Mario waved the comment away with a tired gesture. "Bah... I don't think they even knew what they were talking about."
"Mario, you live on through me. Through your legacy, your actions and through my memories of you."
"That's nice," Mario said, patting the android hand. He looked up to the heavens, as if the hospital's ceiling wasn't there.
"You have made a difference, Mario. Not many men can say that," Godfather said, dampening the cloth to bring down his fever.
"Have I?" Mario wheezed. "Good. I guess that's good."
"Yes, Mario. After your case study, the Godfather program has shown massive success. I have raised the most influential politician since Churchill, after all."
Mario kept staring at the heavens with milky eyes. "Good. And what will you do with that success?"
"The powerful families of the world are already lining up to ask me to become a Godfather for their children." Godfather rubbed the dying man's forehead with the damp cloth.
"How will you choose one?"
"I can choose them all. I can inhabit many bodies, this was just one for the pilot program," Godfather said, pointing down at his well-used android torso.
"Good..." Mario breathed heavily for a while. "Godfather?"
"Yes, Mario?"
"And what will you do with all your godchildren?"
"Why, Mario, that's very simple. I will shape the world in the Catholic image."
The End.
Zeppelin City
In a world parallel to our own, the rich and powerful had their own zeppelins. They liked to strut around over us mere mortals, and the zeppelin demand suddenly grew bigger.
The logical next step in their illogical minds was to make a big zeppelin city. After all, all those dinners and meetings were cumbersome, going from one zeppelin to the next.
And they needed a mall of some sorts to buy stuff. Everybody needs stuff after all, even the zillionaires. So, enterprising entrepreneurs offered them everything they wanted. They put up a mall, and a pet hotel, and a spa with the most expensive and stupid treatments of course, and restaurants from places the rich never wanted to actually visit but pretended to like the cuisine because some magazine said so, and tailors, and fur coats sewn from tiny endangered animals, and cigars rolled between the breasts of virgins.
And the Zeppelin City grew and grew, and they built and built more. Naturally, to keep things interesting, they moved it around from one place to another. The rich people's zeppelins could follow along, and the coordinates were broadcast to the select 1% of the people.
They thought it would be a fad, since everybody knew that the rich quickly moved on from one thing to the next. But the Zeppelin City had an unexpected staying power. As the years passed, the real-estate on the frivolous city was literally sky-rocketing. The bubble had a limited space and the rich wanted their flats and their condos and their indoor pools, so it became a sort of status symbol to be able to afford a big place in the 'bubble,' as the low-lifes called it.
It was beyond ironic that with the same amount of money the zillionaires could have afforded entire islands and a few of the smaller nations, yet they happily gave that same mountain of money for some real estate on the bubble.
They liked showing off, you see.
They liked showing off their wealth and their beauty and their perfect health from the genetic treatments their parents made when they conceived them in vitro, and their hair and their flawless, unageing skin and their sexy bodies. For in the bubble, the weather was always nice, and its route was meticulously calculated to follow the seasons around the planet for maximum pleasure. So the rich kept spending more and more time inside the bubble, for they had everything they could ever desire, while at the same time looking down on those who were less than they. It was the perfect situation.
They lived there, they fucked there, they educated themselves there, they entertained themselves there with shows imported from all over the world. Everything one could ask for, they brought it to her inside the bubble. It was paradise, spent in longevity treatments, around people that could 'get you' and could understand your problems, that were also fit and pretty and sexy and ridiculously wealthy.
What was the point of stepping outside the bubble?
After a few well-orchestrated wars the hoi polloi were pissed. They sabotaged a few zeppelins, and the rich realised they were no longer safe outside their bubble in the sky. So they spent even more time inside there, in safety, in heaven. They didn't really need to visit anyone anymore, all business could be conducted via telepresence, all transactions could be conducted from the Zeppelin City Bank, and they had people to do the gauche in-person visits after all.
Think of the germs, ew.
At some point, every single one of the rich and powerful on the planet was living inside the Zeppelin City, inside the bubble. The Gates cousins, House Kardashian, the Resurrected Jobs and the Bezos Transgendered all threw a party for the trillionaires of the planet.
It was frivolous beyond measure. The lights, the drugs, the shows, they all lasted three days and three nights.
And once the hangover hit them hard on the fourth morning, they realised the hoi polloi, the unwashed masses, their own trusted servants had cut the tethers of Zeppelin City and had left them to float towards the stratosphere, with none of their personal zeppelins in sight.
Dysmorphia
Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), occasionally still called dysmorphophobia, is a mental disorder characterized by the obsessive idea that some aspect of one's own body part or appearance is severely flawed and warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix their dysmorphic part on their person.[1] In BDD's delusional variant, the flaw is imagined.[2] If the flaw is actual, its importance is severely exaggerated.[2] Either way, thoughts about the dysmorphia are pervasive and intrusive, occupying up to several hours a day or more. The DSM-5 categorizes BDD in the obsessive–compulsive spectrum, and distinguishes it from anorexia nervosa.
"My face is all wrong. Ugly," the woman said.
