ANOTHER INCREDIBLY COOL DAY

Cool Johnny Cool woke up. It was a sunny day.

He had a beautiful person on each side of the bed. They stirred fitfully, anxious to repeat the previous nights gymnastics. He wasn't in the mood so he quickly booted them out of bed.

Have to keep them disciplined, he thought as he listened to his former sex-slaves' plaintive cries echo down the hallway. Johnny drifted back to sleep.

When he awoke again the sun was glaring down at him through the slats of his venetian blinds and classical music was coming out of the radio alarm clock. Johnny opened the blinds and leaped out of bed.

It was a great day. A day for action, for being cool in all it's forms. He dressed rapidly, went into the kitchen and picked up the pot from the already perking automatic coffee machine he'd had installed.

He got together his breakfast tray (Coffee, single cream, bacon, eggs, toast and orange juice), and brought it into the living room, set it on the dining table next the picture window by the balcony. He opened the door and let a breeze of warm summer air in. Today was gonna be a good one.

As he devoured his breakfast Johnny heard an urgent news bulletin on the radio. He tried to ignore it. Something nasty, a psychopath had escaped from Legitimate County jail and was heading for the Scum-Ville area, a part of town Johnny remembered living in in his early twenties as a doley scrounger, before he'd discovered the secret of everlasting cool, and rocketed up to fame in the smart part of town on the sales of his book, " How to be a cool dude in20 days without really trying ".

Funny, the psycho's name sounded familiar too.

Sitting back, he pushed all unpleasant thoughts from his mind and concentrated on guzzling his morning coffee, luxuriating in the pleasant fumes, as they mingled with the rays of the rising sun to produce a pleasing visual effect. Life was sweet.

He put some music on the stack system, something cool and groovy of course, and went to the bathroom for his morning ablutions.

***

After washing his face, cleaning his teeth, shaving, applying Eau De Poseur, and cleaning his teeth again (to get them extra fresh), Johnny left his groovy apartment house on the 29th floor of Cooldude Towers and rode the elevator down to the garage.

He got in his car, an authentic '59 Cadillac, and backed it out before pressing the remote to close his garage door. He accelerated down the ramp, ready to head off for the beach.

He almost never went anywhere again. Tapping the brakes to slow down as he descended the off-ramp, Johnny found that they didn't work, fortunately he had the prescence of mind to change down into first and switch the ignition off. Even then, the car hit a concrete buttress and raised a nasty dent.

Badly shook up, Johnny dialled 999 and said to the operator: "Get me the police- someone's trying to kill me and I don't know why!"

***

"I'm sorry sir, but there are so many people who want to kill you, we wouldn't know where to start, so unless you can narrow it down a bit, there's nothing we can do."

That bastard. The stupid cops didn't even try to take any fingerprints. When he'd asked they just sneered. As if he, Johnny Cool, was a waste of police time!

He waited for the pigs to leave and got out his gun. He was going to have to look after himself.

***

With his .32 automatic in his holster Johnny felt much better. Now anyone who tried to kill him had a good chance of being killed first, which was the way it should be.

He would of course have to be extra careful. The unwise or hurried use of weapons is extremely foolish, and may bring about that very thing one seeks to avoid.

In other words, by drawing first, he would only be encouraging others to use theirs. But today his life was at stake.

He went out to get a paper, wondering what the hell was going on.

On the street outside Cooldude Towers, he saw a figure heading towards him; it was only "the Captain".

"The Captain" was a former wannabe-Housing Beurocrat who’d been knocked off with a hotshot of Datura-Scopolamine and LSD. He now wandered the streets with all the other derelicts, getting on people’s nerves.

He'd better not mess me around today, thought Johnny, 'cos I am a dangerous man. Even so, he scurried away, not wanting to attract attention in any way.

On the way back from the paper shop, someone prodded- him on the shoulder. He turned, and the other grabbed his right hand.

Foetid, foul breath wheezed into his face. The Captain breathed down his throat, not in a good mood.

"Now listen, pal..." he started saying in a condascending voice, sometimes you had to be firm with these poor old burn-outs...

The Captain’s hand darted down to Johnny's side, grabbed the gun out of it's holster and shoved it in his face. "Looking for this,asshole?" the bastard growled. It slowly dawned on Johnny. "You... You're... it... him... You're the murderer...!"

"Not yet!" the derelict grinned bleakly. "I know it was you who gave me that hot shot, now prepare to die."

