanely fast construction work on the microbial factory floor. Imagine harnessing the latent technology and strength of the cell itself. Imagine if we had the fundamental building block of all organic material at our disposal.”

“You’re losing us,” I said.

“The idea is that very small machines will be able to first build copies of themselves, and then do some sort of repetitive minor task. Like reconfigure an organic compound that smells like rancid cow pie into a substance that smells like the grocery store detergent aisle by moving around component atoms. Chemical reactions do it all the time on a grand, visible level. We would be getting deep inside this process with the precise scalpel of physics. It is the engineering end of all current science.”

Zeke thought about this. “So this is the philosopher’s stone. In the crucible of this missing T-shirt is the ability to turn lead into gold.”

“Not quite,” said Veronica. “That would require an operation on a subatomic level and any tinkering within the atom is a real bitch. Not that we’ll never be able to get there, but nanotechnology in its present theoretical framework stops at the molecule. Still, humanity would never go hungry again. And fuck the energy crisis. And fuck the environmental crisis. And fuck all crises involving material wealth and human ease, and fuck mortality, and fuck the space program’s colossal incompetence, and so on and so forth. Gold and God would lose all value in a world where nanotechnology reigns.”

“Wow,” said Zeke.

“Bullshit,” I said, “Where’s the money for the dairy cow? Why, I got something even better! Magic beans! They grow a beanstalk to Venus! That’s where Elvis and Jimmy Dean play freeze tag and turn lingerie models into superstar actresses!”

“Does it actually work?” asked Veronica, ignoring me.

“Sure. It does something,” said Beer, “They let me put it on as a joke when they brought it in, and I felt kind of tingly and I smelled better n’ usual afterward, but that could have been for any number of reasons. Maybe there was radioactive urinal cake powder smeared on the inside. Who knows? I asked if I could spill my dinner on it, but they said doing that would compreemise the controlled double blind studies they had planned. Fuckin’ scientists. I could have told ‘em if it was crap in two seconds. Now it’s all gone ‘cause they had to run their wiener experiments, and I’m looking at six months of food stamps and hat-wringing in front of dried-up, unemployment-check-writing government cunts.”

“Whether it does anything is beside the point,” I said. “What exactly happened? Where do we fit in? All signs point to corporate espionage.”

“I’m kind of lazy,” said Beer. “You guys are pretty close. I guess I was hopin’ I’d get lucky.”

“When did it disappear?” asked Veronica.

“The scientists were messing with it in one of the upstairs offices. They all went home for the day, and that’s when I’m supposed to start my rounds. But I got my security cameras. I saw it was gone almost immediatelary. I ran up to check, and there was nothing there at all. Not even any tracks or hair fibers or shit. Man, I should have locked the damn door. But nah, I left it open because there’s nothing more attractive than a locked door in a secure futurist technologies comp’ny. Plus, who would steal a smelly old T-Shirt? I mean, someone who isn’t yer girlfriend.”

I looked over at Jack. His eyes were shut. He was massaging his temples and flexing his bare toes. Everybody looked at me querulously, like I was his keeper. I shrugged, and then I punched him in the shoulder.

“Yes, yes. I’ve already figured it out,” he said, not opening his eyes “Just give me a minute to collect myself.”

“Well, don’t be shy, mister. My balls are in the toaster, here,” said Beer.

“That shirt is made of something synthetic, correct? Rayon? Polyester? Pleather? It’s pleather, isn’t it? No?”

“Nah, it’s straight-up cotton. Cotton and robots. First thing I did was check the tag.”

“And when you say you saw it was gone almost immediately, you mean that you saw it up there on the camera, did a crossword puzzle or something, and then fifteen minutes later or so you looked up and it was no more?”

“Actually, to be perfectly honest, it was gone the first time I thought to check on it,” he said tenebrifically. “I saw those doctors go in there, though. It was the right room. I ain’t a shit-stained cradle-baby, if that’s what yer implying.”

“Let me ask you something else, then. Are you still tingly at all?”

“Well, sure. But I’m also fairly eeneebriated from two different mediums. It’s my God-given right as a patriot to be tingly.”

Jack opened his eyes. “Anybody else tingling?”

We shook our heads. Zeke started to raise his hand and then put it back down.

