Klepto

by Catfish Russ

Table of Contents
Installment 3 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

* * *

OK, now it’s really over, Roscoe thought.

The door of his chamber opened. It awoke him. He had not had enough sleep. That stupid party must have gone for days.

Another large insect was trying to get inside.

“Help!!!! Hey, Praying Mantis Man. Help!!! I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done.”

“This will be temporary,” the voice box chirped.

Panic, raw and fragrant burned in his nostrils. Roscoe squirmed and flailed but the ineluctable lightning reflects and overwhelming strength of armored exoskeleton and resilin powered forelimbs.

In a sort of dreamy horror movie, Roscoe grew so afraid he could no longer scream, and he had not the strength against this thing. And he passed out and in a dream-like nightmare, he felt two proboscis puncture his arteries behind his ear and slip down deep inside of him and secrete something... something that burned and electrified him.

Roscoe dreamed a mixture of Belladonna and Datura. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. He was blind. Lying still, trying not to panic, Roscoe felt something very very different. It was as if he has never heard a note, and suddenly he was listening to music.

He knew the dimensions of the chamber. Wherever his mind went, he could ‘see’ in a way that only the cortex of his brain could know. He knew where his clothes were and how each one was folded. He knew the strange shapes of the adjoining rooms and without feet or inches, he could tell the breadth and depth and height of every corner. He knew the location of the exits, the thickness of the air outside, the pull of gravity, the fragile nature of his own life and his own body. He cool ‘see’ the electricity in the fabric he lay on. It stunned him. Changed him. Changed everything. In retrospect, in another surprising change, he remembered every single jot and tittle of what happened in his life. Every moment, every word, every misstep, every feeling.

Roscoe stood up and knew in a way that can only be explained in an analogy. He had been blind his whole life. Oh, he could see a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. But now he felt the entire spectrum. He sensed particles flying through his body. Neutrinos? Tau mesons? Highly charged electrons?

His feeling extended in every direction, in directions he hardly thought about. He felt the hot molten center of this planet. He felt the spin of the planet and the pull of the sun and the other heavenly bodies in this solar system. He felt light moving through him, and he knew he could not be seen.

His Krig captor returned, and he heard the voice box chirp.

“It is different. No?”

Roscoe didn’t answer. He felt an object float into the room on antigravity pods.

“Climb inside this chamber. You will be sent to Epsilon Eridani. At a moment of our choosing you will escape this storage chamber and find a device. Then you will bring it back to me. Once inside the chamber, you will know where the device is and how to steal it.”

“Then what?” Roscoe was defiant.

“I don’t understand the question.” The Krig lumbered to the edge of the fishbowl room. He was looking around, trying to see where in the fishbowl where Roscoe was standing. Roscoe noted that. I am invisible now, he thought.

“What if I refuse?”

“You will suffer,” the answer chirped from the voice box.

Roscoe could feel the object open up. He crawled inside.

* * *

“We are using our Silicoid Operators to help us speed the simulacra replication of this machine. These plans appear to be that of a working Phase Shift Device.” The Eridani Scientists and technicians stationed at the jump port reported the results to the PM.

“Send my deepest thanks to the Acting Proconsul for the aid of his Operators. How did the Silerian get this information?” the PM asked.

“Apparently he simply downloaded this off the webnet,” Said the Station Chief.

“It doesn’t make sense. Does it make sense to you?” The PM asked the Station Chief.

“Our technicians are telling us that every Replicator Program, every Silicoid Simulacra and every scientist within Quantum Com range tells us that this machine will work. I am an administrator, Great Statesman. My judgment would not trump their pronouncements,” the Station Chief broadcast modestly.

“Forgive me my tantrum, Chief. And thank you for your quick help. You have my permission and my Krig Credit line to go ahead and build the device.”

“Build it?”

“Yes, as soon as possible. I will send you all the help you need. Plus some other things, if you know what I am hinting at.” The Station Chief remained still. The PM floated back toward his resting area. He hoped that the Station Chief was too rattled to see he was acting. The PM knew this machine would only appear to work.

Good. Excellent. Let them distract the Krigs with a fake.

