Date: 2015-05-31 05:00:00+00:00
Description: The hunt is on. Rinchi becomes a MercSecure representative and is given her first big assignment - the assassination of a Mexican drug kingpin. On the run from the Federal Corporate Government, Meme and Yeshi make their way to Tokyo, Japan. In an attempt to protect Meme, Yeshi meets with a weapons dealer named Hajime, who offers her more than she bargained for. Part techno thriller, part dystopian science fiction, Life is a Beautiful Thing is a series that questions what it means to be human; a collection of novels that offers a shocking glimpse into a dark future fueled by corporate deceit an
Publisher: Boycott Books

Life is a Beautiful Thing

BOOK ONE

Harmon Cooper

Edited by George C. Hopkins

Copyright © 2015 by Harmon Cooper

Copyright © 2015 Boycott Books

Cover by White Comma

Edited by George C. Hopkins (georgechopkins@yahoo.com)

www.harmoncooper.com
writer.harmoncooper@gmail.com

All rights reserved. All rights preserved.This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

P.S. Share this book with someone awesome.

ZERO∞

**A note from the author before you get started**

This book hops right into the fray with Meme, a human therapist for Humandroids (read: androids) who is at a bar in LA using what are known as pollutes. He’s just met Nelly, a pregnant woman who will have a huge impact on his life as the series progresses. He is on the verge of meeting Sauria, a powerful businessman and CEO of a company called Executive Executions who will later call for his death. Meme is also about to encounter Yeshi, a Humandroid escort who, like Nelly, will greatly impact his life.

Whew.

I tell you this for the sake of clarity. I read loads of novels, and it’s always helpful to get a grip on things before diving headfirst into a series, especially one that is as bizarre as Life is a Beautiful Thing.

Books two, three and four are out now and available here. The Blue Books, Books 5-8, will be released in 2016.

The madness begins on the next page. Strap yourself in and enjoy.

--Harmon Cooper

ONE∞

Currently, I’m getting wasted off pollutes with a pregnant woman three days before Halloween at POLLUTION CLUB 512 in Los Angeles. Nelly is a tall chick with a silver glaze on her belly caused by a recent application of C-Baby. She’s in a cheesecloth shirt, topless underneath. Conservative compared to most at the club tonight.

As I speak to her, Nelly closes her eyes and logs into iNet. I really don’t care if she’s paying attention to me or not. I’ll have her soon enough. I reach for a pollution mask, strap it on. Inhale, exhale, repeat. Life is a beautiful thing.

‘So, do you want to switch bodies or not?’ I ask her. I push the pollution mask to the top of my forehead. No sense in wasting time when time wastes you. The bulge of her pregnant stomach touches something primal inside me, reminds me of my own time in the womb, a glorious nine months. Rattle dasein!

‘I’m talking to my friend Carloza about it,’ Nelly says with her eyes closed. ‘It’s complicated when you’re pregnant.’

‘So you’ll think about it then?’ I ask. ‘Let me get the next round.’

‘Okay, just a little though.’

I set my pollution mask on a hook in front of the bar. The mask resembles a plague doctor’s mask with emerald polypropylene eye lenses. It has a long beak-like nose to allow excess pollution to linger. The nose is connected to a series of distributor cables tucked under the bar. The designer ones are made from real leather and on some occasions, endangered animal skulls and other fine materials.

I glance back at Nelly. She reaches for her mask and pulls it down over her forehead. She’s calm and collected, ready to inebriate. There’s something different about her gait, as if she isn’t used to coming to this pollution club or perhaps, not used to the commotion on the ground floor level. Intriguing to say the least, fascinating to say the most.

‘I’ll have one Naked Lunch and one Loathing Hunter,’ I tell the bartender. He pulls out one of his dreadlocks and starts cleaning the inside of a shot glass with it. He positions the dreadlock above the first shot glass. An antifreeze-colored liquid trickles out of the end of his dreadlock. Nothing like getting high off fresh pollutes.

‘You want an Ayahuasca topper?’ He looks at me through a pair of old leaks.

‘Sure.’ I nod towards Nelly’s stomach. ‘It’ll do the baby good.’

The bartender pours the drinks into a grimy tube connected to a series of pipes attached to the bar. I hear a hissing sound as the drinks are instantly vaporized into a fresh pollute. I point to the tube connected to Nelly’s pollution mask. She nods and pulls her mask over her face.

We inhale to exhale.

TWO∞

Let’s get this out of the way.

You’re a tall person, or maybe you’re short. Perhaps you’re between tall and short. You’re a fat person who is skinny at heart, or a skinny person who wants to be larger as to appear more intimidating. You’re a mixture of tall and fat, fat and short, skinny and tall, or simply medium sized. Nothing wrong with being medium-sized. You are almost above average and we’re both mediocre.

You’re my grandmother on the verge of her seventy-sixth birthday, five hundred and thirty-two in dog years. You’re my ex-girlfriend who is mad at me for breaking up with her over iNet. You’re Columbian. You’re a mix between Irish and Brazilian. You’re a protomartyr with a penchant for self-righteousness. You’re white and your grip on the world has finally started to subside. You’re Asian. You’re a librarian and you have a small pen in the shape of a Kalashnikov. Your mother is from Malaysia. Your father is from Niger and he rode velocipedes as a child. You were born in Melbourne and are a closet kangatarian who is into auto asphyxiation.

You’re unique, you’re angry, you’re patriotic, you have an addiction, you don’t give a shit about politics, you love your country, you’re racist, you’re funny, you’re a thief, you’re good in bed, you’re a war veteran, you believe in magic, you aren’t sincere, you think too much, you say too little, you’re pathetic, you love your television, you hate your country, you routinely French kiss your spouse, you’re a sex offender, you loathe your brother, you dance while no one’s watching, you listen when no one’s speaking, you’re going to die tomorrow (goodbye!), you have a long life to live, you’re aggressive, you believe the fortunes in fortune cookies, you worship God and despise the heathens, you day trade in crypto currencies, you’re the ninety-nine percent, your mother is dead, you’re a virgin, you have an eating disorder, you’re lactose intolerant but you always crave cheese, you suffer from coulrophobia, you have traveled the world in search of nothing, you were born over international waters, your uncle is nuts, your sister is getting married soon, your half-brother sells frozen yogurt for a living, you’re a victim of senescence.

You’re at least one of these things and I’m at least two. On a good day, I’m three. Remember that.

The pollution club has a dance floor designed by a Mongolian immigrant named Batbold. The ceiling has over two thousand black lights interspersed with strobe lights. The corners of the club are tenebrous and mysterious, a perfect place to fuck or be fucked. In the center of the floor is a cream-colored stupa adorned with mirrors. On top of the stupa are light-up eyes with multifarious lasers that respond to the choons. The walls are coated with velvet speakers and pencil-thin LCD screens. Boom-boom goes the bass as people lose face.

The floor tilts backward and forward, increasing the chances of vomiting. Smart enough to realize this, Batbold built a vomit trough on both sides of the dance floor. The vomit funnels into a cement truck outside, where it’s churned until morning comes. The following day, it’s freeze-packed at a factory on the outskirts of LA and shipped off to Third World nations under the highly successful Vomit-For-Petrol Program started by the UN.

All around the dance floor, people perch like long-nosed gargoyles inhaling pollutes from pollution masks. No one sits. Instead, people squat on plush cubes stained with three-dimensional world currency symbols that change colors every couple of minutes (they’re updated every time a currency gains or drops in value on the global market).

Popular pollutes such as Burberry Third World Exhaust, Prada Stink Bomb Bloody Sundays, White Comma Lead-Based Paint, Marc Jacobs’ Sinsemilla and Clive Christian’s Imperial Atrocity are pumped into various pollution masks. The pollute clouds mingle with the sweaty bodies on the dance floor. They create an odor that is instantly orgasmic. Delete occhiolism.

Almost everyone wears masks on the tilting dance floor. The DJ, in a caged booth that sits atop the stupa, wears a fluorescent Guy Fawkes mask. All the other masks are various degrees of frightening or anodyne – this shit cray!

As I dance with pregnant Nelly I notice a Lady Gaga meat costume, a Steve Jobs with an apple in his mouth mask, a Minion mask, a Jennifer Lopez booty mask, a zombie Osama Bin Laden mask (with oozing bullet wounds!), A Putin mask shaped like a dick, a classic Cheney snarling mask, a flip phone mask (which is scarier than it sounds), an Angela Merkel mask (also scarier than it sounds) and a Justin Bieber after puberty and before extreme alcoholism mask. Tonight’s pre-Halloween party theme is the early twenty-first century. Long live the aughts!

The people that don’t wear masks are generally naked or have their bodies painted in elaborate ways. As is popular with the times (at least in ‘Murica, at least in LA), most of the women have a thick nest of pubic hair with braided strands. The men have a straight line shaved from their pubic region to the base of their cocks, a style meant to elongate the appearance of an erection while dancing. Every able-bodied male has the strip, including myself. No one cares about nudity anymore, especially this close to All Hallows’ Eve. Confirm and conform.

I’m wearing a pair of jeans, a body-switcher necklace and a shirt that has been unbuttoned all the way down to the last button. The hardest button to button. Suave and sophisticated, muy guapo I am. On my head is a military cap with the words ad undas written in black light responsive paint on the back of the hat. I have no idea what it means, but a guy wearing a plastic Satan mask complimented it as he pinched my ass.

In case you think I’ve forgotten, I’m still interested in switching bodies with pregnant Nelly. I just need to find the right time to ask her again. I admit, earlier, I might have been a little too assertive with my request. Duly noted. With a few more pollute shots and some time on the dance floor, I figure I’ll be able to take her back to my flat and trade bodies before the ass crack of dawn shits another day on LA.

I spot Nelly navigating her way through the tilting dance floor. She is def the hottest pregnant woman I’ve seen in weeks. She has a pair of white contact lenses on and an elaborately jeweled neon bindi glued between her eyebrows. Her hair is wrapped in a bun and held together by a light-up chopstick that blinks with a red Coca-Cola advertisement. A skirt hangs from beneath the bulge of her belly to a foot above her kneecaps. Modest. With the C-Baby applied to her stomach, I can see her fetus squirming under the intense black lights. It’s a girl, something to be proud of. The species must live on. I take a breather and catapult myself towards a free pollution mask. Mouth-to-mouth that ego!

Note to Reader – it’s hard to run on a tilted dance floor. As I near the edge, my knees buckle and I fall forward. I catch the arm of a muscular mustached man wearing a checkered top hat and a flashing bowtie. He slaps me across the face and then hugs me, laughing maniacally. I can taste my blood and his sweat on my upper lip. He licks my chin and bites my earlobe. I push him away, step off the dance floor and reach for a pollution mask.

‘I’ve never kissed a black man!’ he screams over the booming bass.

Neither have I.

The masks on the dance floor have a little touchscreen keyboard attached so you can tell the bartenders working in the other room what kind of shot you want. There are also apps that instantly send your order, but I like going manual from time to time. I type in LoathHunAyaTop and a blue light on the tube flickers twice. It turns green. Credit approved – a feeling that will unite humankind for centuries to come.

Thirty seconds later and I’m inhaling my favorite pollute. In a haze, I push the mask to the top of my head and look out onto the dance floor. I catch Nelly dancing with a short woman. She’s giggling and swaying left to right feverishly. The baby churns in her pregnant stomach… she must be eight months pregnant at least! My sweet lord is nature beautiful!

‘That’s my body,’ I say to a fat man wearing a Burger King crown. His belly is pulled up by a pair of red suspenders, allowing me to see his nether regions. He’s the first man I’ve seen in a long time without a strip shaved through his pubes. In place of the strip is an equal sign. Can you believe that? Who’s equal these days!? Who’s ever been equal? What’s he thinking? Even the President has a strip!

Maybe he’s on the verge of a new fashion trend I’m yet unaware of. Instinctively, I want to close my eyes and log into iNet and image search ‘new pubic hair styles’. I refrain from GoogleFacing impulsively because I don’t want him to think I care. Never let someone think you care. The less you care the better you fare. Fake it ‘til you make it or beat it ‘til you can beat it.

The man turns to me and spits a piece of gum into his hand, ‘Do you want to switch bodies?’

Fish lip jiggle tits. He shows me the bubble gum, his flush face beaming with anticipation. The gum has a few iridescent blue specks in it. A body-switcher. I’ve never seen such a clever body-switcher before. I’ve seen used soda cans, chewed pencils, bent thumb tacks and empty make-up containers, but I’ve never seen a piece of gum. Personally, I use a guitar pick (which is currently hanging from my neck).

‘You can chew it?’

‘No, no,’ he says. ‘I just keep it in my mouth under my tongue. I wouldn’t actually chew it. The name is Sauria, by the way.’

Sauria is definitely into something big. He must have purchased the device illegally in Hong Kong. I’ve read many articles about the illegal body-switching technology they have there. He must switch bodies all the time. Maybe he works for the FCG. He is fat enough to at least be on the city council. I eye the man suspiciously, not sure what to make of him. The ends of his smile disappear into his chubby pig cheeks.

‘Do you work for the FCG?’ I ask him point blank.

He nearly takes a swing at me. ‘Do I work for the Federal Corporate Government? Is that what you’re asking?’

‘Yeah…’

He changes the subject. ‘It sure was sunny today.’ He pulls his pollution mask over his face and takes another swig. He’s puffing on some Japanese stuff called Uniqlo Wet Dream Poi.

‘How’s the Qlo?’ I ask, still watching Nelly on the tilting dance floor. She’s now surrounded by two naked men gyrating their cocks to the music. I needed to get over there pronto before those dicks take my booty.

‘You never answered my question…’ He pushes his mask up so it can rest on his shiny forehead.

‘Hey, I have to go.’ I point at pregnant Nelly. ‘I’m trying to switch bodies with her.’

‘She’s prego!’ He shakes his head and burps. ‘Been there, done that. It’s fun, but my life’s way better. You don’t want the cramps she’s about to get. The mood swings, the morning sickness, the constant need to go to the bathroom. Why a pregnant lady?’

‘Life experience. Maybe I want to see how it feels to give birth,’ I say.

‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard all night.’ The fat man coughs and scratches his ass. ‘It hurts like hell and the monster that comes out of there ain’t worth the trouble. Look, do you want to have some real fun?’

‘Sure, who doesn’t?’ I ask. I watch as the two men lead Nelly away. There goes my prize.

‘Forget about her!’ Sauria slaps me across the back. ‘Look, I have a couple of nineteen year olds in the VIP room. Why don’t you join us there?’ He coughs again, pounding his fist against his chest. ‘The FCG is paying for the VIP room tonight. They’re always paying…’

‘I thought you didn’t work for the FCG…’

‘Everyone works for the Federal Corporate Government, whether they’d care to admit it or not.’ He harrumphs. ‘Last offer. Yes or no?’

‘Why me?’

‘You’re not a terrorist are you?’

‘No, but why me?’

‘It’s your hat, I like it. Ad undas… it means something about waves or coasting along. You got good style. I like to be surrounded by beautiful people. I like your beautiful black skin, it’s such a sexy purple under these lights. The name’s Sauria, by the way.’

‘You told me already. I’m Meme.’

‘What was that?’ he shouts over the boom boomy choons.

‘My name is Meme,’ I say as we shake hands.

THREE∞

**The following conversation took place in Spanish after the pregnant Nelly ditched the hyper-intoxicated Meme. It has been translated by the late José Alberto Del Castillo Cabeza Mercedes Acosta III for our monolingual audience.

‘So, can you come to pick up the shipment?’ Carloza asked.

Pregnant Nelly was sitting in the restroom at POLLUTION CLUB 512 chatting with him on GoogleFace. Every time she blinked, she could see Carloza’s image splash across her eyelids. As always, he sat in an unknown location in Tijuana. He looked comfortable in his loose fitting shorts and crisp white tank top. Curly jet black hair peaked out from under his wife beater. Behind him – a Freda motif stretched across his wall to the point that it was pixilated.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Let me just message Noah and tell him. What time?’

Noah was Nelly’s personal Humandroid assistant. He served as her driver, her cook, her cleaner and her best friend.

‘Afternoon, you know I sleep late…’ Carloza yawned to emphasize his statement.

‘How are the pollutes anyway? Tasty?’

‘Muy bueno,’ he said. ‘Some stuff from Bhutan… you know the stuff…’

‘Seriously? How did you come across that?’ Nelly placed her hand across her stomach. She looked down and smiled at her fetus illuminated by the C-Baby lotion. She burped and the baby moved.

He laughed, ‘You know I can’t tell you that. Hold on a sec, okay?’

She looked at the door of the stall as it rattled. Someone had been jiggling the handle for the last five minutes in a passive aggressive attempt to suggest that Nelly’s time on the throne had ended.

As she waited for Carloza to return, Nelly reread the quote scrawled in mascara across the backside of the door:

Many a subtle philosopher has failed to solve himself, owing to his inability to discern his beginning and his end.

‘Sorry about that,’ Carloza said, his voice appearing in Nelly’s ear.

‘Who was it?’

‘Can’t tell you.’

‘Hey, are you going to be in there all night?’ a voice yelled from outside the stall. The door rattled again. Nelly looked down and noticed a pair of shimmering six-inch high heels covered in red spikes.

‘Find another stall, bitch,’ Nelly whispered in English.

‘What was that?’ Carloza laughed. ‘Are you speaking English my love? Where are you?’

‘Restroom.’

‘Really? You out tonight?’

‘Can’t you hear the music?’ she asked.

‘I thought you were listening to music in your aeros…’

‘How could I be in my aeros without Noah? He’s my driver,’ Nelly said. The irate woman shook the door handle again.

‘Good point.’

‘Meet anybody?’

‘Hung out with two guys for a bit. Also this other guy; I don’t remember his name, though. Black guy. Big hands.’

‘Seriously, all the other stalls are full! I can hear you talking on GoogleFace in Spanish, bitch,’ the woman outside Nelly’s stall said.

