Terminal Two: Eighth Episode - Executions Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Delphine Twelve had an old poster tacked to the observation booth wall, sun-blanched and striated with white crease-lines. On it, an onyx-haired woman in a heavy dress of cherry-red taffeta sat astride a water buffalo, bunched material riding up to expose a pair of black leather fuck-me boots equipped with spurs, and pallid, muscular thighs covered in curlicued bramble tattoos. Behind her, lightning forked a sky of crepuscular blue, while the movie's title, OH CAN'T I?, hung above her head in portentous 3D block caps. The bottom of the poster was autographed in a flowing, calligraphic hand: To Delphine Twelve, the myth of mortal redemption got its hymen busted aeons ago, so why bother being nice? Love Bowyer x x x (not 'Miss Bowyer' or 'Bowyer something', it is just 'Bowyer')

In the playroom, the Truce Kewpie stopped firing.

'Bugger me backwards,' Delphine huffed with neither surprise nor enthusiasm. She leant in towards the mike and pressed the red speak button. 'Next.'

As she watched through the one-way mirror, a three-strong clean-up team entered the playroom disguised as a teddy, a button-eyed ragdoll, and some kind of plush hotdog. The entertainer's corpse lay amongst a rubble of alphabet blocks, smoke curling from cauterised laser wounds. While teddy and hotdog carried the warm carcass from the room, ragdoll obscured the baby's line of sight with a frenetic display of slapstick body-popping. Its lasers on recharge, the Truce Kewpie seemed temporarily placid, voice box intoning: Goo¦ Goo¦ Goo¦

With a final woozy pirouette the ragdoll turned and sprinted for the doorway in the far corner of the room. It leapt through and a steel hatch dropped shut with a clang.

Scowling, Delphine tipped her head back and slugged a can of Dr Goizueta's Aspartamatastic Contempo-Soda in a single, guzzling hit. She clanked the empty back down against the switch-riddled control deck, teeth twinking with bright dots of intraphase static. The day had brought the standard rabble of boggle-eyed incompetents stumbling into the playroom ' a timepiece juggler who swore incessantly as he used gravity mitts to make a cuckoo clock, pocket watch, hourglass and dwarf sundial chase one another in chronometrically perfect parabolas; Trip Hazard, the dumb mnemonist, who sketched mundane incidents from his childhood in painstaking detail, 'his accuracy tempered only by artistic ineptitude and a propensity for fanciful confabulation' according to the publicity spiel ('A cruel abuse of the audience's trust' read the Maranaloka Gazette pull-quote; 'This show¦ is¦ in no way¦ dire beyond human comprehension' raved the Tribune); a large, shiny marrow, which, after being rolled in by its owner, did nothing; Lord Zephyr, 'Ancient Summoner of Wind', in fact an elderly tramp with flatulence; the homicidal choral stylings of the Froo-Froo Sisters, who lunged at each other with huge studded maces whilst singing showtunes; and the Great Pretendo, a caped conjuror who simply sat and wept into a black top hat, his greatest feats of legerdemain utterly worthless in a city where anyone with a little legal training could materialise mighty serpentine dragons from the nearest public convenience. None of them lasted more than five minutes before the Truce Kewpie's steady electronic gurgles of contentment turned to displeasure and lasers blasted from its eye-cupolas.

As always, one or two surprise successes had emerged from the welter of abject failures, like emerald shards gleaming in a cowpat. Armed with an antique sabre, Sally Ambulance had a good innings fending off a quintet of aggressive bagpipe homunculi, their tartan guts keening each time the mesmeric choreography of her feint-balestra-parry-riposte combo resulted in a successful strike. In a rare show of clemency, Delphine had recalled the perspiration-soaked fencer when, after goo-goo-gooing through half an hour of ferocious swordplay, the baby showed signs of restlessness. Congratulating Sally on a sterling performance, Delphine had slipped her a chit for a private Ministerial audience later that evening, heart chambers dancing an anticipatory lust-rumba. The other shock hit had been Corpsy the Silent Cadaver, in actuality a hastily rebranded Trip Hazard, laser-holes plugged with modelling putty and a pair of comedy oversized shades nailgunned to his skull. Indeed, Delphine would have left him in the playroom all afternoon had his agent not insisted upon having him returned, citing a sudden surge in bookings since Trip's 'recent shift in focus'.

