by Unce, Bo
Now that my miracle had passed, I felt guilty as shit. It reminded me of masturbating in the porta-potties at school when I had been a teenager.
"Uh, you don’t understand... I was just trying to put us, I mean him, out of our misery. I mean, his misery!" I justified my actions poorly.
"Well, hith ath ain't mitherable now! Hith ath ain't thit now, thon!" Koochy clapped me on the shoulder.
I couldn't disagree with him.
"Come on," I led him towards the surgery room I had seen in my vision of the future.
We kicked open the double doors that blocked our entrance to the hospital and triumphantly strode through. The hallway was empty, but with many telltale signs that it had been made recently and hurriedly so. Papers were still in mid-descent to the floor, having been brushed off of their shelves and tables moments ago as people must have hastily sought the flimsy safety of the hospital rooms.
"This way," I motioned with my third arm as I took the lead of our small group.
"Thit, P! How you know dith da way?" Koochy shoved me hard, in a hood-love kind of way.
"Let's just say I have a feeling this is where we want to go," I told him, over my shoulder, as I continued to lead us. Of course, this was enough of a clue for Marcus.
"Ohhh thit, P! Yo thit back, muh nigga?! Yo ath 'membahin da futha an' thit?" Koochy caught up and walked beside me, his gait ripe with the eagerness of curiosity.
Nodding deeply, I grinned. It felt good to be powerful again. To be special.
I caught a glimpse of myself in a reflective pane of glass as we drew nearer to the surgical unit where I had foreseen our murderous dance battle.
"'Special' doesn't even begin to cover it," I thought as I saw myself. I wiped my sweaty brow with my dick arm.
We reached the doors to the surgery center and entered, unopposed.
"Awwwww yeah, thon!" Koochy exclaimed, happily. He ran over to one of the industrial sized humanoid chambers, plugged full of corrugated hoses and wires. "Dith bitch'll hea' yo ath! Ay, P. Dith goan thix me up right, tho rea'!"
He fiddled with the control pad attached to the front of the surgipod. It made a sleek mechanical noise and, smoothly, the entire top of the unit separated from the base. Koochy shed his suit and helmet. His naked body was hideously ugly and badly deformed. In a few places it appeared it was still dead and rotting.
"Jesus," I muttered louder than I had intended.
"You retherin' ta yathe'th in third perthon now, playa?" Koochy asked me as he settled himself in the medical machine.
"What? No," I didn't get it. "Hey, how long is that going to take?"
"You killed tha thuckin' docta, thucka. How you thank I know? Theit!" Koochy seemed to be thhbbbttting his tongue at me, but I was pretty sure that was only because it was so swollen and busted.
I laughed.
"Hey, Preston, can you keep watch by yourself? I want to get in on some surgipod action too!" Alphonso pointed at his blistered face.
"Uh, sure," I told him. Honestly, I didn't think that either Alphonso's presence, or absence, would be that significant in any kind of situation of gravity.
"Thanks, Preston!" he put his thumb and index finger together as if to signal okay! Then, he too disappeared into an oversized surgipod unit.
"Should I chop off this dick arm?" I asked the obvious question to the empty room. I willed the third limb to act like a frightened pet, trembling at the mere hint of its master's desire to dispose of it. "It's okay, Bronson. It's okay, boy," I comforted it.
Bronson? I thought. Where did that come from? Wherever it came from, it definitely felt right. At that moment, I knew the grafted appendage had taken root and I would not voluntarily part with it.
I poked around the room, searching for anything I could scavenge that may be of use. Surprisingly, there was lots of medical equipment. I swiped a few bottles of pills indiscriminately; this approach had served me well in the past.
"Yes!" I exclaimed as I found a modern, high-end compute-pad. I assumed it belonged to one of the doctors who had no doubt planned to do important, life-saving work in this room before I had blessed this building with my presence.
"Doctor Franz, oh!" a young nurse, whom I did not recognize from my vision, came walking into the room. Upon seeing me, she stopped abruptly and dropped the device she was holding.
"Hi," I greeted her, defiantly.
"Uh, you're not Doctor Franz," she astutely observed. "Where is the doctor? Who are you?"
I decided to play the messiah card.