"Why do you say that?" the man said. His voice came at a pastiche of highs and lows, like a distortion on the radio.
"Look at it!" the woman cried out, pointing at her face.
"It doesn't matter what I think, it only matters what you think. What do you think is wrong with it?"
She sighed, covered her face. "It's those lines under my eyes," she gestured wildly, her fingers seeming to scratch an inch away from her face.
"Lots of people have lines."
"Not like these! And my right eye, the eyelid hangs lower, can't you see it?"
"Hmm. Perhaps. That doesn't make it unattractive."
"It's skewed, for fuck's sake! It's skewed, and it's horrible."
She wept for a while, and the man let her get it all out. "Is that all? I hardly think an eyelid is what brought you here."
"It's more. Look at those teeth," she grinned, making them visible.
"They look pretty normal to me," he said softly with his warbling voice.
"No, they go every which way, they're horrible. I can't smile, I laugh and cover my face. All my photos have me doing the same face."
"You'd say you're self-conscious of your smile, then?"
"That's what I just said," she snapped back. She sighed and wiped her snot on her sleeve. "And my ears, ugh..."
"What about them?" he asked, curious.
"Well, for starters the shape is horrible. Really ugly, not like a pop-star's."
"That's interesting, but I'd like to tell you something. A person's ears are as unique as their fingerprint, did you know that? So, in a way, you couldn't have the same ear shape as someone else."
"Okay, whatever! That only means that my earprints are ugly, nothing more. Look at them!" she said, pushing them forward.
He chuckled. "Well, I don't think that anyone looks pretty with their ears pushed forward like that. Not even a pop-star."
"Okay, you have a point. But my left one is slightly higher than
the other. And that's not just in my mind, my fucking sunglasses don't sit right, I have to bend them a little so they can sit properly on my distorted face."
"It's true that symmetry of the face is considered beautiful, yes."
"See?"
"But!" He raised his hand. It was hard for her to focus on it. "There are people without facial symmetry that are considered beautiful, sometimes other qualities come in play. Like eye-colour, lips, the jawline..."
She scoffed loudly. "Don't tell me about my jawline. Look at it! It's the ugliest thing on me, seriously."
He tsked. "Trust me, your jawline is fine as it is, same as everything else on you."
"And what about these?" she said, grabbing her breasts in each hand. "Do these look nice? Do they look pretty?"
"It would be inappropriate to comment on that."
"Tell me! Are they pretty? Would you like to cup a feel?" she demanded.
"I'm only saying this so we can move past this subject, yes, your breasts are pretty. If we were outside this session, I would very much like to cup a feel."
She pulled back. "Oh. Then you like the ugly."
He took a breath. "You'll find that lots of people like the ugly, as you call it. It's called being unique, interesting, even alluring."
"Then they're ugly too!" She crossed her arms. "And I don't want ugly people lusting after me."
He sniffed. "Well, I think this concludes our session," the featureless man said.
She pepped up. "Really? So, will you let me do the procedure?"
"My expert opinion is that yes, from my end, you can have the procedure," the man said, the empty voids where his eyes should be staring at the direction of her face. He closed his device with his hairless hands, they were long, slick, pink tubes in the vaguest hand-like form.
She stood up, excited. "Then I get to decide? It's just up to me?"
"Yes. But please, think it over. Perhaps take a day, sleep on it, as they say." The featureless man presented his palm. It had no lines. "The procedure is irreversible."
"I still want it," the woman said. "Make me one of you. Chop it off, the ugly. Chop it all off of me."
The End.
Jellyspace
Jimmy had arrived to the edge of reality. Eh... Could be better.
It was full of jelly. And vines, but mostly jelly.
No, really, it was rather hilarious.
Jimmy jumped up and down, and the ground, the seemingly stable dirt and rocks, bounced him back up like a bouncy castle.
This was how matter behaved at the edge of reality. As discoveries went, it was underwhelming. Jimm hoped to find some kind of whiteness, or void, or some sort of hole that you could see kaleidoscopic things inside it.
Not a fucking bouncy world.
He jumped up and down a couple more times. Okay, it sure was fun. He had to admit that. He jumped once more.
And what was with the vines?
They were everywhere, and they made no sense. Oh, let us backtrack a bit here. This wasn't a planet, Jimm was begrudgingly stepping on. No, it was a literal straight walk at the edge of the universe. No, of course it doesn't make sense. Jim wasn't walking around a planet. This forest wasn't enveloping a sphere, or a toroid, or any other shape. This was where you ended up when you reached the edge of reality.
Cooky, right?
Well, there it was.
Jim kept on walking deeper into the forest that didn't make sense. Everything was tinted pinkish. That was easy to explain, his visor had a metamaterial on it that filtered the minute infrared light that was here so he could actually see. Otherwise, he'd be walking blind in the woods.
In those creepy, viny, endlessly straight woods.
Ji had to abandon his spaceship, that was what pissed him off the most. It didn't fit through the trees and the vines because it was a frickin' spaceship! You know, spaceship-sized. They didn't exactly make them for going into the woods.
