Rohk & the [nearly] Marvelous Maurice: the Intern of Doom

by Andy Schocket & Paul Cesarini

Rodriguez barely dodged the next blast, diving behind the remains of the ticketing counter. Three more searing bolts shrieked past, gouging deep scars into the moldstone and turning the backstop into a smoking ruin. A stack of nearby museum holomaps ignited, sending half-burnt pages spiraling through the air.  He glanced up—just in time for another beam to rip past his head. The heat singed the tiny hairs on his left ear, filling his nostrils with the acrid, strangely sweet stench of burnt flesh and paper ash. He grimaced and slunk down behind the counter.  He watched as one of the smoldering maps slowly landed on the floor next to him.  Pity, he thought, those were the new ones that had just arrived that morning.  He remembered how much he liked the sheen of that paper, how the maps had all the updated exhibits, and how he was actually listed as Assistant Curator for one of them. With a sigh, he licked his fingers, snuffed out the embers, and carefully folded the map into his pocket. If he made it out of there alive, he’d order another case.

“Repent!,” Patelinu roared again.  Rodriguez heard an explosion somewhere to his left, across the Great Hall, followed by a shower of plaster hitting the floor. Whimpering floated from that direction, likely Neersif, the new employee in visitor outreach. Some first week for her, he thought.

“Are you an authorized employee of this museum?” an unfamiliar voice asked from behind him. He turned to see a dark grey, granite-like stone slab hovering about two units off the ground. A network of pulsing, lighter-grey and whitish veins ran from its lower left to its upper right, interrupted only by, around a third of the way up its polished front, a horizontal metal rectangle framing a thin slot that ran around across its ‘face’. A few black wires ran from the shiny metal behind its back. How this thing got in the building on an inservice day, he had no idea. 

From behind the slab floated a lavender-colored cephalopod, alternating between translucent and opaque.  Rodridguez noted that it was roughly the size of the armoire from the predynastic Crittig exhibit downstairs, then quickly dodged another beam before seeing it slice clean through the cephalopod and hit the wall directly behind it.  The cephalopod barely noticed.  It turned slightly to view the wall, right as another beam also went right through it, then held up one of its tentacles as a third beam passed through it, as well.  Rodriguez felt an odd humming in the air and an equally odd crackle of static electricity.  He looked down at his forearm and saw his hairs standing on edge, then glanced back at the cephalopod just as it changed from lavender to a muted pink.  A fifth beam ripped out at it, but this time it bounced off that same tentacle, leaving a tiny indentation that quickly healed.  The cephalopod lowered it, then pivoted and faced him.

“Well, perhaps it’s not sentient.” The voice appeared to come from the slab, although Rodriguez had no idea how. Two of the cephalopod’s tentacles made a shrugging gesture. Another blast hit the wall beyond them, near the freight elevator.

“I didn’t say it definitely wasn’t sentient. I just said perhaps,” said the slab, seemingly to no one at all.  “What?  I don’t think we need to ask if it’s sentient.  It either is or it isn’t.  What good would asking do?  No. Why would we do that?  If it isn’t sentient, it won’t understand what we’re asking it, right?  If it is, then the question itself is irrelevant.”

The cephalopod, still facing Rodriguez, held up a single tentacle between itself and the slab.

“Fine,” said the slab.  Yet another beam sliced by, obliterating the Museum of Indigenous Technology – Main Entrance sign behind them.  “Be that way.”  The slab turned toward Rodriguez and, in a somewhat exaggerated tone said, “You there, are you sentient and, if so, are you an authorized employee of this museum?”

“What? I’m… I mean, well…” Rodriguez half whispered, half hissed.

The slab moved closer, somewhat uncomfortably closer, then moved past him and faced the counter.

“I said, are you sentient and, if so…”

The cephalopod stretched out another tentacle and gently tapped the back of the slab.

