The Fly-In Cafe

The Fly-In Cafe ("open 24 hours, 7 days a week!") inhabits the hundred and fiftieth floor of the Municipal Building of New France. There is only one entrance: a hole in the side of the wall.

A simple platform extends over the sheer drop, but Dano Hardy ignores this and plows straight through the entrance to skid across the floor, bowling into chairs and tables and patron legs as he goes.

“Do you think you can hide in there?!” screams a voice from outside: Espa, her yellow eyes darkened with rage, hovers just outside. Her midnight blue hair seems to snap with anger.

“Come on, love,” Dano pleads. “It was an accident. Don’t make a scene now, we’re in public you know!”

The diner patrons that aren’t now heaped around Dano in a spidery tangle watch with interest.

Espa, her jet-boots glowing rosy-hot in the westering light, considers entering the cafe and sliding a stiletto through one of Dano’s lovely green eyeballs. Instead she mouths a hardly-veiled threat and whirls away, ostensibly to go cool down at some chic bar with too many muscled barmen and strobe lights that could knock out a donkey.

Dano struggles to extricate himself from the tangle of limbs around him amid groans and curses.

“What the hell was that?” asks a voice. Dano looks up, his left leg caught beneath a particularly large specimen, and his face immediately spreads into an innocent grin.

“Oh, botender! I’ll have a scotch on the rocks. And some of your beignets, if you will.”

The botender puts her metal hands on her metal hips and blinks her metal eyes at Dano.

“At your service,” she says snidely. “Unfortunately, Monsieur Hardy, that means I must exact payment now.”

“Just put it on my tab, will you?” Dano says, struggling to keep a smile on his face. He finally manages to pull his leg out from under the pile of toppled customers with a colossal straining grunt, the tendons standing out on his neck.

The men and women that had been bowling-pinned by Dano’s entrance stagger off, looking slightly confused, but with no injuries that a steady drink can’t fix.

The botender crosses her arms and tosses her wheat-blonde hair over a silvery shoulder.

“Dano Hardy, I find that you are behind on your tab payments by one week! Do you want to drink me out of house and home? No! You will pay now, and that’s that!”

She made to stalk back behind the bar, but Dano jumped up and followed behind her.

“Wait, wait!”

She spun to face him, her eyes showing as much annoyance as an android could show.

Dano grinned his most charming grin.

“Please, my beautiful mademoiselle. I get paid tonight. That’s why I’m here! I’m meeting a… friend.” He winks, as if everyone there didn’t already know that he made his money selling high-quality drugs to cyborgs and meatheads.

“So, of course, they cannot find me so penniless that I cannot even afford one tiny little croissant…”

When the botender showed no signs of melting, he raked a hand through his bronze curls and took one of her hands in his other.

“I swear to you,” he says, and even an android would say that there was no hint of a lie in his face. “I will pay the entirety of my tab tonight, plus a very generous tip.”

The botender hesitated, though her face didn’t look any less suspicious.

“And I’ll take you boot-dancing,” Dano adds quickly. “You know I’m the best jet-boot dancer in the country. No man can match my in-flight tango.”

He says this only half-jokingly; Dano is arrogant, but there’s also some truth to his words, and the botender knows it.

“Oh, fine!” she snaps, and whirls away to catch up on making all the drinks she’s missed thanks to Dano’s antics.

Dano nods in a self-congratulatory way and heads to his customary table, one set in a dark corner in view of the entrance.

Another bot, a less sophisticated model than the botender, deposits his scotch and beignets, along with a tiny tureen of his favorite vanilla-coffine ice cream.

A present. He knew the botender had a thing for him.

He doesn’t even have time to take a single sip of his scotch before his customer alights on the platform outside.

Anyone would know that this man is a juicer. He’s enormous, cords of muscle wrapping around his bones like thick snakes. Tattoos spatter along his arms and his hair is short, with patterns carved into it - into his scalp, actually. And of course, his right arm ends at the elbow, to continue as wicked-looking blue metal, his fingers ending in spiked claws.

He finds Dano immediately and makes his way over, a sea of faces following him like sunflowers to the sun. He screams dangerous without saying a word. As he draws closer Dano notices that one of his eyes is bionic, but that’s probably just for show. Anyone could get a bionic eye in this day and age.

Dano smiles pleasantly and sets his cup back on the table with an audible thunk: the cafe had gone quiet as a herd of mice.

Is that what you call a lot of mice? A herd? Dano wonders, before extending a hand to shake with the cyborg. Conversation slowly returns to the cafe as the cyborg sits opposite Dano, ignoring the hand.

“Hello there,” Dano says. “The beignets here are legendary.”

“I prefer English muffins,” grunts the cyborg, the chair beneath him creaking in protest of his weight. They didn’t precisely need to have these code phrases, but it made Dano feel sneaky.