* * *

The Silerian garbage scow was probed and decontaminated and held in dock. Using stolen Silicoid decryption technology, Roscoe opened his chambers, pulled on a breather suit provided by the Krigs (also stolen), and crawled out of the Silerian cargo hold ship into the Chief Physicist’s chambers.

He knew all this technology was stolen from Jelly Man. He also knew something foul had happened to Jelly Man.

Jelly Man was not around to teach him how to locate this device. But he didn’t need any help. Roscoe knew exactly where it was. In many ways, he knew everything that he turned his attention to. This new ‘gift’ was a combination of prescience, empathy and precognition. He simply guided his shipping container into a room where the device sat on a table.

Like the quantum jump device he stole at the airport, this one was small enough to hold in his hand. And it refracted light around itself. Of course, Roscoe could not see anything. He knew it and felt it as ineluctably true.

He also knew that a fake Phase Shifter was being prepared for shipment to Praying Mantis Man. He picked it up and put it into a pocket in his well-worn trousers.

* * *

While the Eridanis distracted Krig News Services and the Silerian Embassy with this new device, Roscoe took the real Phase Shifter and returned to the cargo hold.

He slept, and dreamed.

Roscoe dreamt of every single mistake he ever made. He relived every petty crime and every piece of crap he stole. He relived his court appearances and felt every bit of disappointment and fear he created by stealing. He felt the anger and saw the consequences of each action extrapolated to its actual conclusion.

Questions he had about his father were now answered. Yes, that dark-haired, raven-eyed woman dad was leaning next to at a coin laundry was someone he had been sleeping with. Yes, his mother was a prostitute and did not abandon him as it appeared to him. She was arrested in Baltimore and placed in jail there. She never told the judge she had children. She was marched into a cell in an orange jump suit on his 14th birthday. Roscoe remembered his cousin Anne and how she took him in and tried to make a home for him. How she tried to give him a reasonable life. How he had hurt her when he went to jail for stealing a car a week before he turned 15.

“How are you Roscoe, how are you doing?” his Cousin appeared to him and asked. He knew this was some kind of construct.

“I am well, Cousin Ann,” Roscoe said. “I am a thief and currently living on another planet.”

Ann just stared at him the way she did when she just didn’t understand what he was thinking.

“I love you, Ann,” Roscoe said. “I’m sorry for the pain I caused you.”

Ann put her head in her hands and wept. Slowly she disappeared.

Not sure of what had just happened, Roscoe felt deeply grateful for the opportunity.

He felt the presence of another being. His chamber became transparent and lizard-fish being peered around looking for him. Roscoe could ‘see’ he was in a large cargo bay with literally thousands of containers and antigravity pods.

This fellow looked like Flipper. In the distance, he could hear a strange noise, what sounded like a muffled explosion.

The being made a sound. The Silerian was sending out an echo, to find anyone inside the box. Yes, the echo return felt there was something in the box. But this Silerian was drunk on MUzat and too confused to understand why he could not see anything inside the box. He walked off to where his co-workers had broken into another container.

The feeling Roscoe had was unmistakable. This is was a low-level jerk, and his associates in the cargo bay had discovered a weapon in the trash they picked up.

The Silerian slithered off, and Roscoe decided he needed a weapon. The irony of course was that apparently the deadliest weapon in the history of the universe was in his pocket.

Roscoe lay down and felt a new name for this condition he had. In his mind he knew it had a nickname, something that meant the Great Darkness. Appropriately named, one felt the sting of every memory, good and bad. In Roscoe’s case, his addiction to stealing caused far more pain than relief. For each thing he took, he felt the deep disappointment in his victims. The woman who could not phone in to her office and the job she consequently lost. The musician who found his Gibson DL six string guitar pilfered. The man who was beaten and robbed when he had to stay over in a low-rent hotel because that was all Roscoe left him with when he pinched his wallet. And of course, Ann.

Roscoe knew that back on Eridani Prime, the Silicoid Acting Proconsul and the Eridani Prime Minister were were having an emergency meeting and contemplating throwing the Krigs out of the Coalition. Roscoe’s new condition allowed for an epiphany, and the history of the giant insect race was apparent in a flash. The Krigs had recently come upon high technology and they used it to expand their own hegemony over a group of beings that appeared in Roscoe’s minds eye to be giant sentient clouds. The Krigs defeated a common foe that jumped into the Coalition system Command arena and in doing so, won over the Coalition’s members.