“What is it now?” said the slab, pivoting around.  The tip of the tentacle motioned down toward the still cowering Rodriguez, right as yet another beam shot by and blasted the last remaining batch of maps.  “This… being?” said the slab, motioning toward him.  “You think it is the sentient one?  Really?” Another two tentacles drifted over, pointing to Rodriguez, with still another resting on the back of the slab, nudging it toward him. “But, this countertop is a dense, igneous substrate, likely millions of cycles old.  You don’t get to be that old without sentience.  It takes skill – wisdom – to reach such an age.”  Another tentacle made a dismissive gesture.  “Really?” said the slab. “Biological life forms all look the same to me.  I mean, how do we know it doesn’t run around on all four limbs, gnawing vegetation?  Hold on.  I’ll ask it.  You – creature.  Are you sentient?”

“Um, well, y-yes?”

“Ah, sentience.  Do you gnaw vegetation?”

“Well, um… my species is vegetarian, so, yes?” he said, his eyes darting back and forth from the slab to the Great Hall.

“I see.  Apologies for confusing your primitive appearance with a lack of sentience.  You’re an employee of this institution?”

“I-I am.  I’m sorry, but could you keep it down? We’re in a…. situation here!”

“You certainly are,” the slab replied. “And it’s very serious.” The cephalopod folded two of its arms, and wagged a third at Rodriguez. “But we’re here to help.”

“Great!” A wave of relief came over Rodriguez. “What are you going to do about…?” Rodriguez pointed a thumb at the Great Hall. Another explosion boomed.

“We are here to solve that problem. I am Rohk,” the slab said. “The Seventh Kalun of Inthwatan, Heir to the Great Wapghniki, and Bearer of the Sacred Nvokol!”

There was an awkward pause, until the cephalopod reached out a tentacle and tapped the slab.

“And this is my Tendril, a member of a parasitical species that travels with me.”

The cephalopod tapped the slab—Rohk—less gently.

“A symbiotic species.”

The cephalopod folded two of its arms, then started tapping the ground loudly with another one.

“Its name is Maurice.”

The cephalopod’s skin pulsed.

“No,” Rohk said, annoyance creeping into his voice, “I’m not saying that.  You’re not ‘Magnificent’. You don’t just get to be ‘magnificent’.”

The cephalopod’s skin pulsed brighter, changing from pink to red.

“No,” said the slab.  “No one here is magnificent.  Look around.  I’m not going to call you that.  That’s just not a thing.”

The cephalopod flashed bright red.

“Fine,” said the slab, exasperated. “This is Maurice, the… nearly Magnificent.”

A burst of colors that reminded Rodriquez of fireworks played across Maurice’s body and limbs, and it looked like it started into a dance.

Another “Repent!” drew Rodriguez’s attention away from the cephalopod. A blast from Patelinu’s mouths passed within units of the display holding the Precious Holy Urn of G#πan. Words came back to him from his first day of training: All of the artifacts here are rare, but PHUG, which is how Curator Chanyit referred to it, is our crown jewel.

“So, um…” said Rodriguez, still cowering behind the counter,“You’re here to help, right?” Maybe this was some sort of ancient enemy or keeper of the technology or species or being that was or had possessed the artifact that Patelinu had been putting in the display case, he thought.

“And help we shall. I am a Level N-92 agent of the Intergalactic Museum, Archive, and Cultural Depository Confederation’s Asset Inventory Authority’s Sub-Agency for the Reconciliation of Interdepartmental Documentation Informatics.”

Maurice tapped Rohk.

“Maurice… works with me.”

“Wait, you’re with what?”

“You probably know our sub-agency by the more popular acronym we call ourselves.” Rohk emitted a series of low-pitched wails, interspersed with guttural clicking sounds that grew to a crescendo to the point where Rodriguez felt his teeth vibrating inside his head, then it abruptly stopped.  “It rolls off the… what would this species call it?” Rohk paused. The cephalopod turned slightly green, then slightly bluish.  “Yes, tongue, right?”

Rodriguez stared at them blankly.

