This is a random story fragment totally for fun. I don’t know whether it needs to go anywhere, and the plot is extremely vague. I’m reading A Hundred Years of Solitude, and one of the things I like very much is its high-level, detached way of describing quirky characters across long periods of time. I feel like the fiction I write tends to default towards very here-and-now, short-term stuff, and that keeps me pigeonholed. I think it’s interesting to be able to sum up and explore characters in sweeping generalizations, more than just by whatever action is taking place in a story. That’s a skill that I’m interested in building and I think this fragment does that decently.

“But where are the guns?” asked Lampshade, bemused. The room of F. Dinkelacher, the best weapon-maker nobody had ever heard of, was nearly bare. All that stood in the corner of the abandoned hospital ward was a small knobbly schoolchildren’s desk, a bank teller’s lamp with its green glass shade, and a closed notebook slightly ajar, as if a pen was stuck in the middle to hold its place.

“The guns?” laughed F. Dinkelacher, pushing his small circle-frame glasses up his nose. “What guns?”

The old man stood up and retrieved the notebook, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger.

“Could a gun have toppled the Phyrygian Kingdom?”

“Yes, if it had shot the emperor,” began Lampshade.

“Could a gun have caused the self-cannibalization of the Liberal Party of Old Turkistan?”

F. Dinkelacher threw the notebook down onto the floor.

“Could a gun have released the pathogens currently eroding the marriage, and therefore the control, of Half Germany?”

F. Dinkelacher gave a sad smile.

“The worst weapon ever invented by humanity,” he said, “Is belief. And I am more than happy to give belief to people, because  it is also what they most desperately want. They cling to belief, not truth, because belief is a mirror for their own greatest deficits.”

Lampshade let out a derisive laugh.

“This is it?” he said, sneering. “An old man in an empty room, playing at Benjamin Franklin?”

“No,” said F. Dinkelacher, “There’s a little more,'” and he took a Tri-Magnum Electric Pistol from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and shot Lampshade squarely between the eyes.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” said F. Dinkelacher, stepping over the arrogant corpse, “Allow me to show you what else I’ve been working on.”

“Was he serious,” muttered Jess as they followed F. Dinkelacher past a long row of empty hospital cots, into an operating room, “About the belief thing?”

“Quite serious,” said Boris, adjusting his fez with the tip of an enormous claw. The bear had a Russian accent, having spent his early years in the care of a Muscovite prince before being sold into the circus. “But the man also makes a terrific gun.”

The visit to F. Dinkelacher had been costly. Boris had sold his condo. Jess had drained her savings account. Lampshade (RIP) had always been broke. And Spidey was a trustfund robot.

The four of them formed an odd group. There was Lampshade, the boy who couldn’t die. Boris with his Kevlar fez. Jess and her robotic heart, which pumped blood through an otherwise human body. And Spidey, with his failed AI–so good at approximating the human mind that he was constantly paralyzed by anxiety and existential dread.

One might have thought they made up a kind of supernatural hero force, but in reality they were all coworkers at a call center in the Warehouse District.  They were all chronically single, for their own reasons, and so they spent a lot of time after work at a bar near the call center, where they talked mostly about what they would do if they didn’t have to deal with the idiocy of the people they called. Not to mention the rope of demands that stretched down from the CEO through endless levels of middle management.

Spidey didn’t need the money, obviously, but he worked for a sense of camaraderie, and he was so anxious all of the time that the others could hardly get upset by his family’s wealth. His father and mother were both robots, not that they’d managed to birth anything, but they’d designed and put him together by their own ingenious AI. Spidey’s absentee father was a management consultant, who could calculate the best probable recommendations for businesses with such incredible speed that there was no reason why he needed to stay at the office as late as he did. And Spidey’s mother had coddled her young metal boy, acting as if his titanium exterior could not withstand the impact from an oncoming eighteen-wheeler (it very much could, as he would later find out).

All this meant that when Jess hatched the scheme that would free them from the call center, and would eventually lead them to the broken-down hospital where F. Dinkelacher lived, worked, and sometimes, it was said, brought home lovers, Spidey curled up in a ball like a small metal roly-poly and fell off of his barstool, onto the beer-stuck floor.

“Come on,” said Boris, tapping the sad glittering armadillo with the tip of his claw, “You can do this. She hasn’t even explained the plot yet.”

Spidey poked his head out from the ball, saw nothing had changed, and retracted it.

“Who are we to carry out some kind of plot,” chimed in Lampshade. “We barely make our sales numbers.”