"Come to me, my child," I said, creepily. "For I am... Cleveland Jesus."
"What, like some kind of local Goodmas guy? Isn't Jesus illegal? Who - aaahhhEEEEEEEEE!" She began to shriek hysterically.
I moved to calm her down, raising my arms to caution her. All of my arms.
Her frightened screams intensified.
"Whaaat the fuck is that... thing?! Get it away from me! Eww! Ewwwwww!" she held up her own arms, in protest. "Ohmygod, is that a fucking penis? Are you kidding me right now?!"
"Brrrooonnnsssooonnnn..." my dick arm hissed, most unexpectedly.
The nurse fainted. I almost fainted as well.
"Get, get back over here," I yanked my newly vocal member back to me with my both of my real arms.
Bright lights, flashing behind me, caught my attention. It was Koochy's chamber! There was an audible rushing of air as the surgipod depressurized and the top separated itself from the floor-mounted main chassis.
"Awwwww yeaaaahh, boy!" a much healthier sounding voice emanated from inside the medical contraption. "You know what time it is!"
I smiled.
"Marcus!" I offered him my hand to help him climb out of the bed in which he lay.
With surprising speed and grace, he nimbly leaped to his feet and stood beside me, butt-naked. His body and face were fully healed now. He looked exactly as I remembered him, although I couldn't precisely remember the last time I had seen him this nude.
"Unnnnghhh, son!" he thumped his chest, bullishly. "Cain't fuck wit' dis! Cain't no body fuck wit' dis! Fo' rea'! I'm back, boy! Don't call it a comeback!"
I tossed the gilded compute-pad to him and he plucked it deftly out of the air. I figured he needed it more than he needed pants.
"Koochy, now that you've got all your hardware back, you gotta update your software!" I suggested, guessing at the technical terms. "Remember all your hacking skills that you left backed up in the clud?"
"Fuck yeah, P! I'mma get on dat wit' da quickness!" His newly-restored fingers were a blur over the compute-pad's screen. "Mu'fuckin' hospitals got dat premium internets! Dem tubes be like, six, se'en feet across, son!"
It was true. Originally conceived by the Good Man's government as a way to move robotic doctors offshore, the high-bandwidth facilities embedded into every hospital were now used for ensuring that the medical facility's permanent residents, other couch-beasts like Yvonne, had the latest Virtual Augmentation Gogglerz tweeting and poking abilities. It was declared a human right to poke others with one's VAG, and the robotic doctors were cast aside.
"GOT-dammit!" Koochy spat, vehemently. "How da fuck you goan have sixty nine thousand updates, son? Yo ass muh be bad at doin stuff they first damn time if you still ain't got dat shit right sixty nine thousand times lata!"
I laughed.
Updates had become heavily regulated and even mandated after the security servicing nightmares of the twenty first century. After most of Earth's middle east had been inadvertently bombed into non-existence due to a bad software update to the then-rarely-updated MISSLR app, the world governments had come together and treatied that every piece of creation wrought by man's hand must be updateable and updated regularly.
For compute-pads, economy models were required to update themselves once a day, regardless of whether an update was required. For luxury models, more frequent updates were seen as a feature and thus depending on the cost, they might update as frequently as every ten minutes. In fact, some d
evices were so up to date, that they had to interrupt their update process in order to update. Despite all of this investment, software updates were still terrible; slow and unreliable, they always seemed to fail when you needed the device most.
Now was no exception.
"Motha fuck you, son!" Koochy was yelling angrily at the compute-pad. "Somethin' happened my motha fuckin ass! I'll show ya somthin' happen, sucka!" He began slamming the device into the metal frame of the surgipod which had just restored him.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the nurse who had burst in on us was trying to cautiously escape our presence by slinking out of the room as she had entered.
"Whoa, hold on a minute!" I snapped my head around toward her.
"Eep!" she uttered at being caught and turned to run.
Bronson shot out and easily closed the distance between myself and the escaping woman. She screamed furiously as the long arm of my dick wrapped around her feet and yanked them out from under her.
"No! Let me go!" she protested and slapped inefficaciously at my fleshy member. Without conscious direction from me, it was encircling her ankles, like a boa constrictor.
