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

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Life is a Beautiful Thing (4-Book Box Set) Page 55

by Harmon Cooper


  Walt said, “This will not end well for you. We are as much an instrument of the FCG as is the Fed Corp Marine Corps. War with us is war with America; the war will grow, and you will lose.”

  “This is my country, our country.” Manuel waved at his men. “It is you who will lose every time, just as you did in Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Haiti and Burkina Faso. And we in Mexico have something none of those other countries had.”

  “An obesity problem and a government run by corrupt-ass greedy fuck-boys?” Beyoncé offered.

  “A shared border with the USA,” Walt said.

  “Exactemente, viejo.”

  Murika said, “What do you want from us?”

  Manuel shrugged, his arms still covering his muscled chest. “From you four? Not much … just to send a message. Also, my pit bulls are hungry, really hungry.”

  TWENTY-THREE∞

  Havana Harbor!

  I’m like a kid at Christmas after he received a Proxima VE rig; Slick Willie Clinton after he received a new box of cigars and a chubby intern; George R.R. Martin once he handed all creative control of Game of Thrones to HBO (yes, it is still running – the new season starts next spring, in 2084, seriously); a Canuck after a hockey match; a bird after a fresh shit during a migratory trip to Suriname; the Olympic Committee after they’ve convinced yet another sucker country to invest two hundred billion dollars into a state of the art stadium so people can watch curling over iNet.

  The theme is Meme and Meme is me. Life is pretty spectacular right about now, as I sit on the bridge of the ship with my number one Squeeze – the Shi to my Ye – and a former client-cum-terrorist and of course, Dr. Hewman, the bearded demigod who has been giving God the Father a run for his money since the 2040s by creating Humandroids.

  Turn down for what? I really don’t know what that means but iNet tells me it was a popular song in 2014.

  I’ve been on the way out ever since the doctor slapped my ass in the delivery room and handed my screaming little baby carcass to Mrs. Lamar thus declaring, “It is a boy! It is a boy and my God is he going to be a little fucker when he grows up!” To which I replied with a burp and everyone laughed and the crowd went wild and Kurt Cobain tossed himself into a drum set because we all need entertainment!

  Literazi and blubbering history buffs read on – descriptions and the history of Havana Harbor taken from the shriveled mind of a black man in a Japanese man’s tight little body to commence.

  (Steps up to the podium, clears his throat.)

  Havana Harbor was fortified by ballsy Spaniards with pointy metal hats and colorful dresses in the 1550s after transferring the Governor’s Residence from a place known as Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern side of the island. The transfer was due to the fact that it was much easier for the Spaniards to exploit the Cuban natives from the new port and ship out the products produced through slave labor to the rest of Spain, Europe’s oddly shaped testicle, which some may see as an answer to America’s limp baby-maker/Jewish Retirement Community – Florida.

  Havana was attacked numerous times by the likes of the English, the French and the Dutch, all of whom wanted a piece of Cuba’s hot little ass. Yes, young grasshoppers, long before the Cuban Missile Crisis or Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders (no, not DMX) laid waste to anyone with tinted skin at the Battle of San Juan Hill – long before this time – Cuba was already being eyed by western powers due to its proximity to pretty much everything and the abundance of its three vices: coffee, sugar and tobacco.

  Havana Harbor Fun Tidbit #1: the Spanish-American War, which made Teddy Roosevelt (as played by Robin Williams, RIP) so famous, was actually caused by the sinking of the USS MAINE in Havana Harbor, an assault still subject to speculation seeing as how no one really knows if the Spanish actually sunk the ship or if there was a fire in the coal bunker. (Still, as an American I cry out in my head, “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” – a popular phrase at the time.)

  Havana Harbor Fun Tidbit #2: In 1960, a French freighter named La Coubre filled with seventy-six tons of Belgian waffles munitions exploded in the very same harbor I’m currently staring at with a vulva-shaped tear on my cheek (sorry, you know what has been on my mind since Yeshi started batting for the other team). While no one can say for certain (aside from the internet), it is widely believed that the CIA was responsible for this explosion. I asked my fortune teller and she told me to both believe and be suspicious of all conspiracy theories – by doing so I’ll never be wrong!