“Species in your quadrant usually just refer to us as the Confederation’s form guys.”

Rodriguez nodded. That, he somewhat understood. He faintly remembered from various trainings and, since then, overheard snippets of conversations among department heads about how much effort Confederation compliance could cause. It was a relief to find out that the Confederation could also ride to their rescue.

 Bolts hit somewhere in front of Rodriguez and to his right. He was probably safe for now, but maybe not if Patelinu came much closer.

“So,” Rodriguez whisper-screamed, “you’re here to help us?”

“Naturally,” Rohk responded. Traction-fed paper began emerging from the slot on Rohk’s front, a seemingly endless scroll of it that Maurice caught as it came out, tearing from the edges thin strips of paper with holes punched in it—perhaps, Rodriguez guessed, to help guide the paper out of Rohk—and folding the sheets until, finally, they stopped, with Maurice holding a stack of paper that appeared to be thicker than Rohk. Where all that paper came from, Rodriguez had no idea.

“Are you authorized to complete Form FHP-5812-R-7?” Rohk asked. Maurice proffered the ream-sized stack to Rodriguez.

“What? We need to fill this out for you to help us?”

“You need assistance, correct?”

“Repent!” Patelinu thundered again, and the sound of four bolts exploding against what to Rodriguez sounded like the museum’s newly-installed, massive, perfect-to-scale 1/200th-size model of a ceremonial chamber from the Great Temple of Bixfhloshadon. He and the curation team spent nearly three cycles researching and consulting on the construction of it. Rodriguez didn’t need to look to know that it was destroyed beyond repair. He turned back to Rohk and Maurice.

“Can you just stop Patelinu, or whatever’s possessed her – now – before she destroys the museum? I’ll get an office head to fill that out later.”

“Tell me more about this Patelinu.”

“She was recalibrating the Trinquidernian Cube, like she does every week, and then all of a sudden she started – ”

Two blasts exploded, and Patelinu roared “Repent! Repent!” Rodriguez peeked out, and quickly calculated that, given where Patelinu was and where the blasts had hit the wall, they couldn’t have missed the PHUG by much.

“That,” Rodriguez pointed a thumb toward the Great Hall. “First her eyes started glowing  purple, then she started telling us to ‘repent’—why or about what, I have no idea—and then some sort of energy bolts started coming out of both her mouths.”

“I see,” Rohk said. “The Trinquidernian Cube is exactly the exhibit that we came here to address. Do you have Confederation certification 12-HZ, and do you hold a supervisory position?”

“What?” Another bolt hit the ceiling at the other end of the Great Hall. “No, look, I…”

Rohk emitted a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. “Maurice, after all that prattling, it appears that this functionary does not possess Level 4-N authority.”

Maurice put the back of a tentacle to its forehead and shook its entire head back and forth.

“Sentient being, can you please direct us to a properly certified supervisor?”

“I think Johesh is pinned down by that big stone arch leading to the Lower Wing.”  He picked up one of his maps and pointed to where, when Patelinu had first gone berserk, he had seen Johesh dive for cover.

“Excellent. Maurice, come along.”

Rohk glided out into the Great Hall, with Maurice trailing.

“Wait!” cautioned Rodriguez, “you’ll get—” As a bolt came in their direction, he ducked back behind the ticketing counter’s rubble. He heard two sounds in rapid succession, the first a loud electric popping sound coming from the direction of Rohk and Maurice, the second the now-more-familiar report of a bolt hitting plaster. He looked out to see Rohk and Maurice continue toward Johesh. A wisp of smoke rose from Rohk’s upper right—corner? Shoulder? Did that thing, being, even have what could be said to be body parts?

“No,” said Rohk, apparently addressing Maurice in a frustrated tone, “that energy emission was entirely unauthorized.” Rodriguez watched as Rohk continued in a straight line, seemingly oblivious to the bolts screeching this way and that, the sparks emanating from where a screen had been hit, or the sprinkler that activated over the smoldering ruins of the scale model of the ceremonial chamber.

