“You did?” Rinchi asked, her voice softening.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because … because I … ” Keva wiped her face with her arm. “Nothing.”
Rinchi smiled – a horrible, disquieting, burned and blasted grimace; a smile that melted Keva’s heart. “I’m glad you came … I’m glad it was you.”
“You are?”
“I am.”
Keva bent down and delicately kissed Rinchi. She lay down next to her, so that they were facing each other.
Keva finally said. “You should see your eyes right now. So this … this is what you look like naked.”
“This is me… “
“You are beautiful,” Keva finally said, “every part of you, but … ”
“But?”
“We need to get your eyes fixed … ”
“What’s wrong with them?” Rinchi asked as a grin formed on her face.
“They’re looking in the opposite directions.” Keva moved closer to Rinchi, took her in her arms and held her close. “I’m so happy to see … ” She took a deep breath. “To see that you are alive.”
“There is one more thing we need to do here.”
“What’s that?” Keva asked.
“The Techback did some horrible things to Humandroids in his shed out back. He made … a vehicle out of body parts. We need to destroy it.” Rinchi’s eyes twitched. “Humans have played God for far too long.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Keva stood, glanced back down at the fallen droid. “What about the head?”
“My name’s Sand.”
“He’s coming with us. He wants to be a representative.”
“I have no built-in violence governors, no body,” the head said.
“And you don’t mind killing humans?” Keva asked.
“Why would I mind?”
“Good. You two wait here… ” She chuckled at this statement. “Well, I suppose neither of you can really go anywhere. Still, this will take just a moment. I want to see what our twisted little Techback Ben was up to.”
Keva moved to the backyard, where she could see mountains in the distance, their slopes littered with shanty towns. A stone path led to a sheet metal and cinderblock garage with a pull-down vehicle door and a standard personnel door. She opened the personnel door, and her weapon light revealed a brief flash of hobbyist Ben’s creation as it scuttled back into the shadows.
“How do you want this? I can do it quick and easy or I can just blow the building …
A folding chair shot out of the dark, nearly hitting her.
“Throwing stuff?” Keva fired into the darkened garage.
She heard a high-pitched hiss; the building shook as something rammed itself against the sidewall.
Ipsum: Keva, status update. Or turn on your ocular feed.
Keva: Rinchi recovered. Cleaning up here. The Techback was apparently into some weird shit.
Four hands gripped either side of the door frame.
She took a step back, her weapon pointed into the darkness.
Ipsum: Get back to the airfield.
Keva: Ocs on. You’re going to want to see this.
Another step back and Keva aimed her RNG8 at a tremendous centipede cobbled from four Humandroid torsos joined end-to-end with arms and legs attached at right angles. The construct tried to ram itself out of the doorframe, rattling the walls of the building with each attempt.
Ipsum: Oh Good God! Destroy it!
The centipede writhed and twisted and tried to escape as Keva held it in the beam of her PHASR. She held the trigger down long after it had dissolved into its component atoms; long after the roof had collapsed and the walls fallen in; long after the RNG8 overheated and shut itself down.
Keva had enemies a-plenty, but sometimes your worst enemy is the one that rides around behind your eyes, the one that conjures up new nightmares to haunt your sleepless nights – the one that thought of Rinchi’s head grafted to the centipede.
She wept for the second time that day, briefly allowing the moment of human weakness to wash over her and through her and then quickly dissipate.
Keva: It’s done. Returning to the airfield now.
THIRTY-FIVE∞
Papo the Bullet, the punk-rocker who injected himself with HIV to protest the Cuban Government, sits in the living room in front of his own effigy. The American flag covering his neck is tattered, his skin is rotten, his bald spot has all but ruined his Mohawk and he’s got a little pot belly now.
I turn to Asian Meme. “What in the actual fuck is he doing here?”
Asian Meme begins to blur.
“Wait a minute! ... Don’t leave me!”
