Susie in the Crossroads

Doctor Susan Mahler got off her armored cruiser to the long-waited silence of her special place. It was hard to tell the last time she had been to Igreja de Santo Antônio — it surely wasn’t in the last months. Too busy unfucking the yarn ball of all her patents.
Keeping track of time was also a chore in her age, but that had less to do with being old than the fact that time tended to lose meaning the more of it you had. It always gave her a fleeting sensation that something was out of place. Like now.
She dismissed the thought as she sat on a park bench with view to the church. In another bench nearby, some guy played with a visibly synthetic dog (terrible fur, not one of her products). Maybe that’s what she needed, she thought. The SynPup, not the guy. She lacked the necessary parts to play that way.
On the other view side stood an ice-cream man; his cart playing a jingle fitting for that dying afternoon. Things you didn’t see very often those days: ice-cream, an afternoon in the outdoors, real freaking animals.
She tipped her head with a reflex smile as a gang of eager kids flocked around the ice-cream fellow, all arms stretched for popsicles.
Messages and e-mail alerts in front of her eyes suddenly threatened her peace. She blocked the pop-ups with a rapid head movement, and got a book from her purse. The printed version of a Rembrandt in the cover made her chuckle every time.
The ice-cream cart approached with a dragging of wheels, the kids’ thirst well satisfied. It stopped uncomfortably close.
“One for the lady?”, said the ice-cream man. “It is a hellish weather, is it not?”
She declined with a hand wave and threw a faint smile his direction. Then, she lowered her head back to the book, and right back up again when the person would not move.
“Is there a problem, s-“, she said, and at that moment realized who was that person standing in front of her. Or, rather, what it was.
“I would never have guessed you were a fan of Goethe, doctor. Or maybe you have finally embraced the irony of our situation”, the ice-cream man leaned towards her as if trying to get a better look. “Faust? Please…”
Susan sighed.
“What do you want now, Lucifer?”
“Oh, you know, a cold drink to go with my perfect little corner of Hell, in a nice beach, surrounded by my most materially appeasing servants. And, yes, I mean the hot and sexy ones. So, I guess not much”, he sat beside her, legs crossed, casually looking around. He turned to her. “Ah… and my end of our little agreement. It is, after all, long overdue.”
Susan pursed her lips. A digital contract popped up in her view and she started reciting the first paragraph.
“The present instrument, composed in the 28th of February in the year 2019, binds the contractee, Lucifer of the Eternals, to the contractor, Susan Mahler of the Children, until the death of the contractor, in which eventuality the soul of the contractor will become property of…”
“It is very noble of you to remind me of those terms, doctor, but I know that contract through and through,” Lucifer tried to catch whatever it was Susan was looking at. “It was produced by myself in the accursed ditches, with the blood of those who took advantage of the disadvantaged. Really bad place for your natural skin oils, if I may…”
“In this case,” she flipped the contract out of view, “I really don’t know why you came. As you can see, I’m not dead.”
Lucifer scoffed and smiled. “And you haven’t been for the past two hundred years now, have you, dear? That’s a plentiful life you’ve lived. I agreed to fund your every research until the day you perished, and, oh boy, have you turned that on itself. I must say, I was caught utterly off guard when you managed to solve that whole biological aging conundrum. And I’m the bloody Devil!”
“I appreciate the flattery, Lou, but…”
“Are you desperate, doctor? You look desperate,” Lucifer faced the church’s entrance — a simple and hardly noticeable 600-year-old early colonial architecture dedicated to Saint Anthony, hidden underneath the systematic mess of Supertrees and interconnected towers of São Paulo.
Susan grunted and touched her temples. “Not as desperate as the day you found me. Look, if you’re here to torment me over the lawsuits, that’s not going to work. It’s a reach-around that has never gotten close to a trial, and it certainly won’t now. Everyone believes I’ve got the Devil on my side. Heh.”
“It definitely doesn’t hurt to have. But the Devil’s coin can only help you so much, and you’ve managed to piss off, what, every single one of your partners now? The proverbial clock’s ticking.”
“That’s one over wound clock, Lou. Now, if you excuse me, I’ve had a non-proverbial shitty day,” Susan opened the book and activated her auditive blocks with a slight jaw movement.
Susan had to admit, she was surprised when she found out how hard it was to anger Lucifer. The available media “coverage” on the lord of the damned — mostly old movies and theater plays — did not give him due credit.
The fallen angel held his smile patiently as the woman’s eyes scanned with unnatural speed the words on the book.
The voice came from within her augmented mind.
“This is the day, doctor. I am done waiting.”
Susan raised her head, eyes in a squint.
“You know that I know you can’t kill me, right?”
“Certainly, dear,” Lucifer stood up and walked backwards, away from her. “But he can.”
Susan could barely feel the muzzle’s cold metal that touched the back of her neck.
“This is for stealing from us, you ungrateful bitch,” the muffled words came from behind in a whisper.