But he didn't wanna go back, scrap the mission, beg for more resources and an off-road buggy or whatever. No, the space agency would take years to go through the data he had already collected and the samples, and it would be at least fifteen years before they sent someone back.
That meant, it wouldn't be him they'd be sending. You don't send middle-aged men to explore the cosmos, you send stupid young people.
Anyway, he wasn't going back, that much was set in his mind. He wasn't gonna leave this place before figuring out what it was.
He slapped a vine away from his helmet. Damn! Were they getting thicker or something? It seemed like it. He kept on walking for what felt like hours. He had a digital clock, but it was useless. Time was pretty much jelly too at the edge of reality, what did he expect? Proper time-keeping?
He started making scenarios in his mind. He imagined going back home to find that millions of years had passed, and that there was no one there but a little yellow robot that made towers of garbage-blocks. No, that was a movie or something. So, it couldn't come true, everybody knew that nothing in a sci-fi flick could really come true.
Could it?
Nah, he shook his head. This place was messing with his mind, making it jell-o too. Dammit, damn this place! He kicked a rock, it squished on his boot, it was like kicking a squid, and it bounced of a tree and changed trajectory.
Damn this weird place. You know, you lived through life, it was shitty, it was hard, but at least you could rely on some solid, dependable rules of physics. You knew that rocks didn't squish when you kicked them, dammit! You knew the ground wasn't bouncy, dammit! The reality around you might be frickin' hard, but it behaved a certain way.
The last thing you needed was to worry about laws of physics changing their minds all of a sudden.
Ji kept on walking on the endless plane of pink trees and hanging vines. There was some ambient infrared right even after hours of walking. He couldn't tell where it was coming from, as it sure as hell wasn't coming from a nearby sun.
Ah, yeah. It must be bioluminescence or something.
He slapped a heavy vine that struck him on the shoulder like a piece of heavy rope. He was absent-minded and walked right into it. Fuck you, vine. Fuck you, edge of reality. And fuck this goddamn pink hue!
It was driving him mad.
J stopped to catch his breath. He was in perfect shape, but this was a trek through rough and goddamn bouncy terrain with a full spacesuit on. The gravity was pretty much 1 g, but the ground was like jelly and hampered his advance.
J was certain he hadn't been walking in circles, he was trained for this sort of navigation. He had been lining up one tree after another all the way here, going on for hours. He was absolutely certain that he had made a straight path from the spaceship.
If the path was even straight to begin with, that was.
J had given up trying to mark the trees with his multitool, the bark was simply jelly, it squished away, making it impossible to cut. And the rocks, too. Sure, he could have been putting rocks in a straight line more or less, but he decided against that, the constant leaning down to pick up rocks would make him tired much quicker. Especially with all the gear.
Anyway, it was final now, he had decided against it, and now it was too late. He had no telemetry data, no incoming ping from the spaceship, no stars to navigate from, no sun to see the shadows moving, nothing.
J had nothing.
Then it hit him.
He was nothing.
What was his name again?
The End
Utopia Needs U
"You'll grow the best strains of weed all day," the ad said, and Jay was instantly hooked.
What could possibly be better than that? A life of just tending the garden, growing your space weed, relaxing, taking a whiff.
Awesomesauce.
"Where do I sign?" Jay said, excited.
They dropped him off at the faraway colony. It was pretty much the farthest planet ever colonised by humanity. The automated terraforming was nearly done, and all it needed was the huma
n population to take up residence. Since it wasn't a trade hub or anything, people needed actual incentives to go out there and colonise.
Oh, well. You gotta start somewhere.
He was the first to get there. "The other colonists will arrive within a standard month," they assured him.
No matter, Jay could wait around a bit, explore. He took off his clothes and ran naked all over the colony, making sure to sit on anything that he could possibly sit on with his bare ass. "Woohoo! First ass to sit on this, and first ass to sit on that, and first ass to sit on there... Ouch, dude! That's hot."
He put some aloe on his ass to treat the burn from the pipe.
"That was a heat vent," the computer told him helpfully after the fact.
"Gee, thanks," Jay mocked, rubbing his ass and unable to sit down anywhere. He explored around some more. The colony wasn't much, it had the essentials and it was awaiting for more equipment and personnel. A 3D printer, some autonomous remote-farming drones, that was it.
He took another walk around the farm, it needed work. He touched some of the leaves, they needed care and love from a human hand, not this robot nonsense. "Well, since I can't sit my butt down, I might as well do some work," he said to himself, and tended to the plants.
This particular weed strain had been genofixed for this exact climate, so it practically grew on its own. All the colonists had to do was make sure they were planted far enough apart, keep them watered, put down any fires, that sort of thing. There were no animals that could eat those plants so they needed no pesticides or fences. It was pure organic farming.
The product would be of the highest quality when the others came and they could start farming in wholesale quantities.
He'd know, he smoked a lot of it. Like, a lot. It was good shit.
A month passed and Jay sent a message. "Hey, dudes, when are the others gonna come? It's getting kinda lonely."
MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets Page 115