“Well,” said Jack, “I’m tingling. That means I’m pretty sure at least one of the scientists for whom you work is dead. You and I are on our way, Mr. O’ Leary. You, a victim of mirth, and I, a victim of genial hospitality. The shirt is gone for good, but its technology now ironically threatens the very fabric of life as we know it, dig? Whatever you do, don’t touch anything.”

“Oh fuck,” said Veronica.

“Wha?” said Zeke.

“Wh?” I said.

“W?” said Beer.

“The good news is: I think we can save the world. Let’s take a jog.”

We followed him out the door like he had our invisible leashes wrapped around his hand, and we were his metheamphetimated greyhounds. Jack was almost running, and we were all nervously trying to keep up with his mad, beat-skipping gait. We were headed in the general direction of the highway. It was twenty minutes before anybody had enough breath to ask him where exactly we were going.

“This much is clear: the nanobots are out of control. They have no ability to turn themselves off. Every piece of organic debris they come into contact with they are slowly turning into perfume. The shirt can’t tell the difference between a pizza stain and the person wearing it. Here’s the crazy part: the collegiate cretins responsible even made the shirt out of organic material. It has not been stolen, although that is a very logical conclusion to draw. It has merely digested itself. The same way it is digesting you and I, Mr. O’ Leary. Feel that tingle? That is the top layer of your skin being eaten away. They will get faster as they begin to replicate themselves with greater and greater finesse. They will tear through your bone and entrails long before you have time to issue a formal complaint with your union. Maybe even before you have time to scream.”

“So what’n the hell are we going to do about it? I mean, if yer right, we’re screwed.”

“Stop right here!” said Jack.

We were standing in front of the UT turtle pond.

“There’s no way to do this with dignity because every second counts,” said Jack. He grabbed Beer around the shoulders, and then he pushed him over backward into the pond. They both fell sprawling into the murky green water, Beer shrieking and spluttering, Jack actually laughing his pink-suited ass off.

“What in the hell?” said Beer, when he finally got his shit together.

“It’s too late to worry about it! Scrub, scrub! It’s the only way! Make sure to get underneath your arms and behind your ears!”

The UT turtle pond was more like a tiny, opaque artificial stock-tank that existed, as far as I could tell, for the express purpose of breeding mosquitoes that you would someday be able to rope and ride. It was where college students released the turtles purchased from local exotic pet stores that had ceased to be cute and were growing surly and intractable, pushing them around for money and staying home all day and watching daytime TV. They fought for food brought to them from the UT botany department like hungry lawyers, sunning themselves during the day, and lurking beneath the surface at night like…hungry lawyers.

“Ow, goddamit!” said Beer. “Turtle bit me!”

“These turtles are going to save our lives. Hug them! Bite them back! Love them!” said Jack, pulling out a particularly ornery looking red-eared slider and kissing it on its knobbly, Winston Churchill head.

“Ezekiel!” said Jack, “You have a mission. I want you to go the student newspaper and then to the natural sciences dean, in that order, and tell them that a group of UT students have perfected nanotechnological cleansing robots, but they have accidentally released them into the turtle pond which is quickly being turned into grey, Estee Lauder sludge!”

“But…” Zeke began.

“Go!”

Zeke went.

“Veronica! Make an anonymous call to the head of Salamander Technologies. They will seek out the students from whom they stole the shirt, give the students full credit for their discoveries, and then use them to avert the present crisis. Tell SalTech that they have a casualty on their hands, and if they don’t want criminal charges filed against them for both wrongful death and intellectual property theft, they must use their research might to begin the rapid development of nanobot disassemblers that can be operational within 24 hours. Everyone will win. Tell them we will go to the Feds unless they cooperate, and that otherwise the story is that the lead scientist ran away to China with the shirt.”

Veronica started to say something, and then simply nodded her head and left.

“Jack, the turtles…the water is already beginning to clear…”

Jack gave another insane laugh.

“Our only chance is that the bots are programmed to seek out the hardiest protein and to glom to it. The chemical composition of a turtle shell is one of the most dense, durable, frustrating chemical compositions known. They are polymers of bone and horn, and if they don’t baffle these nanobots, nothing will. Now scrub yourself, Beer, wherever you feel a tingle, and get these things off of you and into this primordial soup. We have to encourage these bots to take to the water instead of to us. The damage they do here will be both minimal and hampered by the totality of their enterprise, like diffusing pepper in water. Hopefully it will overwhelm them completely. Whenever you start to feel dirty again, I think it will be okay to get out. The bots never reached critical mass on us. I pity that poor scientist.”