Delphine gavelled the speak button with her soda can and hollered into the mike. 'I said next!'

Along with the Slow Bomb, the Truce Kewpie was a humiliating legacy of the Distraction Wars. Started during a particularly dull autumn, the war with the Chorizo was originally conceived as an antidote to rising existential indifference amongst the Maranaloka citizenry. Authorities hoped that by introducing a fictional external threat they might provide enough of a draw to stop people noticing life's essential crappiness, and, for a time, the ruse worked, hapless drudges drafted in to construct and operate ranks of gargantuan roof-mounted cannon while pamphleteers stalked the streets, crowing baleful warnings about the 'hidden' enemy, insisting the Chorizo had never been seen or previously heard of because they were 'sly'. Burly ordnance launched ever-increasing payloads at everything beyond the city limits; night-time became an interminable party of glib pyrotechnics and teeth-jarring aftershocks. Solicitors, PsiMages, Outer Circle exiles and entities from all over Underspace collaborated with Government engineers to design bigger, more lethal warheads. Supplemental fripperies like psionic shielding and dayglo fins soon gave way to necrokenetic enhancers, Crisis Wells, moodmod augmentation and intraphase splash-damage. Side effects from the fizzing cocktail of untested technologies were rife, and as the missiles grew larger, so did the consequences of malfunction. Undeterred by cheesy winds, areas of land where the ground gave underfoot like a trampoline skin, eerie music and a new breed of vicious, triple-headed panther, the largest of Maranaloka's War Labs fused a Karma Wheel to a rocket housing fifty leathery-winged fiends, and launched it at an indistinct blotch some twenty miles east of the city, having been informed by Military Intelligence that the amorphous coagulation was definitely a major Chorizo stronghold.

The Karma Wheel activated on impact, gashing a rift to one of the Law Realms; fiends were dragged screeching through the fissure, popping like soap bubbles as the vagaries of Samsaric Physics condemned each to hyper-entropy. Weeks later, the rift was still there. Governmental observers grew nervous.

Six weeks and a day after the rift had opened, things began to come out.

No one was sure what they were at first. Vaguely humanoid, they were difficult to look at ' light seemed to slough off them. Military Commanders ordered the shelling cease so they could get a clear view sans dust clouds and etheric debris; around the opening, numbers increased.

City Hall sent out an armed deputation to 'investigate'. All Thirteen Ministers watched through binoculars as two-dozen crack Peace troops toting carousel-guns marched to within a mile of the intraphase fissure then snapped like crispbreads, apparently without provocation. After a frantic bout of sweaty-palmed debate, it was decided to recommence shelling, with all roof-cannon aimed directly at the rift. Polychromatic explosions rocked the eastern wastes as official broadcasts called for 'a final push against our common foe' and 'unity in the face of inconvenience', the populace rallying behind the easy melodies of uplifting jingoistic doggerel such as booze den standard 'Fuck The Ritz':

Come on lads, let's slay Chorizo!
Blow those sons of whores to bits! Oh,
Mindless hate gives them the shits so
Come on lads, let's slay Chorizo!

Ministers' fears briefly morphed into suspicions of an elaborate media prank when an old one-hundred-and-three point treatise entitled 'KNOW THY ENEMY' ' dreamt up during the brief intermissions of lucidity that punctuated a Council 'team building week' spent binging on Principality Dust ' began to be proven factually correct in every bizarre aspect. Terror-raddled survivors of abortive troop actions confirmed that the Chorizo could indeed 'fold air as if it were paper and then throw it causing delusion and injury', that yes, they were able to 'stare at you with a look that implies they know exactly what you're about to say, thus robbing you of the courage necessary to say it', and that, just as Government propaganda had warned, they could also 'manipulate time', 'shrink or grow at will', 'run faster than a dog but slower than a car', 'make you feel suddenly hungry', 'allude to popular literature through a single gesture', 'induce eczema', and 'perform ballads of such wondrous beauty as to make you question your most cherished values, including ' but not limited to ' the importance of good furniture'. As the death toll mounted and wobble-bellied Maranaloka TV execs protested that they knew nothing of a hoax, it became apparent that the once-imaginary Chorizo were now very real and, moreover, they were winning.