“That’s not true,” said Jess. “I don’t make my sales numbers.”

Jess had gone through a breakup two years ago that none of the group dared bring up. It had been so bad that she had undergone voluntary surgery to have her heart removed, and replaced with a device that was functionally the same, but made of cold unfeeling metal. The surgery had posed no small risk, but the emotional pain Jess had felt was so unbearable at that time that she felt she had no choice but to go through with it. This bodily quirk meant that she no longer felt certain things, like fear, and of course love.

“What’s the difference between you, and a psychopath?” Boris had asked her in private. And Jess had no clear answer. She was still motivated by money. She still had trouble forming long-lasting relationships. But at the same time, she fed stray pets, and was kind to them, and had no desire to actively harm anyone if they should get in her way. She claimed to feel remorse.

Jess was also completely oblivious to Spidey’s obvious feelings for her. Boris was the only one among them who recognized the irony of a human with feelings weaker than those of a robot.

He was very smart, Boris, but so often dismissed because of his gigantic body and his peculiar bulletproof fez, which he wore with a wry humor that was lost on others. They saw in him nothing but a circus bear, and his size and lack of precision in movement made it difficult to convince anyone else, in the group and beyond, that he was much more than a sidekick. There were several other literate bears in the world that he had ever heard of, and most of them, like him, were stuck in low-level roles. The C-suite, not to mention middle management, was still ruled by rich white men, and despite lengthy anti-discrimination policies, no bear had ever made it past middle manager of some humdrum internal team.

This low standing was reinforced even by F. Dinkelacher, the weapon-maker, who had given Boris no guns nor grenades, his claws lacking the precision required to pull a pin or a trigger, and instead had done nothing but place over Boris’s shoulders a giant stab-proof vest obviously intended for an overweight human. It was only a cough from Jess that had caused Dinkelacher to suddenly remember that he had hidden several diamond-sharpened plasmasteel fang-caps underneath the pillow of one of the hospital cots.

So crude, thought the bear, that despite possessing a command of English that found its equal only in Nabokov, he was reduced to biting and snapping and charging. It was true that his main role was mostly that of intimidator; he became significantly less fearsome if he ever opened his mouth to speak. Even the other members of the group often undervalued his smarts; meetings often devolved into personality clashes between Lampshade and Jess, when Boris saw that the whole time, underneath the friction, everyone was already in agreement. This sort of event made him sad, and he after witnessing arguments like this he often took to the rooftop late at night, scrawling letters to some long-lost friend from his circus days using a modified pen attached to his paw by means of a leather strap.

Lampshade was an impulsive idiot, most of the time, which was part plain old personality and part due to his unique ability to remain alive, no matter what happened to his body. He had the slightly-off look of someone who had gotten too many Botox injections, which he had, not to mention reconstruction surgeries numbering in the tens. At the age of three, when his mother accidentally dropped him out of a high-rise, it was discovered that he could not die. Her stomach churning, she jumped out after him, overwhelmed by what a terrible mother she felt she had been. She couldn’t have known that he was sitting on the pavement, absolutely fine, if his eyeballs were a little loose.

Sadly, he still bore the trauma of this experience, and despite having worked with several psychotherapists, had not yet managed to come to terms with it. He was prone to violent outbursts, and sometimes pinned Spidey against the wall, a bullying maneuver that the others would stop whenever they saw it. These moments of cruelty were clearly a cry for attention, an attempt to seize power in a life that since the age of three had had it wrenched away from him time after time. Lampshade’s father had been a drunk, who made the boy stand in the corner with a–no, not that–newspaper over his head whenever he misbehaved (and often when he didn’t). For this reason Lampshade hated the smell of newsprint, which burned in his nostrils like inky tar when he caught even the smallest whiff.

This was why the mission had gone south: because their contact in Wegan (pronounced ‘vay-gan’ by the Half Germans) Hamburg had handed him a small parcel of meat, wrapped in plastic sheets and then again with the day’s newspaper, tied off with a piece of string. Lampshade had refused to take the package, and the contact, paranoid, had taken the package with him, which meant that the team did not read the section of newspaper that contained a piece of secret code containing the exact address of the person they were meant to assassinate.

Assassinate, Boris noted, was a word too delicate to describe how their dysfunctional group typically handled jobs. There was a lot of yelling and kicking down of doors, of intimidation and getting their faces seen, and very few poison-tipped darts shot from a silent blowgun or pipes climbed under cover of darkness. But in some way or another, each member of the group was in debt, and had been brought together for the sole purpose of repaying that debt.