Two silenced shots that penetrated the upper chest, one traveling down the spine, the other down larynx and lungs — stopping at the heart, — as the world became a faulty merry-go-round. Susan fell on the ground without taking a glance at her killer. The biofunctionality alerts were going haywire in front of her eyes, all blinking red.
She didn’t feel a thing. Susan made sure her pain centers were one of the first things to go when she made their removal possible.
The bleeding-profusely-all-over-the-ground problem, on the other hand, was still very present.
“I mean, someone was bound to take matters into their own hands,” Lucifer walked and stood towering over her body, like a jolly sleep paralysis vision. “All those wonderful, creative people you forgot to give credit for, as you gobbled up Nobel Prizes.”
“T… t… t…”
Lucifer turned an ear as if trying to make out the words. “What’s that? Oh, yes. Patent trolls. What good is it to have great ideas, when they couldn’t possibly begin to execute them? Ocular implants, subcutaneous hormone regulators, electronic sensation nano-blockers and enhancers. Bloody robo-animals that can speak and tell a joke! Incredible stuff!”
“I… made them… possible…”
“That you did, doctor. That you did,” Lucifer took a pocket watch from his caqui pants. He opened it and checked the time, his other hand stretched over doctor Susan’s body as if waiting to catch something. “And here we… go.”
From Susan’s point of view, the digital alerts that measured her plummeting oxygen levels, blood pressure, and brain activity disappeared. Only one indicator remained, and it showed an upload bar quickly rising to one hundred percent.
“You can run, you can run,” Lucifer sang, as the light from Susan’s dying body was siphoned into his open palm. “Tell my friend Willie Brown. You can… what in the…?”
The hard light escaped his grasp in the last moment, leaving only a derisive puff of which Lucifer failed to get a hold.
“What? Where did it go?!” Lucifer whined at the doctor’s stiff body. He looked up, grunting while he searched the skies for clues of a vanished soul. This fucking woman, he thought.
And then vanished himself, as a patrol drone came to investigate the murder.
* * *
The lights in doctor Susan’s laboratory flicked, like eyes dazzled by a bright flash.
But the flash was pure darkness, and it flooded the ascetic corners and heavy equipment, followed by a contained tremor that made Petri dishes and test tubes clink against each other.
It was not easy to anger the lord of the damned, Susan rationalized in the moment she heard the intruder sensors go off. But if she had a bladder and pants right now, one would be empty, the other would be soaked.
“Of course,” the peevish yet computed voice strewed in an echo as the black figure appeared on all the lab’s cameras. “Another atrocity.”
“I thought you’d like it, you being the Devil and all,” Susan’s voice came from speakers along the walls. “Besides, you’re the one who paid for this neural build isolating-integrity phylactery.”
“Oh, so it’s got a nice Hebrew reference to go along with the techno babble. Where are you, Susie, my dear?”
“I’m right here.”
A loud thud, followed by a hum of pumps functioning, made Lucifer look up to where a large, egg-shaped chamber stuck out of the ceiling. On a side of the chamber, circular blades made of a type of thin and flexible mesh started deforming outwards, as if something heavy pushed against the fabric.
An arm suddenly appeared out of the blades, and another one, and then a perfectly plain and shaved head that bore an uncanny resemblance of doctor Susan Mahler.
When the whole torso freed itself from the chamber, the moist body’s weight was enough to pull out the legs and fall into a vat of a viscous, transparent liquid.
Seconds later, doctor Susan emerged and propped herself against the vat’s edge, coughing and wheezing, throwing up the liquid. She seemed to be in a world of pain.
Lucifer gave a slow clap.
“Bravo, doctor!” he said with a whistle. “You’ve been shat by a giant metal ass. Now, that’s a feat for the annals, pun not intended.”
Susan coughed a couple more times and shook her head. She opened her eyes slowly. For all intents and purposes, she was seeing the light for the first time.
She tried to speak, but the muscles hardly obeyed. It was more difficult than she had thought.
“Baby steps, is it?” Lucifer mocked.
“Damn it.”
“I’m sure those are the first things to cross the mind of every newborn baby.”
“Oh, shut up. God, it hurts like a son of a…” Susan stepped out of the pool, one inch at a time. She used a pair of handrails to hoist herself up from the slippery floor, carefully planting her feet on the ground.
Lucifer studied Susan’s naked body. “You’re looking fine, madame, but I don’t think the man upstairs would approve of any of this.”
“I bet…” Susan swallowed hard and took deep breaths. She shakenly walked to a closet, mumbling words under her heavy breathing.
“I’ve never taken you for a mouth breather, dear. You will have to speak up.”
“I said… how does it feel… to be beaten again?”
“Hmm” Susan saw Lucifer crook his mouth into a look of utter annoyance. He was still not angry, however. That, in turn, almost annoyed her. “Stings a bit and it’s getting old, but you don’t have to be a dick about it. So, tell me. How long do you plan to keep going with this?”
Susan was almost done buttoning her shirt with the help of a mechanical assistant, when she turned to face the beast.
“Until the heat death of the fucking universe.”