“REPENT – OR BE FORSAKEN!” The bolts definitely increased in frequency, he thought. Rodriguez looked around.  Engineered to withstand a quantonuclear event, the  building’s structoskeleton could probably withstand days of this kind of bombardment. But the axaro-glass that protected the PHUG, he wasn’t so sure. Rodriguez knew from his training that the exhibit casing was sealed and radiation-proofed, and could withstand pressures of up to three macromass per square unit. But whether it could weather one of those bolts, he had no idea.

Rohk rotated when he got to the arch. Although unable to make out exactly what Rohk was saying, Rodriguez was relieved that Johesh was alive, and maybe could get Rohk to subdue Patelinu before they all got crushed. Maurice began slowly drifting behind Rohk, clearly now conversing with Johesh, who Rodriguez couldn’t see but assumed was sheltering behind the arch. When the cephalopod got around ten units behind Rohk, it suddenly darted around twenty units in the air and up to its left, directly in the path of a bolt that passed right through it. Its surface glowed an alternating orange and red. Maurice then flew nearly across the Great Hall in front of another bolt that passed through, this time flashing a pattern that reminded Rodriguez of fireworks. Another bolt, and now Maurice glowed a pattern reminiscent of… paisley?

When something touched his back shoulder, Rodriguez nearly jumped out of his skin. He turned to see Johesh crouched behind him, his normally bright orange tendrils flecked with dust and bits of masonry. 

“Hey! What are you doing here?” Rodriguez asked, embarrassed to have lost his cool.

“Sorry!” Johesh whispered, the gold stripes on his arms and face pulsing as his three eye stalks darted around. “I didn’t want to draw the attention of… whatever’s inside Patelinu. But, why wouldn’t I be here?”

“Oh, I thought…” Rodriguez started to point out toward where Rohk was, but then looked back at Johesh.

“I circled back around once the shooting started. What’s the situation?”

“Patelinu, or whatever’s in Patelinu, is still busting up the place.”

“Right! Well, it’s all on us then, isn’t it?,” Johesh said. “Where’s all the other museum personnel?”

“They were all out of the line of fire and on the other side, so probably down in Two, in the safe room.  Is help on the way?”

“I used the emergency call holo, but the dispatcher said that with all the budget cuts, Central Ops is down to one response unit, and they’re out at a big collision on Flyway 7.  They could get here by tea, or never.” Johesh gestured toward the stack of paper at Rodriguez’s feet. “Hey, what’s that?”

“Some slab of stone and his floating octopus showed up. They say they’re from the Confederation.” Rodriguez pointed his head out at the Great Hall.  The sound of another blast echoed.

Johesh’s left and central eyes looked at Rodriguez and narrowed, while he extended his right eye stalk to get an angle at the Great Hall.

“The Confederation?  Really?  Wow, Rohk and Maurice!” Johesh exclaimed.

“You know them?”

“Heard of them. They’re, like, legendary. Literally.  Minor deities. I saw them at a risk management conference once, on one of the Kaltric moons.  Great symposium.  Their spreadsheets were pristine, let me tell you.”  Rodriguez nodded politely, still furtively glancing over at the chaos behind them.  “Believe it or not, in the system where they came from, Rohk is the demigod of paperwork and, I don’t know, hovercraft racers or shoelaces or something. Shows how big the galaxy is.  There’s a demigod for everything, you know?”

Rodriguez glanced again beyond the desk, to see Maurice continuing to zigzag across the vault of the Great Hall, transforming each time the cephalopod absorbed a bolt.

“If Rohk’s the demigod of paperwork, what’s Maurice the demigod of?” Rodriquez asked. Johesh looked down at the floor, then up at the ceiling, then shrugged.

“War?  Or maybe wine?  Something with a ‘w’, I think.”

Johesh extended all three of his eye stalks to spy into the Great Hall. Patelinu emitted another blast that Maurice chased, and while Rodriguez couldn’t make out the words, Rohk appeared to be trying, and failing, to elicit a response from the granite base of the Great Arch.