  (9/11 was an inside job! screamed an alien at Roswell named Shakespeare who was responsible for the JFK assassination after he was poisoned by chemtrails on his way to a New World Order meeting to oversee the fake moon landing.)

  Havana Harbor!

  A man playing a Spanish guitar and wearing a wedding shirt nods at me as he sits on a crate that says Medical Supplies on a dock filled with senoritas all with badunkadunks and little halter tops and ridiculous high heels – the type that would give someone from Southeast Asia a raging eggroll.

  His hand comes up and all of Cuba stops.

  He cracks his knuckles, clears his throat, and away he goes, plucking at the classical guitar with the speed of a coked up Zoran. All around him are pristine beaches being lashed at lightly by the bluest water you’ve ever seen, blue to the point that it is blinding and my God do the waves respond in ecstasy to the hummingbird-fast playing of the Cuban muchacho.

  American classic cars that have been modified into aeros zip around a city of century-old cobblestone streets, zooming past the spires of Catholic Churches where worshippers piss away cash into diamond-plated urinals that lead straight to the Vatican, through Soviet-inspired squares named after revolutionaries and dictators who have had their faces plastered onto the Cuban Peso; the same Peso that is mindlessly stuffed into the cargo pants of American tourists (strangely, American tourists still wear cargo pants in the 2080s, which is a fashion no-no but is still better than the fanny pack or the underarm passport holster), tourists who spend the money on all sorts of useless shit, from keychain-sized piñatas to damn near racist hand-painted Aunt Jemima ceramic statues wearing Chiquita banana hats. (The African-American in me cringes; the Asian in me wants to buy one as a souvenir.)

  And as we – Nelly, Noah, Baby Rebel, Yeshi, Dr. Hewman, Tim7 and yours truly – load into the back of an aeros transport vehicle that resembles a 1950s bus, I can’t help but want to take a stroll through the streets of Havana, whistling Guantanamera and high-fiving anyone wearing a wife-beater that reads: todo por la revolución. We’re in the air moments later, moving past a sign advertising Cayu Largo Beach, and it is at this time that I finally tune in to the conversation at hand.

  Nelly (curly brown hair, Killer shirt, combat boots) says, “We need to hit them hard. I’ve said it twice now and I’ll say it again.” Her eyes, of course, tell the tale of a person who has been directly violated by the system she hopes to undermine. She still hasn’t opened up about what happened to her inside the prison, and I wonder if she ever will.

  Dr. Hewman nods, “I don’t disagree with you, but Tim7 and I have been working for quite some time on a strategy to undermine the system completely, which would be hitting it much harder than some sort of sudden attack.”

  Baby Rebel starts crying and Noah responds like a good nanny, “There, there, cutie, no crying in Havana.”

  I almost want to give Noah a slap on the back for that last statement. Hell yes to no crying in Havana!

  Rebel, as your surrogate mother, let me be the first to tell you that Havana is like no city I’ve ever seen before. As we barrel through the air towards some unknown destination, my eyes take in everything from luxurious villas rimmed with beautiful palms (¡Si, verde!) to buildings painted all sorts of parakeet colors, to stenciled Chè Guevara images on every corner, to shanty towns corrugated and sharp at the edges, to cycle rickshaws swerving around anything bipedal. ¡Esta muy bien!

  Tim7 says, “What about you, M
eme, any ideas?”

  “Me?”

  All eyes fall upon the dude gumming a cigar.

  “Well?” Tim7 asks.

  “I don’t really consider myself the brains behind the operation. That’s you guys.”

  “Well what do you consider yourself?” he asks.

  “Ah, come on Tim7, I’m still recovering from an attack on our aeros transport. My mind is a little fried.”

  “Because of the attack or the pollutes you were using during the attack?”

  “Who told?” I ask, looking from Yeshi to Noah to Nelly and finally stopping on Rebel. The baby sold me out.

  “He examined the video I recorded,” Yeshi says. Her hand covers the torn e-skin on her arm, as if she’s trying to conceal it.

