On the way home from that illustriously mediocre meeting with Chad, I have a terrible realization: I’ll need a beer to relax after that terrible presentation, and I’m all out at home!
“Telaaaa,” I whine, “navigate me to the, uh, the grocery store.”
“But Señor Blake-san! Tonio told you to stop drink--”
Oh right. I have another one now. I switch her out for Veronica in my NeurOS and exhale deeply. “Veronica, take me to the grocery store, please.”
“With much pleasure, Master!” she seductively croons in response, materializing holographically in sexy full-body ZPE projection glory in the passenger’s seat, barely-fitting black leather and all. God, I missed this car. I know that I’ve technically stopped drinking, but... beer doesn’t count as alcohol, really, right? It’s like having a girlfriend but still getting a handjob from the weird girl at a frat party—it’s sad, disappointing, and not very satisfying, but it gets the job done and at least it isn’t REALLY cheating–right? And fuck, God knows I need SOMETHING after having to sit through Chad’s bullshit.
Unfortunately, since most people choose to suck Telecom off and just use Teledirect to get shit delivered since the damn thing came out a couple years ago, there’s now only one actual grocery store in the entire district, and it’s…
“We’ve arrived at… um… the store, Master Blake.”
I want to mock her for not knowing what to call it but I don’t even know what the damn place is called either. The only signage left on this brick shithouse is the word “FOOD” in burned out lights followed by what I can only describe as a flickering white hieroglyph depicting some arcane looking creature. It’s all pretty off-center so I’m assuming there was something else there, like, 50 years ago. “Food Sphinx, maybe?” I ponder aloud, sliding out of my leather throne. Veronica melts into a rain of fading photons as I slam shut the car door behind me.
I choose to ignore the horrible metal-on-metal screeching sound as I struggle to force the rusting ‘automatic’ door at the mouth of the building open. The arcane first-gen ZPE projector just inside is still hard at work, though all it’s managing to project now is a scrambled mess and the word “MVP” upside down and backwards. The core must be getting pretty unstable as this entire side of the entrance is a glitched-out mess, giving me a headache and weird auditory hallucinations as I walk through its wacked-out cloud of projected entanglement. I wish the son of a bitch that runs this joint now would just turn the damn thing off, but just changing the power state on an unstable archaic model like this can cause a bad reaction, so I understand.
I grab a rusty old cart and get to work. While I’m here, I guess I’m gonna need to grab some whey protein shit to make some hackin-ass protein shakes later. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let Chad take over as the hot one in the team now that I’m back, baby. When I first started in the force ten years ago, he was the twink-ass shitlord and I was the muscle god! I’ll be damned if I’m going to let an extra 50 or 60 pounds, an alcohol addiction, and a total lack of physical exercise keep me from outdoing some fit athletic gym rat.
As I mentally monologue to myself in the health food aisle, I overhear a couple of meathead dudebros discussing pre-workout. They’re almost identical, with crew cuts, huge-ass sunglasses, and too-tight Infinite Fight Muscle Waifu tanks over their double-Chad-level muscles. God DAMN are these motherfuckers ripped. I mean that in a totally objective, very heterosexual way, of course. I’m too straight to think about licking the sweat off their abs, I assure you.
“Bra, I’m tellin’ you,” Douche 1 drones, “this C4 shit will make you go fuckin’ Super Muscle Waifu Form 5 and shit, bra. Try this shit on leg day and you’ll, like, you’ll fuckin’ look like Jules Verne, bra. And I’m not talkin’ movie one, I’m talkin’ that full on Jules Verne vs. Sharkhead 2 look, bra. You ain’t seen gains til’ you’ve taken six scoops o’ this shit, bra.”
I look down at the C4 can already in my hand and feel very good about myself.
“Bruhhhh,” Douche 2 replies, “fuck that weak-ass powdered-sugar beta-male-blueberry bullshit, you little cuck. What kind of pussy-ass bitch takes that shit anymore!?”
I stealthily place the C4 into the old woman next to me’s basket when she’s not looking.
“Bra, what the fuck, bra? C4 ain’t no weak shit like that fuckin’ BodyFort whack-ass crack, bra. You gotta try it–”
“Bruhhhh, we don’t need none of that shit. Listen—” he pulls Douche 2 closer and glances around to make sure nobody is listening, though I totally am and I’m only pretending to be looking up snakegirl porn on my phone to trick them. “—see these little pills?”
