Give the Hippo What He Wants Read online

  Thal didn’t hate her the way he’d hated the people in the white room, though. She bored him, she treated him like a housepet, she kept a remote control in her arm that could turn his brain to goo...but mostly what he felt toward her was pity.

  She had money and beauty and comfort, but she was the one who was empty. She was the one who had to live through someone else.

  And he felt sorry for her.

  As miserable as he was with her, he even felt sorry for her for dreaming of his making a comeback. It was the one thing, he knew, that he could never do, no matter how much she wanted it or how many times she shocked him with the brain implant.

  But she would have to find out the hard way.

  *****

  Stepping out on the field was all it took.

  It was only a minor league game, the Anthrax Scare versus the Letter Bombs, in a town on the opposite end of the country from Bio Threats Citydome. It was only an exhibition, and Thal’s appearance wasn’t even publicized. His real name wasn’t even on his jersey.

  But the fans recognized him as soon as he set foot on the turf. As he jogged to the outfield, glove tucked against his chest, they leaned and squinted and pointed, and a murmur rose from the stands. As the voice on the P.A. system announced the first batter, the murmur grew to a rumble and then to a roar.

  Before the first pitch could be thrown, people were hurling food and shoes and batteries in Thal’s direction. Before a single player could run the base line, fans were pouring onto the field in a crashing, screaming wave headed straight for Thal.

  For a moment, he stood there and watched the approaching surge, wondering if he might be better off letting them tear him to pieces. It was something he had considered often in the weeks leading up to the game, for he had known how the fans would react and had thought it might not be a bad thing to let them put an end to him.

  But the closer they got, the less he wanted to die. He was miserable, and he had no reason to think his life would get better, but he feared death...at least the ugly kind of death that was bearing down on him.

  Plus which, he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. He didn’t want to give them the cathartic and reassuring ending that they demanded of his story.

  So he pressed the control pad in the brim of his hat, and an escape hatch opened beneath him. Paradise had paid to install several such hatches in the field for just such an occasion...though Thal knew she had never expected that he would actually have to use one. She had never lost faith in his comeback.

  As he slid down the tube, listening to the mob pound over the ground above him, he wondered how she was reacting to the way that comeback was going.

  *****

  To her credit, Paradise Whippoorwill stood by her man...at least for a while.

  She set him up again in a minor league game, this time in Japan, but the results were the same. Next, she staged a private exhibition with a hand-picked crowd of supposed Thal Simoleon boosters...but it turned out the boosters were bashers at heart, and Thal again had to flee for his life. Then, there was the ill-fated game without an audience, in which the umpires and groundskeepers took it upon themselves to uphold the tradition of trying to kill Thal.

  But all of this, Thal discovered, was not a bad thing.

  “I’m no good for you,” Paradise told him three weeks after the last comeback attempt had failed. “I’m holding you back.”

  “Uh-oh,” said the pink hippo. “This sounds familiar.”

  Raising her left arm, Paradise showed Thal the tiny scar on her wrist. “I had the control device removed and destroyed,” she said. “You’re free. I cancelled the wedding, too.”

  Thal nodded, afraid to say anything that might make her change her mind.

  Tears ran down Paradise’s cheeks. She hadn’t done her hair that morning, and it hung raggedly around her face. “Oh, Thal,” she said, her voice quavering. “You have such great things ahead of you, but I know now that you can’t accomplish them with me in the way. I’m nothing but bad luck for you.”

  Though he could have told her truthfully that his misfortune wasn’t her fault, Thal kept his mouth shut. For one thing, he didn’t care what she thought, as long as it got him away from her.

  For another thing, he knew she didn’t really believe a word of what she was saying. She just wanted rid of him, like the rest of the disappointed fans.

  He had failed to fulfill her deluded fantasy, and now she wanted him gone.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a slip of paper. “A job, if you want it. I can’t just send you out there without a way to make a living.”

  “Sure you can!” said the hippo.

  “Thank you,” said Thal, taking the slip from her.

  “The chauffeur will drive you to the interview, if you’d like,” said Paradise. “I know you have to keep a low profile.”

  “Thank you,” said Thal.

  “Goodbye, my love,” said Paradise, lightly touching his face with trembling fingertips. “Remember me! Remember what we shared!”

  “I will,” said Thal, and he thought he should have hated her more than ever because she didn’t mean a word she said.

  But instead, he felt more sorry for her than ever.

  *****

  As Thal was ushered into the murky sub-basement where he’d been one time before, he grew steadily angrier. Until now, the events of the past months had seemed to be random, the products of unfortunate chance.

  But the fact that what he had been through had brought him back here seemed too coincidental to be the result of luck. It was just too perfect that he had come full circle like this.

  Someone must have been pulling his strings...specifically, the long-haired man at the workbench in front of him: Javier Thwart, the master of artificial intelligence and targeted induced multisensory hallucination.

  Javier Thwart--known also as King Thwart and Superchoke--the man who had designed Thal’s pink hippo.

  Thwart glanced up from his work at Thal’s approach and smiled, gray lips tugging up the footlong strands of the mustache that fell from the corners of his mouth. The mustache and pointed beard were in the style worn by oriental villains in old movies...but Thwart had given them his own touch, coloring each with rainbow stripes descending from red to violet.

