Life is a Beautiful Thing (4-Book Box Set)

by Harmon Cooper

  TEN∞

  “Anonymous Two?” Sauria was at home, a sprawling baller crib in the Hollywood Hills. The lights of LA twinkled beneath his expansive veranda, looping through the two waterfalls that poured over a private grotto. His personal assistant Humandroid, Heidi, was in the pool, swimming a few laps.

  Resting across his lap was his new pollution mask, a one-of-a-kind elephant piece made exclusively for him by John Galliano. The pollute distributor cable doubled as the elephant’s trunk and the green polypropylene eye lenses were the latest from Japan, which featured digital enhancements that allowed one to make custom mixes through voice activated commands. The size of the mask allowed for fresh pollutes to be mixed in the sawed-off tusks and immediately distributed to the user. A true work of art.

  He quickly scanned through the documents again. A woman named Anonymous Two had infiltrated the Japanese MercSecure headquarters in Shinagawa, planting a decoy DL agent inside the body of an employee named Aya Hayashi, who then transferred classified information to a person known as Anonymous One.

  “This still doesn’t make any sense.” Sauria sat down on a cube-shaped block of concrete, resting his elbows on his knees. “Why would anyone want to know Nelly’s position unless … ”

  Yeshi.

  He knew that something fishy had happened in Japan a few days ago. Now he had what was essentially proof. “Have you transferred this information to Antimeria?” he asked his secretary. “And Lorem Ipsum?”

  “I wanted to contact you first; however, Mr. Ipsum may already know.”

  “Good, always let me know before you pass on any information.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He disconnected the call and looked out over the city of LA. A breeze whipped past him, twisting through the Mexican Fan Palms surrounding his house. Sauria moved from the concrete cube to a white loveseat, new, which he was thinking of replacing next spring. He kicked his feet onto a foot rest, relaxing further.

  Control. For his entire life, Sauria had sought to control the unpredictable forces around him. He’d grown up in a single parent household that was mostly funded by his rich grandfather (who had made a killing in the 2020s trading compound derivatives and student loan bonds). His deadbeat mother was addicted to pollutes back before they were semi-regulated. She’d strap a mask on and sit there all day, inhaling and exhaling.

  Sauria picked up the habit at the age of twelve. He’d get high off pollutes and get digital. It was through virtual reality that he slowly realized the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, and why the haves must control the have-nots, especially in the information clusterfuck of the twenty-first century.

  In his favorite Proxima World, which was based on a game called Defenders of the Ancients (or DOTA), people could actually choose their wealth class. Sure, they could earn more or do things that increased their status in society, but the first thing everyone chose when selecting an avatar was the wealthiest class. And what do you know – everyone wanted to start the game rich. Eventually the developers put a cap on how many people could start the game rich, which was almost a philosophical gesture.

  Even though his mom was an addict and a bad parent to boot, Sauria had started the game of life rich due to a clever grandfather. This got him thinking one day during a nightlong Proxima bender – everyone wants to start the game of life rich, but not everyone can be rich. It then becomes the job of the rich to keep the hope alive for the wannabe lower classes. It is also the job of the rich to tell them that they too can one day be rich, if they work hard enough (or pray hard enough, or whatever). If the rich don’t do this, the poor will revolt. If they do this well, or create a plethora of distractions, the poor will be happy enough with what little they’ve been given not to question who it was that gave it to them and how much more they could actually get.

  The American Dream (which had gone viral around the world) was basically encapsulated by Sauria’s epiphany at seventeen years of age. And sure, there were outliers, there were those who by chance were able to claw their way out of the hole, but the outliers were, by geometric orders of magnitude, far outnumbered by the people who thought they could be outliers; the self-deluding proles still searching through the Gospels of Malcolm Gladwell and trying to fit it over their own lives.

  Thus, true power was the power to control hope, not the power to send armies or the power to manipulate stocks or the power of appearance. No, humanity was driven by hope, and cold hard cash was the platform from which this idea of hope sprang forth. How to manipulate hope then? How to control the masses?

