Buy or Die. There cometh a time of ruthless advertising

The procedure has not a single side effect.

There was not a single complaint over the last two years.

The thank-you list has just moved to the eighth volume.

A twofold increase in quality of living was officially registered as the poorest outcome of the correction.

The correction covers the widest range of mental deficiencies including all existing fears, phobias, imaginary and real flaws, complexes, blocks and syndromes.

There is an individual approach to each client and any extra changes at the request of a client.

And last but not the least, there is a complete preliminary scan and back up of a personality with a guaranteed possibility to immediately roll back any changes upon request.”

All this sounded extremely convincing, but for some reason did not convince. When he was leaving the room with the firm intention never return here again, Y suddenly stopped and asked:

“As a psychologist, do you think, will science ever learn to return a child-like perception of the world to a grown man? Well, you see, I mean…”

“One hundred thirty-nine,” the consultant responded absently without lifting his eyes from the form he was filling out.

“Excuse me, what?” Y asked, carefully closing the door.

“One hundred and thirty-ninth item on the official list of approved corrections.”

“You are kidding!” Y blurted.

“Why?” the consultant answered wearily. “It’s very simple. All that is needed is to remove most influential negative memories and to clean out all ruined hopes. Well, plus a few trifling operations like refreshing the memory, stimulating the retina and, of course, restoring potency…”

He looked mockingly at Y.

“Don’t forget. One hundred thirty-nine.”

“I will not.” Y nodded. “Goodbye, then.”

Chapter 7 | Day Watch

The start of the watch was awful today. Z’s head was aching badly from the stink in Toy’s cabin, a phantom pain was throbbing at the spot of the torn away ear, a dead cook was staring into the back of Z’s head intently from the backseat, and the day was still dragging unbearably slow towards noon.

The morning exposure also had left its mark on Z’s head. The scraps of advertising slogans and phrases hammered into it by salesbirds circled his thoughts, meaningless. Z listened… Something unintelligible about some washing powder… Then a couple of beer brands, several unknown addresses, some phone numbers and a heap of numbers without any meaning or correlation. Ah, and an irresistible aversion to any shoes other than “Mike’.

Z clenched his teeth and with difficulty suppressed the desire to immediately throw off his shoes. Ideally, after such a shake-up, one should have lain in bed for a week, alternating between sessions of massage, psychotherapy and hypnosis.

He was not about to complain, and he knew it. He was the man who managed escape punishment for a crime in the very center of the city. A miraculous escape, to be sure. Ideally, he should have gone and lit a candle to some god. Unfortunately, he had no idea where gods live and where in the city candles are sold; and what good those gods would get from those candles. Moreover, he felt neither happy nor even lucky. On the contrary, he felt tired, sick, old and useless. He was trying in vain to convince himself that everything was wonderful in his life. Everything was disgusting. His head ached, his ear ached, and red skinny cats were playing volleyball with his heart, scratching it with their clawed paws.

***

Toy, who had nothing to ache but his wounded pride, rolled slowly along the sidewalk, and the last flecks of autumn sunlight were joyfully jumping along the grey curves of his powerful varnished body. One of them, having stumbled, landed right into Z’s eye and exploded there with a flash of blinding light that plunged the retina into darkness for a long time. Blinking hard, Z smiled and suddenly felt happy. After all, even with a single ear, he was alive; even with the little money he had, he still had it. He also had autumn, sunlight and the city outside the car window, and somewhere there, just a few blocks away, there was Ness, terribly occupied with something important as always; and in the evening, they both would return home and… Dammit, what else could he wish for?

He also had a job that he loved. The same job his father had, who defended the city from people stealing time, and the father of his father, who protected citizens from people stealing money, and the father of his father’s father, who guarded the country against people stealing land, and so on and so on, down to the very roots of his family tree. The work that would pass to his son and then to son’s son and so on and so on, up to the most distant branches, which he could not even imagine now.

“I am a happy man,” he told to himself. “Few have a job that is both useful and enjoyable at the same time.”

He smiled, looking at the city, which, locked behind Toy’s magic windows, buzzed busily but noiselessly, and frowned, having suddenly realized that something was moving next to Toy, and had been there for a while now. Z leaned forward and took a closer look.

Sure enough, there they were: omnipresent, annoying, tenacious and ineradicable like flies, the twins Mac and Donald with their self-propelled stall. Z shook his head. The twins, of course, did not violate the law and hardly would be able to do that with their tiny IQ, but even their chicken brains should have known better than molesting an Undo officer at work. However, fools are lucky, and the twins were lucky today too. Five minutes earlier Z without hesitation would have turned their clunker into a cloud of hamburgers, ketchup and gears with one shot of Purifier. Now he simply put on his protection, lowered Toy’s window and, having beckoned to the twins, ordered a coffee and some doughnuts.