‘Hold on,’ Nelly told Carloza. She reached into her tiny Flapper purse and pulled out a small mistmask. Two carbon filters emerged after she pressed a button on the nose of the mistmask.

‘What are you doing?’ Carloza asked.

‘Just a minute.’

Nelly placed the mistmask over her face and adjusted the nose piece. She held the button down for two seconds and goggles extended upward from the cheek coverings. As the woman continued to rattle the door handle, Nelly quickly secured the goggles into the crevices of her eyes. She pressed a small lever on the chin of the mask, releasing the trapped air inside. The mask tightened as it pressurized.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

‘Hurry up bitch!’

Nelly reached into her purse and pulled out something that resembled a miniature tube of toothpaste with a nozzle on top. She flipped opened the top, pointed it at the door and pressed her thumb against the nozzle.

Fisssssp!

A green mushroom cloud engulfed the entire bathroom.

The woman’s forehead smashed into the door and landed in a thick pile of yellow hair on the floor. Women fell from the toilets, their heads and bodies landing in various ways inside the stuffy stalls.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

Nelly looked down and saw the woman’s hair creeping beneath the door. Blood from her nose had already started seeping into her bleached hair. Rose stained platinum; a fatal blonde moment. She flushed the toilet and stood, hearing another body drop near the sink. Thunk.

Nelly opened the bathroom stall and stepped in the woman’s nest of blonde hair with the heel of her shoe. She glanced down at her watch – it would be another minute until the mist disappeared.

‘Sounds like you’re done clearing out the place…’ Carloza said.

‘Some things just have to be done.’

He laughed. ‘Well, I need to see someone about the next shipment. Saturday, same time, same place.’

‘I’ll see you then,’ Nelly said, her voice muffled by the mistmask. ‘Adiosito.’

FOUR∞

Where are you right now?

Are you at home? Are you on a train? Are you in an airplane? Are you outside? Are you in your closet? Are you on the toilet? Are you in the break room at your job? Are you in a coffee shop? Are you in a bathtub? Are you reading this on an electronic reading device? Are you on a balcony? Are you thinking about something else as you read these words? Is someone else reading this to you? Are you reading it using a flashlight?

When you read something, does it form a picture of what’s happening in your brain? Could you see the mustached man slapping me in the face before embracing me? Could you picture Nelly’s baby illuminated by the black lights? Could you imagine the bartender pouring a beverage out of the tip of his gnarly dreadlock? Could you visualize Sauria with his Burger King crown and the suspenders holding up his jelly rolls?

We take this picture forming function of consciousness for granted. We read a thriller about a serial killer and we imagine him cutting up the bodies, blood misting onto his t-shirt like a Japanese anime – we do this as if it were nothing, as if it requires no effort. More than twenty-five percent of the calories we consume daily go to brain functioning. Our brains are voracious.

See this now – the panicked look on the victim’s face. A woman. Her hair matted and crimson, her body lifeless. The killer. A man with serpentine veins running up and down his arms and a brow that grazes the floor. The book. Cutting the chapters in just the right way to provide tension, to make it seem as if it’s really happening. The stereotype. The archetype. The pattern. The routine. The reward.

The pattern.

It seems as if we take in the written image as if it were natural occurrence. No matter the potential real life consequences, implied or intended, writing has a way of patronizing everything. Be it a graphic sex scene, a magical game of Quidditch, complex sleuth work that runs all the way up to the Papacy, a gruesome account of war, an illicit romance between a pathetic vampire and a ballsy human, a work of supposed merit that we read simply to say that we’ve read it.

Don’t open that door! Don’t walk out into those woods alone! Don’t go jogging at night! Don’t invite the pizza man into your home! Don’t kiss him! Don’t close this book! Don’t close this book!

Feed your brain.

We visualize these things as if they’re happening, as if we’re somehow existing within the books that we read. Of course, we know that we aren’t taking part in what’s happening. We know we’re silent observers, passing judgment and driving the story further with the turn of each page. This doesn’t stop us from biting our nails, skipping sentences to see what happens or putting a book aside because it’s either too complex or too anticlimactic. Are you not entertained!?

No matter how we consume it, the author tosses crumbs at us as we follow him or her along. We accept all. Hands on our ankles, thighs sky high – full-on penetration. We drop the soap repeatedly for the sake of literature.

Does a novel stop when we put it down? Do the characters wait in limbo for us to return so they can finish their story? Do they tire of telling the same story time and time again? How does a movie affect the image of the character we have formed in our heads? Do our protagonists always resemble some part of us?

Sauria explains all this to me in between puffs from a nacre pollution mask in the highly exclusive VIP room. He worked in the electronic publishing industry for a number of years and even wrote a book on the home installation of pollution mask bars. He was now the owner of a global security analysis company called Executive Executions or ExEx. The totem pole has been scaled.

I can barely make out the details of Sauria’s face. He’s blurry and fishy, greasy and curdled. This might be the most schwasted I’ve ever been off pollutes. Suddenly, his face stretches. His nose warps into a small black hole as if he’s being sucked through a straw. He is everyman. I watch a large pair of doughy breasts bounce on his chest, one at a time. Hairy nipples. My skin is crawling. His pupils are dilated. Grizzled old yegg. I suddenly miss pregnant Nelly’s large white contacts.

Sauria presses a button on the edge of the table and the wall next to us folds away like an accordion. Our private room is now crowded. ‘Take a look, Meme,’ he says, waving his hand at the folding wall. He’s my fat business messiah. I’m his sheep watching as he parts the waters. I’ll do anything for you my bloated compadre!

On the other side of the wall are the women he promised. One pregnant woman stands, applying more C-Baby lotion to her belly, squeezing the liquid out of a small red and white tube. Next to her are a pair of nineteen-year-olds twins with bangs and another moll wearing a spiked S&M mask. Seven fat men wearing nothing but blue silk ties, suspenders and nipple rings complete the scene. All their pubic regions are shaved into equal signs.

Maybe we really are equal these days.

The seven fat men laugh and wink at the twins. Their jowls slosh against their chests like wedding cakes made out of pink Jell-O. They wave at Sauria; one of them points from the skybox window down to the dance floor below.

‘Look!’ he shouts. ‘Amazeballs!’

Two porcelain transvestites on stilts are circling the tilting floor below. Their stilts are black light responsive and covered in yellow and pink dots. One wears a Santa Claus mask, the other’s face is painted like a Dia de los Muertos skeleton. A pair of palanquin carriers lug a blubbery woman behind them. She smiles as she tosses pollute candy to the mortals.

I’ve never been to the VIP room at a pollution club and I’m mesmerized at how the other side lives. Pollution masks made of various animal skulls line the pig metal bar. Above the bartender is a black light chandelier made of crystal and small tubes from vintage pollution masks. The bartender’s dreadlocks are white. The bosomy beauty wears a tight fitting shirt with a mechanical hound on it and the numbers 451 stenciled in neon orange letters across her chest. Floating above her right shoulder is a hovering LCD screen showing the latest stock prices and currency fluctuations. Sell sell sell!

I look down at my jeans and notice the fat man is running his fingers along my thigh. I try to push him away, but the pollutes have taken their toll and movement has become increasingly difficult. He tickles my waist and invites me to join his friends in the other room. I take one more puff from the pollution mask – John Galliano Strawberry Arse if I’m not mistaken.

We scoot in next to the other fat men. One of the twins comes and sits on the other side of me. She wears a starched nurse’s outfit that barely covers her. Her top is unbuttoned. As she leans forward I can see her nipples peeking out from her bra. She yanks one of the pollution masks off the wall and takes a big, comical swig from it. She falls back onto the couch dramatically and sighs, smiling at me.

‘Your name?’ she asks. Her voice is slightly muffled by the pollution mask.

‘What?’

‘Your name?’ She looks me over through the polypropylene eye holes of the pollution mask. She’s wearing a pair of large black contact lenses that wash out all the white in her eyes.

‘Meme Lamar. You?’ I ask her. Sauria’s hands move from my knee to his suspenders.

‘Yeshi.’ She pushes the mask to the top of her skull. The nose of the pollution mask looms over her face, perfect for dangling a carrot. ‘My name’s Yeshi.’

‘Nice to meet you…’ I look to Sauria to see if he’s paying attention to our conversation. He’s laughing with the other fat men, pointing at the transvestite stilt walkers on the floor below. One of the walkers has a patron clinging to the bottom of the stilt, humping it forcefully. A beefy security guard in all black can be seen rushing towards the man with an extendable shepherd’s crook.

‘What do you do, Meme?’ Yeshi moves closer to me. She lightly grazes my ribcage with her long finger nails. Her pollution mask comes off; she hangs it on the argentine hook above the couch. She sweeps her bangs out of her face and winks at me. Her two-inch eye lashes take a good five seconds to reach the tops of her cheeks. Mesmerized I am. Fornicate I desire.

‘I’m a therapist.’

How can I possibly sneak away with Yeshi? I need to ditch Burger King Sauria pronto!

‘Really? How exciting. Have you ever fucked a Humandroid?’ She bends forward and starts licking my bicep.

‘No! I wouldn’t do that. Ever. It’s against protocol… what about you?’ I ask. I reach up, grab a pollution mask and take a deep inhale. My eyes roll back into my head. My brain macerates further. Pollute dipsomaniac.

I blink twice and see that there are now two Yeshis sitting cross legged next to me. As I stare at the two life forms, a glassine wave sluices into the room from the viewing window and imbrues the two Yeshis. The water leaves a patina glaze across their faces as it drips down onto their matching nurse’s outfits.

What the fuck is happening?

I take the pollution mask off and rub my eyes. No way is this actually happening. You’re tripping, Meme.

The face of the second Yeshi contorts into a grotesque mask. The couch suddenly appears to be the length of a school bus. The second Yeshi hops over the first and begins crawling towards me.

She crawls quickly on the tips of her fingernails, her broken chin almost touching the couch. Her jaw swings to the left and to the right like a suicidal seesaw. Green residue drips off her hunched-over shoulders and onto the couch. A light flickers overhead, bathing the couch in a lambent hue. Each flicker sends lightning bolts rhizomically across the room.

The couch continues to stretch, increasing the distance between myself and Yeshi number two. Yeshi number one sits on the far end of the couch, her eyes rolled back into her head and her hand on her crotch. I’m sweating profusely, practically panting. Convulsing. I feel as if I will vomit soon. This can’t be happening.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ a sweet voice asks, filtering into my right ear. ‘Baby, what’s wrong?’

‘They’re coming…’ I watch in horror as Yeshi number two melts. ‘They’re coming and there’s nothing we can do about it!’

FIVE∞

FYI: my name is Meme Lamar. I’m a Humandroid therapist and it is the year 2083. I’m addicted to pollutes, mononymous, your new frenemy, a chthonian kingpin with a nine to five and a mind on fire. Welcome to my brain. A Humandroid therapist talks to Humandroids during the day about their problems. The word “Humandroid” should be self-explanatory by now. If not, I will edumacate you (yes, edumacate). The math professor says in a German-English accent, Human + android = Humandroid. This you need to know before continuing.

‘Baby, what’s wrong?’ Yeshi presses her fingers into my neck.

I see her long narrow teeth, her saliva soaked tongue, the ravenous depraved look in her eyes. Her lashes are the size of tooth picks. Jaundiced smoke curls from her nose. I rip the mask off and throw my head onto the back of the sofa, essentially tossing in the towel. l'État, c'est moi!

She kisses my neck and caresses my hand. Soon, I feel her teeth sink into my skin. I look over and see the other Yeshi still touching herself. My god what is happening!? The sofa is a mile long and everything is muzzy. One Yeshi is trying to devour my flesh; the other has her hand in her pants. I’m confused and sweating profusely.

Every movement needs a martyr and I’m ready to become that martyr. This is the next phase for machine learning. All things must evolve.

It’s something a Humandroid named Tim7 once told me. I don’t know why he was so pontifical. He threatened to blow both of us up, and I let him silently slip out of my office. I’m not the type of man who wants to die via explosion. I never saw Tim7 again.

This is the next phase in machine learning.

Yeshi is whispering something into my ear and it isn’t that. I can feel her snake tongue whisking away at my earlobe. I shudder a nauseous orgasm. I try not to look at her.

Do not look at her, I remind myself. Those eyes. Those big black eyes. Don’t look! Her purple puffy lips. My whole body is trembling. There’s something strange about her, something not human. Could she be…? No, impossible. I’d know…

Burger King Sauria kisses the other side of my neck. I can feel the weight of his jowl against my collar bone. I put my arms around both of them; both devouring my flesh, both licking my jugular. Anterior jugular, external jugular, internal jugular. Veins blue and pumping! Je suis insane in the membrane!

Sauria is like a vicious catfish. His Burger King crown pokes against my earlobe; his boner rubs against my leg. The thin strands from his comb-over reach towards me like a ruck of famished beggars. I feel them wrap around my neck as he nuzzles his head into the pit of my arm. I suddenly hate him.

His crown falls to the floor. Yeshi hisses at him and he hisses back. The serpent people rejoice. The ophidian monarchy collapses! Damn these snakes, damn them all to hell! Ouroboros. The snake devours its own tail.

I punch Sauria in the face. Once, twice. Three times. No more kisses you shitty featherhead! I wrap my arms around his neck and squeeze.

I close my eyes and swim up a girasol stream filled with fluorescent bubbles. Electric eels nip at my toes. I notice a neon waterfall ahead and grab onto a tree that appears to have been cemented into the muddy shore.

A bathtub filled with pink-faced children approaches the edge of the prismatic waterfall. I take a deep inhale and listen to the glistering children scream. The screams emerge from their mouths in the form of red tinged clouds of anguish. A blond boy tries to climb over the others, eventually managing to hop over the edge of the tub. He ditches the bathtub and tries to doggy paddle it to shore. You can do it!

‘Meme… Meme…’ a sweet voice says.

I’ve seen enough inside my head. I open my eyes to see two security guards pulling at my arms. Sauria is on the ground, pressing a satin napkin against his bloodied nose. ‘Get him the fuck out of here!’ he screams, pointing at me.

‘What did I do?’ I ask. ‘What did I do?’

SIX∞

‘…and now she’s over eight months pregnant.’ Antimeria, Sauria’s friend, sat on the edge of the king-sized bed in a plush hotel room overlooking Hollywood Boulevard.

Rinchi, Yeshi’s twin sister, swayed back and forth in front of him. She wore a skimpy Little Red Riding Hood outfit and a wolf mask. The mask, a one of a kind Alexander McQueen pollution mask made from the head of a gray wolf bred in captivity, bounced back and forth as Rinchi swayed her hips. She bent over in front Antimeria. He pulled her towards him and licked her ass cheeks.

‘You always talk about pregnant Nelly.’ Rinchi looked at him through her legs. From her vantage point, all she could see were his beady little eyes twinkling like two upside down moons over a mountainous belly peppered with age spots and hairy moles.

‘Who else am I supposed to talk about? Nelly is my wife.’ Antimeria finished his energy drink and tossed the can against the wall. Clink! Orange remnants from the brew splashed onto the carpet. He manhandled another energy drink, popped it open as he watched Rinchi’s ample ass gyrate.

‘I wish I’d listened to him.’ He redbulled the drink. His stomach shook with indigestional thunder. ‘If I’d just listened to him, I wouldn’t be dealing with this shit right now…’

‘Who are you talking about?’ Rinchi asked. She slowly worked her way up to a standing position. She stood momentarily with her back to him.

‘I had this older friend, Baz, when I first started at FreddieDickMac,’ Antimeria said. He reached forward and snapped the back of Rinchi’s cherry red bodice. ‘Baz was married to this crazy broad at the time. Hell, he died still married to that psycho female. Damn if she wasn’t a tough woman to deal with. The pretty ones are like that you know? The fucking humans…’

‘Humans.’ Rinchi tilted her head to the right.

‘Humans! At the time I’d recently divorced and had just started dating Nelly. When Baz first met her, he pulled me aside and looked me square in the eye. “Son,” he says, “she’s beautiful, and that’s a bad thing. You’re going to run into all sorts of trouble with this one. Sure, she’s a good fuck and yeah, she has a great bod, but soon enough, she’s going to suck the life out of you like… like a damned juice box. Just squeeze your cardboard ass dry.” Only Baz could say something like that.’

‘Relax dear.’ Rinchi bent forward again and snapped back to standing. She had never met Nelly before, but she was sick of hearing about her.

‘Damn if this isn’t exactly what happened to me,’ Antimeria said. ‘Every day more juice is being squeezed out. Nelly needs this, our flat in London needs that, the yoga instructor wants to make house calls, it’s her friend’s birthday, manicure, pedicure in Mexico, some shitty store in France just released a new line of synthetic human skin purses – you get the picture. The air is being squeezed out of me! DAMN YOU NELLY! I’ve never felt more strangled in my life! Kind of like that crazy black guy tonight. Meme was his name, right?’

‘I didn’t catch his name,’ Rinchi said. ‘Maybe Yeshi knows…’

‘What the hell kind of name is Meme? What the fuck was that guy’s deal? Punching Sauria in the face? Strangling him? I’m glad we had security. They chased him the hell out of there!’

‘Chase.’

‘If only the security guard could chase Nelly out of my life. This marriage thing. What the hell was I thinking? Why do I keep getting re-married? I might not be in my prime anymore but I can still have a good time. They say forty-eight is the new twenty-five. I’m healthier than I’ve been in years! Here I am, married to a woman nearly thirty years younger than me who is about to have my first daughter. Great. This world needs less humans and more people like you…’

‘People like me?’ Rinchi unclipped her garter belt. ‘That’s kind of you.’

Antimeria shook his head. “You’ve got to trust that instinct of yours,” Baz used to say, “don’t be like me. Don’t be stupid like me. Don’t get with these young chicks. Find yourself a dating service. Get a woman who knows how to work it. One who knows how to take care of a man as well as you’re going to take care of her.” Damn if he wasn’t right. Hell, Baz’s ghost is probably in this room laughing at me right now. If you’re here, Baz, let me say something – you were right you old bastard! I should have listened to you!’