"Damn, P! You always up ta some kinda trouble," Koochy was still smacking his compute-pad into his other hand, as if that would somehow shorten the update cycle. "Who dis bitch?"
I shrugged. "Unlucky?" I proffered in return.
"Please!" my trapped victim pleaded. "Please, let me go! I won't tell anyone I saw you in here. I... I don't even know where Dr. Franz is. Please, I have a family!"
"Look, we're not going to hurt you," I try to comfort her by retracting Bronson, which turned to be more challenging that I expected. Bronson was not listening to me.
Koochy laughed.
"Our track record fo' not hurtin' foo's ain't dat great, yo," he explained. "How you goan tell dis girl yo ass ain't dangerous when you got a damn tentacle dick runnin' up her legs?"
"Shut up, Koochy," I tried to use my other two hands to reel Bronson back in without looking like I wasn't in control.
This interaction did nothing to calm the nurse, who realized I was in the process of letting her go and began to thrash frantically in an effort to free herself. Our posse had almost recovered itself to the point of being able to go rescue TK! I was loathe to backslide into medical necessity right away thanks to a firefight or a deadly dance off with the hospital guards she would summon if allowed to leave.
"Here," I had an idea. Instead of pulling Bronson away from her, I willed him to tighten his grasp on her limbs. Deftly, I swept her up off of the ground and, like a crane, used my dexterous dong to deposit her into the surgipod that Koochy had just vacated. "Let's put her in here for now." The heavy top to the device began to automatically seal her inside.
Koochy grinned, connivingly.
"Ay, we sorry, girl," he called to her through the thick glass that windowed the medical pod. "Don't worry doh, Big Kooch gonna make it right. Unnnnghh!" He pocketed his useless compute-pad and let his fingers dance over the surgipod's control panel.
"What?" I was concerned by this. I already felt bad about having to ruin the nurse's day thanks to her chance encounter with us. The terribleness of merely a moment with us was more than sufficient to spoil years of her life. "What are you doing?"
"Brangin' dat booty back!" Koochy joyfully told me. "Bubba bubba bubba bubba bubba butt!"
"Uh, come on, man, leave that poor girl alone," I tried to dissuade him from hacking her rear.
Before Koochy could respond, Alphonso's surgical unit unsealed itself with a wooooosh. Simultaneously, we both turned our heads to see him emerge.
"Wha tha FUCK?!" Koochy yelled, furiously.
I gasped.
Alphonso had apparently reprogrammed his surgipod not just to heal him, but to make him better. Or at least turn him into Alphonso's idea of better. What strutted out of the surgipod was barely recognizable as Alphonso.
He had replaced his burnt and blistered skin, of course. Now he was a golden-brown tan from head to toe, smooth and hairless except for a rugged five-o'-clock shadow.
He'd also given himself a physique that Adonis himself would have been envious of. Muscles bulged from his arms and shoulders. I took a closer look though and saw that the muscles were often not even attached to anything. Alphonso had created a caricature of what a human should look like. His lower body was practically unchanged and looked atrophied in comparison.
"Yo' 'bro', you skip leg day? Haaaah!" Koochy mocked.
"Hi guys!" Alphonso greeted us. "Aww, Koochy, you're just jealous, aren't you? That's okay, one day you'll grow up to be a real man like me." Alphonso turned to flex his biceps in a weak imitation of a bodybuilding pose and the swollen mass of muscle tissue drooped off to one side.
"Alphonso, um," I started, "why do you have six-pack abs on your forehead?"
"Just because you haven't put in the work to get the body I have, doesn't mean you should criticize me!" Alphonso shouted back defensively. "And now you're worried I'm going to get all the girls!"
Alphonso looked around for a girl and saw the nurse trapped in the surgipod, still scared witless.
"Um. 'Ay!' Yeah. Ay girl!" Alphonso tried to spit game. "You like this, huh? Like when I talk dirty with my pussy? Uhh, I mean, no, wait!"
"C'mon Alphonso, you went zero to a hundred there," I said. The nurse looked like she was about to vomit in the tight confines of the medical enclosure. I thought I was bad at dealing with women, but Alphonso was bad at everything.