Faced with an impossible realisation, Governmental departments fell upon their own in an orgy of paranoid bloodletting. Who was the anonymous editor responsible for amendments to the first denouncement of the Chorizo? Who had stuffed the Ministerial Suggestion Box with one hundred slips that read: 'The Chorizo have tiny plastic pipes which they use to smell our dreams'? Internal investigations escalated to purges in a matter of hours, the enculturated, obvious corruption of City Hall now apparently a front for something far more intricate, a conspiracy within a conspiracy. Canny self-appointed Inquisitors turned offices into interrogation rooms and, through a series of confessions extracted under torture, discovered that some eighty percent of City Hall staff were members of the nefarious 'Onion League' ' a group committed to overthrowing the Government and installing themselves as leaders, a group feigning self-interest in a bid to conceal self-interest, a group who, through a multitude of indirect feints and ruses, had introduced the idea of the fake war against a hitherto unknown enemy called the Chorizo as cover for a genuine assault planned by a hitherto unknown enemy called the Chorizo who they, the Onion League, were in cahoots with. What, after all, could be harder to fight than an enemy you don't believe in? Backed up with sworn affidavits from a host of alleged conspirators, the Inquisitors' nascent theory might have gained currency if the Council of Thirteen had been able to understand it.

As it was, the Onion Conspiracy was quickly superseded by the Propagandistic Determinacy Hypothesis; the brainchild of a truculent clerk, it held that just as exposure to Samsaric Physics had delivered the fifty fiends to their rightful judgement, so too was leakage from the Law Realms gifting Maranaloka its just desserts ' in short, the city's lies were coming true.

Jolted into unity, horrified civil servants began poring over three years of obscure anti-Chorizo literature in an attempt to understand the foe they had created. Increasingly hysterical exchanges between Ministers, Intelligence workers, and Military top-brass culminated in a total ban on all inter- and intra-departmental memoranda, when an intern wondered out loud if their discussions on the nigh-invincible nature of the Chorizo might be literally emboldening their enemy. With communications hamstrung, the war effort crumbled, the Military reduced to gaggles of oddly-attired men with poor impulse control and an abundance of lethal hardware. A week later, the Government surrendered.

As it transpired, the Chorizo were quite amenable to a ceasefire. Though their 'perpetual state of semi-camoflage' and 'discomfiting bovine musk' complicated negotiations, a treaty was soon hammered out ' the Disgrace Accord, as it became known. In return for the Chorizo promising to spare Maranaloka from their 'lightning breath' and 'propensity to make withering remarks', the Government had to agree to a few demonstrations of good faith, namely: assisting in the erection of a citywide LawNet that would render all cannon, rifles, rocket-launchers, guns and pistols inoperable; erecting a plaque extolling the great mercy of the conquering Chorizo; installing close circuit cameras in every room of City Hall and allowing round-the-clock coverage to be broadcast across the city's TV networks; and accepting custody of a large simulated baby.

Just like a real child, the Chorizo explained, the Truce Kewpie needed constant entertaining or it was liable to throw a tantrum. The Government's ability to care for the baby in perpetuity was a direct indication of its commitment to ethical, compassionate leadership ' after all, if City Hall could not attend to the needs of a single artificial child, what right did it have acting as moral steward for an entire populace? Continuation of the ceasefire would be dependent on the Truce Kewpie's ongoing contentment.

With a fragile peace brokered, the Chorizo retreated into obscurity, cautioning authorities that they would return should any of the Accord's conditions be violated. That had been fifteen years ago, and still the Thirteen found themselves bound by its strictures.

Delphine Twelve stabbed the speak button a third time. 'For the love of Jenkins! NEXT!'