“Let’s get them over here,” Johesh said. He waited for the sound of a blast, then leaned out beyond the desk and inflated his mouth sacks. His voice boomed loudly across the Great Hall. “Rohk! Rohk! Over here!”

Rohk rotated back from the base of the Arch, then turned toward Johesh and Rodriguez and glided toward them.  As Rohk zipped back across the hall, an absurdly thick stack of forms trailed behind it as it spat out of his slot.

Rohk showed no regard either to Patelinu’s increasing frequent blasts – which bounced off its angular backside and ricocheted into several exhibits – or exhortations to repent. Maurice continued to chase the blasts, one turning it day-glow yellow, another giving it alternating green and purple stripes. Rodriguez noticed that a blast had hit directly over the PHUG. A section of the ceiling had fallen on the case, and an exposed pipe dripped on the top.  He was relieved that the case and PHUG appeared undamaged.

“Are you a) sentient, b) an authorized supervisor, and c) have you completed Form FHP-5812-R-7?” Rohk asked Johesh.

“Um, yes, yes, and no.  Well, not yet!”

“Maurice!” Rohk bellowed, if a seemingly solid slab could be said to bellow. The cephalopod darted to the end of the long scroll of paper now extending across the floor, folded it in a whir, and dropped the stack of forms next to Johesh with a moist fwump.  Maurice gestured to it with a tentacle while patting Rodriguez and Johesh on their backs with two other ones.

Rohk hovered over to them. “You must complete Form FHP-5812-R-7. As a certified supervisor, you may also initiate protocol SR-90, granting temporary authority to deploy Interventional Bureaucratic Disruption measures.”

“What does that even mean?” asked Rodriguez.

Maurice flashed a sequence of calming blues and greens as Rohk said, “It means we file the pink form.”

“The… the pink form?”, asked Rodriguez, nervously.

Johesh grimaced. “You can’t be serious. The last time we used that, it took three cycles, two elective surgeries, and a tribunal!”

“We’ve updated it,” said Rohk, with a slight tone of satisfaction. “It now only takes four signatures, a temporal acknowledgment waiver, and a single elective surgery.  The tribunal is entirely optional now (though I still recommend it – the pageantry is magnificent).”

Maurice solemnly extracted from Rohk a shimmering pink form and handed it to Johesh.  With a sigh, Johesh reluctantly signed it by way of a palm print.

Rohk moved back slightly, then announced in as official a tone as possible, “Let the Interventional Disruption commence!”  It inhaled deeply—or emitted a noise that sounded like a slab inhaling deeply—and then unleashed bureaucratic hell.  A vortex of papery light burst from Rohk’s front panel. Flocks of humming microforms swarmed through the air, spiraling toward Patelinu. Most bolts she launched were quickly intercepted mid-flight by holographically printed carbonless triplicates, which absorbed the energy, glowed a furious orange, and then filed themselves neatly into the air like origami doves.  The few bolts that weren’t intercepted ricocheted around the hall, randomly bouncing off, punching through, or vaporizing  exhibits depending on their chemical composition.  Out of the corner of his eye, Rodriquez saw the PHUG disappear in a flash of teal smoke.

Meanwhile, Maurice floated directly in front of Patelinu, its form pulsing in an incomprehensible bureaucratic rave tempo. A field of what appeared to be linked holostyluses surrounded the cephalopod in orbit, scribbling furiously in languages known only to tax assessors, archivists, and Quivistalian bookmakers.

Patelinu’s eyes glowed brighter, her arms shaking as she screamed, “REPENT!—”

“Form HN-2A filed!” Rohk boomed.

“—REP—”

“Request for Energetic Possession Moratorium, subclause 8, filed and retroactively backdated!”

Patelinu froze.

Maurice extended a tentacle… and gently tapped her forehead.

She blinked. Once. Twice. Then collapsed, completely unconscious.