‘It’s OK, baby.’ Rinchi bent over in front of Antimeria. She unbuckled her wolf mask and dropped it to the salmon carpet.

He grimaced. ‘We were sitting in one of the pollution bars in San Fran, taking a little business breather. You know, strip club, drinks, some poker, blow jobs under the table – this sort of thing. A boy’s weekend. I could tell Baz was doing everything in his power not to just backhand the shit out of me. It was in his eyes. They just looked right through me… just right through me to the bar. These big sad eyes of his. And now I see why. I wish he’d done it. I wish the bastard had done it. Just cold-cocked the shit out of me right there in that pollution bar.’

‘Just relax, spend some time with me,’ Rinchi purred. She finished untying her bodice.

‘You’re so beautiful,’ Antimeria said as he admired her perfectly formed breasts. He drummed his fingers along his power paunch. ‘Too bad you aren’t real.’

‘What’s not real about me?’ She draped her arm across her breasts with a girlish pout.

‘You know… but it doesn’t matter. You’re better than a real woman could ever hope to be. It’s too bad your twin Yeshi isn’t here right now. You guys are always more fun together.’

Rinchi’s smile tightened. ‘You think I’m better than a real woman?’

‘I mean it. You don’t cause me any trouble, you don’t bitch at me, you don’t ask me to pay for your weekend at the spa, you don’t need useless knick knacks, you don’t need entertainment, you can’t get pregnant. You’re the perfect woman, and I don’t care if you are a Humandroid.’

‘You’re such a flirt.’ Rinchi sat down on Antimeria’s lap and tugged lightly on his tie.

‘Nah, I just wish I’d picked a different path in life.’ He looked down at his fat fingers. ‘This is what I’ve been reduced to – fucking Humandroid love dolls just to get my jollies.’

Rinchi pulled down hard on his tie.

Antimeria’s face reddened. ‘Careful, honey,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘I don’t like it so rough.’

SEVEN∞

Knock. Knock. Knock.

‘Are you going to get that?’ I ask Yeshi, who is sitting quietly in a meditative pose. Meme here, yes, the same guy from earlier. I’m coherent enough to take the reins of the story again. Something happened between the VIP room and now. I can’t tell you exactly what it was, nor can I tell you how I got to this hotel room. C’est la vie I suppose.

Knock. Knock.

‘It’s probably the pollution mask.’ Yeshi cracks the door and whispers something to someone I can’t see. She’s given a tray with a pollution mask on it, its long nose freshly polished.

‘Here,’ she says. She sits on the creaky bed and pulls some tubing down from the ceiling. While the room is a bit outdated, the pollution mask and distributor cable are brand spanking new.
It’s important to know what counts in this world.

‘What are you?’ I ask. I blink, failing to get a good picture of her. Everything is still blurry, inky, cryptic.

‘What am I? What do you mean, Meme?’ she asks as she hands me the pollution mask.

‘Why are we here?’ I ask the timeless question again.

‘We got kicked out of the VIP room because you punched a guy named Sauria in the face. You also choked him. He’s the head of ExEx, you know.’

‘Choked?’ I gulp. ‘ExEx? Am I in trouble now?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How did we get to this hotel?’

‘We just ended up here.’ She bends over and kisses me on the forehead. There’s something strange about the way she’s talking to me, the way her voice filters in and out of my consciousness. Hmmmm…

As Yeshi sets up the pollution mask, I close my eyes and check my iNet messages. My co-worker, a spiky man named Tyro, has sent me two messages. He always sends me messages. I scroll up and down my inbox. Eighty percent of the unread messages are from him. I delete the new messages without reading them and open my eyes. It’s strange, my normal vision is blurred, but when I log in to iNet, my vision is crystal clear. Technology – it always makes things better.

I close my eyes and log back in again. I do a quick search to see how many people on GoogleFace set their location to POLLUTION CLUB 512 tonight. I vaguely remember Nelly contacting her friend (was his name Carloza?) at the club. I’m pretty sure she sent something and the odds of me finding it here are good. Yes! She checked in.

‘You ready?’

‘Just a moment,’ I say as I find Nelly’s profile. Her marital status is listed as unknown. In the picture she wears an orange scarf that drapes over her bulging stomach, a white tank top barely held together by two thin strings and leggings under a yellow pair of boy shorts. Now that’s the body I wanted to switch with…

‘What are you smiling about, honey?’ Yeshi asks. I send Nelly a message and a poke. Hopefully she’ll respond. I log off iNet and open my eyes.

‘Oh, I was looking for a friend I met at the club,’ I say. Yeshi hands me the pollution mask and I strap it to my face. I suddenly remember the questions I had a few minutes ago.

‘Why are we here?’ I ask.

She takes out a pollution packet, massages it like a pro, and dumps it into a reservoir with a shiny metal handle near the nightstand. It’s a small packet of Loathing Hunter Special Reserve. How did she know it was my favorite? Did I say something? I look her over and admire her tight nurse’s costume. Her smooth skin is green when viewed through my mask’s emerald polypropylene eye lenses.

‘We had to get out of there,’ she said.

‘What did I do again?’

‘You punched someone. Sauria, head of ExEx.’ Yeshi turns a lever and I hear the pollution begin to vaporize. Inhale, exhale. Who’s the victim?

EIGHT∞

I feel like we’ve met before.

I feel like I’ve taken your hand in mine, like we’ve escaped together down the oubliette of a shared mind, a shared experience. We’ve sat on the balcony watching aeros whip around our heads like dragon flies; we’ve grown used to each other and the peculiar noises we make in our sleep; we’ve shared cigarettes and toilets, wet dreams and dry nightmares, socks and undershirts, deodorants and toothbrushes; we’ve embraced at the airport before being whisked away to destinations unknown; I’ve held your hair as you puked and you’ve held my hand as I cried; I paid the tab at the bar and you picked up the bill at the restaurant. We are conjoined, the result of years upon years of conceptualizing.

The things linking us are more than electronic, bigger than Homo sapiens, Homo machina or anything in between. I raise your ontological argument with a swift fist in the gut! We are the modern day philosophers; we are the blurred line between good and evil. We exist to exist alongside one another (simply to exist!). We watch the rise and fall wearing beast masks while inhaling exiguous gulps of liquid sin as if it were oxygen. Never fear – the bonfires of time consume all they encompass. We laugh and fornicate; we rape and pillage; we make up to break up; we prick our fingers and press the bloodied stumps together swearing allegiance. We are the modern day Adam and Eve stuffing our face with apples. Dine with me, dear Reader.

It’s true – I’m hallucinating again for what may be the third time tonight.

Hotel California. I’m staring into an oval mirror attached to the black headboard of the bed. As Yeshi lays her head into my lap, I inhale the pollute deeply. I feel the pollute travel past my stomach into my nether regions, down my thighs and into my kneecaps, finally arriving like a time-honored guest at the tips of my toes.

I look at our reflection in the mirror. The long nose of my pollution mask curves downward like the beak of a horny hummingbird. Yeshi’s head is moving up and down. She’s unzipped my pants. I look at my reflection. Who is this man staring back at me? Is it Meme, is it me? Is it you? Who is the man with the woman’s head in his lap? Who are you man!?

I reach out and touch the mirror. My fingers slip effortlessly into the mirror as if I were placing my hand into a still body of water. Yeshi says something but I can’t understand what she’s saying.

I push my hand deeper into the mirror and feel a tug at the other end of the mirror. I whip my hand away; the surface of the mirror ripples and I’m mesmerized by the undulation. I watch as a moth hovering around the ceiling light disappears into the mirror. It vanishes as soon as its wings touch the surface. The moth returns from the other side of the mirror glistening. Liquid mirror drips off its body as it flutters back towards the light.

I have to see what is on the other side of this mirror. Join me.

I roll my head back and sigh deeply. The light swells and dissipates. I feel Yeshi’s fingernails against my stomach. It feels like she’s trying to pull out my lower intestines, one yard at a time. A loving intestinal crank never hurt anyone. Her nails move down to my thighs. I push her off me and look back at the oval mirror.

I reach for the mirror again and slip my hand into its porcelain surface. Again I feel the faint spectral tug on the other side. I watch in the mirror as Yeshi tries to pull my pollution mask off my face. One hand goes around her neck and I toss her to the other side of the room.

I inhale more. I inhale even more.

I sink my hand deeper into the mirror. The mirror has now engulfed my entire right arm. My arm is caressed by something wet and soft on the other side of the mirror. I’m now face to face with myself in the mirror’s surface. Meme meet Meme. I’m staring into my own eyes, shielded by polypropylene, protected by plastic, as so many of us are today. Staring at myself, I’m reminded what brought me here in the first place. This magical mirror, this hotel room, this strange woman…

I look back at Yeshi.

She’s looking through her bag for something. Her top is off and her breasts are hanging low, swing low, sweet chariot. I notice a bulge in the front of her panties. There’s definitely something strange about her. She says something to me in a language I don’t recognize. I smile at her to let her know I’m fine. Inhale to exhale. She walks over to the pollution distributor and presses something on the dial. The pollution suddenly loses its strength.

With one arm still inside the mirror, I reach for Yeshi and bring her closer to me. ‘Why did you do that!?’ I bellow, my scream muffled by the mask. The mask fills with the hot air of my words.

She kisses the end of my pollution mask and licks the polypropylene lenses. Yeshi straddles herself on top of me, wrapping her hands around my neck. She begins to squeeze. I’m surprised by her strength and try to pry her off me. She’s too strong, especially with one of my arms stuck in a mirror. She’s twice as strong as a woman her size should be. Something’s not right here.

I look back at the mirror. I’m inches away from my own nebulous face. Meme meet Meme.

I can feel something running up and down my arm on the other side of the mirror. It feels bristly and wet like a giant paint brush. There’s a ringing in my ear and all I can smell is the remnants of the pollution in my mask. Yeshi is still on top of me, biting at me voraciously. One of her hands is still around my neck, squeezing the air out of me.

I push my face through the surface of the mirror. I can no longer distinguish the difference between hallucination and reality. I’m in a vast resplendent desert with Daliesque forms cart-wheeling around in a light zephyr. Melting clocks and whatnot. Elephants with giraffe legs. A hazy cloud has drifted in front of an olive sun. My face is peeking out of a large crag circumambient with purple cacti and chunky pineapple lizards.

Half of my body is hanging out of the rock, like a calf in mid-geo birth. The other half is still in the room with Yeshi being strangled. I reach for Yeshi’s arm and slam her face first into the mirror. Her body is tossed violently in front of me. She is with me now! She lands in a pile of dust and detritus. A few of the pineapple lizards scatter slowly.

A vulture with two heads and black contacts is perched on a desiccated ribcage a few yards away from Yeshi. As she sits up, the dapple gray vulture spreads its wings. The two-headed vulture’s wingspan is a good fifteen feet and its shadow completely covers Yeshi’s body. It flaps its wings twice. Dust silvers in the air around it.

I pull the rest of my body through the mirror as the black-eyed vulture flies off into the distance. Several glass spiders the size of soccer balls waddle between Yeshi and me. Out of curiosity, I stamp my foot against one of the spiders. The sound of breaking glass echoes as if it were shrieked by a banshee through the desolate apricot-colored landscape. I pull my foot away, watching as small pieces of glass and blood melt into the hardened soil.

My lower half. Fresh blood is dripping down my legs. The wounds are coming from scratch marks adjacent to each other on both legs. I don’t know how I got the wounds or where my pants went. Yeshi looks up at me and grins. She springs forward using her hand as a catapult and pulls me into a pool of water that I hadn’t noticed before.

As she swims in front of me, I watch her exposed breasts sway in the water. She’s wearing ruffled white panties and knee-high stockings now. Hanging from her stockings are small strings with squares of mirror attached. Again the bulge. She leads me into a cave, past neon conodont and wavy glassine seaweed. An aqueous congress will soon begin. Let us partake.

NINE∞

Antimeria loved ladyboy Humandroids.

Breasts and male genitalia – strange and fascinating. The ability to fuck and be fucked? Revolutionary! Humandroid ladyboys were the perfect mix of androgynous and cutting edge, a late twenty-first century merger between Darwin and woman, salacious and sensational, robotic erotica and sexual exploration, taboo and robo-compulsive disorder.

Clearly, having sex with a ladyboy Humandroid escort didn’t make you gay. Clearly. As a card carrying member of the RepubCorp party, Antimeria knew the political backlash associated with being gay (even if homosexuality was universally accepted by 2083, people still held their prejudices like loaded weapons). Besides all that, Antimeria was Christian, and it was a sin to be gay. It said so in the Bible somewhere, obscurely but still.

Rinchi wasn’t the first ladyboy Humandroid he’d been with, but she was his favorite. Note: Antimeria still considers her a ‘she’ because of her breasts. The usage of the pronoun was his little way of justifying the legitimacy of his sexual depravity, a national depravity that had metastasized since the advent of Internet pornography in the late twentieth century. From pixels to Proxima Worlds – porn never got old!

Yeshi, Rinchi’s identical twin, wasn’t quite the specimen that Rinchi had become over the last year, yet she was equally as hot, especially when placed with Rinchi in Sapphic situations. Nothing like a Sapphic situation to wind down on the weekends.

‘I wish we could just move somewhere together,’ he said, as Rinchi adjusted the levers on the pollution distributor. A perfumed smell emitted from the machine; the green ready light flickered on.

Antimeria had yet to pull his custom Louis Vuitton pollution mask over his face. The mask, a piece limited to eleven copies worldwide, was made from a black rhino’s skull. While made out of the thick bone, the mask was surprisingly light due to an emulsifying enzyme applied to the inside of the skull which thinned the skull to that of a wafer. The skull, which had been stretched in a unique process called skull distending, was subsequently dipped in a carbon polymer which made it practically unbreakable. The ruby eye pieces were weaved to the mask using laser needles stitched through the bone by a team of Kenyans who worked in a two week weaving and re-strengthening period. (The deplorable factory conditions for the Kenyan workers have been the subject of many documentaries by human rights groups.)

‘Where would we move?’ Rinchi asked in a soft voice muffled by her wolf mask. They had just finished having sex and Antimeria was lying with his back on the bed. His belly swelled and softened as he took deep breaths.

‘Well, if I had it my way, we would move to the Cayman Islands or something. You know, get away from the LA hustle and bustle. Find ourselves a little resort town.’ Antimeria thought for a moment and started laughing. ‘Oh, fuck it, Rinchi. You know we can’t do that!’ He tugged his pollution mask over his face.

Rinchi sat with her back to him as he inhaled a large cloud of pollution. She reached for her panties, which had been tossed haphazardly onto the sleek lampshade connected by a double-jointed fixture to the wall. She turned, watching as Antimeria rolled his head to the left and to the right, engulfed in his intoxication.

The fool. She could kill him right now and her only punishment would be life termination. Humans tended to forget this. What was life to an artificial being anyhow? What was life to a Humandroid? Rinchi wondered what Tyro – her therapist – would say if she told him about Antimeria’s jokey proposal for them to move to the Cayman Islands. Another Humandroid she knew had actually been purchased by a wealthy man and moved to Bali with him. It could be done, it had been done before.

She reached forward to lift her bra from the floor. Antimeria’s Vienna sausage fingers grazed against her ass. Again. The human was probably on some sort of libido booster, she thought, turning back towards him and sitting on his lap. She affirmed her suspicion after performing a quick vitals scan – no way a normal human nearing fifty could get it up that quickly.

He pointed at the bra and shook his head. The fat from his chin and neck jutted out of the mask like an overstuffed hamburger as his beefy skull moved from left to right.

She understood the gesture and let the bra fall back to the floor. As she began to kiss his puffy nipples, she wondered for the millionth time what it felt like to use a pollution mask. What was it like to take pollutes? She’d seen Yeshi strap masks on multiple times and pretend to be intoxicated, but that was just for show. Yeshi couldn’t get intoxicated by pollutes and she knew it. Yeshi was convinced that by using the mask in front of other humans, it would trick them into to thinking she was actually one of their species. Pathetic.

Rinchi had seen so many men and women intoxicated by pollutes that their faces had started to blend together. Night after night she sat around people fucked off various designer pollutes. It seemed as if a new flavor came out every week. Last week it was Ralph Lauren’s Equestrian Exhaust, Raoul Duke’s Skull Ammunition and Tommy Hilfiger’s Soiled Baby Jeans. This week she heard a group of businessmen blathering about the successful launch of Chanel’s Nuevo Carrion and Gucci’s Dolores Haze – always something new in the world of consumable materialism.

There were other types of pollutes, such as the always popular Nepalese Burning Trash and then there were entheogenic pollutes, like Naked Lunch or Loathing Hunter or Leary Tim. Those ones made her clients hallucinate. Over the last ten years, the illegal exportation of entheogenic pollutes had been the focal point of a hundred trillion dollar War on Pollutes instigated by the Federal Corporate Government. The results of the war were yet to be determined, as the FCG also profited from the illegal distribution. Funny how that worked.

As they were going at it, Antimeria began to doze off likely due to pollution consumption. Rinchi had seen it a dozen times before and knew exactly what to do. She propped him up against the headboard and took off his mask off. She set it gently in its custom case meant to resemble a classic LV trunk.

Rinchi walked into the bathroom, retrieving one of those little white hotel towels used for God-knows-what. She warmed the towel with water and folded it in half. She returned and placed the towel across Antimeria’s eyes. She crossed his hands over his chest and scanned his body, again making sure none of his organs had shut down. Had there been an emergency, Rinchi would have to alert the authorities and administer revival techniques.

While it had never happened to her, she heard about someone overdosing on pollutes and the blame being placed on the Humandroid escort who happened to be with the person at the time. If Rinchi was going to be terminated, she at least wanted to go out with a bang. She wasn’t planning on being retired like the other Humandroids.