Papo stands, cracks his neck. He’s wearing a crazy metallic belt with a crudely made buckle and combat boots without laces. “Are you Meme?” he asks indifferently.
“Shit yes I am!”
“Well, then sit down and let’s chat.”
“You speak English?”
“No.”
“I speak Spanish?”
“Poorly.”
“Then how are we talking?”
“No sé.”
I look back to Asian Meme – all that is left of him now are his eyes, which are glaring directly into my soul. I’d give him a ball tap if he were standing next to me. The last thing a man on the verge of hallucinatory death needs is smugness!
“Let’s get this over with,” Papo says, his finger going into his nose. He picks for a minute, examines his findings, and flicks it in my direction. “I have some shit to do tonight.”
“Why are you here?” I ask. Somehow I’ve managed to sit down across from Papo; somehow I’ve managed to dodge his projectile booger.
“I’m here to talk to you. Your name is Meme, isn’t it?”
“In Cuba I go by Memito.”
“Memito.” He pulls a cigarette from the front pocket on his vest, lights it. “Not a bad name for a pinche Chihuahua.”
Shivery I feel – annus horribilis encapsulated in a couple of foolhardy choices. Moxie depleted, doxy acquired, life on the verge of being retired. My brain is heavy with intergalactic dust and bloated cosmic spherules.
The room is dark and subfusc, aside from a few religious candles lighting the picture of Papo on the wall. I can make out some ghetto-ass prisonyard, spit-and-pencil tattoos on his arms. Other than that, most of his body is covered in shadows.
“We need to talk.”
“Do you mind if I lie down?” I ask, trembling now.
“Go ahead.”
I curl up onto the leather couch, my eyes trained on the Cuban punk-rocker. “Well?”
Papo looks up at his picture. “What do you think about me? About what I did?”
“Injecting yourself with HIV?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Well, it was pretty stupid, but fuck communist governments and the sanatorium didn’t sound too bad. I guess … it was stupid, but clever in its own way. Shit homber, why are you asking me? If it were my job to judge the dead, I’d be a historian! Well, I suppose I do fancy myself an expert of the early twenty-first century, but I digress.” The room twists; my hands come to my mouth to prevent emesis. “What was the question again?”
Papo the Bullet takes a long drag off his cigarette. “Sometimes, this is the only way to fight something as powerful as a government.”
“What do you mean?”
“From the inside.”
“I want to say that is very Kafkaesque, but I’ve never read anything by the author aside from a story about a man who turned into a roach, or was it a roach that turned into a man? Damn Russian writers!”
“From the inside,” he says again. “Fighting from the inside.”
A thought comes to me. “How much fighting did you do once you were committed here?”
“I did a lot of relaxing once I was here, listening to music, playing my guitar. I guess it was my way of fighting, a final ‘fuck you’ to the government. Maybe
this is the best way to undermine authority, especially when your world is fucked. Is your world fucked, Memito?”
I’m full on crying now, dizzy, chilblains to follow. “I have some problems in America. An entity is trying to kill me.”
“An entity or a person?” he asks, stubbing his cigarette into his open palm.
“Both,” I say through bitter tears. I don’t know where they’ve come from, but if it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break.
“Then you have to fight back.”
“With what?” I ask. With my eyes raining cats and dogs, it’s growing more and more difficult to make out Papo the Bullet’s features. “I’m the odd man out here, the useless one, the … the … weakest link…”
He leans in, showing me his hollow eyes. “Cutting off the head of the snake is the perfect way to keep it from suffocating you, as long as it doesn’t bite you first.”
“A snake? What are you talking about?”
“Think about it.”
He lights another cigarette and we sit in relative quiet for a moment. The smoke from his cigarette twirls in the air, forming the outline of two snakes, which wrap together and become one. An idea comes to me, an idea as loud and as clear as a gunshot in a closet with high ceilings. I hold onto it for a moment, storing it in the back of my mind. Umble-cum-stumble this could work!