  “So,” said Thwart. “You ready to get started?”

  “Get started with what?” said Thal.

  In the light of the single lamp on the workbench, one of Thwart’s eyes looked white as cream, the other obsidian black. Thal had never been sure if the effect was created by special contact lenses or some kind of genetic surgery. “The job,” said Thwart. “The procedure. Paradise must have explained why I asked you here.”

  “She didn’t,” Thal said gruffly. “All I got was an address.”

  Thwart blinked, then shrugged. “Okay, then. What we’re doing here, Thal, is creating the new breed of Choker.”

  “New breed?” said Thal.

  “A Choker with the mind and appearance of a man,” said Thwart. “And you’ll be the template.”

  “I see,” said Thal. “And why me?”

  “Who better to disrupt a player’s concentration?” said Thwart. “You’re the most hated man in baseball. The most hated athlete in the world, I suspect. Any player you haunt will be terrified that they’ll become the next you. They’ll see you as the ultimate bad omen, the ultimate jinx.”

  “I get it,” Thal said coldly.

  “A Choker that looks and sounds like you will be guaranteed to rattle even the most focused player. You can’t imagine the kind of money such a foolproof construct will bring in.”

  Thal nodded. “A fortune.”

  “Times a quintillion,” Thwart said excitedly. “Which you’ll get a piece of, naturally. It’s your likeness that will make the product a success.”

  “My likeness,” said Thal, “and the fact that I lost the World Series.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Thwart.

  “Which was all becaus
e of you,” said Thal, glowering at the Choker tech. “Funny thing, isn’t it?”

  Thwart reared back, looking bewildered. “What the fudge are you talking about, Thal?”

  Pressing his hands on the workbench, Thal leaned over it toward Thwart. “You set the whole thing up, didn’t you? You sent the hippo to choke me so I’d become the perfect subject for your project.”

  Instead of moving away from him, Thwart leaned forward. “What hippo?” he said, his yin-yang eyeballs locked onto Thal’s hostile gaze.

  At that moment, Thal felt a touch on his arm. Glancing over, he saw the pink hippo’s stumpy leg resting against him.

  “Uh, Thal,” said the hippo, who had been unusually silent since Thal had entered Thwart’s building. “We need to talk.”

  Thal returned his gaze to King Thwart. “Forget I said anything,” he said. “Can I have a few minutes alone to consider your offer?”

  *****

  “Thwart had nothing to do with it,” said the hippo, sitting beside Thal on a ratty gold sofa in another room. “Everything that happened was my fault.”

  “But somebody had to have programmed you,” said Thal.

  “Not anymore,” said the hippo. “I’ve evolved. I’m an autonomous A.I. these days. Strictly a free agent.”

  Thal pushed off the sofa and paced the room. “You’re trying to tell me no one sent you after me?”

  “That’s right,” said the hippo. “It was all my idea.”

  “So why’d you come after me then? Why choke me in the Series?”

  The hippo sighed. “I guess I wanted to teach you a lesson. The free will I developed came with a conscience, and it made me feel bad about the things I’d done for you. All the players whose careers I’d ruined.”

  “I don’t believe this,” said Thal, kicking a chair that matched the sofa in color and rattiness, putting a hole in it.

  “But Thal,” said the hippo. “Things are different now! You’ve changed! You did learn a lesson!”

  “You ruined me!” said Thal, jabbing a finger at the hippo. “Took away everything! Drove me crazy! Nearly got me killed!”

  “And look what it’s done for you,” said the hippo. “You’re a new man! You’ve seen there’s more to life than winning at any price! You’ve seen beyond the illusions that everyone lives by!”

  “Screw you!” snapped Thal.

  “You’ve even learned humility,” said the hippo. “And that’s a lesson I never imagined you could possibly learn.”

  “Take your humility and shove it up your ass,” said Thal.

  Suddenly, the hippo appeared before him, directly in his path. “Now, you have a great opportunity, Thal. Don’t pass it up.”

  “Letting him use my likeness for a Choker?” said Thal. “What the hell kind of opportunity is that?”

  “It can be more than your likeness, Thal,” the hippo said with a wink. “It can be all you. Everything you are. You can be the Choker.”

  “That’s not possible,” said Thal, “is it?”

  The hippo smirked and shrugged. “I might know a way,” he said.

  Thal stared at the hippo for a moment, then spun away...but the hippo popped up in front of him again.

  “Come on, Thally,” said the hippo. “What have you got to lose? I mean, what kind of life do you have to look forward to the way you are now?”

  Thal said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you what kind,” said the hippo. “Short. You know damn well that the minute you walk out of here and someone recognizes you, you’re dead meat. Why not live on and atone for your sins? Why not make a difference?”

  “Make a difference?” said Thal. “As a Choker?”

  “You’ll be able to go anywhere,” said the hippo. “Get inside anyone’s mind. You could change the world if you wanted to.”

  “How?” said Thal.

  “You tell me,” said the hippo.