  Freedom. The hope for freedom was essentially the hope to earn money freely and get rich. Freedom, while a great buzz word, had become a euphemism for free access to capital and the administration of said funds. Sure, there was once a point where freedom meant actual freedom, freedom from the command of a Lord or the right to make a personal choice, but the Lords quickly figured out (well not quickly, but quickly enough) that if they gave people the semblance of freedom, the semblance of free choice – even though their choices were manipulated – these people would feel ‘free enough’ to work even harder for their overseers.

  So Sauria got out of the virtual entertainment dreamworld and cut back on the pollutes. He wasn’t done with pollutes per se – at the age of twenty-two, after graduating with a degree in business from Berkeley, he got in to the pollute business, starting a company that installed pollution rigs in people’s homes. After all, what is freedom if it is not the ability to choose one’s intoxicant? (Which, of course, someone else profits from.) Pollutes were just becoming popular at this time, and Sauria made a killing through ebooks about installing pollution masks and of course, his business, which at its peak had a yearly net revenue of close to a billion dollars.

  It was an old friend who guided Sauria to what would become his lifelong pursuit, from addiction profiteering to fear profiteering – not as far of a leap as many would think. He got a PhD in terrorist studies and prevention and started ExEx with seed money from a number of rightwing companies. Boom – the rest is history.

  “Lorem.”

  Lorem’s video feed appeared on the inside of Sauria’s eyelids.

  “I’m aware of the breach,” Lorem said instead of hello. “I’ve been poring over the video feed from the surrounding areas and I have some … news for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  A video appeared in Sauria’s GoogleFace message box.

  “Notice the couple who are both using a bodymasking app called BlurYou. We’re fairly certain one is a man and one is a woman.”

  Sauria watched the feed for a moment. Everyone in the feed was visible aside from two people, whose forms were scrambled.

  “Now I can’t confirm it, but I think the woman may be Yeshi.”

  “Have the video analyzed tonight,” Sauria said, “if Yeshi is behind this, as I expect she is, then there is much more to this puzzle than I had originally anticipated.”

  ELEVEN∞

  My lungs are filled with fresh air yet the pollute still lingers. Jailbait or clickbait – which will it be? Aldous Huxley lend me your bicycle! I say these words from 2083 with the hopes that people will remember me.

  A movement. Behind me a movement sends a shudder down my spine. The darkness has returned! What is this darkness, this black hole, this overbearing feeling of dark matter drifting towards me? What is the darkness inside us that inspires us and conspires with us and berates us with these evil thoughts we collectively share?

  (Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Wo ist meine mutti?)

  The door knob looms like a shrunken nipple in the abyss. All doors must eventually be opened, including this door, a door that leads to something, something possibly sinister or possibly heavenly. Can there be an in-between? Why must things be demarcated as such? What better way to accept life than realize it’s simply purgatory?

  I twist, but the knob doesn’t twist back.

  Locked! I slam my s
houlder into the door and the hinges creak. Abbacadabra! Another shoulder and the doorframe splinters. Open sesame! Open Sez Me! I step back, hands on my knees as I gasp for breath. Damn Carloza’s body – I really need to switch before his extra breakfast taco-derived flab and lack of endurance gets the best of me and I have a heart episode.

  Yo-heave-ho, yeoooooooo ho!

  Another shoulder blade and the door responds, sending me face-first into a pyramid of ramen boxes. My God are they sharp! I scramble to stand but I’m more egg than man and my legs give way and my skin whittles away. I’m literally watching my skin rip off my body and stretch onto the floor like a cardboard whore. I’m literally being as literal as possible in a work of supposed literary merit. I’m literally reiterating what I’ve just said because the words have a way of ringing in my head and I’d rather talk instead of dealing with the girthy chick across the room in a rig.

  Break free, compatriot!