I look down to see a pale, white hand on my leg.
“Are you all right?”
Papo is gone and I’m greeted by Nelly, who’s in a loose shirt over a pair of panties.
“What are you doing?” she asks. She kneels in front of me, her face morphed by the light from the candles. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I … I licked the red snail,” I finally say, overcome with shame.
“Come on,” she says as she helps me up. “Let’s get you back to your room.”
THIRTY-SIX∞
The next morning.
Sauria sat in a wheelchair wearing a black hat that would be more appropriate on the Wicked Witch of The West. He’d chosen this style after seeing a photo of his favorite Vice President, Dick Cheney, at President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2008. In the classic photo, Cheney could be seen sitting hunched over in a wheelchair with a wide-brimmed hat covering his face, a sinister yet powerful look that Sauria hoped to replicate.
“I like your hat,” Heidi his assistant commented as she pushed him to the waiting aerosSUV.
“Thanks, dear, it’s a one of a kind Bush Family Neocon hat. You have to be making over a certain amount per year just to get on the waiting list for the waiting list to grab one of these,” he said, running his finger along the rim. “This is the way a sick man should dress.”
“You aren’t sick,” she reminded him. “You’re on the path to recovery.”
“You’re right.” He reached his hand back and she squeezed it. “I’ll get better soon.”
Heidi helped him into the aeros. Sauria could walk, but the doctors told him to use the wheelchair for a few days, just to give his body a rest. Ticking inside his chest was a brand new heart, cloned in a Berkeley lab and ready to be used and abused. His heart attack a few days back wasn’t the first heart episode Sauria had experienced – the first episode was back in the 2060s – but it was by far the most severe.
The aerosSUV lifted into the air after Heidi got in next to him. A quick vitals scan told her that her owner was recovering rapidly, aided by the advances in modern medicine, fuck-tons of money and the fact that three of the world’s top five cardiologists were overseeing his recovery.
As the vehicle picked up speed, aeros whipped through the air outside the windows, gone in a flash. They were in the self-driven airlane, only available for aeros without drivers, which allowed them to travel at about 120 miles per hour. At this speed, it didn’t take them long to reach ExEx’s headquarters, located in Palo Alto aka Silicon Valley aka the place ubiquitous for both the social decline and social advancements of the twenty-first century.
Sauria had purposely placed the headquarters here due to its proximity to money – venture capitalists, SV Leeches – as well as the other ridiculously large tech companies that all called the valley home. Strange to think that a company which allowed people to film half-second videos and share them was valued at nearly a trillion dollars, but this type of ADHD shit was here to stay and people needed ways to waste time and advertisers needed ways to reach these people so they could all mutually waste money.
Compared to the GoogleFace offices, or the mahoosive Instagram building (that consisted of a giant holoscreen twenty stories tall which routinely flashed images being uploaded at such a rapid rate that it looked like a strobe light on crack), the ExEx Offices were rather modest.
They were situated in two remodeled World War II aircraft hangars that had been flipped on their ends and enhanced to provide an enormous cylindrical structure. Sauria had the modified hangars transported from Europe at a great cost to US taxpayers, who had unknowingly provided the funding for the move.
The street that led to ExEx’s headquarters was marked by a long line of statues, all modeled after the Statue of Liberty, each sixty feet tall with eternally flaming torches. Asian tourists in Donald Trump toupees purchased at LAX paid out the ass to come see the statues and take pictures in front of them, flashing obnoxious peace signs to signify the impending conclusion of the Asian Century.
An enormous sliding glass door shaped like the contiguous United States made up the entrance to the building. The front entrance also featured a huge waterfall which poured over a waterproof holoscreen that displayed the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence. On Sundays, the fountain broadcasted a live feed from Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, which boasted a flock of nearly half a million sheeple yet had never paid a single tax dollar since its inception.
A GoogleFace message appeared on iNet.