“I don’t,” said Beer.

“Care to elaborate?” I asked.

“Fuck science,” said Beer, ducking his hair back and then scrubbing at an elbow. “Let ‘em all burn like the rest of us.”

“Veronica and Zeke might argue if they were here,” I said, “But I tend to agree.”

“Make sure to rinse your mouth out,” said Jack, “There’s great protein in here. People would pay for this sort of health spa pampering.”

“Short of doing a Hot Coffin, I can’t think of a dirtier place to be,” I said, “Good thinking, Jack.”

“What’s a Hot Coffin?” asked Beer.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Hell…”

“It’s where you get somebody to lay down inside a tight Teflon box and then a group of dudes keeps jacking off inside of it until the person begin to float. Then the person…um…rolls around in the semen and sprays everyone like a wet dog.”

“Uh-huh. Sounds like a Navy thing,” said Beer without flinching, “This pond smells horrible. This might keep me alive and get rid of all them bots, but I think I’m going to be sick,” said Beer.

“Great!” said Jack. “Bile shampoo! Let me have some!”

And that was all I could stand to watch. To this day, the turtles in that pond are still the nicest smelling in the world. I still say something must have seeped into their DNA and made them mutants, but Veronica tells me that is impossible.

Eventually, sopping and stinky, Jack and Beer crawled out of the turtle pond and into the humid night. A couple of drunk students walked by and laughed, probably because Beer was still in his uniform. Zeke and Veronica rejoined us, and bade us all get the hell home. We could hear campus officials and reporters on their way, and none of us were keen on inquisition. Ever since grade school, Zeke, for instance, took any question posed to him by an authority figure as a serious philosophical inroad. Nothing pissed them off more. (“Where was I last night? Interesting. Heraclitus would say, that no, I was not last night. That it is only now, that I am.”)

We started the trek back, discussing how close we had come to turning the world into chic, Palmolive goo. When we eventually made it home, Beer’s walkie talkie began bleeping. He rolled his eyes at us, and then answered it.

“Yeah? I’m fucking averting a situation, that’s what I’m dooin. Don’t get all up in arms. If it weren’t fer me, who knows what kind of shit we’d be trying to squash right now? I assessed the sitchy’ashin and made some judgment snaps. Nah, I don’t know who made that phone call. Prolly a real pretty girl trying to do you bastards a favor. Everything’s under control now, and I might be expecting a raise in the future if you guys are going to keep stretching me outside of my job descriptions. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I think you ought to consider yourselves lucky, and stop bothering the help. I’m out.”

Jack raised an eyebrow at him.

“So what about us?” asked Jack.

“Well, you folks saved my damn life. It’s only right that I do my best to protect you from the pryin’ eyes of corporate justice. Perhaps you might want to go on vacation fer a bit though. Take in some sights. I figger everything’ll be back to normal in a week or so. I’ll even let you park yer dump next to my trailer, while the snitches are scouring SalTech fer leaks.”

“That’s incredibly noble of you, Mr. O’Leary.”

“Hey, I’m nothing if not noble.”

We shook hands and went our separate ways.

As soon as he was gone, Veronica slapped me in the back of the head. Pretty hard, too – and she’s got rings and nails.

“Ow…what was that for?”

“Shock and awe. A preemptive strike against whatever lame ass thing you were going to say about nanobots being dangerous and scientists being idiots.”

“So you have regressed entirely to intimidation and violence to win your arguments? Just like when we were nine?”

“Yes.”

Zeke smiled and took us both under his arms.

“Now, now. The only good way to win a philosophical discussion is to tie your opponent’s theories and logic back to Hitler. Neither of you have done that, so I win.”

“I’m just glad no one was hurt,” said Jack, “I mean, except for that dead scientist.”

We all looked at the ground. It was finally Veronica who broke us from our meditation.

“Hey, here’s something. Anybody want to see if I can still put my legs behind my head?”

We all did. It was a good night.