"My brakes! The escaped psychopath....! IT'S YOU! HEEELP!"

"Hush, now, I ain't gonna hurt you... much, I just want to talk to you... heh heh heh heh.."

The Captain’s finger tightened on the trigger. The gun clicked and creaked as it started to fire....

*

Joe Partition woke up in his shitty council flat, on the 12th floor of the building next to the local sewage plant. He reached to the side of the bed and turned on the light, so drenched in sweat he nearly electrocuted himself. It was a damp, dark, rainy, shitty winter's morning. green- grey light shone pathetically in the sky, as if the individual photons were having a hard time just getting through the crap-soaked clouds.

"Another crappy day..." he muttered.

Another Hubrizine night. The highly addictive super-psychadelic drug had taken the city by storm. 40% of the population was strung out on the stuff, for the very good reason that in these days of world financial depression and ultra-violent nihilistic terrorism the population needed something to not only steady it's nerves, but also to get it so blitzed out of it's head they percieved a completely different reality, a reality of personal wealth, success, and "slack". (After all, the remaining 60% were wired to the new hyperreality computer constructs, apart from the police, of course. Well, some of them.)

When you were on Hubrizine you were still able to act, but your perceptions - and the perceptions of those around you- were violently altered. If the weather was bad, you thought it was goood, if you drove a Morris Marina you thought you had a Cadillac, if you had a bike it became a Harley-Davidson (even a pedal bike), and if you were shlepping away your miserable life on social security, you thought you were incredibly successful and independantly wealthy.

That was the problem, people took the stuff and behaved strangely, very strangely, and the weather changed when others were near, along with other phenomena, and that was how you got picked up; the world was altered as you walked through it and you simply weren't paranoid enough to worry about police picking up on it.

The cure for this was to take a sleeping pill with it, but this caused it's own pharmachalogical problems, it was possible for your worst insecurities and nightmares to infest the trip and fuck it up.

This is what had happened to Joe Partition / Johnny Cool.

Joe got out of bed and fixed himself coffee. The apartment overlooked the scum area of the city, and a police siren wailed into the night. A gunshot, or a car backfiring, echoed off the tower blocks and rain lashed at the windows. 'Sort of a Raymond Chandler atmosphere', thought Joe as he sucked on his nasty black Kwik-Save Instant coffee.

Yeah, a Raymond Chandler novel. Dream on, sucker, compared to your miserable life that would be an improvement, at least Philip Marlowe got to be a good guy. That was the problem, everyone was busy fantasising their ives away; ever since 2001 the world had been on edge, electing more and more insane people to make the difficult descisions of blasting some third-world country to pieces. Then they'd caught that guy with a portable nuke, back in '09, and they'd suspended democracy "for an interim period" while they utterly destroyed Outer Mongolia in "Operation Big Hard One". Democracy hadn't been re-instated yet.

It was all the fault of that Church of the SubGenius, it turned out, and Austin, Texas had had to be wiped off the map. Fundamentalist SubGenius remnants had come back with another one though, and had introduced the entire population of the developed world to Hubrizine in the most lucrative terrorist drug deal in history.

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs had disseminated video emails to everyone on the planet, the vids had appeared to be Osama Bin Laden-style press releases, except that they weren’t.

The videos were encoded with a subliminal brainwashing signal which encouraged everyone to rush out and take as many drugs as was humanly possible, and to "ask for Hubrizine".

The addiction rate soared by 70,000% in two weeks. It turned out there was no escape from this hell, one hit and you were hooked for life, withdrawl meant an agonizing death, and now one billion people were puppets dancing on Dobb's crimimal junk-mastermind puppet strings.

Bummer, thought Joe, and yawned. Outside, the sun was grudgingly emerging from the horizon.

****

Johnny Cool lounged in the Groove-A-Thon Cafe, a cool and groovy bar by the sludge pit that passed for a river in this town. His teeth glinted, he was cool and groovy.

Posing around by the bar was a fellow Cool Person, a neat looking young woman from the university, Johnny made his move.

****

"We need to find another man." she said.

"I know this place..." replied Johnny.

****

Several glitzy bars and gay clubs later the threesome of Cool People grooved their way into Johnny Cool's apartment.

Joe got out his New Translation edition of the Kama-Sutra, and they flomped onto the sofa and began to make luuurrve....

*****

Cool Johnny Cool woke up. It was a sunny day.

He had a beautiful person on each side of the bed.

It was nice to be completely insane…

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