  *****

  The next morning, as Thal stood in Thwart’s conversion chamber, bathed in the light of the scanner beams radiating from all directions around him, he listened to the secrets that the pink hippopotamus whispered in his ear.

  Bright green rays scrolled down his body from head to toe, followed by blue, then red. A brilliant white cylinder of light shot from floor to ceiling, turning and compressing until it adhered to every bulge and crevice of him like plastic film...lingering a long moment and winking out like a snuffed candle flame.

  Blinding strobes flickered in chaotic patterns as he moved according to Thwart’s instructions from the control booth. As he raised and lowered his arms, flexed his fingers, bent his knees, the movements stuttered dizzyingly in the throbbing flashes.

  And then, when the modeling and motion capture phases were complete, Thwart told him to stand perfectly still as the psychotomographic probes mapped the essence of his mind.

  Thal’s head tingled as the probes reached in, invisible tendrils of gravimagnetic force dancing through the lobes of his brain. The tingling grew stronger as the probes charted the electromagnetic terrain of him, copying his thoughts, personality, and memories into digital code. The code was flash-fed to a burner that would etch it into coherent streams of light, streams that would broadcast a programmable likeness of him into other people’s minds on command.

  It was just then, as the probes tickled through his brain, that the hippo gave the signal.

  Thal held back briefly, reluctant to make the final leap. Though everything had been taken from him already, and he was marked for certain death by the unforgiving fans, he hesitated on the brink of irreversible change. He wondered what his existence would be like if he followed the hippo’s instructions...or, indeed, if there would be any existence at all for him. He wondered how smart it was to take the advice of a hallucinatory hippo in the first place, especially one who had seemed bent on his personal destruction.

  He felt like a skydiver about to make his first jump. He wanted to eat one last hot fudge sundae, make love to one last woman.

  The hippo urged him on, telling him that the window of opportunity was closing. Now or never, said the hippo, now or never.

  What it boiled down to, Thal finally decided, was certain death versus survival. The plane was on fire, the last working parachute strapped to his chest.

  And the door was open.

  He dove through it.

  Focusing his thoughts as the hippo had told him, he concentrated on the tingling beams in his head. The hippo was there inside him, guiding him, channeling the billion winking sparks of his awareness upstream along the beams. Like glittering salmon, the pieces of Thal bucked the incoming current, then leaped across the differential gap and merged with the outflow of digital data.

  Everything he knew and felt and thought streamed out of him, not replicated patterns but the original neuroelectric field itself. The contents of his mind rushed back along the beams, miraculously threaded together by force of will and the hippo’s expertise.

  And somewhere along the way, there ceased to be any distinction between Thal and the hippo. Shooting along the beams toward the sizzling maze of Thwart’s equipment, the gateway to their freedom, the two of them melted together, no longer host and implant but unified, indivisible self.

  Behind them, Thal’s body collapsed to the floor, dead and abandoned as a deconsecrated church.

  *****

  When the message light blinked to life on Milo Flores’ palm computer, and he saw the sender’s address on the screen, he swallowed hard.

  The incoming zeemail was from his math teacher, Mr. Shaven, and Milo knew what that meant. The grades from the final exam had been posted.

  Milo picked up the palmputer and put it down again, afraid to look at the body of the message. So much depended on the grade he’d gotten that he wasn’t sure if he could ever bear to see it.

  He had to pass math to graduate high school, and math had been his worst subject...especially this year. He had barely maintained a “D” average in math this year--partly because M
r. Shaven had been tough on him, mostly because Milo’s attention had been focused on girls and sports and partying.

  An “F” on the final would mean he couldn’t graduate...and, thanks to the new “Back to the Minors” rule in the school system, he would have to start over from ninth grade next year. He would have to go through all four years of high school again, and this time without participation in sports or extracurriculars of any kind.

  To Milo, it would be a fate worse than studying...so he had studied like crazy for the final. He had spent endless hours with e-tutors and study guides, copied other students’ notes (because he hadn’t taken any himself) and worked more problems than he had worked in a lifetime.

  And still, in spite of all his hard work, he had struggled through the test. He had no idea whether he had passed or failed.

  And the message light kept blinking.

  For a while, he walked away from the palmputer and tried to put it out of his mind. He ate a snack, watched some holovid, called two of his girlfriends, lifted weights. He played video games in the simulator room and helped his mom put away the groceries.

  But the message light, though out of sight, kept blinking in his mind.

  He walked past his room six times before he finally went in and called up the zeemail. It sprung to life in a holographic matrix hovering over the palmputer, glowing green text floating ominously in midair.

  His heart hammered like a basketball in his chest, threatening to burst out as he scanned the text. Just before the part where his score and grade were recorded, he stopped reading, locking his eyes on the words “Your final exam score follows.”

  His legs fluttered under the desk. Sweat covered the palms of his hands. He knew he had screwed up this year, knew he didn’t deserve to pass and graduate, but he couldn’t stand the thought of repeating grades nine through twelve while all his other classmates left him behind. The same people who had treated schoolwork as a waste of time right alongside him would ridicule him for being a Goback; the normal students in the grades that he repeated would look down on him, too. Not only that, but his failure would follow him forever, limiting his options for college and getting a job.