Brain Dead Peep Star Dreams
by Lance Dean
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 3
Genetech’s initial success was spring-boarded into more products. Redefining human perfection was their slogan. Their body modifications would make you stronger, smarter, faster, sexier. Their prebirth genetic manipulation could make your baby perfect.
Soon they had enough filthy and powerful people in their pockets to overturn the international laws against cloning. The rainbow they wrapped that idea in was that Genetech would provide a disposable race to colonize the stars.
Once Genetech started cloning, they soon had the manpower to match their financial force. This plunged Earth into the Merger Wars, and there they stayed for a century and a half.
When the dust settled, Pancorp was the only company standing. The first and only monoconglomerate, they provided air, water, food, housing, fuel, all consumer goods. They governed all principalities and human resources.
Advertising agencies from the days of competition, morphed into propaganda generators for the new corporate order. They painted Pancorp in glowing colors, as the champion of a better quality of life.
Of course, Pancorp had no interest in life; they were only interested in consumers. Workers were a byproduct of their need for customers. They granted worker rights to clones, not for equality, but to make them functioning consumers.
If they had followed the trend of the Industrial Revolution and automated everything, they would have had no consumers left. Pancorp went in the opposite direction.
They replaced automation with workers. Elongated life spans and abundant clones led to an ongoing surplus of labor, which made human effort cheaper than robotic assembly lines. Machines had to be repaired. Humans could just be worn to death and discarded.
Pancorp did explore space and strung their hollow men across the stars like Buyspree tree decorations. As the first interstellar colonies were founded, the original Extendistance users shuffled off their mortal coil and shivered to the ground as ash.
By then it was too late. After hundreds of years of genetic modification and interbreeding between homo sapiens and Pancorp sapiens, there wasn’t any human DNA left that was untainted by manipulation.
Everyone was a flawed copy of an illegible corrupted copy. Like the nanobots, our structural integrity was on the skids. We were crumbling apart at the molecular level.
As we spread throughout the galaxy, we started falling apart as a species. Every new generation had more mutation, birth defects, organ failure and sterility. The creeping consumption was killing us by micro-degrees.
It was like watching a ship careening out of control towards you and waiting two hundred generations for the final impact.
They damned us all by trying to lift humanity above the filth of fucking. Now fucking had lost its function; everybody was shooting blanks. The futility and frustration of it drove the dwindling population into escalating perversion and humiliating variations that mocked the procreative origins of the act.
The bastards pissed in the gene pool and corrupted us all. Pancorp engineers eventually discovered that their proprietary DNA, which had been created by Genetech for their clone models, had degraded and was no longer usable.
Genetech started with human DNA and manipulated it to suit their needs, but there was no human DNA left. Worse, they had abandoned research and development centuries ago, to concentrate on production. They had procedures and tools, but no one was left who could reproduce the original work. The human capacity for creativity had withered beyond recovery.
It had been a race to the bottom ever since.
I was born with a decent brain, but wildly divergent body. Zed looked like a normal guy, but his brain wasn’t worth half a cup of piss.
If you weren’t benevolently blessed at birth with that sort of numbing idiocy, you had to pay to get there. I have certainly done my due diligence to eradicate my brain cells, but nothing short of a scoop job would solve the problem permanently.
Licorice Slip, the peep star from Titan, had a scoop job a few years back. She was cursed by birth with high intelligence and blessed by classic beauty. She did have some minor surgical reconstruction, to remove her tail and a malformed conjoined twin, but those are blemishes hardly worth mentioning. The twin would have been an asset on Tsantsi; more holes to sell.
Slip’s scoop didn’t change her popularity much, although her core demographic shifted toward necrophiliac fetishists. When she was splayed out like the fresh corpse of a dead slug, they went at her. The occasional spasms that rippled through her body had nothing to do with the acts inflicted upon her.
Her brain was on a permanent loop of the purple pebbled shores of the beaches of Europa, or whatever it was brain-dead peep stars dreamed of.
If I could remember a pleasant memory, or find something beautiful, if anything like that still existed, I would go out on an autopilot loop forever. Sleep, say I, to end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks inherited by this flawed and corrupt flesh.
Of all my options, it was the most compelling. But, to sleep, perchance to dream. Oi, there was the blister on the nipple.
I had the Pancreds to pay for a scoop. Closest I ever got to nirvana was a coma that I caught from working a party. Four prospectives had their pill-stiffened whoopsies shoved in me. One had this two stone cephalopod with him and stuffed parts of it inside me.
