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. . .

Abandoned Candy

She had already overtly 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.”

“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.”