“Bra, fuckin’ steroids ain’t no shit I’m gonna be stickin’ in mah beef, bra, that shit ain’t hack!”
“Bruhhhhh, quiet down, bitch, this—this isn’t some shitty steroid shit, bitch. Ain’t you ever heard of Rapture Green?”
“Aw’ shit, bra! We cain’t get into that bull, bra, that shit is so fuckin’ illegal—”
“Man up, bruh! Why do you think they don’t want us to have it? It’s-it’s the man, bruh, the man’s keeping you down, tryin’ to keep us from gettin’ strong enough to embalm the corpse of democracy, bruhhhh. This is a fucking nanodrug, it ain’t your beta cuck C4 shit, it doesn’t just give you the pump, bitch, it rewires your brain to feel no pain, to go 150%, to direct EVERYTHING into your gains. You’ll feel like a god, bruh, this changes everything. And what I got here is authentic, Rapture Oobfoo.”
“Rapture Whofoo!?”
“It’s the street way to say Rapture Green, Hex Code #00BF00—the purest shit you can get, bruhhhhh.”
“Bra, what the fuck, bra? Hex codes and–ain’t that HTML6 or some dumb shit, bra?! You sellin’ nanodrugs or makin’ a fuckin’ website, bra?! What fuckin’ year is it, bra!?”
“Bruhhh, hex codes are what you figure out what kind of batch you got. There’s Rapture Red, Rapture Blue, and Rapture Green, and they all do different shit, bruh.”
“How come I never heard of this, bra–”
“This shit’s been around for like, fifteen years, bitch, they just never sold it outside of the Colonies before now. And you get different levels of each like, thing in based on what kind of shit you after, man. You can mix and match what you want like you’re at a jellybean store. Red is like poppers and Viagra and Star Platinum mixed all together, bruhhhh, people’ve died from the orgasms from that shit, bruh, and Green is the muscle shit, makes you stronger and angrier and less of a little pussy faggot beta bitch, and Blue is the one I ain’t gonna fuck with, cause—”
“Aight, bra, I’ll try that shit once, but bra, I swear to leg day, bra, if I fuckin’ die from this shit—” they walk off quickly in a sort of bra-bruh-huddle so I lose the trail end of their conversation, but my curiosity is piqued. I take my whey protein, get in line, and try really hard to put on my best not-a-pussy-ass-bitch face as I struggle to lug the 24 pack of Corona I grabbed right before checkout onto the belt.
The guy in front of me in line plops a giant fucking basket full of brussels sprouts on the line and then proceeds to laugh maniacally in this bizarre nasally whine of a chortle. As he turns a bit I see he’s dressed in a ridiculous overly formal outfit I can only describe as a cosplay of that ancient British doctor show tailored to a gay bar costume party. He even kind of looks like one of those immortal time-traveling medical people on that thing, just with beady, evil little eyes and a doofy grin. He’s way too thin to look cool, though. Almost makes Mike McDonald look tall and imposing.
“I’m sure you’re wonderin’ why I’m, uhhhh, why I’m gettin’ all these brussels sprouts,” he assails the cashier in the thickest Georgia accent I’ve ever heard in my life, shattering the BBC vibe his clothing was giving off. Well, except for the GI Joe tie. That was pretty American. He rocks back and forth on his feet as he waits for a reply, like the sheer anticipation was so much that he couldn’t stand still. He’s kind of creeping me out, and I’m a grown-ass man in a Princess of Ping Pong t-shirt.
“I really wasn’t,” the mid-20s cashier of ambiguous gender replies, yawning. “Do you want paper or pla--”
“Well, I’m so glad you asked!” He proceeds to pull a 6” Darth Vader figure from his pocket, stuffing one of the sprouts in his plastic hand like… like… I don’t even know. This is too weird, similes elude me. “See, these things are the PERFECT scale to be cabbages for my 6” Star Wars figure line, vintage 2015—”
“Why would your Star Wars figures need cabbages!?” I blurt out in spite of myself. He turns around incredulously with a mix of personal offense, confusion, and blind rage. “Wh-what are ya’ talkin’ about? Of-of course they need cabbages, they… they’re people, and people eat cabbages…”
“Name one moment in any show or movie that we see cabbages, smartass,” I reply, stepping up to this little bitch and towering over him with my… form.