"Don't mess with me, Preston! I know you guys are just jelly," Alphonso pushed me away and began pressing buttons on the surgipod interface.
"What are you doing?" I was pretty sure Alphonso had no idea how anything worked, other than a Good Man Ship.
"I'm helping this little beautiful baby," he responded as if I was annoying him with my inquiry.
I shot a glance at Marcus who had an "oh shit, this is about to be funny," expression on his face. He looked hilarious when he tried to hold back his raucous, guffawing laughter and I was the one who ended up laughing in response to his visible effort.
"Come on, Alphonso," I grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the surgipod.
"No, Preston! Guys! Come on," he allowed me to drag him towards the door, although not without protest. "I'm just about to score here! Come on!"
I rolled my eyes. "Jesus, Alphonso. Did that thing spike your testosterone? There's no time for her! We have to get to TK, remember?"
"Call me! Call me, baby!" Alphonso mimed use of a compute-pad to the trapped nurse as we exited the surgery room.
"Damn, 'phonso," Koochy chided him. "You like some kinda frat dude. I usually be thankin' a you like 'dere's 'phonso, dat fuckin' pussy.' But now I be all like 'damn, dat dudes a dick.' 'sup den, bro-man?"
Broman! I was reminded of Limbozer's body guard in the subterranean sorority we had started with. Had he shared a similar genesis? I didn't remember his muscles looking all retarded like Alphonso's did.
"Why do you think you have three biceps?" I noticed the extra lumps rippling under Alphono's skin.
"Bro, do you even lift?" Alphonso snarked. The machine seemed to have healed his sense of humor, which had obviously been defective since birth.
"Dat foo' stupid," Koochy waved his hand in dismissal. "Reason yo' muscles got muscles is cause you got on dat beta, sucka!"
"What?"
"Oh, he's talking about the surgipod," muscular Alphonso explained. "The surgipod let me sign up for beta features right from the control panel! Technology is so cool. I tried this sweet healing mode called FeelTheGAINZ! BulkUP Pro (Beta)."
"Yeah, you know why it a beta?" Koochy asked him. "'cause dat shit ain't ready yet!"
Alphonso held up and waved his index finger, knowingly. I saw that he had a bonus set of triceps in the back of his hand.
"You can't hurt me with your words, Koochy," Alphonso said, pleased with himself. "I'm finally confident in my looks. And I'm a Vice-Admiral. I'm
done being the side-kick in the group. I want, no, I demand the respect I deserve!"
I sighed. A self-righteous, over-confident Alphonso was not going to be a boon to my rescue mission.
"Look, we'll sort out our friendship hierarchy after we get TK back. She's been down there way too long! Come on," I urged us on.
The hospital hallway was still empty. Unlike the possible musical future I had foreseen, no dancing nurses or any blaring hip hop music was present. We walked shoulder to shoulder down the vacant hospital corridor; a nightmarish trio, the sight of which would shake the sanity of any who encountered us.
"TK," I pledged an oath to the cerulean morning. "I'm coming to get you."
We boarded the GMS-KJH86 and took to the sky, with murder on our minds.
End of Prologue
"Where the heck is this place? Are you sure this is the right lake?" Alphonso whined after several hours of circling the great ice sheet of old lake Erie. "I don't see any tracks in the snow or ice."
"You can't read heat signals or anything beneath the ice?" I asked incredulously as I looked over the vast array of high tech sensors and doo-dads decorating the GMS' cockpit.
Alphonso flexed various muscles on his arms and hands that should not have existed as he interfaced with the warship he was piloting. He shook his head.
"Either there's nothing there, or there's some kind of interference," he told me. "I can't see anything. I can't even see the big robot monster we fought. It doesn't make sense."
I shrugged and scratched my head with Bronson. Nothing in my life made sense.
"TK!" I finally worked up the nerve to reach out to her telepathically. I braced myself for what I might receive in return. More than a full day had passed since I last talked to her. Twenty four hours of being trapped in that cave with the crowd of naked, hairy, middle-aged men. I had not slept since we had last interacted. I wondered if the same was true for her.
"P-Preston," TK's tired and weak mental voice reached back to me. She sounded very far away. "Oh, Preston. Is it really you?"