  The blob of a woman in front of me is five hundred kilos and counting, hyperventilating out of fear triggered by the Mexican man (me!) who has stormed her bedroom. Madoka’s ladyfriend? Hardly able to walk, this one. Methinks she rarely moves from her seated position in the VE rig all blobby and shit with lardy hunks of fat billowing out of her marshmallow rolls. To stand would be a triumph for this beast! A small step for gigawoman and a large leap for gigakind. Zing! The thousand pound club is alive in well and this woman is the female president and she is… she is…

  Not Japanese? I’m more curious than she, both about the fecal smell quickly encapsulating me and the paunchy butterball porcine jelly belly. How does Madoka have sex with this meaty sweety? This thing is more quicksand than human!

  “You are white!” I scream in horror, as if six hundred years of needless racism have been reversed and the whites are forced to the back of the bus and she sat down next to me and I was genuinely shocked by the color of her skin.

  Of course, white doesn’t necessarily mean white. The color also entails a national identity, class, social status, passport status, caste ranking, supposed beauty and a slew of other things that a color shouldn’t embody. Ah! But this roly-poly blubbernaut aisle-blocker tuba-luba is white as in … not Asian-white. My only guess is that she is from some place that once had plantations or still does via outsourcing.

  “Get … get out!” Rotundo the Immense screams.

  “You … you get out!” I return the battle cry of the uninvited.

  “Get out you fucked up bastard!”

  “I’m offended! Madoka! Madoka! What is this thing!?”

  Seriously, whatever this thing is it is not human. Fat Albert’s portly adopted sister maybe, but this thing, this sluggy house cow can’t be classified as Homo sapiens.

  “Chill, Meme.” I say to myself as mephitic airs envelop me. “Chill you fool. Sit somewhere.”

  “Madoka! Madoka!” the horizontally tall sugar monster bellows.

  “Quiet, über-zaftig!”

  I try to press myself off the floor, but my knees buckle and I find myself right back where I started, in a pile of ramen containers eyeing a rubenesque pork beast. Deep breaths, Meme, deep breaths.

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!?”

  “I’m living my life to the fullest and entertaining an audience of thousands through the fucked up nature of my existence! We’re in a book, a book I tell you, a book!”

  “I don’t read!” the cantankerous bladder-stretcher bellows.

  “Most people don’t!”

  A voice from behind me scissors through my psyche. “Meme, stand up.”

  “Eh?” I stretch my head back to find Madoka standing in the doorway. (Yes, he speaks English, most gamers do.)

  “Madoka! What the … ?” I ask about his podgy gf, but I bite my tongue (literally – again, it’s bleeding now).

  “Why are you up here … you are supposed to be on the third floor!”

  Madoka – all sixty kilos of him – takes an angry step into the room. He morphs from innocuous to intimidating. His slick black hair falls into his face as he snarls at me. I bring my fist back, but then I remember that Yeshi told me to behave.

  “I’m sorry!” I shout. “The pollutes got the best of me … ”

  “You really need to get some help,” he says, his puny arm looping under my elbow.

  “My apologies host of mine! I got a little carried away. I think the distribution system on your mask has been … modified … something … I took too much. I blame the separation between church and state! The fact that there is a mass shooting in America on a daily basis is the result of a system that focuses too closely to the laws of the past that made sense in those different eras but don’t necessarily apply to the time from which we shit! Fuck the eighteenth century! I want to retire to a community of like-minded individuals surrounded by an iron gate to keep the plebs out aside from the gardeners and the house cleaners!”

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

  Madoka’s thin hand strikes me across the face.

  “I’ve been hit!”

  “SHUT UP!”

  He strikes me again.

  “Thank you, bae,” Madoka’s corpulent bullfrog-swine hybrid gf burps.

  I crack up at the word bae, as even I have too much class to use such a ridiculous pet name, no matter how popular it was on Instagram in the early twenty-first century. Standards must be maintained – some throwbacks aren’t worth reciting.

  “As for the pollution mask, of course it’s modified,” Madoka says as he leads me away from his girlfriend’s room. “Everything I have is modified; I’m a goddamn weapons dealer.”

  “I always wanted to be a weapons dealer,” I admit.