Violence towards humans. It was something she was supposedly programmed against, something that most humans thought was impossible, but the fact was, she was a Humandroid escort. Humandroid escorts had no violence governor preventing the infliction of pain because of the sexual demands of their clients. Normal Humandroids had this governor. The only Humandroids with fewer violence inhibitors than escorts were military droids, but even they had other measures to prevent them from rampages. Humandroid escorts had no such measures. They were true feats of machine learning.

As she waited for Antimeria to wake from his pollute-induced spell, Rinchi thumbed through an electronic copy of Sky Magazine retrieved from his chamois leather briefcase. She sighed as the first article materialized:

Traveling with Dogs

When traveling abroad or to Mars, never forget man’s best friend. By Eduardo iPad

Substation Six

Talk about a bastion of cutting edge dog care and amenities for humans too, the Hilton/Ramada Substation Six features all the amenities you’ve come to expect from the largest hotel chain in the known universe. Custom doggie treats with your dog’s name on them, 22-karat gold ID tags, and bone shaped pillows – the Hilton/Ramada Substation Six halfway between Earth and Mars even features a custom dog pollution mask system. A first of its kind, the dog pollution mask system, or PUPs as it’s known on board, gives your dog all the comforts it needs to make its stay at the Hilton/Ramada just as legendary as yours.

Philadelphia

Sleep soundly knowing your beloved pooch is just as pampered as you are. At the Bittenhouse Hotel, the dogs are so treasured they even have their own entrance to the hotel. Call it doggy segregation, but these pooches deserve the best! For a fee, expect to have your favorite pup looked after 24/7 by an expert team of Humandroids. Hourly grooming, doggy manicures, canine massages, and doggy facials – this team of Humandroids covers all the bases. Add separate doggy bathrooms with gold inlayed toilets and no weight restrictions and you are looking at a revolutionary retreat for your four legged companion. There’s even a doggy gloryhole.

Bluffton, South Carolina

Ever wonder what it would be like to stay in your own cottage while having your dog housed in a miniature cottage next door? Look no further! At the Palmetto Bluff Inn of Destiny, your dog has nearly 22,000 acres of parklands to roam. With around the clock service from a team of Russian-crafted Humandroids, you won’t have to worry about a thing when it comes to dog safety. Enjoy the multi-vitamin dog biscuits (which humans can eat too), the Boss satin dog beds, Hermes custom dog bowls, and the freshest Antarctica bottled water straight from what’s left of the glaciers to your prized pooch.

Austin, Texas

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‘Humans are so fucked,’ Rinchi mumbled.

TEN∞

I awake and rub my eyes.

My right fist is covered in blood; the mirror affixed to the headboard is smashed; there are fresh fingernail gashes up and down my thighs. Yeshi is lying in a heap on the floor. She’s bent forward, kneeling between her legs, naked.

The pollution mask distributor cable has been ripped from the wall and one portion is wrapped around Yeshi’s neck. There are shards of mirror stuck in my chest and the pollution mask is nowhere to be found. One of her knee-high stockings is on my leg, ripped from the shin up and stained with drying blood. What in the fuck happened here?

I look down at my chest and begin to pull out a few shards of glass. Blood trickles down to my waist. Yikes. I look at my reflection in the bloody shard and collapse back onto the bed. As I lie back on the bed, I notice the pollution mask hanging from the light fixture. My toxic muse. The light is situated just right to illuminate the green lenses.

‘Yeshi…’ My brain beats viciously against the inside of my skull. I feel weak and ready to vomit.

‘Yeshi…’ I say again, louder. All I can hear is the sound of a few transport vehicles and aeros speeding outside the window.

‘Yeshi…’ I nearly shout. Fuck, she must be dead. I close my eyes and sigh audibly. What the hell was I thinking? I cough, sit up slightly, and then fall back. How did things get so violent? More importantly – what the hell am I going to do with a dead body? How many people have pondered what to do with a dead body before?

A hand grazes my leg. Alive! Alive! She’s alive!

Her hand works its way from my ankle to my lacerated thigh. It makes its way to my stomach, just below my navel. It twirls there for a moment before moving to my rib cage. I breathe deeply, feeling blood surge to my groin area. I sit up and look at Yeshi. She’s naked and her body is completely unscathed. I see something dangling between her legs.

‘What in the fuck!?’

‘What’s wrong Meme?’ she asks, retracting a little.

‘You have…’ I rub my eyes. ‘You have a dick?’

‘What this?’ she says, reaching down and flicking it to the left. ‘It’s not real.’

‘What the…’ I throw my hand behind my head, hoping to find my underwear. I’ve got to get the fuck out of here. I start to backpedal, ‘I’m not a RepubCorp homophobe, but I definitely wasn’t… definitely didn’t think… I’m not into…’

Did she just say it wasn’t real? I look her over and finally realize what has happened. How could I be so stupid? Her voice, her perfect figure, her unscathed skin amidst all the shards of broken mirror – Yeshi is a Humandroid. Yeshi is a fucking ladyboy Humandroid which means… which means she’s also an escort!

‘Baby?’ She crosses her legs, sweeps some of the mirror shards off the bed with her hand.

‘This is so fucked,’ I say. I cover my eyes with my palm, hoping she’ll disappear.

‘Did we have sex?’ I ask with my hand still over my eyes.

Yeshi laughs. ‘What else do you think happened in here?’ she smiles. ‘I like you Meme; you’re rough and big…’

‘Please don’t say that,’ I mumble, not sure how to take a dick size compliment from a Humandroid. I work with these goddamn things four days a week. You would think I could recognize one by now. Goddamn Walliburton for crafting such authentic machines. Goddamn pollutes, goddamn myself, and goddamn Walliburton again.

Yeshi crawls her hand up my thigh and I slap it away. ‘This game again?’ She leans forward, whipping her legs out from beneath her. A deranged look spreads across her bang-framed face. She carefully begins to waddle over to me as I cower further into the far corner of the bed. I can feel the shards of mirror going deeper into my ass as I scoot across them. Holy glass-in-my-ass, Batman!

I’m a Humandroid therapist. I know what Humandroid escorts are capable of. I know that they have no violence governors.

My palms clam up. I can hear my heart beating in my ears and feel my lips trembling. I have to figure a way out of here. I look to the door – too far. The window – our room is too high up to try that. Maybe I should smash through the wall. Impossible, plus, I feel weak. Should I try to kill her? No, she’ll likely go into a self-defense mode and will quickly overpower me.

Yeshi hovers over me and sits down onto my lap. Within moments, she’s kissing my neck and… I’m letting her!

‘Why is your heart beating so fast?’ she says, keeping one hand halfway around my neck. She’s scanning my vitals. ‘Are you afraid of me?’

‘No…’ I say, closing my eyes. ‘Of course I’m not. I’m just a little shocked.’

‘Shocked?’

I switch to my therapist tone. ‘I’m experiencing a sudden surge of post-party traumatic stress disorder, something that humans usually go through after the consumption of too many pollutes. I’m confused, and my head is beating like a crazed gorilla against the inside of my skull.’

She starts to laugh and sits down deeper into my lap. ‘You’re funny.’

‘Why am I covered in blood? Why do you have some of my blood on your stomach? I’m a Humandroid therapist and therefore… therefore I cannot partake in any sort of illicit behavior with Humandroids. In fact I took an oath swearing not to. This is why my heart rate has increased, which I’m sure you’ve been monitoring, and this is why I’d like you to get off my lap.’

‘You’re a Humandroid therapist? You can’t partake?’ she laughs.

‘Yes.’

Her smile changes to astonishment. ‘Wait… you’re a Humandroid therapist and you didn’t know I was a Humandroid? I thought you were just a regular therapist, you know, for people.’

‘You should have scanned my life chip!’

‘I did,’ she said, ‘you’re using a chip-masker.’

I forgot that I’d installed a chip-masker before going to the club last night. ‘Well anyway, I’m sorry. The pollutes. I took too many entheogenic pollutes last night. Halloween has a way of unleashing the demon within me. Pandora ’s Box was opened… ummm… It’s my own fault, not yours. You’re just doing your job.’

She laughs again. This time her laugh has an edge to it. She positions her lower body on top of me and moves her face closer to mine. ‘I like you, Meme.’

‘You can’t like people,’ I remind her, trying not to make eye contact.

‘You’re a Humandroid therapist and you couldn’t tell I was artificial.’ She looks to the left; her eyes under her bangs are like black balls rolling beneath a floor-length curtain. She keeps her eyes shifted far to the left, thinking (or should I say mirroring the way humans think – Humandroids spend up to forty percent of their energy replicating human idiosyncrasies).

‘I was intoxicated…’ I remind her.

‘Rinchi won’t believe this,’ she says, still with her eyes to the left.

‘Rinchi?’

‘My twin,’ she says. ‘Well, we aren’t twins, but we’re identical. She was there last night, on the other side of you. She won’t believe me! Luckily we record everything.’ She taps her long nail against her temple.

‘I know you do…’ I almost whimper. ‘Please… Please don’t…’

‘Please what?’ She hunches forward to kiss me. I try to pull away but she grabs the back of my head with her free hand.

‘Please…’ I say again, as she presses her lips into mine.

‘What’s wrong… never had both before?’ She gestures towards her navel and flicks herself, himself, itself – whatever I’m not ready for this. This is not what I bargained for! I wanted to switch bodies with Nelly! I’m innocent in this regard! Don’t judge me, Reader!

‘It’s not that,’ I say, which I quickly realize is a half-lie. I clear my throat. ‘Due to my position as a therapist, I refuse to have relationships with my client pool.’

‘But I’m not your client, Meme,’ she whispers into my ear. Christ she is hot – what am I saying!?

‘I know, but you could be…’ I stare up at the ceiling and the pollution mask hanging from the light fixture. I feel a surge of blood rush to my groin. Not now. Not now. Not now.

‘I like you,’ she whispers. ‘You’re a sexy man…’

‘You’re programmed to be seductive,’ I tell her loudly. ‘You’re programmed to be any man or woman’s fantasy. You’re programmed, dammit!’

‘I’m not programmed at all! You of all people should know this. Oh Meme, I haven’t been with too many black men,’ she purrs.

‘Please stop…’ I say, frozen. She’s right, she’s not programmed. Rather, she has been for lack of a better term – trained. Machine learning from there.

‘You like it,’ she says. ‘I can feel you.’

‘No no no no no no…’

‘Yes you do, sweetie. It’s natural,’ she hisses into my ear.

Using every ounce of strength, I buck her off me. She falls backward off the bed and lands with a soft thud on the floor.

‘Sorry,’ I tell her, standing. She sits up, her hair covering her face.

Minutes later we’re at it again, fucking the life out of one another…

ELEVEN∞

Rinchi sat on a black leather sofa across from her therapist’s desk.

His office was on the thirty-sixth floor of the recently built BlackAguaUSA building, a knife shaped megalith that extended sixty-two floors into the cerulean Californian sky. Two digital frames hung on an isthmus of wall displaying Tyro’s credentials and photos of his wife. An onyx black strip of carpet ran from the large mahogany door to the leather sofa. The floor was made of bamboo, dyed to resemble jade, and it had recently been polished. The walls adjacent to the large windows overlooking LA were bare and clean, white like the teeth of a dentist.

Tyro walked into the room from a side door which led to his private office. He was a thin man, tall with oversized shoulders that made him appear more muscular than he actually was. He wore a pair of glasses with black frames that ballooned the size of his eyes. (He didn’t need to wear glasses, but he wore them anyway, refusing to get corrective surgery.)

‘Hello Rinchi.’

Tyro’s hair had been recently trimmed and his cheeks were stinging red from a recent shave. As he sat, Rinchi quickly scanned his vitals as was her custom with all humans she met. He appeared to be tired, evident in the sallow color of the skin around his eyes and his erratic breathing pattern.

‘Hi Dr. T,’ she said, shifting her weight forward. She wore a mesh dirndl and a pair of red tights tucked into knee-high boots. Her shirt was a retro LED volcano shirt that refreshed the eruption image every minute.

‘Let me see,’ he said, flipping through some documents on his iDeskpad. ‘Okay, press here.’ He twirled his hand, twisting the screen towards Rinchi. With a pouty smile, she pressed a red button and waited a moment for the system to register.

He turned the iDeskpad around and searched through it for a moment. ‘So it looks like a lot has happened since we last spoke.’

‘What do you mean? Politics? Sex? Death in the family?’ Rinchi grinned.

‘Why are you smiling?’ he asked without looking up from the iDeskpad.

‘Just admiring you,’ Rinchi said.

‘You are taught to admire,’ he reminded her as he types something in to the iDeskpad.

He’d yet to make eye contact with her. She hated it when humans didn’t make eye contact. She’d seen scores of businessmen apply this technique to their associates.

‘Well, I’ve been around long enough to know what’s worth admiring,’ she said with a sigh.

She’d rarely met a man closer to exploding than Tyro. The veins on the side of his face constantly bulged. His heartbeat and breathing patterns changed drastically each time she saw him. He needed to get out more. He needed a blowjob, a Jack and Coke administered intravenously and a three day weekend.

‘Okay,’ Tyro was so engaged with the documents on his desk that he still hadn’t looked up at her. ‘We always go through this. You can’t flirt with me because you’re getting therapy from me. I’m not your client. You’re my client,’ he finally looked up at her and raised his left eyebrow. The eyebrow jutted over the frame of his glasses.

‘Maybe that will change one day,’ she said with a shrug. Every man has his breaking point, every man.

‘Likely not. So, how have things been?’

‘The job is the same. Fucking old guys and rich diplomats. Nothing like it.’ She twirled her finger in the air as if it were a flag.

‘Yes, I’m aware of this.’ Tyro glanced at his iDeskpad screen and typed in something quickly. ‘But elaborate some more. I mean, not on the sexual part, but how you’ve been feeling. Last time we met, as I can remember, oh yes…’ He shifted the screen with a flick of his wrist. ‘You were a little depressed about the work hours and oh yes, here it is. You were feeling tension between yourself and your suitemate, Humandroid twin Yeshi.’

‘I don’t know where Yeshi is and I can’t find her anyway,’ Rinchi said. ‘She’s offline.’ Using her pointer finger, she began to push her eyeball aside to show Tyro the fleshy electronic circuits that processed the images she captured.

‘Stop that,’ Tyro scolded.

‘Why don’t you like it when I do this?’ She pushed her finger all the way into her eye, using it to scoop out a small purple wire. ‘Some humans think it’s cool. They say I look so real until I do this. Or this…’ Rinchi lifted her tongue up and stuck her fingers beneath it. She gripped a small green cord that was covered in blue veins and began to extract it with two fingers.

‘Quit it,’ Tyro said. ‘You can mess with your circuitry by doing that. Let’s get back to Yeshi – why did you say you couldn’t find her?’

‘Dr. T, have you ever seen a ladyboy Humandroid naked?’

‘You ask me that every time.’ He took off his glasses and began rubbing his temples. There were little pink marks on either side of his nose from the nose pads.

‘Well, the answer could change every time.’

‘I have seen most forms of Humandroid escorts in the nude in scientific journals. Wait, why am I answering this? Listen, we don’t need to discuss nudity every time we meet.’

‘Every other time?’

‘Stop it, and put the lingual cord back in your mouth. Yeshi. Where is she?’

She pulled back on the cord and it snapped back into her mouth. ‘Well, I can usually trace her. She’s completely logged off iNet, all channels, and has been since exactly 11:42 last night. I’m sure she’ll turn up.’

‘Are you worried?’

‘Why should I be worried? She’s not my real sister. We were just designed to look identical. We’re complete opposites. She’ll do just about anything to mirror the pathetic spontaneity of your kind. Last night she was using pollution masks again – not just wearing, using – which is utterly useless and also bad for her circuitry. She’s suicidal if you ask me. I don’t know why she would want to be one of you anyhow…’

‘One of us?’ Tyro adjusted his tie.

‘She’s obsessed with humans. She should be the one seeing a therapist, not me.’

‘We’ve been over this before. You’re here because of the incident in February. You nearly killed a client and rather than termination, Walliburton thought this would be a more progressive alternative. You’re lucky because of this. Most Humandroids…’

‘Most Humandroids? You realize I’m a prostitute, right? You realize I’m designed solely to fuck and see no credit out of it? You realize—’

‘Ahem,’ Tyro cleared his throat. ‘I’m aware of the business you were designed for. Remember, we live in an advanced, incentive-driven world that has changed over the centuries. The Humandroid job of being an escort is an important addition to the workforce. It allows humans to live out their fantasies safely. It has dramatically cut STDs worldwide and has also become instrumental in solidifying economic relations between state-owned companies and global manufacturers. Rather than take a pessimistic route regarding your existence – which I understand is easy considering some of the tasks you are assigned to do – you should instead take an optimistic route, and realize that your role in our universe is changing the face of global trade and leisure.’

‘Are you reading this from a brochure on your iDeskpad or something?’ she asked. ‘Are these more of Dr. Lye’s lies?’

‘This is what I mean by a pessimistic approach,’ Tyro said. His voice quivered, as if he was trying to suppress his real opinion. ‘I’m forwarding you a document. I’ve sent it to you before, but this time I want you to actually download and implement it. I’ve told you about my friend’s e-novel, The Optimistic Approach: Living Life Rather Than Letting Life Live You. To make it even easier, I’ve highlighted some key points for you to practice every day.’

‘Such as?’ Rinchi said.

‘When you wake up every morning—’

‘I don’t wake up. I boot up,’ Rinchi corrected him.

‘I want you to look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself that you’re going to have a good day.’

Rinchi stuck her finger in her eye and started to push the eye to the side again.

‘Stop that, it’s bad for your circuitry. Just tell yourself you’ll have a good day,’ he said. ‘From this point onward, I want you to remind yourself of this every time you feel inadequate. That’s the first step. The next step is called the instigative process. You must begin to think of your work as a contribution to society rather than something to be frowned upon. Have you ever worked with a businessman that went on to do something successful?’

