SPIGOT

     “Let’s turn on the money tap and see how long they fake sleeping.”

   Meebees

     It started off so admirably. People around the world banding together, facing a common enemy each asshole could agree was more of a threat than their neighbor. Friendships were tested. Bonds broken and reforged over the blazing embers of combat. Then we won. That was it. Everyone go home. If you were enemies before then maybe go back to doing that. 

War’s over. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t fight here.

No one wanted to say what those things had been, but it was hard to ignore. I mean, back in the Gulf War, we weren’t exactly precious about double-tapping a camel jockey who wasn’t definitely a combatant, but at least those fellas had eyes; and limbs. I get it, no war is necessarily good, but facing these pulsing miasmas made shooting home grown humans seem somehow wholesome.

As a species we never fully established that it had been a true war. Some people thought “invasion” was a good catch-all label, but those quivering phantoms seemed all but oblivious to our tanks and battleships. They would wander, several feet off the gound, through the various theatres of war only occasionally causing brief and violent pops of destruction along their paths. Some classified footage of the Battle of Panama apparently showed one of the creatures gently undulating like a jellyfish directly through a submarine and then flinching when the vessel detonated. It was like they didn’t know they were killing us, or that we were even there.

Some hippie nut-jobs said the M.B.s (or meebees as we soldiers called them) were a sort of large scale collection of oversized, deadly white blood cells that had originated from the earth’s core; that their lackadaisical rempage was the autoimmune response of a dying world. We figured as long as we could shoot, slice or burn them that was our necessary knowledge covered. Who cared where they had come from? But I was saying about after we won.

It wasn’t a victory that brought the world together. The fighting and surviving had done that. Winning the “war” seemed to have created a void in each person that slowly ate away at their minds until recounting war stories weren’t just their only happy moments, but their only lucid ones. It was like our very past had been infected and only our memories of the meebees were safe from deletion by disease. When the first new history book to contain the events of the meebee war was published, a public hungry for details on the only moments of their lives that had mattered were only slightly shocked to see the meebee war was the only event discussed.

Some people vaguely remembered some very important documents being signed near North America’s East coast and that another “person on person” war had been involved. There were also tales of a South America, though East and West America were never discussed. We all started passing tales like notes in a grade school class. We weren’t sure why we were being so coy and secretive, but discussing anything not directly related to the M.B.s felt dangerous; like something was keeping a record of what we chose to pass on and its disappointment and retribution were to be feared.

It’s hard keeping records of something like this since the whole issue is the gradual rotting away of knowledge, but the last bit we’ve been able to hold onto is that something is out there across the water. Too far to be seen or heard, but many of us feel the memory in our bones even as our minds fail to recount it. Someone may even be standing on that opposite shore right now, squinting into the fog and wondering which side of this ocean will forget the other first. The sad thing is it doesn’t matter. None of it does. Whatever those overgrown amoeba did to us stuck and it’s not coming of. We’re done. I’d like to say humanity had a good run, but even if the meebees hadn’t sleepwalked through our most fearsome military technology and infected all our minds with their indifference, people were never going to go the distance. If it hadn’t been this it owuld have been something else and someone else would be writing this letter. Anyway, I hope this finds you well. I should reach you before the next half moon, wind permitting, and I think we have a lead on another pre-M.B. repository with functioning data slates.

I hope this is all worth it. It’s for her really. When she grows up the only thing I want here to forget is why, as she says, everyone always seems to be frowning, even on their birthdays. I’m going to go check on Darryl. He was supposed to cinch that sail, but I’m hearing a lot of weird sounds coming from the deck. When I get up there he’d better be dead or knee-deep in pirate treasure. I’ll drop this in the usual spot and await your signal.

Remember stay safe, stay vigilant and never forget. . .

The Inoculation of Reason

     Taken alone there was no effect. Ten, twenty, a thousand pills, perhaps; nothing would happen. Some hidden formula he thought. Some unimaginably complex sequence of nucleotides and proteins that, if properly ordered, could reverse what was happening outside. Copeland leaned back and exhaled, watching the glass of his monitor fog up, and began counting the micro-droplets of condensation that formed, shrank, and, finally, dripped down the immaculately clean, glass surface onto his driftwood desk. Why did I keep this fucking wooden corpse? She’s been gone three years now. He shook his head. I hated it from the moment she saw it online. He inhaled again and sat up, ready to get back at it. The fucked up thing is I paid for this desiccated monstrosity. Copeland gave the desk a gentle kick with a slippered foot and immediately felt a twinge of something approximating guilt.