However, the Krigs had long since worn out their welcome with their perfidy, corruption and power-grabbing. The Thief of 56th street agreed with the Silicoids and the Eridanis. The Krigs should not have this device.

* * *

After some time, Roscoe’s chamber arrived back inside his fishbowl, and there, outside the entryway, Krig drones were awaiting him with breathing devices. Roscoe felt something else with certainty. Praying Mantis Man was on the way. Now. When he returned, the drones were going to enter his chamber, search him for the device and let him suffocate as his artificial atmosphere leaked out.

The weapon Roscoe had stolen looked like a long metal rod. Recessed into the handle, built for something other than a human being, was a single button.

Like a Macintosh, it was point and click.

Jelly Man suddenly appeared, but this time inside the fishbowl, next to Roscoe.

“You are a recording, aren’t you?” Roscoe said.

“Yes. I see that you have the device and I am guessing that you will not give this weapon to the Krigs.” The growing Silicoid looked just like Jelly Man.

“You look none the worse for wear, Jelly Man.”

“Our high speed processors concluded that there was a large chance that the Krigs were going to destroy me. So I prepared this simulacrum to help you in case your mission succeeded. I am also prepared to give you your wish as long as you do not allow the Krigs — or anyone else for that matter — to have the Phase Shift Device.”

Roscoe was silent.

“The Krigs are coming to kill you now, Roscoe. Do what you know you have to do, and when the moment is right, look in the drawer by your bed.”

The Silicoid disappeared and Praying Mantis Man appeared.

The long story made short is this: the drones entered the Fishbowl when Praying Mantis Man showed up. Roscoe sent a wave of highly charged ions across his chamber that stopped the drones in their tracks. As they hit the floor, Praying Mantis Man went nuts and lurched through the fishbowl hole and over Roscoe.

Too late.

Roscoe second shot sent the Krig Proconsul wherever it is that Krigs go when they die.

As the last moments of breathable air leaked out, Roscoe reached into the drawer and touched the Quantum Jump Device.

Still entangled with objects in his apartment, Roscoe appeared back in the bathroom of his old digs on 56th Street.

It had apparently been rented out to someone else who had long since cleaned it.

No one was home. It was 3:30 PM, and many years had passed since he left.

Roscoe breathed deeply into his lungs the strange air of Earth. He pulled off his breather, and looked around the empty apartment for something to wear outside.

* * *

Roscoe used his Phase Shift device to enter a vault at the 41st Street New York Credit Union and removed about 10 million dollars in cash and placed it into a bag. He rented a flat and waited three weeks to receive a new driver’s license. He bought a used 500 SL Benz and drove until the tank had emptied three times.

At Bear Lake, Canada, 16 hours later, he felt his sight coming back, and the new condition receding. In a hotel room with a bagful of clothes and supplies he had picked up on the way, he lay in bed, sick as a dog. Heroine sick. Withdrawal sick. High fever sick. He lost 25 pounds in three days and stayed in the hotel recovering on room service and HBO.

Eventually everything returned. And Jelly man had indeed given Roscoe back everything he promised. Roscoe went online and could fine absolutely no record of himself anywhere. He had never existed. This was a completely new start.

Back on the other side of the galaxy, the Krigs went to war with the Silicoids but didn’t stand a chance. Proconsul Car Tarsus Tha had Roscoe cloned and reloaded and catalogued.

The original Roscoe bought a bar in Bear Lake, Manitoba. One night he saw someone had left a PDA. He picked it up. Put it in his apron, and left it in a box on the counter: his first lost and found. That night the owner of the PDA called and thanked Roscoe for holding it. With his high technology devices hidden away, he passed most of his last drunk, feverish, demented days in a cold winter cabin on Iroquois Street, with his odd memories and strange stories that he blurted out in fits in front of customers.

At an old age, he wasn’t sure, he packed a bottle of Canadian Mist and drove to Albany, New York, to put roses on the gravestone of his Cousin Ann.