  “Me too,” Noah says.

  Sold out by modern technology again. Damn you AppleSoft, iNet and GoogleFace!

  “Any ideas?” Tim7 asks. “We have our own,” he nods towards Dr. Hewman, “but we brought you here to discuss a different strategy for disruption.”

  “Well, in that case … ” I think for a minute, leaning back in my chair. My eyes drift to the window and from there, to Havana, which is streaming all around me.

  “And?”

  “Let me get back to you on that,” I finally say.

  TWENTY-FOUR∞

  “You never said where we were going.” I say to the head honcho, YHVH, the closest Homo Machina will come to salvation.

  Dr. Hewman smiles in a way that should remind you of John Hammond (you know I’m an early twenty-first century buff). “We are going to Santiago de Las Vegas–”

  “I call first dibs on the craps table.”

  “—Santiago de Las Vegas AIDS Sanatorium.”

  “Le wha’?” I ask. AIDS had been eradicated up until ten years ago, when a group of non-denominational fundamentalist buttplugs decided that if Jesus didn’t need vaccinations, they and their children didn’t need them either. Now it’s active again in the South and parts of the Midwest, which just goes to show you the power of ignorance in a time when all one has to do is blink their eyes to access the internet.

  Tim7 speaks in Spanish to Yeshi for a moment.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m transferring her some punk music from Cuba written in the early nineties. VIH, Escoria.”

  “Which is?”

  Yeshi explains, “VIH is the Spanish word for HIV. It means virus de immunodeficiencia humana. Escoria means scum.”

  “And these are punk bands? Why am I sensing a theme here?”

  “We’re almost there,” Dr. Hewman says, “it will make more sense once we arrive. For our purposes now, just know that I purchased a sanatorium that used to house AIDS patients. The socialist Cuban Government sent them there to die.”

  “Ah, the power of positive socialism.”

  Palms appear as we move further away from Havana Harbor. The future-shamble of the city swells in a way that brings yet another tear to my eye. Future-shamble is the best way to describe what surrounds the center of Cuba – you know, the place where the poor people live (they must live somewhere!). It is exactly what you imagine it to be – high tech meets low tech and no tech, hombres with pimped out aeros in casas made from cinderblocks donated to the destitute through a U.N. program called Cinder without Tender, their leaky rooftops made from rotting palm fronds. Houses adorned with crosses big enough to scare away Edward and Bella poke out of every nook and cranny.

  Jesus is now legal after the Cuban government finally re-embraced Catholicism in the 2020s, which was possibly a mistake as the birthrate has since quintupled and expensive visits from Pope Benedick Phorahuille have caused massive social unrest. Hallelujah!

  IMHO – it’s probably better than the old Regime’s little ditty, Socialismo o muerte!

  (For the monolinguists – socialism or death.) Actually – and I’ll be brief about this as the aeros is landing and Tim7 is still speaking en Español and Dr. Hewman is looking smug as a bug on drugs – what would humans be like if we had no influence from the past? Would we simply rehash the Hatfield and McCoy rivalry over and over again, killing ourselves back into the Stone Age whenever a new generation was born? Would we invent even more ridiculous organized religions every generation only to be stomped out by the newcomers? What would we become without institutionalized order cleverly disguised as social media? AppleSoft? GoogleFace? Tweeting? The ability to tag your great g-ma in that kind of sexy bikini pic she took back in the aughts? (Nana was a hotbody.)

  Shut the philosophy up, Memito!

  Outside our aeros – a countryside full of insects with buzzing wings and stingers the length of your … pinkie, and a verdant lushness to everything that would give the Emerald Isle color envy; farm animals everywhere adding methane to deplete the ozone layer (or what’s left of that pitiful shitbird); housing units painted in psychedelic ways screaming electric Kool-Aid; a wrought-iron fence with Celtic loops rusted and long since abandoned. Egads! I’m finally going to be able to use the word bucolic and damn well mean it.

  “What a vista of bucolic splendor!” I say as I wink at Nelly. (What, you think I forgot about the spark that lit my candle?)

  She smiles.

  Me: You’ve been quiet lately.

