Deleted Scene: The Instant Whiskey Machine

Here’s another scene I had to cut from All the Birds in the Sky, purely for length reasons. The witch, Patricia, goes to a party that’s being hosted by Laurence’s boss, Milton Dirth, and encounters… the Instant Whiskey Machine. But sabotage is afoot!

Just like with the other deleted scenes, I’m throwing in a caveat that these scenes probably aren’t as good as reading the actual book, and you should really read the book first. Also, there are spoilers here!

The big party happened in the giant UFO-shaped house that
overlooked Diamond Heights. This time around the big curving windows were covered
with holographic screens that showed cutscenes from famous video games, except
that the faces of the party attendees were swapped in. Somewhere a set of
cameras was snapping people’s faces, scanning them, and pasting them into
loading screens from Dead Space V and Art of Mayhem. The technology was
sophisticated enough that the holographic projections tended to show whoever
was looking at them at the time. Patricia was startled to catch a glimpse of
her pixilated face, superimposed over the body of FemShep. You could still just
about see the amazing view of Corona Heights, through the glowy
computer-generated imagery. There was also a weird contraption in the middle of
the room, labeled the Instant Whiskey Machine. People were feeding barley and
rye in at one end, and then through some proprietary chemical process, it was
instantly fermented and aged the equivalent of 20 years, coming out the other
end as single-malt Scotch. (The actual results tasted more like drain cleaner.)

Everywhere Patricia looked, there were guys in leather jackets and stripey
chinos, with biker sideburns. And women wearing 1940s Marilyn Monroe gowns.
Patricia hadn’t gotten the style memo, she was just wearing a long flowy skirt
that was longer in front than back, and a silk corset with little embroidered
flowers on it. This was the outfit she had thrown together in the five minutes
between getting home from Tartine and running out again to do a mission for
Ernesto, before catching a cab to the party. (She’d had to carry out Ernesto’s task,
poisoning an oil executive who was part-way responsible for the Northwest
Passage disaster, while wearing her ridiculous corset, which had just added a
whole extra layer of weirdness to the whole thing. She’d left the oil exec,
whose name was Martin, twitching on the floor of the bar at the Fairmont, a
substance not unlike seafoam spraying out of his mouth, and walked towards the
lobby with her long skirt rustling and her crimson corset catching the
chandelier lights.)

And now that Patricia was at the party, she was caught in a
loop of worrying she’d worn the wrong thing, both too fetishy and too casual,
and replaying in her head the split-second glimpse of Martin’s face turning
pale as his breath rattled to a stop. That image was still going to be stuck in
Patricia’s head.

“I want to stuff a whole cantaloupe into the Instant
Whiskey Machine.” Patricia turned to see Anya, giggling and wearing a
black tunic and black pants. Not a 1940s ballgown, thank goodness. Solidarity.

“I totally dare you to stuff a whole cantaloupe into
the Instant Whiskey Machine,” Patricia said.

“Don’t dare me to do things,” Anya said.
“Unless you really want me to do them.”

“Do it,” Patricia said. “I dare you.”

“You’re on guard duty,” Anya said.

Patricia kept a good watch for Milton, or anyone else who
might freak out. The spout at the top of the Instant Whiskey Machine was sort
of like a brass funnel, and there were some metal teeth inside that were
designed to crush up the grains, not too different from the garbage disposal in
your kitchen sink. Smushing a whole cantaloupe, rind and all, into that spout
was kind of a challenge, especially without attracting attention from all the
other party guests. Anya finally resorted to pulling a big penknife out of the
waistband of her fancy slacks and slicing the bowling ball-sized fruit in half,
then mushing the first half in with both hands, so that she was in serious
danger of losing a finger.

Watching that pulpy flesh and hard rind thrashing around as
Anya forced it mercilessly into the teeth of the Whiskey Machine, the seeds and
juice spurting upwards volcanically, Patricia did not at all think about the
noxious ooze coming out of Martin Churchill’s lips and nostrils as he fought
for life. She was totally focused on the moment and making sure that nobody
came over and saw what Anya was doing.

“Almost there,” Anya cackled.

“What the hell is going on over here?” A tall man
with spiky white hair and crazy eyebrows came over. Patricia recognized Milton
Dirth from the cover of the Wired Magazine that she’d seen in someone’s
bathroom. “Are you kids breaking my new machine?”

“Not breaking,” Anya said, turning away from the
machine just in time with her hands empty and miraculously clean. “Just
innovating.”

“What did you put in there?” Milton Dirth barked,
his ears starting to turn red. “That device is highly calibrated for a
very specific mixture of ingredients, and any impurities will…”

A green liquid started to leak out of the faucet at the
other end of the Instant Whiskey Machine. It dribbled into a nice demitasse
with a metal rim and handle, first just a little bit and then a steady flow.
Soon the glass was full of thick green liqueur, which looked sort of like
Midori. Anya plucked it up, while Milton Dirth looked on in horror. She sipped
it and cocked her head. “That’s really good,” she said. She passed it
to Patricia, who sipped as well. It tasted amazing: fresh and tangy, with a
hint of the first rainfall of summer. “Wow,” Patricia said. They
passed it to Milton, who was still scowling. He sipped it, and then just
shrugged and walked away without saying anything.

“He’ll never admit we found a better use for his fancy
machine than he did,” Anya said. “But you don’t get to be like the
eighth richest person on the planet without understanding that users are going
to want to customize their tech.”

When Laurence finally showed up, he was wearing a fancy
waistcoat with little wheels and cogs all over it, and a bowtie, plus black
tuxedo pants. He looked even skinnier and more gangly than ever, in all these
layers of billowy fabric. He looked kind of freaked out. His housemate Isobel
came in right behind him, wearing her usual business casual outfit and the sort
of smile that says that we are going to get through this evening somehow, whatever
it takes.

“What did I miss?” Laurence asked Patricia and
Anya, who handed him the glass that was still half full of cantaloupe liqueur.

“We’re going to call it ‘cantilever,’” Anya said.
“Or maybe you can mix it with Jack Daniels and make a Jackalope.”

“You broke Milton’s fancy machine,” Laurence said.
“He’s going to shit a brick.”

“If he did, he kept it under wraps,” Patricia
said. “He wrapped that brick up.” She giggled. Seeing Laurence was
helping her get out of the I-just-killed-a-man funk that she was trying not to
have.

“You don’t understand,” Laurence stared at the
which would probably never produce terrible whiskey again. Its inner workings
were fatally contaminated with fruit. “This device was supposed to be a
giant metaphor, for progress or something. You know what I mean. Progress in
science and technology is like making decent whiskey, it takes years and years
of hard work and a controlled process. You don’t revolutionize everything
overnight, no matter how smart you are. But here’s Milton, trying to show us
that there are shortcuts if you’re crazy and clever enough.”

“But it was really bad whiskey,” Anya said.

Top image: Brankomaster/Flickr