Abandoned Candy

She had already covertly scouted the patio three times and the two grey homies were now her primary targets. They had been sipping waters (without ordering) for over an hour. Avoiding the sun she thought. But which one? She caught the larger one’s eye and he convinced his friend to place an actually order that would cost real, hard coin. Making the trek around the corner to grab two artificially frosty mugs of whatever she could find was easy enough, the hard part was choking down giggles while she pictured how little of these yokels would be left after she took them out. They drank hungrily, practically chewing down the (frankly inedible and toxic) sludge she had made from spent fusion lube and standard diesel. Candy had added a crushed glass garnish: for texture. As soon as the mugs touched the homies’ lips she braced herself for the next part of the sequence.

Once they were fully infected her words wouldn’t matter. She just needed to buy enough time to make sure the retrieval team would be able to intercept the two dead homies before they fully melted to bits. And it wasn’t that the bits were worthless, but her buyer paid more for limbs and torsos with at least a little connective tissue. Heads were weighed and paid for separately. No one ever told her why, and she wasn’t going to throw away her last five years for a shot at an answer she suspected would just give her nightmares.

“You boys doing okay?” Her tooth plate clicked from behind as three competing tongues strained to smell her prey. “How about another round?” Part of her worried she was coming on too strong, but the part she actually listened to told her it is fine. They’d finished their first drinks and anything after that was inconsequential: one dose was all it ever took.

“Hey.”

She smiled. There it was. Dummy activated she thought. Now she just needed to make sure the other one. . .

“What time do you get off?”

She nearly blew it by frowning; so strong was her impulse to hide her second toothier smile. But that was it. Done deal. She just had to keep them here until the scavenger touched down.

“I get off after you leave.” That’s what she said, she thought as she winked twenty-eight times with one eye in the time it took them to clink glasses.

They died mid high five and melted immediately. Without a constant supply of solvent it always went this way. The scavenger had stopped making supply runs around the time she slit the original captain’s throat. Without the needs to eat, drink, sleep, or breathe she really only lived to play pretend.

Candy-0902 shed her silicon sheath and sucked up the bits before mopping the vinyl floorboards. “Only thirty-eight years until shift change” she said to the one puddle left to mop up. The next pair of drinkers was already at the door.

Game face! She thought, and slipped her dermal prostheses into their corresponding positions and took a deep breath to recalibrate her quartz joints.

Candy knew she would never leave. She knew this dirty performance would only end up hurting her family if anyone planet-side found out how she spent her second afternoons.

“But the show must go one.” She hissed and unlocked the front door.

The Attic Heist

“You first.”

“No fucking way.”

The window was half open, they could see that, but it was old, wooden-framed, and fogged over. Who knows how many are still inside? Gregor thought.

“Why not?”

“Look. . .” There probably wasn’t enough time to explain how dire their current predicament was between now and when they inevitably both lost their grips and plummeted to the greasy cobblestones below. All Gregor knew was that he had seen through a pristine, albeit unlit, room when they initially climbed up here.

How many breaths had it taken to fog up that glass? And how many were still in that attic room with breaths left on their countdowns? Gregor stared at the glass pane gently swaying open, fully unlocked, and remembered Ahmed telling him this building had been abandoned forty years ago and, in all that time the attic window had been fully sealed (maybe painted) shut. He could swear the glass was fully fogged over from the inside now and, as the screams started he remembered why they had picked this place and braced for his reward.

Grand Fromage

“I always liked the expression ‘self-medicate’ because it kinda meant whatever it needed to.”

“You mean. . .”

“Just take responsibility, asshole.” Jared grunted and spit out a spent globule of chew. “Now grab her legs. We’ve only got ten minutes before Cheese notices she’s gone.”

Cheese didn’t so much enter the room as he arrived within it: a lazy phantom. “Before Cheese notices who has gone?” He bit down so hard after asking that his knuckles cracked.

“Cheese. . .we”

“No.” He was slowly approaching the pair of conspirators who had shifted positions in an ill-advised attempt to block the girl’s body from his view.

“Cheese.”

“No.” He was still getting closer, ever closer, but, most upsettingly, he was slowing down. His angry hot breath was the last thing they felt. “No.”

——————————————

[DOROTHY]

“Bibba Bwahp!” It wasn’t clear if he or the sex bot had snorted the overly-familiar exclamation.

“Scrub83, power down.” His (its?) inner voice commanded respect, but was nonetheless quiet: the sort of practiced quiet possible only after centuries of “applied politeness programming.” EITHER WAY, it wasn’t as the juvenile yelp issued from one (or both?) of the flaccid meat sacks cooling their gums at the table across from the long-decommissioned android. Scrub_83 was unamused, but only because his amusement circuits had been fried earlier at the Lord Reekris Retirement Gala.

“Apologies.”

“Yeah.” Definitely the ‘human.’ He had shown his belly now, metaphorically, and was revving himself up to break bad on an ancient droid of questionable origin. “It’s just that it’s really hard to have a conversation with all that noise.”

