Monsters of the Week

Together With Qubi - [1] -

Ralph came in grinning and waving a package. This was a bad sign. Seriously, I couldn't remember five times he'd been smiling like that and it was a good thing, mostly involving winning some stupid bet off those nerds in Forensics. And zero of those times had involved a package. He waved it again, looking right at me. Hooray.

"It's here," he said, like this was supposed to mean something, grinning from ear to ear, thick bands of packing tape crackling.

"Awesome," I replied, still looking at the cat video on the desk calendar. "So what gross thing did you buy on GotTech this time, or are you going to make me guess?" Ralph dropped into his seat with a thump, and flicked open his boxcutter off his webbing.

"This, Andi, is the future of pets." The smile was NOT helping.

"I hope to hell it's different from that 'future of kimchi' thing you bought last month."

He smiled wider as he cut the tape open. "Maybe not so much."

"Awesome, enjoy your self-digesting cabbage chia pet. Somewhere outside my workspace and on your side of the apartment."

He frowned. "Come on, I thought you'd like this. Don't you have all those old Dragon Quest posters on your side?"

"I'm not following."

"Voila!" He lifted a thin circle of plastic free of the box, something weird inside it refracting the light. "The latest-model built-in sub-sapient artificial-intelligence bio-CPU!"

"So you need to shove it in the cabbage yourself?"

"Jello, actually."

I headdesked. "I KNEW to fuck there had to be some stupid reason for there to be those two blocks of plain jello curing in the fridge. Would I have got poisoned eating that shit?"

"Probably not." Bonk, bonk, bonk, against the blotter.

"We're going home now, right? To watch you build your dumbass slime pet?"

"Shift's over, so..."

"Fine. Fine. Just keep it out of my shit, ok?"

"Don't worry, it'll be fine."

"I'd worry less if you hadn't said that exact same thing about the cornedbeefadon, and about the self-waxing countertop, and the bug-eating windshield, and that plug-in robot maid, and..." Ralph had his stuff picked up and his coat on already, and I hadn't even gotten started on half of the stupid disgusting shit he kept wasting his pay on.

Ralph was a brilliant detective, way better than someone like me who'd worked her way out of a squad car just by not giving up. He would completely tear it up in private practice if he could get someone to feed him cases, but he wouldn't go out and get his own work because he was a complete gonzo biotech otaku freakazoid who couldn't keep his wallet closed, so he had to split an apartment with his partner just to keep a friggin roof over his head. An apartment that he kept shorting his half of the rent on, and filling with weird semi-alive garbage.

It started with Ralph clunking the two bricks of jello out onto a sheet of baking paper on our kitchen table. Because this was super the same thing as a biological cleanroom. He took the plastic disk out of the phone pocket on his webbing, and opened the lid. He brought it down to one of the bricks, then carefully tipped it over. He tapped on the back of the case to knock the agar or whatever free of the plastic, then slowly lifted it up, leaving the biogel with the CPU and whatever in it on the jello brick. Then he just picked up the other brick and lumped it on top.