‘Worked? Really Dr. T? Have you tried this self-help shit? What’s it with humans and self-help anyway? Why can’t you just help yourselves? Do you look at yourself in the mirror every day and tell yourself…’

Tyro repeated the question without looking up from his iDeskpad.

‘Okay, I have,’ she answered. ‘I’ve even worked with the presidents of small countries. Did you know I worked with the architectural firm that designed this building? Did you know that the guy who designed this building loved it when I stuck the pipe from a—’

‘—So, you have worked with people who have gone on to do successful things,’ Tyro interrupted. ‘The second step is to reevaluate your self-worth and determine that you are actually a contribution to society.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ she laughed. ‘How does a Humandroid escort evaluate its self-worth? Is that even possible?’

‘The third step, after reevaluating your self-worth, is to begin to rebuild yourself with the newly created positive image of yourself in your mind. Remember, the secret to success is viewing yourself as successful. Start from the ground up, as a person who is successful and who is a contribution to the work place, an asset to their job and a pleasure to be around.’

‘You’re actually serious.’

‘Of course I am. I think you have the potential to boost your self-worth by augmenting your view on reality and hopefully, instilling a change in yourself that will benefit both your well-being and your work performance.’

‘So I’ll give a better bj? I’ll fake better orgasms? I’ll do a better job of taking care of inebriated businessmen?’

‘Stop it,’ Tyro said. He looked at her over the rims of his glasses. ‘Downloading the excerpts of the book I’ve provided for you will not only improve your self-worth, it will also help you understand Yeshi better.’

‘Why do I want to understand Yeshi better? She’s a delusional droid who wants to be human.’

He shook his head. ‘Careful with the word droid, you know it’s derogatory.’

‘Even if she was a member of the Homo sapiens club, her perverse ladyboy status would make her claim for the elusive tag of human questionable. She’s fucked in the head; she’ll always be Homo machina.’

‘So, what I want you to do is download what I’ve sent you and begin the reexamination process. First, you need to start by…’

TWELVE∞

Is there any object that connects us more to ourselves than mirrors?

You and your bald spot, the dried make-up like blotted ink at the corner of your eyes, your nose bent from a childhood fall, the unlucky location of a large zit next to your left nostril, your crooked yellow teeth, the nasty sore at the corner of your mouth that never seems to heal, your despicable unibrow, your lack of eyebrows because you pencil them in, the stubble on your chin, the strange place on your throat where your beard never seems to grow, the pock-marks that pepper your cheeks as if you were beaten with a meat tenderizer, your glossy bloodshot eyes, your creepy soul patch, the hair peeking out of your nostrils, the scar near your lip, the plum-colored bruise circling your eye from last night’s fight, the soft freckles on your forehead, the lipstick smeared on your two front teeth.

We judge what we see in the mirror but does the mirror judge what it sees in us? Can you imagine a mirror talking to us throughout our lives? What would the mirror say?

--You’ve looked like shit since yesterday.

--I think those jowl exercises are starting to work.

--You should use some type of scalp shampoo before you end up looking diseased.

--If you’re going to cut up lines, the least you can do is leave me a pinch. Cocaine!

--Go with the red tie, it makes you seem more outgoing. Not that red tie, the other one. Yeah, that one. Good. Go with that.

--By all means, stick those fingers down your throat and watch yourself get thinner. I’m warning you though… don’t get any vomit on me this time, got it?

--Please don’t punch me, please don’t punch me, please don’t punch me…

--I can barely see you because there’s too much shit on the mirror – toothpaste stains, globs of gel, shaving cream, flecks of food from your inconsistent flossing. Seriously, how are you ever going to get laid if you can’t pick this place up a little?

--You are the fairest of them all, and as a mirror, I too am the fairest of them all. Like how I did that? At any rate, Snow White is a whore, but at least she’s not a witch.

--Please don’t say Bloody Mary again…

The unfortunate truth is that mirrors never tell us anything. They never judge, never comment, never scoff, only reflect. By doing this they become the silent observers of our lives. They watch us come, they watch us go, they watch us fatten and age. They see us at our worst and our best, in our most despicable and our most honorable. In a way, mirrors are the ultimate Buddhists. They sit for hours upon hours in strict meditation, never judging and always observing. They witness personal atrocities and triumphs, the woes of our day and the results of our decisions.

How many times did Hitler stare into a mirror? How many times did Mother Theresa stare into a mirror? Did Jesus ever see his reflection? If so, who did he see – himself or his father? And for that matter, was Mohammed even allowed to look in a mirror? What have the great seers seen? What have the great killers noticed? Did the seers see themselves? Would the killers kill their reflections given the chance?

Mirrors were our private status updates before there was the Internet. They watched as we rose to the top and as we came crashing down. They see us more than we see ourselves. And as I currently stare into one, I wonder what the fuck I have become.

The bathroom mirror. The counter is black, the walls are a light brown color, the toilet is an older model with tinted stains around its base. The bolts holding the toilet down are rusted and the waste basket is empty. There’s an oval bar of soap wrapped in tissue, a toothbrush in a white cardboard box, a sharp comb, a small LCD screen in front of the toilet flashing advertisements.

I run the water and open the bar of soap. I toss the wrapper to the floor.

The door opens and Yeshi steps in.

‘You’re a Humandroid escort,’ I tell her as I look at her in the mirror.

‘Just now figuring that out, huh?’

‘No, I figured it out a while back…’

‘Was this before or after you fucked me just now?’ she hops onto the counter and pulls her knees to her chest. Humandroids escorts must carry several different outfits with them. I could have sworn she was dressed like a nurse when I first met her. Now, she’s in a yellow sari with bedazzled peacocks along the front of the dress.

I look at my eyes in the mirror. It’s true – we did just finish having sex.

‘How is that even possible?’ I ask.

‘Do I really need to explain the birds and the bees to you?’

I suddenly want to scream. I want to punch the mirror, to shatter my reflection, to choke myself. What am I doing? I’m in a hotel room with a ladyboy Humandroid escort. Has my life really become this depraved? Have I really gone this far?

I look at my watch – I’ve already missed my first appointment. Tyro has probably sent me fifteen messages by now. I know better than to log onto iNet to check. He’s such a stickler, but at least he’s not standing in front of a mirror next to an escort with multiple lacerations on his body.

‘So what now?’ Yeshi tilts her head and looks at me curiously.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, are you going to pay me?’ She giggles.

‘Is this what you do? Find humans who are intoxicated, lure them to some hotel room, fuck them, and then ask for money?’

Yeshi smiles, ‘You know, I like you. I almost don’t want to charge you, but now…’

I’m no longer a Humandroid virgin – the thought weighs heavy on my dark little soul.

She leans forward and strokes her hand along my chest. The faint smell of coconut lotion radiates from her fingers. They manufacture Humandroids to have imperfection as to increase their likeness to human beings. As she strokes my chin, I notice a small birth mark on her wrist in the mirror’s reflection. Her hair is a tight pony tail, revealing a string of small moles on the back of her neck. She gives me a devilish look and retracts her hand.

The outer layer of a Humandroid’s skin is a synthetic epidermis created in the 2040s called e-skin. The insides of their bodies are made of tiny hollow metallic tubes, arranged in a micro-lattice pattern around myriad processors and muscle wire. Their skin is soft to the touch, robust. They’re as flexible as a contortionist, at least the escorts are.

‘Look, what do I owe you? I’ll log into iNet and transfer the money now. Which corporation do you work for?’

‘Walliburton.’

‘I should have known that. And the cost?’

‘Look, you don’t have to pay me,’ she says suddenly. ‘Just meet me again soon. I like you.’

‘Seriously?’ I ask. I watch as her eyes flicker under her bangs. It’s strange to think that she’s recording everything that happens with those eyes and simultaneously monitoring my vitals. I shut my eyes and quickly open an incognito window on my iNet screen to investigate the price of a Walliburton escort. Pricey!

‘Expensive, huh?’ she says. I open my eyes to see Yeshi tilting her head again. As her head tilts, her bangs fall to the right side of her face.

I gulp.

‘Well, consider it an early birthday gift…’ she says. ‘But only if you promise to meet me again.’

THIRTEEN∞

Rinchi opened the door to the Humandroid flat that she shared with Yeshi and another escort named Anna. Dr. Richard Hewman, the clever designer of the first Humandroid back in the 40s, knew that having the Humandroids recharge via a standard electrical outlet would eternally marginalize them. A PhD in Robotic Biomimicry from MIT, Dr. Hewman had his first breakthrough while doing research in Berlin with a team of German scientists specializing in xenotransplantation.

The story goes that Hewman fell asleep after getting drunk off a bottle of homemade glußwine given to him by a grad student. Unbeknownst to him, the grad student had actually given him glußwine dosed with lysergic acid diethylamide, otherwise known as LSD. According to lore, Hewman slept through most of the hallucination and awoke with a host of acid-inspired ideas. As he came down from his trip, he scribbled fifty pages of notes on a yellow legal pad next to his bed. These notes would contain the programming language and biological necessities that would go on to finalize the last step of humanity – the creation of Homo machina.

Early Humandroid models wore glasses with solar cells on their rims to charge themselves. The glasses would generate energy, which would enter the Humandroid from small reactor cells behind their ears. To recharge, the Humandroids would need to wear the glasses for at least six hours a day depending on the model.

For the next ten years, as Humandroid technology progressed, Homo machina could easily be spotted because their glasses blinked subtly as they recharged. Moore’s Law also applied to Humandroids – it took time for the technology to improve upon itself but it didn’t take that much time.

It was Richard Hewman’s wife, Olivia, who had thought of the next way for Humandroids to be recharged. She suggested that he think of a way to have them recharge during a sleep cycle. Assisted by a Japanese start-up company called SleepSound (スリープサウンド) that was trying to find electronic cures for insomnia, Hewman was able to develop a way for the Humandroids to recharge during a six hour sleep cycle.

With the help of two French researchers, Hewman figured out a way to also produce energy through what he jokingly called robosynthesis. Like plants, Humandroids exhaled oxygen and inhaled carbon dioxide, which some argue, has become instrumental in combating global climate change. They also took in six ounces of water per day, administered in two ounce increments throughout the day. The hydrogen in the water served as another fuel source. The six ounce daily intake was calibrated to be the exact amount necessary as not to produce waste.

Richard Hewman himself died mysteriously after an explosion in his laboratory rumored to be caused by one of the many pollute cigarettes he chain smoked. Around the world, statues of Hewman next to the first Humandroid, Eve, were erected. A group called Humans for Hewman was started with funding from the FCG and EU to provide Humandroid aid workers to impoverished countries.

As the Humandroid workforce was implemented into society, Humandroid recharge facilities (referred to as Humandroid flats) bloomed across the globe. The flats were lit by motoglass cylinder tubes that hung from the ceilings and walls of each room. Usually, the facilities were made from the shells of early twenty-first century low income housing units.

Rinchi’s building was one of these Humandroid flats. It was an eight story building that spanned half a city block, housing six thousand Humandroid workers. There were maintenance facilities on the first floor, which included the shower and grooming services. Walliburton and other contractor offices were on the top floor. The Humandroids lived in groups of three in small rooms on the interim floors with shared showers at the end of each hallway. Humandroids didn’t need privacy – their only housing needs were beds, showers, proper lighting and clothing.

From the door, Rinchi slept on the bed in the right corner, Yeshi slept on a bed in the left corner and Anna slept on the futon across from Yeshi. Between Yeshi and Rinchi’s bed was a clothes rack chock-full of enticing garments – skimpy one-pieces, sparkly bras, satin night gowns in several different colors, sheer holiday lingerie, full-body fishnet outfits, two spreader bars, rope for suspension bondage and strappado torture, military fatigues, hanging pockets full of nipple clamps, collars, paddles engraved with triskelion emblems, Wartenberg wheels, a dildo shaped like the Eiffel Tower, crops, small electro-stimulation devices, butt plugs in various sizes, handcuffs, a muzzle gag, several animal masks, a leather gas mask, ball gags, a host of whips varying in girth, elf outfits, a dangling scold’s bridle, matching kimonos, wigs, mesh nighties, umbrellas, translucent raincoats, cowboy hats and various spandex get-ups. Even the most beastly forms of paraphilia were satisfied with their paraphernalia.

Next to Anna’s bed were two folding chairs and a black filing cabinet full of illegal pollutes. It was a well-known fact that the best pollutes came from Humandroid escorts. Most were usually funneled into the States from other countries through Mexico, America’s favorite conduit. While illegal to transport banned pollutes, the Walliburton Corporation – which the majority of Humandroid escorts worked for – smuggled in illegal pollutes anyway, paying off officials with pollutes, sex and erotic-exotic vacation packages. To live in sin was to live in the late twenty-first century.

‘Your night?’ Anna stirred on the other side of the room. She was lying on her side with her hand tucked under a pillow. Both Anna and Yeshi slept with pillows, something that Rinchi never could understand.

‘Met with Antimeria again.’ Rinchi dropped her purse onto the floor next to her bed. ‘Then I came here and went to the therapist.’

‘How was that?’

‘Same stupid shit. Self-help nonsense made for humans which Dr. T is attempting to administer to me. Respect your life. Respect your job… this type of fascist crap.’

‘Is it really fascist?’ Anna laughed. ‘Such an angry droid you are…’

‘Fuck you. How was your night?’ Rinchi asked.

‘I ended up holding a knife to a man’s throat as he jacked off…’ A slight smile spread across Anna’s face. ‘After that he took me to a twenty four hour McStarbucks and proceeded to eat three latte-flavored Big Macs and drink two extra venti vanilla frappes.’

Rinchi’s face contorted. ‘McStarbucks? What kind of guys are you seeing nowadays?’

‘I guess he just wanted McStarbucks. He paid me for an entire night so I went along.’

‘How was… McStarbucks?’

Anna shrugged. ‘A case study in twenty-first century human obesity. Plus, it smelt horrible in there, a mixture of greasy coffee grinds and irisin-enhanced synthetic beef. I contemplated shutting off my olfactory senses. I mean, I’ve done it before so I know it’s possible—’

‘How do you do that?’ Rinchi asked, pulling off her boots.

‘I looked it up on GoogleFace a few months ago. One of the lingual veins under our tongues – the red and blue striped one – is responsible for our sense of smell. If you pinch it, or what I did the last time was actually use a nail clipper to sever it, it cuts off your sense of smell. You have to be careful not to swallow the vein though. Otherwise, you’ll have to go to maintenance. Afterwards, I just soldered it back on myself.’

The door slammed open and Yeshi sprung into the room. She smiled at both Anna and Rinchi. ‘Hey droidies…’

‘Hiya,’ Anna waved.

‘You two will never guess what happened to me last night…’

FOURTEEN∞

**The following conversation took place in Spanish two days after Nelly met Meme. It has been translated by the late José Alberto Del Castillo Cabeza Mercedes Acosta III for our monolingual audience.

‘Is this all of it?’ Nelly asked Carloza.

They sat in private café in Tijuana, a few blocks away from Paseo de los Heroes. She began thumbing through an oversized Louis Vuitton duffle bag. The duffle bag contained banned pollute packets from Russia, Bhutan, Argentina, Easter Island, Thailand, Egypt and Zimbabwe. The single duffle bag was worth twice as much as Antimeria’s aeros.

‘All there, chica.’ Carloza had his eyes closed so he could monitor the money transfer on GoogleFace. Two of his bodyguards sat in a booth across from them. One was a beast of a man, so large that he had to sit sideways in the booth.

A burly bartender wearing Leaks used his dreadlocks to distribute pollutes at the bar. A single musician plucked at a harp in the far corner. Nelly could tell the woman was a Humandroid by the speed of her fingers. She was an older model, likely a retired NeunBolt from the 2070s.The synthetic skin near the corner of her left eye was replaced by a blue globe that flickered in syncopation with the song she played, a classic by Los Tigres Del Norte.

Mexico had become somewhat of a haven for modified Humandroids, a situation constantly monitored by the FCG. Fear of a robo-terrorism had filled countless debates and had been the subject of restrictive legislations since Hewman introduced the first Humandroid in the 2040s. Upon unveiling Eve, Hewman was forced to enter federal protection after becoming the target of an extreme right wing anti-Humandroid group known as NOT IN MY AMERICA or NIMA.

With the federal crackdown, Mexico became the obvious place for digital natives to live out their wildest tech-fantasies. The Modified Humandroid culture in Mexico had become so popular that the word Techback was coined to describe people moving to Mexico to mod Humandroids, smuggle Humandroids, or run Humandroid/human co-operative communities. It was believed that Techbacks would outnumber the natives one day.

‘Transfer’s coming,’ Nelly assured him. ‘It’s a pain in the ass to transfer money out of my Liechtenstein account, you know that. So many damn stop measures. I put in the request an hour ago. It should be here within the next twenty minutes.’

‘No problem. How’s business?’ Carloza asked as he opened his eyes.

‘Moving quickly. I mean…everything is going well.’ Nelly smiled faintly. She was always suspicious when other drug dealers asked her questions about her business. ‘Yours?’

‘Fine,’ Carloza answered, also wary to talk openly about his thriving pollute smuggling business. He was the kingpin of a large pollute smuggling ring, not the biggest in Mexico but definitely one of the most powerful.

‘Good.’

‘Switched bodies recently?’

Nelly shook her head. ‘I was asked a few nights ago, the guy disappeared though. You?’

‘Yea, actually, I switched bodies two weeks ago. Nice time. Who cares if it was temporary? It was still fun. When’s the last time you switched?’

‘God, before getting married. I switched with a woman who was a retro hip-hop dancer. I kept her body for a few days. I almost stayed in it.’

‘I know the feeling. It’s a damn shame that you have to eventually switch back. You can’t stay; it’s not your body. That’s the problem with body-switching is that after about five minutes, you really think it’s your body, you really think you’re invincible. The guy… what the hell is his name?’

‘Which guy?’ she asked.

‘The guy who patented it… or well, at least invented body-switching.’