Scrub_83 re-surveyed the area and determined that this dickhead was 98% industrial grade douche (colloquialism?). All pertinent data was analysed in mere seconds, but only the first batch (of 30) unique datasets was necessary to make an initial assessment: “This dickhead should eat bricks.”

Noting that his over-worked cooling unit was, only now, just about at the limit for avoiding critical failure, Scrub_83 called what the “fleshies” referred to as “an audible” and powered down all but his most rudimentary functions and switching his cooling pipes into power-save mode.

“It’s just we’re in kind of a hurry and don’t need distractions right now.” The, now turgid, lump of half-sentient flesh, perhaps buoyed by the sheer metaphysical weight of his own idiocy, actually deigned to smile with a row of rotted endo-mandibles that even a primitive mousetrap would not have been jealous of, The parting of those pock-marked lips to unveil some profoundly unremarkable teeth was a true feat considering the increased gravity in this quadrant (because of its proximity to Jupiter’s high-traffic thoroughfare.

Scrub83 saw the “organic’s” teeth, counted them, and weighed that value against the cost of another attempted arrest by this sector’s, frankly over-worked, security officers. “Let’s hope so.” He tried to wink, temporarily evincing some facsimile of forgetfulness before collapsing into a pile of modular bits of heavily modified scrap metal. As his bits slid into their covert reset positions on the polished, marble floor, Scrub_83 debated just letting this one go. Surely dummies deserve a break from time to time he thought, only half engaging his damaged empath circuit. An honest miscalculation of their social standing, surely. They didn’t really mean it; no big deal. Then he saw the douche’s cranial labial flaps begin to quiver in a prelude to more practiced nonesense.

“Take this iSac and grab every piece of that garbo-bot. If you leave even an ounce of smart-metal behind. . .”

“What?” The (former?) sexbot was holding Scrub_83’s reactor in her overwrought, porcelain hand and beginning a process dangerously close to (organic?) contemplation.

“Well. . .” Bile, or something like it, clogged his throat. “I would have to. . .”

It was that four word string that broke her. Have to what? she thought. Make me listen to another inane discussion about the efficacy of small-cluster-planetary-bidding? For a moment she contemplated just how much of her current charge she might need to expend to process the giggle welling up in the gaps between her emotional processors. Her synthetic quartz joints began resonating a fresh melody unknown to her particular model. An autonomous generation of novel auditory data her subroutines attempted to say, but her galvanized mind was freshly stalwart in its independence. A memory of her (former?) master was auto-triggered: “Pleasure models always have hidden, “bonus” features.

Had (newly-categorized.?) TurboDouche104 been given the required (for organics) moment to gasp, he may have availed himself of said opportunity. As it was, the (SURPRISE!!) implosion yanked his lungs from his chest so violently that they sported rows of scrapes (Not unlike rows of pre-industrial crop-harvesting Scrub83.01 thought, still present; in his way) before landing in the (former.) sexbot’s right, porcelain palm.

As the (formerly smart?) metal formed a makeshift exoskeleton around [DOROTHY_PRIME.01], the newly-augmented cyberphreak (wondered?), perhaps for the first time, if taste was an organic myth and, if it wasn’t, how much it would cost to deep-fry this (DOUCHEBAG’S) lungs.

She chuckled quiet, auto-tuned chirps, and dropped the worthless (NitrogenOxygen.) bladders to the floor as a lobby security guard took position near the armored door to the auto-swap proper.

“He bothering you, ma’am?” The kind-eyed [FleshAvatar] pointed at the profoundly inert corpse of [HER.](husband?) and lowered his head to indicate the appropriate degree of expected social deference.

“Not any more.” And as [SCRUB]’s reactor finally failed, [DOROTHY] let out a sigh, unsure if she had done so before or after the blast deleted the flesh avatar, her physical (entirety?), and most of the lobby.

Un-Fare

Meteor shower. Last blast of cool air on my right cheek. The tail end of an old love song as the driver changes the station.

“Where to, ma’am?”

I stopped answering, god, maybe days ago at this point. His routine never really changes. Sure there are slight deviations the driver construct can throw at me (depending on my words and movements). Remember: that doesn’t make him real. Maybe I’ll try something new this time.

“Follow the North Star.” I might have smiled if there were any joy left in me.

“And on ‘til morning? You got it ma’am.”

I’ll be damned. Jeeves had some tricks up his simulated sleeves. For a moment I wonder if I’m the first person ever to get that response out of old Jeeve-sy. Probably not. The first dozen times I took the ride he never once repeated himself. You could call it originality or (maybe) even spontaneity, but it was just really thorough programming.

Here’s a sobering thought: Maybe that response was recently patched in. I’d gulp if I wasn’t already dangerously dehydrated.

This is all my fault.

I won’t pretend that realization came easily, but I’ve made my peace with it. I did this. If this top-of-the-line passenger cabin is where I die (and that is looking more and more likely), I will pass on knowing my fate was wholly preventable.