  “Shut the fuck up, Meme.”

  TWELVE∞

  A heavily modified MRAP with extensive undercarriage armor bore Rinchi towards Baghdad International Airport at breakneck pace.

  The decades of war – holy war, civil war, war to impose western democracy, war for fun, war for profit – had negatively impacted personal air transportation in Iraq. In a country where every beardy knucklehead with an automatic weapon or rocket propelled grenade launcher considered any aeros a legitimate target, the savvy and survival-minded traveler went by armed and armored ground transport.

  The driver of the MRAP, a helmeted and body armored Humandroid grunt leftover from America’s latest intervention in the region, expertly negotiated the Khomeini barriers at the Rashid Hotel’s vehicle egress point. He curved right, past a collection of rubbled buildings, deftly avoiding mounded debris and scattered carcasses – both animal and human – in varying states of decomposition.

  Baghdad was a glimpse into a dystopian future, a scabrous, bullet-pocked poster child for apocalyptic; war-torn Shitvilles everywhere; the twenty-first century Dresden with slaughterhouses sufficient for one and all; a 3-D coming attractions preview complete with Smell-O-Vision of the true shape of things to come. Disheveled, malnourished people drifted through the once great city like hungry ghosts, stripped of everything aside from their empty forms. For most, there was no life here – only bare, day-to-day, hand-to-mouth survival. Trash, debris, vehicles – all burned untended and unnoticed by the roadside and cast a low-hanging pall of oily, sooty smoke that caught at the back of the throat and made unprotected eyes water and burn.

  The entire place reeked of despair and to Rinchi, it was almost laughable, so predictably human.

  Those born in shit usually died in shit, and those born in ivory towers usually stayed in their ivory towers. Just seeing the city reminded Rinchi of the fact that humans were basically extincting themselves through religion, resource grabs and sheer, bloody-minded dumb-fuckery. Sure, it could take another hundred years or so, but their genius had created something that made them replaceable. This was clear – the Humandroid would replace the human, just as Cro-Magnon replaced Neanderthal. And so on.

  “You’re quiet,” the Humandroid driver said.

  “Not required to make conversation.”

  He scann
ed her. Surprise evident in his voice as he asked, “You’re a Humandroid MercSecure rep? You’re the first I’ve met.”

  “Would you please just stop talking?”

  A message appeared on her iNet screen from Antimeria.

  Antimeria: We think we’ve found Yeshi.

  Rinchi: Go on.

  Antimeria: MercSecure Japan has been infiltrated by two people calling themselves Anonymous One and Anonymous Two. They stole data related to my ex-wife, Nelly! Sauria can’t confirm if it is Yeshi yet, but he has a hunch …

  Rinchi: I see.

  They rounded a tight bend and the driver jumped on the brakes. “Hang on … ”

  Rinchi had just enough time to register a blockade of four or five beat-up vehicles laid out in a herringbone pattern when the world exploded.

  Her seat smacked her in the ass and the harness pulled tight across her torso as the MRAP spun; she was the axis about which a tornado of smoke and flame, noise and debris rotated as eighteen tons of hurtling steel flipped and hit, flipped and hit, flipped and hit.

  The vehicle landed on its passenger’s side with a rending crash. The driver hung limp in his harness, not exactly Humandroid dead, but close enough.

  The compartment filled with smoke and particulate debris; Rinchi stopped breathing to avoid taking any of the chemical crap into her respiratory system. Her harness was jammed, but her knife was in easy reach and she quickly sliced her way free.

  Unclipping her PHASR from the rack, she scrambled through the troop compartment to the rear hatch, where she fumbled briefly with the combat lock. She swung the door open and low-crawled out with her weapon ahead of her, trying to orient herself.

  The PHASR was kicked out of her hands; a knee slammed down on the back of her neck, grinding her face into the hardscrabble of the roadside. The muzzle of a Humgun dug into her ear, and she felt rather than heard the ominous hum as it powered up.

  “We meet again, my little droid whore.”