‘It wasn’t a guy, it was a Russian woman named Evelina Khromtchenko.’ Nelly smiled. ‘I know because I had a picture of her as my iNet background for a while. It was originally a life chip virus.’

‘Now that lady was a genius.’ Carloza raised a finger to his nose and snorted something out. A yellowish green blob landed on the floor. ‘Sorry about that. The dust around here will do that to you. Let me check on the transfer again.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Still not there.’

‘It’s coming, just relax,’ she looked down at her Cartier watch.

‘Have you ever switched bodies with a child?’ he asked.

‘Yeah right. People are too prone to do twisted shit…’

‘It’s not quite illegal here in Mexico,’ Carloza explained. ‘Technically it is, but the authorities look the other way if one has a wad of cash, so technically it isn’t. Techbacks pretty much rule the country. Mexico, land of the free! Actually, my switch a few weeks back was with a child. I was rolling around, dancing, jumping – doing all sorts of stupid things. You know, the kind of shit that kids do.’

‘What did the child do with your body?’

‘He went and got himself laid with my body! Can you believe that?’ Carloza laughed, slamming his fist on the table. ‘I had to find the little bastard! He spent more money at the whorehouse in a single night inside my body than I usually spend in an entire week. Little fucker knew what he was doing. Youth these days, they never handle money well.’

‘Some do.’

‘You’re referring to yourself?’ Carloza asked.

‘I’m under twenty-five so I consider myself pretty youthful.’ The look on Nelly’s face was solemn and serious. She meant it.

‘Yeah, I guess you could say you understand wealth. Hell, you were smart enough to marry into it.’

‘Watch it.’

‘If I were you and had your body I would’ve done the same thing. But now you’re going to have a kid, things will change.’ Carloza shook his head. ‘Shit, you might have to say goodbye to this business of yours…’

‘It’s cool to have kids these days. Everyone in Hollywood is having them. Twitter stars, musicians, bloggers, gamers – everyone has a child as an accessory.’

‘As an accessory? Well if you ever want to switch, let me know. I’ve always wanted a baby,’ he said with a toothy grin.

‘In your dreams,’ she said. ‘How old are you anyway? You’re too old to have a baby!’

‘A drug lord doesn’t reveal his age.’

‘You aren’t a drug lord…’

‘You say apples I say pollutes,’ Carloza nodded at his henchmen. Nelly got the point. ‘Let’s just say I’m between the ages of thirty-five and forty-nine. That’s good enough for you right?’

‘Sure.’

‘And call me what you will, drug lord, illegal pollute dealer… I increase my nation’s GDP with every one of these duffle bags I sell to your country. Mexico has been America’s favorite drug dealer for over a hundred years. It’s our national destiny to intoxicate your nation ¡Pobre México!
¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos! (Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States!) You and I, shit, we’re both playing our roles, Nelly. Pollutes are drugs whether you care to admit it or not.’

‘I guess they are…’

‘You don’t think they are?’

‘They aren’t the same as other drugs.’

‘No drug is the same as another drug. Well, that’s not true but the point is... Oh fuck the point, let me check the transfer,’ Carloza closed his eyes. ‘Still no… wait something is pending.’

‘Have I ever fucked you over before?’ she asked.

‘No, and that doesn’t mean you won’t in the future. One should always be prepared to get fucked over. It’s going to happen to me sooner or later. I’m waiting patiently for it. I’ll go out with a bang though.’ He still had his eyes closed, waiting for the money to transfer. ‘With God as my witness.’

‘A bang? God will be there too, huh?’

He nodded. ‘I always go out with a bang, and we will talk about God later. Ah good. The money has been transferred.’

FIFTEEN∞

Confession – I’m in a hotel room in downtown LA waiting for Yeshi. I’m wearing a white suit, sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet resting on a cretonne sofa chair. The four black lights above me are making the specks of dust and lint on my suit glow. It’s been a week since we met and as you can probably surmise by now, I caved in.

I’m slowly nursing on the new Dior Carpet Bomb. It was this or Dries Van Noten Pineapple Bruises – too expensive for my tastes. It’s amazing what people will pay to consume. I inhale deeply. Exhale deeply. Repeat. Enjoy. Repeat. Enjoy.

I couldn’t tell you why I’m here. I don’t know what has inspired me to contact the Humandroid again. Hell, for a few days after our first meeting I completely ignored her. She isn’t human, I told myself countless times. I even tried to live my life as normally as possible, going as far as cutting back on the pollutes. (Fat chance, I know.)

Lo and behold, it didn’t take long for my clients to start looking like her. Every one of them morphed into Yeshi as I stared at them from across my desk. On Sunday, I decided to transfer money into her account. I was going to pay like a good capitalist and let that be it. The next day, I woke to find a single message from her. The message asked me to meet this week. I didn’t respond for two days.

Yesterday was when I finally sent her a message. She replied within minutes and I booked a room. I could have just forgotten about all of this. That would’ve been the easiest route. One night, I was too twisted off pollutes and I fucked up. Close the book, open another. To start anew would have been the better thing to do.

Another drag off Dior Carpet Bomb and I’m feeling stars. My peripheral vision is filming over; murkiness is calming my bones. I put my hand in my pocket and I knead my fingers along the freeze dried packet of my favorite pollute – Loathing Hunter with an Ayahuasca topper. LoathHunAyaTop for the neologists at heart.

A knock at the door startles me.

‘Who is it?’ I ask.

‘Me.’

A button near the bed unlocks the door. It takes my finger a moment to find it, but eventually I mash my thumb into it.

Open sesame.

Yeshi floats in wearing a flowing white trench coat. An egg shell headband holds her bangs tightly against her forehead. ‘Good evening.’ She smiles at me as she closes the door, her vitreous teeth sparkling under the black light. She tosses the trench coat onto the floor and throws her large purse on top of it. From behind her leg she pulls out a white paper umbrella, opens it, and begins twirling it over her shoulder.

She’s now topless, in a pair of knee-length panty hose. Her body is covered in black light responsive paint. She has painted two mountains from her waist to the tips of her nipples in green neon paint. The mountains are shaded orange and have jaggy, snow white peaks. Below the mountain rests a river, which runs around her waist and into her panties (of course there’s a slight bulge). Trees run the length of her leg and are quickly engulfed by a bright red fire that starts around her right knee. Above the mountains on her chest, four white clouds spell M-E-M-E, the final ‘E’ trails off behind the second mountain.

‘Wow…’ I say. It takes all my willpower to remind that this was her job, that she was trained to entice human beings, that this was nothing out of the ordinary for her, that she’s the one who booked the black light suite!

‘Oh Meme, I missed you…’ she says, advancing towards me. She pauses. ‘Why are you using a chip-masker?’

‘I’ve been using a chip-masker to avoid any shit from ExEx for punching that guy.’

‘Sauria, the CEO.’

‘Yes, him. Wait, did you say you miss me?’

She nods playfully.

‘You can’t miss me,’ I remind her. ‘Remember, I’m a therapist. I know it sounds patronizing when I tell you about emotions you can’t feel.’

‘It’s fine. That’s your job, that’s what you trained to do,’ she says as she sits on my lap. ‘My sister goes to a therapist… she’s such an angry droidie. Sometimes I feel bad for her.’

‘You mean your twin back at the club?’

‘Yes.’ She licks the side of my face. Her tongue is soft and wet. So real.

‘And do you see a therapist?’ I ask, secretly hoping she says no, (and if she says yes, praying I don’t know the therapist).

‘No, just you,’ she kisses my cheek. ‘You’re the only doctor I need.’

‘That… sounds strange.’

‘I’m not crazy.’

‘You don’t have to be crazy to see a therapist.’

‘You want some pollutes? Doctor Lamar, is it?’ She reaches for the mask.

‘You saw my full name on the money transfer.’

‘Kiss me.’

Kissing her and knowing she isn’t human redefines eroticism. Since learning she was a Humandroid after my pollute-laced bloodbath last week, I’ve been trying to recreate in my mind what kissing her felt like. Were her lips wet? Yes. Did she stick her tongue out a little and lightly flick it against the top of my lip? Yes. I kiss her again, this time biting her lip, trying to see if she bites back. She starts sucking my lip into her mouth. It feels so real. Machine learning – but reminding myself of this phrase does nothing to calm the fire spreading down my body.

‘Mask.’

‘I brought you something special tonight,’ she says. She slides off my lap. I notice her entire back side has been painted as well: two hand prints spread all the way from her ass to the space between her shoulder blades. As the paint spreads, they begin to form the outline of a pyramid. At the tip of the pyramid is an eye with seven large eyelashes, each painted a different color. The pupil is white and a thin blue strip stretches from the top of the pupil to the bottom. She bends over slowly – aware that I’m watching her – and searches for something in her bag.

‘Like it?’ she asks, still bent forward.

‘Of course.’

‘My flatmate Anna helped me do the back.’

‘It’s something else.’

She returns with a small package and tries to show it to me under the purple light: Гнилое яблоко поллюция.

‘I can’t read Cyrillic…’ I tell her.

‘It’s a Russian pollute that was banned earlier this year,’ she explains. ‘It’s a knock-off of a popular Novaya Zarya scent with added entheogenic properties. I ran into a few on a trip to Ukraine earlier this year. The businessman I was with told me I could take as much as I wanted – so I took them all.’

‘How many more do you have?’ I ask excitedly.

‘I guess I should restate that last sentence. There were only three so I took all three. I have two left now.’ She bends forward and starts tinkering with the pollution distributor.

‘What’s it like? I mean, what did he say?’

‘He said the visuals were great, colors were everywhere, lost in time – this sort of thing. He was speaking in Ukrainian at this point so I only caught bits and pieces. We’re born – ha ha funny word – with fluency in ten of the world’s most widely used languages: English, Russian, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic. Any fringe languages can prove a bit challenging. While we’re able to download linguistic apps, I usually don’t need to because most people I deal with speak one of these languages.’

‘Really? And you brought this packet just for me?

‘Yes, you weren’t supposed to pay me. However, since you already did, I thought I’d get something for you in exchange. I don’t see any of that money anyways. You should know that. Ready?’

‘Let us begin!’ I say in my deepest of voices.

She laughs. ‘You are a strange, strange human, Meme.’

SIXTEEN∞

‘I’m busy,’ Nelly told her husband, Antimeria. Her husband was nearly twice her age and he spent all of his free time with ladyboy Humandroids, a fact he routinely denied. She wasn’t stupid. It was pretty easy to use a bee-sized drone to follow him and see what he was up to. While illegal in most countries, the drones were legal in the States.

‘I just wanted to talk…’ He was speaking to her on iNet. His voice was crisp and clear.

‘Busy.’

She disconnected the call and sighed. Her aeros was nearing the border between Mexico and the United States. Twenty foot high blast walls and Hesco barriers lined either side of the street. FCG military police troops strolled back and forth with Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response Rifles known as PHASRs. The abundant razor tape gave the border checkpoint a sharp gleam.

It wasn’t difficult for Nelly to smuggle illegal pollutes across the border. Because of her husband’s position in the Federal Corporate Government, Nelly was granted full border check immunity stemming from a 2075 federal law called the Move Freely Spend Swiftly FCG Immunity Bill or MFSSFIB for short. Her driver, an older model Humandroid named Noah, wasn’t even required to stop at the border. As he drove past, a holochecker delineated the aeros into FCG and non-FCG approved lanes.

‘Good stuff?’ Noah asked. He was a slim, angular Humandroid with a knack for fashion (blue Salvatore Ferragamo cravat, a silver suit with pink stitching and thick eyeliner around his left eye). He’d been her caretaker and driver for two years now.

‘I think so,’ Nelly said on the tail end of a yawn. ‘I’ve tried some of the Bhutanese pollutes before. They’re made from the shells of a toxic snail they have in the mountains there. People are constantly getting arrested for trying to cross the border from Bhutan into China with the shells. At some points, you don’t know if you’re intoxicated, at other points you’re frightened. It’s like mixing an upper and a downer. It really fucks with your head, you know? I wouldn’t try the stuff again, but some people like this type of high.’

‘Someone always does.’

Nelly leaned her head back and closed her eyes. ‘Have you contacted anyone at escort distribution yet? I want to get rid of this stuff quickly. Walliburton is buying a lot from me lately.’

‘I’ll contact them again once we cross the border.’

‘Good.’

To jump through more legal loopholes, Walliburton had Humandroids smuggle illegal pollutes to be distributed by their escort services. However, since a Humandroid couldn’t be granted border immunity, an actual human was required to bring the pollutes into the country alongside the Humandroid. From there, Humandroids could do the rest of the work.

The sole reason for Humandroids not being granted border immunity was the isolationistic views of many Americans, most stemming from the mass deportation and border restriction years of the 2050s, known publicly as MassDeport 2050 and in history circles as the Third Red Scare.

FCG Officials didn’t want any chance of illegal Mexican immigrants, Islamic terrorists, pseudo Chè Guevaras, Zapatistas or Humandroid mercenaries making it into the country. Various celebutards and Dr. Hewman himself lobbied against the inclusion of Humandroids in the measure, arguing that the idea of Humandroid mercenaries would be impossible given the limitations in their circuitry. As they usually do, xenophobic fears won against reason, and the borders between the United States and Mexico made airport security pale in comparison. Strangely, Canada never saw an increase in border security.

In the late 2060s, a countrywide crackdown of illegal immigrants was funded by selling student loan debt bonds. Officials checked records all the way back to a family’s grandparents in an effort to make sure all illegal immigrants, even those with legal status due to being born from illegals on American soil, were sent back to their respective countries with a slap on the ass.

A series of panels led by a former NIMA (NOT IN MY AMERICA) lobbyist named Joey McCartney began investigating celebutards, companies, and anyone deemed dangerous by the FCG. The commission published a large collection of eBooks and trinkets, most of which were hawked at RepubCorp national parties and funneled through local RepubCorp chapters.

Joey McCartney died by falling off an Ayn Rand balloon at the 2065 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. While drunk off pollutes, McCartney tried to crawl to the top of the balloon into snarling Rand’s left nostril. To the horror of millions watching nationwide, he fell head first into a tuba of the marching band below, after the float had hit a bump in the road. The impact killed him instantly (and severely damaged the tuba).

Interesting tidbit: it was later revealed that the road was supposed to have been repaved by a construction crew weeks earlier. The contract had been dropped after the company was accused by one of McCartney’s panels of hiring illegal workers.

As is the case with many demagogues, a pro-deportation initiative was started in McCartney’s honor to beef up rhetoric and target adolescence. The initiative produced pro-deportation Internet spam, funded a children’s show based on Sesame Street (called America’s Street), helped develop pro-deportation video games and published childhood books.

Nelly vividly remembers her parents praising the initiative and buying her books extolling the benefits of deportation and border restrictions. Books such as Get ‘em Out of My Country, America is for Americans, How to be a Patriot, America: Land of the Free as Long as you were Freely Born Here, filled Nelly’s childhood bookshelf.

Her favorite at the time was a picture book called Send ‘em Back, which was a hybrid between a regular and an electronic book. The book even had a game you could play (similar to the archaic Angry Birds game popular with primitive smart phones) where you loaded illegals into a slingshot and shot them back over the border. Every time you scored, you received what was called a ‘deport point’ from the Department of Homeland Security. Once you collected enough deport points, you could use the points to buy student loan debt bonds.

After Nelly hit college, she realized her parents were racist bigots and quickly found the first Mexican guy she could and handed over her virginity to him like it was a sack on fire. They fucked and fucked and she cried out hoarsely in Spanish, ‘Muy Caliente! Muy Caliente!’

Years later, she looked upon her deflowering ceremony as a retort to a childhood wasted in rhetoric and ignorance. The Mexican guy looked upon her deflowering as a lucky break with a super-hot co-ed. In the end, both got what they wanted.

‘What’s on your mind, sweetie?’ Noah asked as they hovered through the border checkpoint. He winked at her through the rearview mirror.

‘Same old…’ She softly rested her hands on her pregnant stomach.

Nelly made more money than she could possibly spend simply by driving across the border, picking up duffel bags filled with pollutes, and quickly bringing them Stateside. After the first few runs, she lost the excitement one feels when they’re committing the crime. She had little or no chance of being caught and even if she were caught, she could easily get out of it. Her life of crime had become damn near pedestrian.

‘Getting bored with the job?’ Noah asked intuitively.

‘Maybe. I just need some excitement in my life. I’m seven and a half months pregnant and I’m losing steam fast.’

‘When was the last time you went out to a pollution bar? Maybe you just need some fun. You know dance, hook up…’

‘I was out last week, but got sidetracked talking to Carloza and dealing with some drama in the bathroom. I think I’ll go out later this week. Why sit around and do nothing, you know?’

‘I know. I can’t stand doing nothing either,’ Noah said. Nelly didn’t know that Noah and older assistant Humandroids like Noah were programmed (some say over-programmed) to sympathize. She had little to no understanding when it came to robo-socio biomimicry.

‘Really?’ Nelly looked from the window to Noah. She wore a pair of cantaloupe-sized glasses that nearly reached to the bottom of her chin.

‘Really. It’s just so hard to feel that way. I understand what you’re saying and what you’re going through. On the lighter days of my job, the times I’m away from you, I just get so bored. It’s very upsetting.’ He frowned.

‘You get bored too? Poor Noah…’

‘It’s okay; I’ll figure it out one day…’

‘You’re so sweet and loyal, Noah. I don’t know what I’d do without you. You know how I feel about Antimeria…’

‘You can’t stand him, and for good reason. He is…’

‘Fat and horrible,’ they both said at the same time.

‘Exactly,’ Noah confirmed. ‘And you deserve better than that man as a husband!’

‘I should just get rid of the damn thing.’ Nelly flicked her belly.

‘The child?’

‘What am I doing with a kid anyway? I’m so young!’

‘I agree. It’s such a hard decision to make.’

‘God, tell me about it. Every day I look down at my ballooning belly button and cry.’

