Big Bang Generation Read Free Page B

twice. I don’t recall how well you got on.’
    ‘I rarely get on with your friends Doctor. More often than not they try to kill me. Or, in the case of your old tin dog, shoot me.’
    ‘Well, to be fair to K-9, you were possessed by the ancient spirit of the Kortha Gestalt. Sarah Jane and Luke did explain to me that you weren’t best pleased, though…’
    ‘Anyway, moving to the here and now, just how did this particular “old friend” know I’d broken my leg, yeah?’
    ‘Ah yes, that might have something to do with Gal-Tube.’
    ‘And my leg-breaking incident was on that, I’m guessing. Humiliation on a universal scale.’ Keri paused. ‘Who uploaded it, Doctor?’
    ‘Anyway, so it’s possible that she saw it and decided to make her way here, to see you. And maybe me. It’s been a lot of years and faces since we last met up. Well, I’d better head off.’
    ‘Oh no you don’t. If someone I don’t know from your past is coming here, you’re sticking around too.’
    ‘I am?’
    ‘You are. But before she gets here, you’re also going to explain why you uploaded footage of me falling on my bum to the entire universe, yeah?’
    The Doctor smiled. ‘Fizzy water, yeah?’

3
Be My Icon
    The human colony of El Diablo was established in the late forty-ninth century, on the outskirts of the Vadim solar system, right at the heart of the human empire’s trade routes. El Diablo was named because of its dichotomous sulphurous atmosphere and volcanic polar regions, which put a lot of settlers off – its distance from its sun didn’t help.
    But enterprise can be found everywhere and one of the fledgling power companies, a small mom-and-pop family operation, decided to invest in the dwarf planet, seeing if it could contain the unpleasant lava seas and turn that into self-perpetuating power to keep a colony going, rather like being a planet and sun all in one.
    After many years of planning and experimenting and some very hard-sought patents, the company succeeded and began selling plots of terraformed land on this exciting, potentially prosperous new world.
    And that’s when the big corporations moved in – not worried about the dwarf planet itself, but terriblyinterested in the technology and patents owned by the family business. Without too much concern for the people involved, one of the bigger companies, Bolen, simply absorbed the company in a hostile takeover, sacked the family, and owned El Diablo outright.
    Within a hundred years, with the technology having proved functional and successful, Bolen began populating El Diablo with businesses – mainly banking, securities, and a few satellite offices of the bigger cosmo-nationals. And a lot of coffee shops.
    But as always when you mix big business with financial institutions (and a ready supply of coffee) the less-than-honest types move in. Not exactly crime lords and gangsters, but a significant number of small time grifters and con artists who saw an opportunity to make a quick buck out of shady transactions, then move on, perhaps to the gallery world of Rembrandt or the jewellery world of Sappho–lots of easy pickings from the celebs, aristocracy or other delusional inbreds with a shared IQ of six that populated such places.
    Bolen, however, wanted to stop these stings occurring, so they went to the Church of the Papal Mainframe and signed up for their security and other services.
    Thus it came to pass in the early summer of 5064 that a man as wide as he was tall (and he was quite tall) called Cyrrus Globb arrived on El Diablo. Globb probably wasn’t his real name – rather as Al Capone had been called Scarface or George Nelson was called Babyface because of physical characteristics, so Globb had become known asexactly that thanks to his impressive bulk. He also, it had to be noted, moved very fast and quietly for a man of said shape and size.
    So Globb became a grifter, a conman and a rogue. There’s often a charm, a slight admiration of someone who can