For the first time that morning, the Great Hall was as quiet as a xenomouse.

Teal smoke drifted lazily above the ruined exhibits. A scorched Ancient Reliquaries & Databases sign, once hanging proudly above the entrance, swayed flaccidly behind them.

Rodriguez and Johesh cowered in stunned silence, until they heard the sound of printing.  They turned their gaze to Rohk, who emitted what might have been a receipt of some sort, which Maurice grabbed from Rohk’s horizontal slot.  In a blur of tentacles, Maurice folded it in a seemingly prescribed manner, and promptly swallowed it.

Rohk turned toward them.

“We have contained the artifact’s emergent entity and retroactively revoked its dimensional possession permit. You’re welcome.”

“You… what?” asked Rodriguez, blinking far too many times.

“We nullified the breach via regulatory intervention.” Rohk turned to Johesh. “Now. Regarding the aftermath—”

Maurice dropped another stack of papers from out of nowhere.  They landed with a thud and a poof of masonry dust.

“What… what is this?” Johesh asked in a low, quiet tone, filled with dread.

“Incident Reports, Destruction Logs, Dimensional Possession Appeal Forms, Unauthorized Energy Discharge Summaries, Historical Reconstruction Authorizations, and, of course, the Post-Event Custodial Statement.”

“But… the paperwork! It’ll take a lifetime!”

Rohk’s slab-face somehow smiled. “Perhaps, for a carbon-based life-form. And don’t forget the appendices.”

Maurice helpfully unrolled an additional scroll that extended across the debris-strewn floor.

“But wait—didn’t you cause some of this?” Rodriguez asked, gesturing to the still-smoldering display that had once housed the PHUG.

“Oh, that,” Rohk said, floating serenely above the wreckage. “Minor collateral compliance deviation. You’ll find the PHUG destruction covered under Clause 47-B of Form FHP-23: ‘Incidental Sacred Artifact Loss Due to Form-Processing Interventions.’ Very standard.”

Rodriguez slowly knelt, picking up the glittering, cracked base of the PHUG. He looked back up, horrified. “That’s the crown jewel of the museum!”

“I’m sure it was,” Rohk said.

Maurice flashed sympathetically, draping a tentacle around Rodriguez’s shoulder.

Rodriguez collapsed into a heap beside the paperwork as Rohk began to glide toward the exit. Maurice rose from Rodriguez and floated above Rohk.

“Oh,” Rohk called back, “someone will be in touch within two cycles for your compliance audit. Good luck!”

Maurice did a figure-eight in the air. Smoke wafted from the smoldering remains of  the model of the Great Temple of Bixfhloshadon, obscuring Rodriguez’s sight.  When the smoke blew past, Rohk and Maurice were gone.

Rodriguez turned to Johesh.

“I’m gonna need… so much coffee.”

Johesh sighed a deep, low sigh – one that, to civilians, may have just seemed like any other sigh.  Yet, to any public administrator, civil servant, or middle manager, it was immediately recognizable.  It was not simply a sigh: it was the sigh: the sigh of drudgery, of forlorn acceptance, of lost youth, of green eyeshades and short-sleeved dress shirts, of unfulfilled potential wrapped in a timesheet and a pivot table.  He then cracked his knuckles, picked a holostylus off the floor, brushed some masonry dust off it, and handed it to Rodriguez.

“Let’s start with Form 1.”

The sprinkler above them activated again.

BIOS

Andy Schocket is a historian, writer, and proud union member. He lives in the banana republic known as “Ohio.”

Paul Cesarini is a Professor & Dean at Loyola University New Orleans.  His fiction appears in numerous venues, with additional stories in-press. In his spare time, he serves as the editor/curator of Mobile Tech Weekly, at: https://flipboard.com/@pcesari/mobile-tech-weekly-lh2560e4y. 

Paul is a big fan of science fiction from the 1930s–1950s. He is not a fan of wax beans. Beans are supposed to be green, not yellow.