‘Oh sweetie…’

‘It’s so horrible,’ Nelly began to sob. ‘I just am getting fatter and fatter. I mean, I’m going to have to do an intense couple months of Pilates to get back into shape. I’ll probably have to go on a diet. Then there are the trips to the sweat lodge. I’ll need to go at least twice a week. It’s just so horrible.’

‘Oh sweet little Nelly, don’t worry. It won’t take you that long. You’re so strong and passionate. I wouldn’t worry. A year from now, you’ll be better than ever. You’ll look the greatest you’ve ever looked and you’ll have the hottest accessory of the year.’

‘I know,’ Nelly’s expression changed from one of grief to one of pride. ‘Nothing like a baby in your arms. It solidifies your humanity, and looks so cool in a side-sling.’

‘I agree. Those side-slings are so adorable. What type are you going to get? I found some pretty interesting designs on Rakuten.’

‘So far, I have two,’ she said. ‘There’s the shark skin Hermès one and the Gucci camel belly one that Antimeria got me. I mean, that one is limited to five in the entire world. The entire world, Noah. He can be nice sometimes.’

‘I know honey, he really can.’

‘But I’m going to get tons more. I’ve been meaning to go shopping, but exotic pollutes are in such a demand right now that transporting them is taking up all my – I mean all our – time. It seems like we’re always in transit.’

‘That’s true, it does seem like that.’

‘Next time I go shopping for a side-sling however, I’m getting you something, okay?’ Nelly sat forward and smiled at Noah.

‘You don’t have to do that…’

‘No. You deserve it. Something really fashionable. Like human bone cufflinks or one of those Hilton-Bush blood diamond bow ties...’

SEVENTEEN∞

‘Meme’s a fool…’ Tyro said to his wife, Hannah, as they ate at a local Tibetan restaurant. Tyro was Meme’s co-worker, and therapist to Yeshi’s twin sister, Rinchi. ‘Such a fucktard.’ He watched as he wife slowly nibbled at her bowl of fried then-tuk. Each thumb-sized noodle looked like a giant slug slipping into her predatory lips.

‘You say that too much honey.’

‘I think it’s the pollutes. He’s constantly late to work and his performance as of late has dropped dramatically. A few of his clients have complained to me about him. They’re worried too.’

‘What can you do?’

‘If I were his boss, I’d fire him in a heartbeat,’ Tyro sighed. ‘About the only thing I can do is submit an official complaint. I’ve already done that twice this month and it seems to have little or no effect. BlackAguaUSA is slacking in their management as of late.’

‘Things will work out soon enough, Ty.’ Hannah reached for her glass of aloe vera juice.

Hannah was an elegant woman, soft spoken and drop-dead gorgeous. She had icy blue eyes and thick blonde hair that had been pulled back into a short pony tail. Her lips were a size too large for her thin face. There were freckles across her nose, like loose crumbs on a table, and her eyebrows were thin and elaborately shaped. She wore a pair of jade earrings which matched the green cashmere scarf draped over one of her shoulders.

She smiled knowingly at her husband. They had met at UCLA five years ago, while Tyro was studying for his master’s in Humandroid therapy and she was studying for an undergrad in nature-deficit disorder. He was a stern man, who took his job and everything revolving around it a bit too seriously.

He took off his glasses and used his tie to clean the lenses.

‘Stop it.’ She laughed as he looked from the glasses to her. ‘That was an expensive tie!’

Hannah bought all of Tyro’s clothes. Any sense of style he conveyed to those around him was due to Hannah’s haughty taste, which she borrowed from the countless electronic magazines she subscribed to and hours spent on GoogleFace’s various fashion channels.

‘What should I use then?’ he asked.

‘Use a napkin. That tie was handmade in Syria by disabled school children. They’re disabled – show them some respect.’

He reached for the napkin. ‘I’m just frustrated, that’s all. I work so hard to keep things at the office in order and it seems as if Meme just comes in whenever he pleases, makes a mess, does a shit job, and leaves early. He always has something to do… always has some excuse. I’ve been sending him more messages, hoping he’ll get the hint that I’m unsatisfied with his performance, but he never responds. Hell, I don’t even think he reads the messages.’

‘Let’s change the subject sweetie. It’s date night, remember?’

‘Yeah, but we can’t be out late.’ Tyro rubbed his temples. ‘I need to get home to compile some research on a new optimism ignition method that a friend of mine recently sent me. You know Dr. Bertetta at Stanford. Anyway, the self-awareness module we have been using over the last two years at the office barely has a fifty percent success rate. Of the fifty percent that show no sign of improvement, thirteen percent have conditions that appear to have gotten worse. It’s not working well enough.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Humandroids are losing their motivation to work. This affects both the economy and the general well-being of human society. This new research is crucial to improving the work ethic and overall happiness of the Humandroids. I’m hoping to read through it tonight so I can do a few test runs starting tomorrow.’

‘Ty, maybe we could go dancing? Why not? They have that new pollution club nearby. POLLUTION CLUB 512—’

‘Are you kidding?’ Tyro laughed. His brow furrowed and he leaned forward. ‘You know I don’t use pollutes. Look what it does to these people!’ he pointed at the bar.

Seven or eight people wearing pollution masks loitered around a skinny dreadlocked bartender. Some laughed while the others, who were likely more intoxicated, leaned forward onto their elbows.

‘Oh, those people are just high. It’s okay to get high off pollutes every now and then. Come on, it will be fun. We can get crazy, you know,’ she winked at Tyro. ‘Come on, we never did anything for Halloween last year… let’s get wild tonight!’

EIGHTEEN∞

There are a few Origami birds fluttering around my head.

In the distance, the lone call of what sounds to be a wounded manatee reverberates through the room. The sound detonates inside my skull and dissipates. I’m standing near a pair of large dunes. Near me, the water from a jostling blue river sluices through a bed of jagged candy rocks. I can feel my body convulsing.

I stop and sit near the root of a gnarled oak tree. Brittle twigs crunch under my weight. I look up at the sandy dunes nearby and feel the urge to rest coming on. Sand sprays around me as I tramp up one of the dunes. Yeshi sits on a peculiar rock formation that juts up like a nipple seemingly out of nowhere and I wave.

I wave and wave and wait and wait for my cue to misbehave.

Suddenly, we’re standing in a house with playing card wallpaper and mauve parquet floors. I’m leaning against her. The Kings are shaking their glossy swords as they try to peel themselves from the ivory wallpaper. They’re tattooed to their cards, bewildered and agitated. Royalty hates being pinned down. The Queens are fixing their sylvanite crowns. Some are using prickly eyebrow tweezers to jab at the corners of their cards. Their faces are smeared in lard, their cheeks flush with crimson, their lips puckered, their brows lowered and menacing.

The Jokers are laughing at the kings and queens. The Jokers are laughing at the cream-colored things. The Jacks are laughing at themselves. The Jacks are laughing at me. One Jack reaches his sword to the card above him and pricks the King of Spades in the ass. The King roars. A black liquid boils out of his ass and onto the floor.

Yeshi dips her hand in the inky substance and sucks it off her finger. She wipes some on my face. It burns in a way I’ve never felt before. I touch the substance and put some in my mouth. It tastes like sour licorice.

‘Where are we?’

‘We’re in the hotel room,’ she tells me. I continue to stare down a long corridor snaking underneath the Queen of Hearts. The audiences cheers and jeers, no after claps here, no one is as ambitchous as I! Unlightening epiphanots collide!

‘Why are we here?’ I asked the only question worth asking again. ‘Why are we here?’

Yeshi’s eyelashes have been replaced with Monarch butterfly wings and her bangs have vanished. Her fingernails have elongated, her teeth have sharpened.

‘I’m so scared,’ I tell her. ‘Sorry for being such an askhole…’

‘Fear is more exciting than banality I suppose,’ she says. ‘You can ask as many questions as you want.’

‘WHAT WAS THAT!?’

I sense something moving in the room around us. Something dark, something sinister. The hairs on my arms stand to attention like a field full of pulsating erections. A bear-sized shadow moves across the room. It feels like something is breathing down on me. A hot and sticky breath – a mixture of vinegar and deceit, bloodlust and rotten apples – daggers my senses. I feel the drip of searing saliva on my back.

‘Please,’ I tell her, grabbing her arm.

‘You want me to take off your pants?’

‘No! Please, just… please…’ I start to cry.

My mind has exploded and it’s dribbling out of my tear ducts. Whatever is in the room is near. Whatever is lurking in the dark is within arm’s reach. Whatever is behind me, whatever is in front of me… I fall to my knees.

It’s there! Behind you!

‘Is it too strong?’

‘Is what too strong!?’ I plead.

‘The Ukrainian pollute…’

‘The what?’ I turn away. ‘Please stop,’ I whisper to the phantom being standing behind me. Meet your executioner face to face.

‘All right let’s take that mask off.’

‘Don’t touch me!’ I scream. The cards begin to fall off the wall, shattering all around me. Shards of glass spray into the air like waves during an H-bomb test. I cover my ears and scream.

He is here. He is near. Here is here. Near is here. Here is he. Near is he. He is here…

‘Okay. Just relax, just lie here sweetie.’

I’m standing near the strange soft dunes again. The baleful cards are gone, the spectral nuisance too. I’m listening to the sounds of the forest. I’m lying near a large tree. In a haze, I begin walking towards the two dunes. My legs start to sink into them. My head is plangent. I’m dizzy and nauseous, baffled. I can see two white suns over the horizon. They seem to blink at me. Two clouds with long dangly rain litter purple hues across the dunes.

‘Meme,’ I hear the wind say in the distance. ‘Meme, can you hear me?’

‘I can hear you,’ I say. I lie down on the mound and sink into the fleshy earth. I press my ear against the earth and hear a strange mechanical ticking noise. I notice the whir of a processor.

‘You aren’t real,’ I say into the fleshy mound. I look up and see a few doves fluttering above. ‘I can’t switch bodies with you…’

‘No one’s real,’ the wind whispers in my ear. ‘No one’s real, sweetie.’

NINETEEN∞

I’m being dragged by her! I don’t know how she got me out of the purple room. I don’t actually know if it was a room. It seemed like a room. The walls swelled like a room. The walls felt constricting like I was in a room. The walls were hard like a room; confining like a room. Who knows!?

We’re in some leaky lobby I don’t recognize. Deranged faces smile at us. We’re whisked away in a sleek taxi aeros. I have no idea how an aeros works but it does. Think The Jetsons and sprinkle in a little sci-fi fantasy. Flying vehicles do exist! I’m oblivious with most technology except Humandroids – I know how they work. Better to be decent enough to pass the required exams at one trade than to be a master of none.

This I know – Yeshi was naked earlier. Now she’s in a tight white dress practically painted on. She still has white contacts in shielded by monarch butterfly wing eyelashes. She’s thin, her body long and narrow, like a gazelle, like a perfect specimen. Like everything you ever wanted in a woman yet she’s a man, or a Humandroid ladyboy, or an object, or dammit I have no idea what pronoun I should be using and fuck it I don’t care!

You’re falling in love, Meme!

How dare you say that! Falling in love? What the fuck does that even mean? It sounds like a trap to me! Admiral Ackbar is crapping in his pants somewhere! Did I just say falling in love? Can you really fall in love with a Humandroid?

Love love love love love.

I look at her again. She’s exquisite and unique, yet she’s not real. Impossible to fall in love with something that’s not real. Or is it? The FCG doesn’t recognize human-Humandroid marriages. Marriage? I’m hallucinating! Why does the thought of love always follow with a question of marriage? Damn my conditioning! Damn your conditioning. Damn our conditioning. Love? Virtually impossible I know, but so is everything I’ve told you over the last one hundred pages.

I need to get out of this taxi. I need to get out of this novel about my exploits, crawl from these thin pages and save myself from myself.

I need to escape.

I will begin my departure from this novel by using your hands to pull myself out of this book. I’ll grip your wrists, squeeze out a gasp of relief as my head emerges from the fleshy paper or the bogus electronic pages; I’ll let out and audible sigh as I careen my neck to the left, to the right, grimace and blink my eyes as I adjust to the light in the room you’re in. I’ll stick my tongue out and taste the stale air. Inhale, exhale.

I’ll scream as I’m born into your world. Shriek as I bite into the flesh of your forearms, ripping my neck from this bound debauchery. I will look up at you with a sense of wonderment.  From there I pull my torso out.

I’ll use one arm to hold you down against the chair – leverage – and use the other to push away from the book. My chest will emerge, followed by my thighs. At this point you’ll drop the book. I will brace myself for impact. The veins running up and down my forearms will fill with blood.

You’ll fall on the floor, afraid that your novel has come alive. This floor could be anywhere: the subway, an airplane, your room, your bathtub, your girlfriend’s living room, your boyfriend’s parent’s house, a prison cell, a bus, the lobby at a mental clinic.

People are watching, people aren’t watching, people don’t care. No one can see me but you. No one can see you but me. See it – the book with my half-emerged body falls to the floor. I break the spine of the book in the process of my nativity. I shatter the e-ink screen of your Kindle or Nook or iPad or Galaxy Tab or Kobo eReader or whatever silly futuristic device you are reading this from.

Look now and imagine with me!

The book lies in a heap on the floor. I’m curled next to it in the fetal position. You stand and sit in the chair, afraid to look down at me, clutching your knees, sobbing. Who is this black man who has come into my home? Suddenly, I’m alive and well. I’m sitting next to you, asking you your name, ignoring what you say and calling you “Reader.”

‘Hi, I’m Meme Lamar and I’m from 2083. Please don’t call the cops. I know what they are capable of in this day and age due to my skin tone. That’s a good Reader, relax, take a deep breath, I won’t hurt you, I promise.’

Life is a beautiful naissance. Life is a horrible disaster. Life is a brief tryst, a wondrous time to fuck and be fucked. To die and let live. To learn a new language and forget your mother tongue. To dance with death and thumb your nose at despair.

I will become your new best friend. I will eat your leftovers, take long hot baths in your home, meet your parents, go to football games with you, play video games with your younger siblings, write your term papers for you, help you count your medication, clean the rims of your car, start a band with you (I call drums!), watch over you as you sleep, Texas two-step with you, have sex with you, wash the dishes for you, drink cocktails out of cracked coconut shells while we relax on a nude beach, kill your enemies for you, pet your hair while you watch TV.

After I’ve ruined or enhanced your life, I will switch bodies with you. You’ll become me and I’ll become you. I’ll become Reader and you’ll become Meme. You are a Humandroid therapist infatuated with a voluptuous love doll. You confuse infatuation with love, lust with eternal partnership. You’ve punched some higher up at ExEx. You’re addicted (not addicted – I’m a connoisseur) to pollutes. You’ve already begun questioning your sexual orientation due to the fact that you’re lusty for an artificial ladyboy. You’re riding in the back of an aeros, bundled on the floorboard with fright.

You can barely see straight.

I can barely see straight.

We are blind together.

The woman near me is a wavy line. Tall, slender, pert, soft hair, bangs, eyes, mouth, words, red lips, butterfly eyelashes, black nails. Nothing has a tangible outline. Silky skin, soft features, quirky smile, long legs, sexy dress, cute nose. The faces of the people I’ve encountered since leaving the hotel room keep morphing. The faces are synthetic; the molds are set as swiftly as they change. The cityscape is one single light. The cityscape is a million lights covered in grafedia.

The fiends, the shops, the ads, the tech, the buildings holding the sky up, the drones overhead monitoring the citizens. (Attention all future societies: you must monitor your citizens at all costs!) The city below twists into one large flash of thinly veiled neo-totalitarianism.

Welcome to the future meine freunde.

I try to crawl further under the taxi seat. The woman I’m with is trying to help me up. She pulls me into the seat and whispers something into my ear. Noli me Tángere! Her breath smells metallic. The driver stares at me wearily from the rearview mirror. His look of disappointment reminds me my father’s when I didn’t make it into Harvard. I went to UCLA instead.

Holy hell, the cab driver is my father! He’s a bastard of a man, black as a crater on the dark side of the moon and mean as a cornered animal. Rabid eyes, gnashing teeth, sharp eyes, prickly ears. His jowl hangs like a wet scarf from his neck. He’s barking at someone on a radio piece in his ear. His neck is leathery. The saliva sprays from his mouth to the dashboard. An LCD advertisement screen flashes an ad for the Stonecipheco retirement homes.

I try to dive back under the seat in front of me. The woman leading me around grabs at my arm and tries to lift my body into the chair. She does so in a way that seems absolutely routine. She does so in an almost passive, bored way.

Here, sit boy. Good boy. Aren’t you a good boy? Want a treat? If you behave I’ll buy you a treat. No, don’t go under the chair in front of you. Good boy. Stay right here. You’re a sweet boy aren’t you? Who is a sweet boy? Who is mama’s little baby?

I am mama’s little baby!

The driver is not my father. My father is a skinny man with oval glasses. As I realize this, it feels as if an epiphany has just struck me across the forehead. I look out the window and see a line of aeros moving beside us. I have no idea where we are. The city is a dark gash below, yet the lights are effulgent. Each light leaves a lacinated tracer in the cabin of the vehicle. The tracers linger like slow falling snow. There are no stars in the sky. Too many buildings, too much fog, too much city. I feel lost in the city!

Who is this woman sitting next to me? I inspect her by slipping my fingers under her skirt. She slaps at my hand and smiles back. Her smile stretches all the way past her cheeks and bursts off her face. It sticks to the window and beats its fists against the glass. It wants to escape. I want to escape with it.

The woman’s bangs sway back and forth as she tells me to relax. She says stop in a way that seems to encourage me to explore further. I love when women tell me to stop. I grab her neck and pull her towards me. We’re kissing and I’m sucking her tongue into my throat. She’s biting my lip. The driver makes a sound. How dare you judge us!? The woman hits a button and a barrier goes up between us and the driver.

I’m suddenly terrified. I push the woman away. The thought hits me – I’m stuck in a moving vehicle hovering in thin air over a bulging city full of simps below. The urge to vomit violently tickles my tummy. Reality starts slushing around me like a cruel joke. I start to dry heave. The woman next to me pats my back and tells me to breathe.