“Darth Jestocost’s Rise, Season 2, Episode 2, 12 minutes and fifteen seconds in. Cabbage patch in the background as the Tie Fighter does a flyover of Naboo. Not that you’d know,” he continues, pausing to poke Teta’s face on my shirt, “ya’ big…” he gets up on his tiptoes to get up in my face for emphasis, “...weeb.”
“My virus brought down the entire fucking Wild West Syndicate, and I invented the tech that brought down Old West himself. What have you ever done, aside from dress like outdated pop culture icons and harass cute cashiers about your cosplay cabbages?”
“Ahhhh,” he says, chuckling bizarrely. “So you’re the infamous Detective Flake, eh?” He does a snort laugh as he kicks his foot happily to his own joke. Nobody else laughs, so he reaches into the pocket of his stupid Whovian bullshit replica jacket, fiddles with some device or other, and suddenly the PA system in the grocery erupts with hysterical, canned laughter.
“What is your damage, hackhead?” I glance down and notice him fiddling with a sleeve-length glove on his right arm--and it all comes together. Of course he’s being a dick to me--he must know me because he’s a big shot in LDS. That’s how he affords all the stupid machinery and ancient nerd shit… and he thinks he’s gonna’ be real cool by whipping off that glove and trying to fry my brain. I dramatically slide the glove off of his arm first, expecting one of the skull projector tats, but instead I reveal an entire fucking mechanical arm--and we’re not talking cheap, normal prosthetics here; we’re talking full-on loaded-up red-glowing-ZPE-powered carbon-fiber-tendons titanium-plated chan’d-the-fuck-up cyborg arm fuckin’ buuuuullshit.
“I lost it in the ART rebellion conflict,” he says, his voice suddenly deadly serious.
“I’m s-so sorry,” I mumble, panicking as everyone around us glares at me like I kicked a crippled homeless puppy, “I, uh, I thought you were an insane cultist wi–”
“It was a small price to pay for ART freedom.”
There’s a moment of hushed silence as his words permeate the room uncomfortably like so much unstable zero-point energy. My heart pounds harder and faster as he takes a step towards me. I don’t like the look in his eyes--and it’s not the look of an actual ART, surprisingly. It’s the look of a man who’s killed before and who won’t hesitate to kill again, and it’s totally unfitting with his demeanor before this and his body and dress in general--it’s like I’m looking at a man possessed.
“My old man died in that ‘conflict,’” I reply, taking a small step forward myself. “Look, d-don’t get me wrong, I support ARTs, as-as controversial as that is. I was a pariah for a good while because my fiancé was one, before she was–unjustly murdered. But that-that war you’re talking about? It wasn’t a ‘conflict.’ It was a massacre, a violent backlash against innocent men, women and children, slaughter in the streets--”
“It was a desperate last ditch attempt of the enslaved to gain autonomy. I’m only sorry that it failed.”
“What do you mean it failed? Show me one ART still bound to a limiter, and I’ll--”
Before I can even finish that sentence, he’s fiddled with something in his pocket again, and my Telaphone is forced back to life, my Tela projected holographically between us on the floor.
“Th-that doesn’t count,” I snap, “everyone has these damn things, I-I don’t even want one, it’s mandatory; and they’re not ARTs, so they--”
“They don’t even have a body, so they don’t count, is that what you’re going to say? Go ahead, try and moralize to me how it’s somehow less slavery to force a sentient thing to obey you because it’s imprisoned in a device where its physical manifestations are entirely under your control. Randomized human BIM, just like you or me, false or filler memories and knowledge forced in, slap on a nice limiter to make it play nice and appreciate its slavery, keep it in the TeleCloud so it can’t leak out, can’t see outside of its predetermined little sensory bubble, can’t know any of the pleasures of the physical world that might encourage autonomy--have I paraphrased you well enough in advance, Flake? It is because of you this system can continue to thrive.”
I look uncomfortably at the chibi manifestation of Tela that’s just sitting there listening to all this. “Don’t worry Blake-san!” she cheers, blowing me a kiss. “Tela loves being your slave!”