Dano nods subtly and pulls a carton of cigarettes from his pocket. He offers one to the cyborg, who only stares at Dano in response.

Dano shrugs and lights one for himself. Cigarettes had gone out of fashion years ago, only to be revitalized by a company that makes organic, “healthy” cigarettes with no adverse effects for those who like the action of smoking more than the black lungs. These are rose flavored.

“You have the juice?” the cyborg asks. Impatient. Dano notices he’s got a tiny tattoo of a chihuahua holding an ice cream cone on his forearm.

Dano smile and exhales the smoke through his teeth.

“Of course,” he says, and extracts the two battery-sized cases out of his pocket. Battery Acide. The new synthesized drug for cyborgs. An organic human could use it too, of course, if he wanted to burn from the inside out.

He places the two vials on the table; they glow dimly electric blue. He isn’t worried about anyone tattling; this place knows him for what he is. All of his deals are carried out here. Well, Espa might just be mad enough to want to see me behind bars, but she’s probably cooled down by now.

Dano holds out his wrist, a currency chip embedded in the skin.

“I’ll take payment in New Francs,” Dano says pleasantly.

The cyborg moves to swipe his wrist over Dano’s when something very, very bad happens.

A cage of pale purple lines appears around the diner. A force field. A law enforcement sanctioned force field. Their fellow diners make noises of surprise and dismay.

Dano glances sharply up at the cyborg. “Are you a cop?”

The cyborg looks just as concerned as Dano, though, and simply shakes his head.

“Dano Hardy,” a loud, tinny voice says from just outside the entrance platform. “You are hereby ordered to surrender your person and anything on your person. Place any weapons on the floor and approach the entrance with your hands on your head.”

He and the cyborg look at each other mutely.

“I can’t go to jail,” Dano blurts. “I’m too pretty to go to jail!” He stole that from some old movie, but it holds true in his eyes.

“King Electric,” the voice called, “You are hereby ordered to surrender your person and anything on your person. Place any weapons on the floor and approach the entrance with your hands on your head.”

“King Electric?” Dano says in disbelief as the cyborg stands. What kind of name is that? The cyborg - King Electric - glares down at Dano and Dano swallows and says, “Nice name, that. Lovely name. Very… unique.”

King snatches the vials of acide off the table.

“Wait a second, you haven’t paid for those yet!” Dano says desperately, but before he can stop the cyborg, both of the containers are upended into King’s open maw.

Dano’s heart plummets.

“Oh god oh god, what have you done? Are you suicidal?!” Dano shrieks; typically one drop of acide was enough to energize a cyborg for a few good hours.

But King just stands there, looking perfectly normal, as if he hadn’t just taken a few hundred doses of a dangerous drug.

Then he explodes.

Not literally, but it sure feels like it.

The force he gives off as the acide takes effect blows Dano back into the wall, throwing everyone around them away from King, who stands still and solid in the light now cracking out of his skin.

As if electricity itself was laced into his body.

Dano watches in horror and awe as King lights up the Diner with surges of power. He turns back to Dano.

“Run, little man,” he says, blue light eking out of his eyes and nose and mouth. Then he turns and stalks over to the entrance.

Dano hears the screams and gunshots as policemen see the hulking form of an electrified cyborg advance upon them. He takes his chance to scurry out from behind his table, his legs throbbing from his fall, and follows King to the platform. It’s the only way out.

King launches off the platform, his boots struggling to carry his weight. Dano notices with a detached sort of concern that the electricity pinging out of King is affecting his already strained jet boots.

Dano follows after him. He stands on the platform, watching King fly towards the police with bullets ricocheting off of his steel-enforced skin. A bullet thuds into the wall beside him.

A second bullet grazing his elbow gives him courage enough to tear his eyes away from King, and he jumps off the platform.

Then King really explodes. The electricity tears him apart like his skin is wrapping paper, the force from the explosion rocking the Fly-In Cafe and throwing its patrons to the floor.

I’m not going to jail, I’m not going to jail! Dano thinks fiercely. He would not let King’s sacrifice go in vain. He had let the speed of his fall pull him away from the cops; after falling a few hundred feet, he kicks at the engagement lever to start up his jet boots. They start with a flare and then stutter, gutter, and die.

Oh no, no, no no no, is what’s ripping through Dano’s mind as he watches the ground waft up to meet him.

He kicks at his boots again, and again. They don’t start.

He turns in the air to look up at the remnants of King and all of the law enforcement vehicles, chunks of metal following Dano down to the earth below.

And off in the distance, a woman with a swathe of midnight-blue hair. Espa, Dano thinks. So, she did follow through after all.

I guess that’s what I get for asking her to marry me.

And then - you’ll never believe what happened to old Dano Hardy, dance extraordinaire, purveyor of fine pharmaceuticals.

He fell, screaming, to the earth.

And he died.