Brain Dead Peep Star Dreams
by Lance Dean
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 2
Slick as a wet whistle, Zed poked out his begrimed wigglies and shoeless pigglies and uncurled himself from within. Grime darkened his pale skin to ashen and lightened his black long-coat to a greasy gray.
Zed was spun out of his maraca. He swayed and weaved to keep a can of jenkem from spilling. He offered me a huff. The stink made the throbbing knot of my endo headache pulse. I declined.
“Didja ship come?” Zed slurred. He stared upwards as if he could see it hovering there.
Apparently, Zed still believed that was a good thing. Perhaps he believed the ship would bring supplies, as they had so many times before.
I envied his ignorance with vicious imaginings. Mate or not, if there were actually a pearl of idiocy inside him that I could take for my own, I would cut his stupidity from him with a knife.
I couldn’t dissuade Zed from tagging along. I made him leave the jenkem. The laws were draconian, and the smell eschewed subtlety.
The Tsantsi were Boss Family of the planet. As the licensed Pancorp distributor, they controlled all trade, especially the drug trade.
Since Boss Family controlled the security, legitimate business and organized crime, it wasn’t such a rough trick to control this space-locked rock, millions of light years from the next inhabited world.
Passenger buses never came anymore, so smuggling was out. Boss Family was the only source, which made drugs too expensive for most people.
But sanity wouldn’t survive long on Tsantsi, if you didn’t blunt your senses somehow. Options dwindled rapidly when you couldn’t afford Pancorp narcotics.
When the local economy tanked, jenkem went on the rise. Milking and scooping became more popular. Anything to get high, when all we had left was junk we made with our own bodies.
Boss Family outlawed it all. The punishments were severe, designed to be worse than death. Death was easy, a consummation devoutly to be wished, compared to the dull throb of life.
Unfortunately clones were unable to commit suicide. They were built that way. As they mixed with humans, that trait proved to be dominant. Since everyone was at least part clone, that final escape was taken from us.
I made a wasp-line to the nearest food machine and pumped in my pitiful fistful of filthy: Pancorp credit tokens, coin of the realm on all civilized worlds. The force that drove commerce in a hundred thousand solar systems, that made stars pirouette in their orbits, whose saucy sweetness was coined of heaven’s image.
Whatever the hell that means. I have a fritzed ancillary language chip. I had a repeat client, many years ago, an effete who preferred my protuberances to my orifices. He gifted me with an English literature chip. He wanted me to be a better conversationalist.
Unfortunately recreational psycho-narcos fried my Bacon, and my Shakespeare was randomized, then reordered alphabetically, line by line: nice and orderly by chip logic, but otherwise complete gibberish.
I punched buttons for a can of Pancorp-Cola, Pancorp Carbo Crisps and Pancorp Dried Fish Snackados, which were GMO fish flesh grown as fruit on a plant.
Zed looked me over as I collected the munchies from the slot. I didn’t mind him looking. He was the only one who didn’t look at me like meat.
We sat at a table on the patio of an abandoned cafe. I passed the crisps to him, put the Pan-Cola on the table between us, and tore open the Snackado bag with my teeth.
“Wha’ boot da bruises?” he asked.
I knew he meant my face. The rest were covered by clothes. I remembered Martone’s fleshy face flushed with exertion as he bludgeoned me within and without with his truncheon taser. Slobbering, drooling, snot running from his unformed nose. Lidless eyes bulging behind goggles. Teeth gnashed inside his lipless maw like a chattering death’s-head skull.
I didn’t know what or how to tell Zed. I didn’t want to think about it, so I kept myself clamwise, which confirmed Zed’s suspicions, no doubt. He passed the crisps back without taking any. Couldn’t tell if he was trying to be noble or if the jenks had his tummy turned.
Hot pain in my side made me bite down so hard I chipped a tooth. My liver was failing. My teeth were breaking down.
True, I hit my liver hard, like I was mad at it. Past habits weren’t the cause of said system failures, though. It was the creeping corruption that had chewed at humans for two millennia.