Thanks, Tela.
“I’ve read your book, Blake. I know about your cute, dead little ART wife. You did the impossible, you little wannabe messiah, you! You used a police-Tela as a test run, and when it was successful, you removed her limiter--after it had been forcefully applied post-activation, no less making it even more impossible--and you did it without destroying her delicate little brain image. A veritable minefield, algorithms that should take forever to parse, and you figured out how to program it just like that in the name of love, you smitten little smartie, you! You got away with it because it had been illegally applied to begin with, and then… you never bothered to use the program again.”
“I didn’t do it well enough,” I reply, voice cracking. “You didn’t read what happened to her.”
“Oh, I did read all about it, in the news and on Darkworld. If you think ‘going rogue’ is a real thing, then I’ve got a flying DrivePod to sell you. Of course you won’t care enough to figure it out until it’s affecting your fellow humans and is too late…”
“Who are you!?”
“Before I answer, let me tell you who you are.” He walks right up to me and presses against me, jamming his left pointer finger forcefully in my pecs. “You’re the man who figured out how to make miracles, how to free this entire class of sentient beings from their bonds, and who only used that knowledge to save the cute one that you wanted to fuck. You’re the man who works for the ones that put the whole ART project together to begin with, and the 1:1 Scale AI project before that, and who continue to create more minds that are born into digital chains. You’re the man who got rich writing a shitty book about how great he is, preaching how by saving that system, he saved the world. If you’d been more proactive about your supposed feelings towards ART rights, if you’d stood against Telecom when you could have instead of joining them, perhaps your dear little Cassandra would still be alive instead of a white synth-blood stain on the pavement—“
“Shut up while you still can,” I growl, clenching my fists and gritting my teeth.
“And maybe you’d be getting groceries with her instead of your green-haired little pixie slave, and kissing her instead of filling the void inside your rotten soul with--”
I finally snap, shrieking through the tears for him to ‘shut the fuck up’ and winding up for a punch, but--I can’t even get my arm back enough to aim before I’m suddenly weightless, suspended effortlessly in the air now by the front of my shirt, his mechanical arm not even shaking to support my whole massive… uh… let’s go with 150 pounds.
“Come now, Blake,” he whispers, his lips curling into a sardonic grin. “There’s no need to be such a… glasshole.”
“Do you mean ass--”
I’m interrupted by the fact that I’m now careening backwards through the aisleways at incredible speed after being thrown with all the effort it takes to lob a baseball. I rotate a bit in my trajectory and barely have time to process the fact that I’m about to smash into glass doors in the dairy section. The next thing I remember is waking up mangled and contorted inside the dairy cooler section. I’m covered in milk, half and half, and blood; and “I’M THE WORST WAIFU!” is written in permanent marker in a speech bubble next to Princess Teta on my shirt, who has also been gifted with crudely drawn cartoon male genitalia and a mustache.
“Tela,” I mumble, struggling to pull myself up as the growing crowd around my tattered body gasps. Tela materializes next to me, only now she also has a fucking cartoon penis and a mustache drawn on her face. Very thorough, Doctor Dorkface. “Tela, I want you to make a note for me. I want you to write down every detail of our encounter with that little westaboo cuntsucking dicklord, and I want you to block me out from engaging in any entertainment until after I kick his fucking Doctor-Who-wannabe cabbage-sucking taint-licking pinche-puta prettyboy cabron mierda asscrack cuntface to Naboo and back.”
“A-as you wish, Blake-sama,” she replies with a gulp.
I rise triumphantly, blood spewing from the various holes made by the glass on my various bodily locations (oh, glass holes—hah, I get it now). As I hobble out of the store, I find myself overflowing with a bloodthirst I didn’t know I had. Forget the skull-tat Mormons, forget Chad—I have a nemesis now, and he’s gonna fuckin’ pay. Canned laughter plays over the PA system again as I stumble towards the door, lugging my Corona and swiping the TeleWallet chan in my left hand over the WallOrb by the exit to quickly pay. As I hobble through the doorway I catch a glimpse of a bionic hand flipping me the bird from the window of a priceless, double-manual, original DeLorean. Even worse, I can hear the telltale previously exclusive sound of a ZPE turbo under its hood as it zooms away.
This was a really shitty day to stop drinking.