We have a witness, seated out on a motor launch, a pair of electronic night-goggles lent to him by Clarice Starling glued to his eyes and a light-weight portable, eMacs onscreen, open on his knees. We'll call him the Narrator, because that's what he's about to do.
High up above him, on the bridge, the shimmering outlines, picking up a glow from the darkly setting sun, of 68 and his opponent, flicker and weave. 68 shapes as if to unleash a blow, then steps back with pursed lips.
"Wait a minute! What the phoque* has this orientalist junk you're pulling got to do with what this has got to do with? We're going to play this in the good old eMu style, the way eMu was before the clouds gathered and the ratios dropped. It's dance to the death. Your choice of step!"
His opponent rocked on his feet, then straightened up. For an instant, his eyes flickered with doubt, but then he threw the word down like a chainmail glove**. "Pogo!" he breathed.
86 grimaced in distaste, then shrugged. He stretched out a hand and made a slow gesture towards a spot equidistant between his enemy and himself. The Narrator focussed his goggles and gasped as he saw a large box, chromium, black and pink fluorescent plastic take shape. "My God," he whispered to himself, "a Bronx Blaster".
86 snapped his finger once, twice, and again. The two giant forms began to bounce, the bridge shaking beneath them, eye fixed to eye, toecaps glinting and their shirts flaring in the last rays of the sun.
When the last thrash of plectrum on catgut had died away, 68 opened his palm and gestured expansively towards his rival. The latter hesitated and then, in his turn, shook a finger at the Beatbox. As the first chords hit his ears, 68 leaped into the air with a howl of dismay that buried itself in the Narrator's ears, twisted its way down into his stomach, through his large intestine, on thorugh his small intestine, to lose itself fearfully within his vestigal appendix, spinning round upon itself 666 times before burying itself like a razor-blade in his most sacred organ.
68's body, as it rose through the air to unprecedented heights, took upon itself volume, solidity, flesh, and when he fell back to the bridge once more, such was the weightiness of his tumble that the bridge withstood it not***. Boot first the increasingly heavy object, at increasing speed, increasingly approached the waters. The bridge itself collapsed in upon him, bearing the body down to the unforgiving mud at the bottom.
As the dust cleared, a small frog hopped its way across the wreckage, from one side of the river to the other.
*Mmarsupilami will willingly explone that the word employed here is foreigner speak for 'seal', which is what a man sets upon his Alfred David, as proof and guarantee that the Truth in In There. 86 is here invoking the sacredness of the word; the word itself, too powerful to be spoken aloud by a mere hologramme, shall remain there where the Germano-British philosopher consigned it when, in a move untypical in his profession, he enjoined those who had nought to say to keep their bleeding gobs shut.
** I know, I know, but today's readers expect that sort of thing, and you have to give them what they want. Think of it as Sony on text.
*** We're going for the sword and sorcery market here.
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