After I awoke from the coma, I discovered the cephalopod was venomous. Upside to that one was being in a coma for close to a month. Downside was waking up minus a kidney. Never did find out who stole it.
* * *
“C’mon, jenk breath. Gotta go.”
Nowhere to go, but we had to keep moving. Swimming against the tide of consumption was the only way to keep our heads above the shit level of the universal cesspool.
Aimlessly wandering shanty back alleys, we got hungry. Zed overturned a rotten crate and grabbed up fistfuls of the disgusting delicacy he called land-shrimp. Cockroaches and rats had hitched a ride to the stars. Like filth, corruption and perversity, they reached everywhere mankind did. Rats were vicious and fast and, ever since the food shortages, hard to find. Lucky us, roaches multiplied faster than we could eat them.
We chewed in silence. Mastication required determination. My pounding shipwreck of a hangover had subsided into an achy sick funk, featuring occasional stabbies in the brain and the flavor of metal ringing on my teeth.
I could stomach only the softer bits. As they wiggled their way down to my tummy, I clenched my gut to keep the bile down. Zed powered right through, crunched the shrimplies up whole.
He took a moment to pick legs from his teeth with a grimy nail. “Wot the hell we do now, Tap?”
Simple query, heavy with meaning, if philosophy could find it out. I would kite my consciousness up into the stratosphere, Icarus myself into the nuclear furnace of Raskolnikov, pop like pyrotechnics into the nirvana of nonexistence. The natural solution, but this was something more than natural. Such a spectacular egress was sadly outside the realm of our meager possibilities.
I looked anew at Zed. Him being the raggedest rapscallion I’d ever acquainted, I had always assumed him blessed with natural ignorance, but I was beginning to doubt his cretinous blessing.
Zed nodded at me all-knowing, like he held all the crayons to the coloring book of my mind. Maybe he did. All he would need was gray.
Zed said he hid when he heard Martone, laughing so hard it sounded like puking. All the laughing Martone did, you’d think he had a sense of humor, but his kink was cruelty, and his release came from making you feel more miserable than he looked.
I had almost reached my nest. Only Zed knew where my hidey-hole was hid. He was there. Watched the whole thing. Martone catching me. Applying various bludgeons. Gibbering and laughing. Bragging about the big operation. Drool spraying through his yellowed teeth from his lipless attempts at transient consonants.
Martone took his time unwinding the yarn, which was written in traditional corporate doublespeak and related in language broken by deformed articulation.
The Proprietary Reduction Ruling’s definition of assets was the first chiller thriller. Everyone knew there were no pure humans left. We had bits of human and clone, but mostly we were junk DNA, a scrambled mass of stuttered information, manipulated, corrupted and mutated beyond recognition.
However the PRR ruled that everything that was not undiluted homo sapiens DNA was proprietary sequencing code. Intellectual property of Pancorp. The resulting flesh of such code was stolen property.
The ritual ransom of taxation by Pancorps’ financial wing had finally extended to its logical limit. They owned us in body, brain and bone.
Anyone gainfully employed by Pancorp had taxes removed from their salary. Everyone else had to pay out of pocket to justify their existence. The new cost of living was your weight in credits.
The alternative wasn’t pretty. Be better if all the miseries nature owed were mine all at once. Think about it. What do you think “asset liquidation” means?
Hence indeed, Wot the hell now?
We’d have to suss it on the move. We were prey. We had nowhere safe to stay.
* * *
We plied our brains towards what passed for a solution, either finding permanent, blissful surcease or at least blotto our brains out to forget the interim.
I turned another trick as we went. Since Tsantsi’s heyday, clients have become considerably more sparse and less generous. Being in the Sex Corps was often unpleasant, but there was a minimum payment contract. Since they retired me, I had to take what I got on the gray market.
I needed a drink. Stale land-shrimp were vile on my breath, and the piece of eight for my ass didn’t cover the cost of a cola. We found a kiosk bot that bought urine.
Being piss-poor and without a pot to piss in, we had to direct our streams into the collection jug with precision. Not a problem for Zed. More difficult, with my plumbing nightmare genitalia and five discrete spigots.
It took two-thirds of our piss as payment and returned a third as water: filtered, desalinated and still warm.
I tried to remember what it was like, in the penthouse of Tsantsi Tower with Tikiru himself, when I drank glacier water, bottled a galaxy away.
Zed led us deeper into the underbelly, the underground of Tsantsi. A misnomer, since tunneling beneath the surface of diamond was the pinnacle of futility.
Tsantsi City grew outwards from the surface, with buildings built on successions of risers to allow room for utility lines.