“Human” being a relative term, a second cousin to the truth. We thought of ourselves as human. Everyone claimed to be mostly human. But any titwit with two neurons left to rub together knew there were no real humans left.
* * *
Extendistance was the beginning of the end: self-replicating life extension nanobots that mimicked damaged flesh and organs. It was released by Genetech, a bio-engineering firm from New Mexico.
Genetech claimed Extendistance made you immortal. It took several hundred years to discover the real-world life expectancy the bots granted.
Turned out the bots stored DNA and RNA sequences as 64 bit numbers. After sequences had been stored and recalled by the bots, chunks of data would be truncated, lost to quantization error.
In each succeeding generation of replicated bots, more data was lost. Over time, the host would flatten out. Their personality and appearance would lose the things that made them unique.
Eventually, the bots lost cohesive validity. They forgot they were part of a greater whole. The greater body and individual bots ceased to replicate. Disassociated from other people and themselves, they hid from the light like vampires.
In the end, their bodies crumbled into dust. Damned oblivion entombed honored bones indeed, but by then it was already too late. We had wasted more than enough time to screw ourselves but proper.
While I munched crisps, Zed came around to the idea of food and helped me polish off the Snackados and cola. He didn’t ask any more questions, but my mind still turned back to last night.
* * *
Skipping down memory lane with Martone, my breast drum thudded as I remembered him pinning me by my throat.
He smiled as he throttled me, the way he did. Since he was lidless, you could only see it in the lift of his fat cheeks and the bulge of his naked eyeballs beneath his goggles.
He showed off the big clunky rings on his other hand. The jewelry flowed together around his fist and reshaped itself into brass knuckles. Memogold jewelry is a registered trademark of Pancorp, but that isn’t an especially pertinent detail when you’re being smashed in the face.
Martone worked for Boss Family, the descendants of Chan Tsantsi, the cartographer on the good ship Stock Incentive, which had discovered this planet.
Tikiru, the last Tsantsi heir, was over nine hundred years old. I met him once, if a service call counts. He was in a penthouse on the top floor of the tallest building on the planet.
Tsantsi Tower was hewn from diamond bricks and slabs. It sparkled and flashed against the sky like a frozen explosion. Tikiru hid from the sunlight up there, with heavy drapes drawn against the windows to prolong the life of his nanobots.
He was the last of his line. Tikiru was born without a cock. Smooth as a doll down there. He told me I looked like a living Picasso while I fiddled his ass.
He would catch a first-class seat out of here when that ship finally came in. That last ship ever.
Martone bragged about it to his toadies. A bustling rumor, a fray blown by an ill wind, seeding my clouded thoughts as I sprawled face down in a puddle of my blood.
One ship wasn’t enough to haul us all away, and that was a chilly enough thought, but old Martone was always one to ratchet up the terror whenever he could.
Maybe he knew I was still awake. Maybe Martone made it all up, to screw my mind with a sick idea. Ill deeds doubled with an ill word and all that.
I’d like to believe it was a lie, but bits sounded like authentic corporate double-speak, and Martone wasn’t exactly a wordsmith. For instance, he kept talking about the Proprietary Reduction Ruling.
The PRR was a free-trade agreement that allowed Pancorp to exercise freedom of trade. That was the gist of what was reported by the media. The exact details were contained somewhere in the thousands of pages of top-secret legalese of the PRR itself.
Martone claimed that the PRR redefined the meaning of terms such as proprietary, free trade, property and the like.
The ruling corporate board periodically issued these mandates during their “Shape of the Future” address. The PRR was supposed to enhance liquidity of Pancorp assets.
Sounded like a reasonable notion, until you discovered what they meant by it. That was knowledge I would scratch out of my brain if I could. It gave me cold grim shakies every time the thought crept up on me.
Think it was hard to wait for something nice? Waiting for something horrific stretched the terror along every second of anticipation.
Nothing short of a scoop job would ever get those memories out of my skull.
* * *
Copyright © 2018 by Lance Dean
