Mardock Scramble

Balot started thinking about the things that had died such a long time ago. Things that had been buried underground for many years, slowly turning to stone. Things long since forgotten. Why did they then have to be dug up again?

–I don’t really know.

Oeufcoque changed the subject. “Isn’t it about time for your medication?”

Balot tidied her tray away and went to the self-service water cooler to take the medicine the Doctor had given her. Skin stabilizers, hair growth agents, medicine to fix her eyelashes, vitamins, calcium tablets. Lots of things she had to take—and she took them all.

As she swallowed her medicine she thought about the fossils. One fossil in particular. A swirling shell. What were those things called that stayed hidden in their shells except for their moplike hands and feet that they used to crawl along the seabed?

“Ammonite or something, that sort of thing, wasn’t it?” Oeufcoque answered conscientiously when asked.

After she’d walked through the mall for a while, she did indeed come across a collection of spirals.

They were in the form of some computer graphics projected onto the wall of a building. Balot stopped in front of the stall that sold them.

The shop sold Eject Posters. Small square boxes that, when fitted to a wall, would project images onto the space just below. There were a number of patterns lined up in a row, and there was a memory card that contained over a hundred different pictures of fossils.

“Why not buy something that takes your fancy? It’d be a pleasant diversion, and the decor in your room is pretty dull,” said Oeufcoque.

Balot took advantage of his offer. She bought an Eject Poster and a card with the fossils on it, then walked on, eyes on the instruction manual. Computer simulations of live ammonites, nautiluses, trilobites, along with photographs of the fossilized creatures, mixed with other minerals and fossilized into spirals of silver and gold and crystal.

After a while she put it away in her bag. She was somehow excited.

–Is it okay if I buy a few things I like?

“Of course.”

Balot went to the stationery section of a department store and bought a PDA—the sort a child might use—and six different types of colored markers. And she bought some lipstick that caught her eye in a shop that she happened to pass by. Because she liked its bright poppy red and the design of the case.

As she went around the department store she felt more and more that she and Oeufcoque were becoming one.

No matter where they went they were as one. Like the mojo, that protective charm so often sung about in the blues.

But there was a moment when Oeufcoque resisted.

“Stop, Balot. I’ll be waiting outside, so…”

The pendant turned back into the form of a golden mouse with a squelch and jumped straight off Balot’s shoulders. Balot correctly read his path of flight and plucked him up by his suspenders midflight.

“I’ve already said, haven’t I? That I don’t want to be called a Peeping Tom?”

He spoke so pitifully that she snarced him, making him turn into an alarm bell. A poppy-red alarm bell. She looked around to check that no one was watching before sticking it on the wall with a fluid movement.

“I’ll keep an eye out for you, so off you go.”

He spoke as if to a child who was scared of the dark.

Balot went into the women’s restroom.

The toilets were clean and empty. She went into the stall at the very end, loosened her belt, and lowered first her shorts, then tights and underwear, down to her knees, layer by layer.

Relief and anxiety assaulted her in equal measure as her lower body was freed from its wrapping.

She sat down on the toilet seat and took some ointment from her jacket pocket. She squirted some bright white hydration cream on her palm and rubbed it on her stomach and thighs. These were the only parts that were still rough, still scabbed.

As she rubbed the cream into her skin it started peeling off, like the thin membrane of a boiled egg. She brushed the skin off and rubbed the remaining cream on her shoulders and elbows.

She sat on the toilet, waiting to pee. She stared absentmindedly at the linoleum wall with not a single piece of graffiti.

All of a sudden she felt that something was not quite right. As she did her business she thought about why she might be feeling this way.

Her urine smelled of medicine. A result of the eighteen different pills she had to take every day.

Not a single one of those was a tranquilizer—the Doctor himself was surprised by this fact.

Your psyche is incredibly tenacious—the Doctor was full of admiration. But Balot thought that, in all honesty, if medication could make her mind even tougher then so much the better, and she should be taking as much as she could handle.