We ended up at ground level, in the sewage system. Wandering deeper into the bowels of the city, through a winding maze of giant diacrete tubes made of silica bonded with diamond dust.
We passed clustered knots of jenkheads and milk galleries run by wranglers who, for a small fee, guarded comatose endo heads while they rushed.
There were more people here. Struggling survivors stayed in the underground sectors. The last of the rich kept to their gilded towers.
The henchmen of the rich roamed the streets. It wasn’t safe for them here, where they were outnumbered. But their ranks were increased by every worker released from quarry duty.
They would come eventually and sweep away every last crumb of our existence, squeeze all the good out of us and leave the rot for the roaches.
* * *
Zed escaped while my mind wandered. I found him with some jenkheads, doing the shaky dance of the freshly huffed. Shaking his head, panting through puffed cheeks, Zed staggered in circles.
“Wot you doing, Zed? Need you sharp, mate.”
“Znat? Gatherin’ me ’telligence ’sall.”
“Yer knackered. Useless twat.” I scowled at the jenkers. Them in various stages of consciousness, ignored me. I noticed one though, further into the shadows, that writhed with familiar twitches that hinted at a deeper absence.
The closest jenker lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb against his fingers in the intergalactic gesture of commerce. “’S me sis. Wanna fucks ’er?”
“Wot I look like to you now?” said I.
He gave a noncommittal shrug.
“’Ow she got ’er scooper? Yer na filthy ’nuff ’fford tha’.”.
He rubbed his fingers until I dug out my last ducket. A piece of eight, 12.5 centicreds. I handed it over.
Jenker said his sister was scooped from a back-alley croaker doing high volume, quick and dirty scoops, to grab cash for getting off the planet.
He gave me the name Whithers and an idea of where to find him. All in all, a fair return on investment.
I went back to Zed, who was still looping from the jenkem, staggering in a circle. “Gatherin’ me ’telligence ’sall.”
Gathering intelligence indeed. Well done, you right bastard.
* * *
Staggering and muttering, Zed led the way, moving us deeper into the underground. Sky of pipes and diamonds underfoot. No more light answers. We headed further into another aspect of Pancorporate civilization, its criminal culture.
We followed the largest pipes into the empire of the unseen. The barest of curves along their length gave the impression that we were spiraling inwards as we traveled towards the center, where the pipes converged, like spokes on the hub of the planet’s grindstone.
Sitting at the center like a fat spider, with his arms encircling every bit of illicit activity, was Xodeaux, the Under Boss of Tsantsi City.
Xodeaux ran the underground. Pimps, pawnbrokers, sidewalk casino entrepreneurs, purveyors of fine counterfeit goods, all of them ultimately worked for him.
He was head crook, but Xodeaux was every bit as much an upstanding member of Pancorp’s stratified monopoly as Tikiru Tsantsi himself.
Xodeaux’s black market was a sanctioned criminal enterprise. Every scrap of filthy was counted and taxed. Counterfeit products were actually made by Pancorp and sold at a discount due to defects.
According to marketing research, selling the items as counterfeit increased the buyer’s satisfaction. Bastards took your dissatisfaction and sold it back to you at a profit.
Further in, there were more people, not like before the mass migration off this rock, but nothing like the current ghost shanty at street level. Folks here didn’t have duckets to buy their way clear of Tsantsi. Only Xodeaux was filthy enough to leave and he, like Tikiru, would stay until the job was done.
We made shite progress. I was tired, so I lumbered Zed over to one side for a bit of a sit.
Zed’s senses started to return, and his mumbling glossolalia began slipping his syllables around, like sliding tiles in a puzzle, until meaning spilled out.
I told Zed about the scooped sister, the cut-rate croaker and my last piece of eight.
Zed said that he had a plan.
We nested there, nurturing and kindling this spark of conspiracy to hatch a scheme, which must be a noble plot, parented of such pedigreed mongrels as ourselves. Even if we botched and bungled up damnation, any plan seemed good when the tick-tock was tapping a countdown to your demise.
Zed told me about a crone who ran a pawnbroker cart for Xodeaux. Scarcity of customers had driven her working turf to the outer skids of the underground, far from Xodeaux’s hub of activity.
She was bound to have some duckets. Enough for the croaker, with filth to spare. Zed was a man of little need. He would be my wrangler. Keep me safe and rent out my holes for recompense, like that loving brother from earlier. Even after Xodeaux’s cut, it would be a couple steps up the food chain for Zed.
* * *
Copyright © 2018 by Lance Dean