Bill Bleak: Glad to see that you’re wearing a Dick Cheney hat you piece of fuck.
Sauria’s new heart twisted into a knot. Bill Bleak was the head of BlurYou, the man responsible for his heart attack at the hotel room back in LA.
Bill Bleak: Here’s a link to the live feed of the press conference I’m about to have regarding the Gene X Program. Enjoy.
Sauria squeezed Heidi’s hand.
“What is it, dear?” she asked, her face filling with concern.
“Bill … ” His fist came down on the door handle nearest to him, forcing the window to roll down. “Window up!” he shouted in a whiny voice.
Heidi’s eyes dilated. “Your new heart,” she reminded him.
Sauria was already placing a call to Lorem Ipsum over iNet.
“Lorem! Bleak is going public … ” He could hardly get the words out. “Public! Gene X! He’s going public … he’s … he’s … ”
“What? Public? Where are you?” Lorem asked.
“I’m almost at ExEx now,” he said, panting. “How quickly can you be here?”
“I’m already here,” Lorem said. “The staff was going to … umm … surprise you.”
THIRTY-SEVEN∞
Heidi pushed Sauria through a beautiful colonnade separating his private landing pad from the main offices of ExEx. They passed in front of the ExEx logo, which consisted of two letter E’s facing one another with an X between them and a small number two at the top right hand corner. The logo had been designed by the granddaughter of graphic artist who had designed the MTV logo, and it cost Sauria about as much as it would to wipe out AIDS in Haiti, but it was a small price to pay for a logo that good – and quality costs.
They entered an elevator, and quickly made their way to the first floor. Sliding glass doors opened and Sauria was rolled out into an enormous arcade, nearly ten stories tall. The ExEx staff stood all around him, arranged in arcs from the most important people in front to the night janitors in back. A huge banner hung from the ceiling that read: WELCOME BACK SAURIA. Lorem Ispum stood in front of the crowd, a nervous look on his fa
ce.
Sauria smiled grimly at his staff, many of whom he knew personally. Some had been with him since ExEx was just a startup trying to get ‘A’ round funding. They’d been with them through the market burp of ‘78 (due to the Arctic Wars), in which millions of Americans lost the money in their IRAs and nearly, nearly, got angry enough at Wall Street to actually try and change the system. Nearly.
Luckily for Wall Street chumps and companies like ExEx, most of the American public had become engrossed with a relationship gone sour between Brangelina’s granddaughter and Jayden Smith, who was at least sixty years her senior. The public had become divided on the fact that Jayden had recently divorced his seventh wife due to her unwillingness to accept the more implausible aspects of Scientology and the fact that Pitt and Jolie’s granddaughter, named Tiramisu, had come out against NIMA and the wall within a wall within a wall surrounded by a wall taxpayers funded along the Texas-Mexican border, which had little or no effect on America’s illegal immigration problem.
By the grace of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit and the Media (or at least the strong fart of R. Murdoch’s Global News Enhancement Team), most Americans had either forgotten or come to grips with the fact that Wall Street had, for the umpteenth time in the twenty-first century, bankrupted worldwide retirement funds due to gross negligence, poor pollute habits, limited stop measures, greed, the desire to fund Manhattan strippers’ college educations and the desire to drink fresh dollar slushies, which consisted of two thousand dollars in fresh hundreds blended up with kale, brown sugar and basil and served chilled, at a cost to tax payers of four thousand dollars because each dollar slushie cost two thousand dollars to make, in addition to the actual money used in the drink.
(Naturally, the cost of making a dollar slushie fell upon the tax payer due to the fact that most Wall Street firms billed the FCG for the beverages through a Charge the Government Program started by the Koch Dynasty to offset the costs of funding PACs.)
Of course, none of this was on Sauria’s mind as he looked out over his staff, the ‘worker bees’ as he liked to think of them.
Life is a Beautiful Thing (4-Book Box Set) Page 60