  Nelly: I was nearly killed. Then I had the lower half of my body replaced. After that, I was in a hostage situation in Mexico and from there, I was sent to a maximum security prison where they beat me and put me in a wall coffin, feeding me through a tube in my ass.

  Me: You never told me that!

  Nelly: Then, I broke out of jail and went straight to Mexico, where I killed my ex-husband and finally got to spend time with my daughter, only to have crazy droid mercenary Rinchi crash a Comsuit into the aeros and almost kill all of us. So yeah, it has been a shitty couple of weeks.

  Me: Well, have you learned anything?

  Nelly: I learned who my enemies are.

  Me: I hope you’re not referring to yours truly.

  Nelly: No, you’re just a catalyst. Give me some time to get my bearings. We’ll be able to catch up at some point. The Nelly that you know and love will be back soon.

  Me: I never said I loved you.

  Nelly: But you had a crush, no?

  Me: I plead the fifth. My gf will kick your ass if she finds out you’re flirting with me over iNet.

  Nelly: Who? Yeshi? LOL.

  Me: She’s a badass – trust me on that. Plus she’s taller than you.

  Nelly: And I’m taller than you.

  Me: Correction – you are taller than Japanese Meme. You weren’t taller than black Meme – that I can assure you.

  “This is it,” Dr. Hewman says as the aeros settled. “Mi casa, su casa.”

  TWENTY-FIVE∞

  “All of you have been dismembered and modified by Ben?” Rinchi asked the five Humandroid voices that surrounded her.

  She was not going to wait for Butchering Ben to come back and get started. Arms and legs off-line, she shifted herself to the edge of the bench with her shoulder blades.

  “What are you doing?” one of the Humandroid heads surrounding her asked.

  “I will not become a mangled piece of shit like the five of you heads,” she said, “or whatever else is in Ben the Butcher’s backyard fright factory.”

  She heard a clattering noise on a shelf near her, something that sounded like a rattling bowl.

  “You won’t escape,” a voice said, low and metallic.

  “I will escape.”

  Rinchi fell off the workbench and landed on her shoulder, which popped back into place. She was now face-down on a ceramic floor which stunk of Clorox.

  “Ben!” one of the voices in the room shouted.

  “Don’t call him yet,” another Humandroid voice said. “I want to see what happens next.”

  Rinchi stretched her fingers out; the numbness in her left arm quickly subsided. She would need both arms, but one would do for now.

  “You’ll never escape…”
<
br />   Ignoring the voice, she carefully moved her arm around, feeling for something, anything, that could help her get back onto the workbench. If Ben entered now, she could play dead, but the mutilated Humandroids around her would likely sell her out.

  Rinchi touched the leg of a stool, and dragged it closer. One-handed, she levered herself up, got the seat under her left armpit, carefully positioned herself right shoulder down, and pushed off. Her landing was not quite right; she pulled herself back up, tried again and popped her shoulder back in.

  “You’ll never escape!” the deep, metallic voice said.

  With both arms operational, Rinchi pulled herself back onto the table and into more or less the same position Ben the Butcher had left her. She heard the diesel truck start – Uncle Rodrigo and little Selena were leaving.

  “He’ll know,” one of the voices said. “We’ll tell him!”

  “He’ll see the stool…”

  This gave Rinchi an idea. She rolled over, reached down and retrieved the stool. Lying back down, she held the stool over her chest with a leg in either hand.

  “What are you doing?” one of the voices asked.

  She turned her head and listened, calculating angles and distances.

  “He’ll see you!” The deepest voice hissed.

  Rinchi threw the stool and connected with the deep-voiced Humandroid, a metal tool rack, and a box of noisy frangible shit that made a racket like dropping bedsprings into greenhouses when it hit the floor.

  Ben the Butcher came storming in moments later. “What the fuck is going on in here?” he shouted as he moved directly to the workbench.

  Rinchi got a fistful of T-shirt and lab coat and pulled him down so he landed face-up on her b-i-i-i-g hooters. She put his chin in the crook of her arm, slid her other forearm behind his head, and whispered, “How do you like me now little man?”

 

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