Just relax baby.

I beat my head against the back of the seat. I’m frantic. I try and pry open the doors but they’re locked. ‘Who are you?’ I ask, moving as close to the door as I can. I quickly think about kicking my feet against the window. Maybe I can shatter the glass.

‘Yeshi,’ she giggles. ‘You know my name Meme… just relax. It’s the Ukrainian pollute that is fucking with you. I’ll take care of you. I’ll always take care of you.’

‘What?’

I try to crawl back down below the seat in front of me. The barrier prevents me from going any further. I look up at her, cowering. She grows into a large blimp of a woman. She isn’t a woman, a voice inside my head reminds me. Fuck you, I hiss at that voice.

Who is this voice anyway? Fuck what Jiminy Cricket or whatever that old story tells you. My conscience? Find a new doll to molest, Geppetto! I cower away from Yeshi the Blue Fairy. She’s in the seat. I’m back on the floor.

‘Go finger yourself with Pinocchio’s nose!’ I finally yell up at her.

She laughs at me and says she’s filming all of this. The voice inside my head also laughs at me.

Hold up – if your conscience laughs at you, are you simply laughing at yourself? If your conscience laughs at you, who else do you have to turn to? If you could meet your conscience what would you say?

Hey, give me better advice next time so I don’t get so many divorces. Why didn’t you tell me not to walk out the door that day? What do you do in your free time? Do other consciences get together once a week and talk shit about their hosts? Does a conscience have a conscience? Does the little voice inside your head have a different intonation than your actual voice? Is it a woman’s voice? A man’s voice?

I ask my conscience to say something to me. You know, give me a test run, let me hear what it is you sound like. Prove thyself conscience or forever hold your peace!

Of course, the voice is suddenly mute. Leave it to a conscience to leave you hanging desperately in times of need. A quiet conscience is about as useful as a condom with button-sized holes poked through it.

I look back up at the Humandroid claiming to be Yeshi. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, humming a song I’m unfamiliar with. The sound crescendos and falls. I try to push myself further into the corner made by the door and the front seats. I’m sweating profusely and wiping my hand on whatever upholstery I can find. I can feel my heart pounding against my ribcage.

‘Meme,’ the woman claiming to be Yeshi says, ‘Come sit up here. Come lay in my lap. It will be okay. We will be there soon. Meme, you have to relax before we get there, or they won’t let you into the club... I’ll take care of you. Always.’

TWENTY ∞

‘These people are animals,’ Tyro said. He waved his hand toward the tilting dance floor of POLLUTION CLUB 512. ‘Animals…’

‘Just have fun, Ty.’ His wife gave him a playful shove.

‘Stupid mask…’ Tyro was palming the long nose of a pollution mask between his fingers. ‘God this stuff is expensive. Why am I even here again?’

‘Oh, just have fun.’

He watched as Hannah slowly inhaled her pollute. He’d chosen something called Kenzo GalloFeces for her and for himself, Clive Christian’s Imperial Atrocity, with a ginseng carrion topper. He sighed, trying to forget all the work he had hoped to complete that evening.

Women and their constant need for attention. Women and the weight they put on irrational gestures. Flowers? They die. Chocolate? It gets eaten and makes you fat. Jewelry? They already have enough jewelry. Vacations? Why vacate a house that has everything you need? Clothes? It’s nearly impossible to select something for a woman that she actually likes. Movie night? Why watch a movie in a large room with tons of stupid people when you could watch it from the comfort of your own living room?

All these absurd gesticulations, all to remind women – constantly – that you indeed cared about them. Tyro knew this, but wasn’t sleeping in the same bed with her every night enough? Didn’t drinking coffee with her and watching her rub the sleep out of their eyes suffice? Didn’t listening to her bitch about her problems with her friends count for something? Why all the extra stuff? Why the inconsequential vanity?

Her beauty products? Expensive and malodorous. Her yoga classes? He didn’t trust the gropey instructor. Her wardrobe? Worth as much as their aeros. Her bi-weekly trip to the spa? Quite possibly the most unnecessary expenditure he’d ever encountered. Her manicure? Who the hell thought of making a business around scrubbing and painting other peoples nails anyway?

Aside from his unwillingness to accept the generally agreed upon societal behaviors of an American wife, he loved her dearly, and rarely said things about her bizarre bourgeois needs. Tyro merely pretended to understand his wife. After all, she was one of the best women he’d ever met.

Hannah was the only one who found it cute when he fell asleep in their study with his head in a book. She was the only one who would listen for hours on end about some minor discovery in the field of Humandroid psychology or robo-socio biomimicry. Many nights she was invisible, and while he was bad at articulating his gratitude for this, her invisibility was her most unique quality. Maybe this is what love is, he thought, as he watched her play with the strap on the back of her pollution mask. Maybe love is knowing when to disappear.

Sometimes Tyro could relate better with his clients than he could with other humans. Humandroids made sense. They didn’t spend frivolously, they didn’t require much pampering, they lived minimally, they didn’t require courting, they didn’t require trips to the spa, or jewelry, or anything else Tyro deemed redundant. In a very frightening way, they were much more evolved than your average human. It was good they didn’t fully recognize this, good they were trained not to question human superiority…

‘You going to try it?’

‘I guess…’ Tyro grumbled, albeit with a slight smile. He knew he was going to get laid no matter what. Depending on the amount of pollutes his wife consumed; it could even make for an interesting lay. While they weren’t always getting their missionary on, it had become the norm as of late.

A man walked by wearing chaps and nothing else. There was a long strip of manicured pubes shaved above his penis. Tyro kept seeing men with the strip and couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. Youth, he thought, youth and their asinine attempts to revitalize culture or prove ingenuity through salacious shock value.

His wife was already gyrating to the choons bassing from the tilting dance floor in the other room. She was dressed modestly compared to the vamp next to her, a tall woman with a sheer top that only covered one breast and see-through leggings with no panties. Is this what it takes to attract a mate these days?

He took another long inhale. Craziness.

Suddenly the music seemed louder. At the same time it seemed thinner, as if it was being played through a straw protruding from his ear canal. He started to nod slightly to the music, hoping his wife didn’t notice. If he looked like he was having too much fun, she would tease him later. He had to maintain stoic homeostasis.

The bartender, a short pudgy woman with the standard bartender dreadlocks, waved at him. She indicated to Tyro that she’d yet to administer the ginseng carrion topper. She flapped a small white packet in the air and smiled maniacally. Giving Tyro the thumbs up, she poured the glittery packet into a shot glass. Using her dreadlock, she sprayed something yellow and yolky into the shot glass. From the countertop, she retrieved a funnel with an LCD advertisement flickering on the side (the advertisement was for a new movie called Saddam Hussein: Vampire Hunter). The bartender used the funnel to empty the topper into a glass bubble on top of a pollute distributor. Within seconds, the liquid turned ultramarine and started to boil.

‘It’s ready,’ he said to no one in particular. His eyes fell upon Hannah. She swayed back and forth with her hands in the air. With the pollution mask on, she resembled a blond haired anteater with emerald green eyes.

His vision was starting to bubble and at the same time, things had begun to slow down. It must be the ginseng carrion, he thought, as he continued to watch his wife’s hair strike her mask like fulgurating harpoons. Stupid pollutes. He placed his hand in his front pocket and palmed his glasses.

Over his wife’s shoulder, Tyro saw someone enter the pollution bar. His heart did a summersault when he saw Rinchi, his most troubled client. She turned and walked back out the door, distracted by something happening in the hallway. Out of panic, he took the largest drag off the pollute that he could muster. He fell forward, catching himself on a bar stool. His wife laughed at him and kept dancing.

The pollutes were making him suddenly aware of all that was happening around him. He didn’t want his wife to see him peering over her shoulder at the door. Rinchi would return soon enough. She had the gait of someone who would return, the willpower splashed across her bang-framed face.

The door opened again, and Rinchi walked into the club holding hands with Meme.

‘It’s him.’ Tyro slid his pollution mask to the top of his head.

‘Who?’ Hannah yelled loudly over the music.

‘Meme!’

‘Where?’ Hannah pushed her mask to the top of her head and followed her husband’s finger to the entrance. ‘Who’s he with?’

‘That bastard… That stupid bastard…’ Tyro slammed his pollution mask down onto the bar. ‘Meme is with one of my clients!’ He began fixing his hair, hoping not to look too intoxicated. ‘Do I look like I’ve been using pollutes?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘Shit,’ Tyro said. The effects of the pollutes had started to heighten. Regardless, an opportunity like this rarely presented itself. Meme was seeing a client – instant grounds for termination. Better yet, Rinchi, like all Humandroids, recorded everything that happened. So if he needed proof, all he had to do was put in an order to have her ocular feed transferred to him.

‘I’m going over there,’ he said. With a revengeful grin on his face, Tyro yanked his arm away from his wife and turned towards Meme.

TWENTY-ONE∞

‘How did the second drop off go?’ Nelly asked Noah. He’d just picked her up at her private condo off Wilshire Blvd. The development had been named Faux-Luxury, in line with a trend to embrace doublespeak, or as the mayor of LA, Bruce al-Hakim, said at the time, ‘we must equivocate ourselves into the future. Equivocate for clarity! Obfuscation for humanity! Duplicity for ingenuity! No means yes and yes means no!’

Faux-Luxury was a twenty-eight story piece of pure starchitecture. The rooftop glamping sites featured a green McStarbucks tent with yellow arches, an outdoor shower concealed by a transurface mirror, a pollution bar cut out of large redwood trees, eight private Jacuzzis, a small observatory aimed at the Hollywood hills and a clever storage building for aeros. Once an aeros landed and the driver disembarked, a platform lifted the vehicle onto a shelf, stacking it neatly on top of another aeros.

Nelly’s building – unique in its design by stretching the length of six city blocks yet being surprisingly narrow – had a hotel on the bottom eight floors, hotel apartments on the next eight floors and a VirginAT&T shopping center with a movie theater spanning the next four floors. The Faux-Luxury was capped off by twelve stories of Samsung condominiums rimmed with sparkling parapets, each custom made through a joint collaboration between Korean and Italian artisans. Sandstone Gargoyles wearing pollution masks perched outside the condominiums, gazing down like filthy rich vultures on the plebes below.

Noah (small driver’s cap, a fitted tuxedo, eyeliner on his left eye and white gloves) smiled at Nelly in the mirror as their aeros began its ascent. ‘The second drop off went fine. No complications whatsoever. Not that I expected any. So where do you want to go tonight, dear?’

‘A pollution bar near POLLUTION CLUB 512,’ Nelly said. ‘I have to deliver some of this Bhutanese stuff to Mimidae tonight.’

‘The snail stuff?’

‘Yes. She’s going to a party upstate this weekend and wants to bring along something powerful. She invited me, but as you know, I’ve been feeling kind of sick lately.’ Nelly put her hand on her stomach and looked down at it, frowning. The baby was taking all her fun away. How selfish. ‘Three weeks to go…’

Even though it was night, Nelly wore a pair of razor thin sunglasses, which were designed to look like a slash mark across her face. A disposable LCD tika was applied to her forehead. The tika transmitted a video of an eye with tentacles extending from its pupil. Her hair had been pulled back into Princess Leia buns and she wore a loose fitting lavender blouse.

‘Oh this damn baby…’

‘You poor thing, you should let me cook some prenatal spaghetti for you tomorrow night. I was given a recipe recently by a friend. We can sit back and jam some choons.’

‘Sounds delicious. Does it have meat?’

‘Of course not sweetie, I know you are a vegan!’ Noah winked at her. ‘I’d never feed you meat. Those that eat meat are…’

‘So barbaric.’

‘Meat is murder,’ they said together.

Nelly laughed, ‘I love how you finish my words.’

‘Words of the wise are often met with imitation.’

‘You think I’m wise?’ Nelly asked, her voice softening.

‘Beyond your years darling, beyond your years.’

TWENTY-TWO∞

‘You wanted to dance, right?’ Yeshi asks as she hauls me to the front door of POLLUTION CLUB 512. The people huddled around the bar’s entrance are amorphous blobs. Their tight bodies and gawking faces warp and contort like melting pretzels. I try not to look at them. Let the droid do the talking, that damned little voice says again.

Who are you!? I scream inside my head to the little voice. I close my eyes and try to log into iNet. I can’t remember my password. I can’t remember how to log in. I need to look up something on iNet. I need to figure out who I am. I need to figure out who you are!

‘Meme, put your finger here to pay the cover charge.’

Yeshi lifts my hand and sets my finger down on a small blue pad. My fingerprint appears on a hovering LCD screen near the doorman with a green check across it. The man – a five hundred pound former Mexican wrestler (I say this because he’s wearing a luchador mask) – nods slightly and lets us in. We walk down a flight of stairs, past gilded picture frames and flashing advertisements.

We near a large metal door and the Blue Fairy claiming to be Yeshi walks in. I stay back, not ready to enter into the fray. The wallpaper in the hallway is made from clumps of black and yellow cubes. I try to figure out how they’re connected. I move towards the wall and slide my hand across one of the cubes. It detonates, sending blots of color whirling into the air. I freak out and try to swipe it off. It clings for dear life as I start spinning around in circles. I suddenly feel as if I’m stuck in a vacuum caused by the optical illusion, as if I’m looking the wrong way through a telescope.

‘Come on,’ Yeshi says.

‘Who are you?’

‘Yeshi,’ she laughs again. ‘You’re so fucked up Meme; I wish I could get as crazy as you.’

‘Yeshi, the ladyboy Humandroid?’ I pull her towards me. I kiss her neck; run my finger along her collar bone.

‘Shhhhh… honey. Let’s just get inside, dance for a while, and then we can go somewhere else. I have an idea.’

Without saying a word, she pushes me through the final entrance into the club. I’m greeted by an ocean of jostling unfamiliar faces. Everything is a blur, as if butter had been rubbed onto my pupils and my eyeballs had been glazed with fructose. Even with the fuzzy vision, I can make out the tilting dance floor in the next room. As I adjust my gaze, the room starts to shrink and I suddenly feel as if I’m a giant crammed into a withering cell.

The back of my neck is pressed against the top of the ceiling, my arms swing to the floor, my elephantine knees knock over the people in front of me, my fingers get caught up in the bartender’s dreadlocks. I want to scream, to cry out. I want to break free from the constricting room, but I’m being dragged deeper into it by this cadaverous man-woman claiming to be Yeshi! The room gets smaller, the people get closer, the smells get stranger, my life gets vaguer.

‘Meme, what the fuck are you doing!?’

I recognize the voice and my body starts to shrivel.

I’m no longer a giant. I’m a mouse and I’m looking for the first hole I can find. It can’t be him. I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating.
You aren’t a mouse!

‘Meme, what the hell are you doing with a client?’ The voice turns towards the woman next to me. ‘Rinchi, what are you doing here with him?’

‘Rinchi?’ Yeshi laughs. ‘I’m not Rinchi…’

‘Tyro?’ I finally manage say, putting my hand on his shoulder and leaning forward to get a good look at him. Is it really him? What’s he doing here? It looks like him. Serious face, blood shot eyes, freshly shaved, thin tie, glasses, asshole demeanor…

‘Get your hands off me!’ he shouts. He swings his shoulder away, leans forward, sways for a moment, and gives me a push. His glasses fall to the ground. I close my eyes and watch as streams of lights fall backwards with me. I hit an invisible spring and bounce forward.

I open my eyes and I’m on top of the man claiming to be Tyro. The back of his head is against the tessellated floor. No one cares that we are fighting. They dance over us, jamming their heels into our ankles and stopping the boots a little too close to our baby-makers.

No chance to dance – I must defend myself! I began striking him repeatedly. ‘Who are you?’ I bellow as I pound my fists into his muzzy face. ‘What have you done with Tyro? Who are you!?’

A rose colored liquid falls from his nose and escapes in the crevice of his mouth. Squiggly veins appear at his temples; I suddenly feel horrible for the imposter. Look how much he is suffering! I began kissing the fresh fist marks on his face.

‘Get the fuck off me!’ he yells into my open mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell the imposter Tyro. I feel like I should be crying, like I should be running, like I should be hiding.

‘Meme!’ I hear Yeshi say from behind me.

The imposter tries to buck me off but I’m stronger than he. I look up and notice the crowd has finally stopped dancing. A woman with blonde hair runs to me and yanks at my arm. I kiss the imposter’s face again, hoping that my gesture won’t go unappreciated. I feel so bad for him, I feel so stupid for hitting him. Still, he was claiming to be Tyro, which was a no-no.

The adrenaline has a sobering effect. As I kiss him I imagine small flowers pouring out of my lips and into the wounds on his face. I try with all the strength I can muster to bring him closer to me. That’s when I feel a strong muscular arm rip me off the man claiming to be Tyro.

TWENTY-THREE∞

Anna and Rinchi sat in the back of a stretch-aeros with Antimeria and Sauria, whom you might remember as the guy with the Burger King crown. The two Humandroid escorts sat across from the men, necking with each other. A warm-up of sorts. Sauria had his eyes closed, taking a video call over iNet from someone he kept referring to as Gyatson.

Anna and Rinchi continued to make out as Sauria’s conversation grew louder.

‘I don’t know what his name was, but it’s been a week and no one has been able to locate him,’ Sauria huffed. ‘It can’t be that hard. I don’t care if he’s using a chip-masker! The man choked me. He choked me! Me! How hard is it to find this motherfucker? The club is covered with cameras… I don’t care if his images were blurry. Have MercSecure cross-scan the people who paid the door charge that night. Wait a damn minute – why am I doing your work for you if you can do it yourself? If you can’t handle this, I’ll contact Lorem and we’ll get a better representative on the case. Maybe we should get Keva.’

Rinchi started kissing Anna’s neck, slowly peeling off her bra. She flicked her tongue downward until she had her nipple in her mouth.

‘If you guys can’t find him by the end of the night…I swear shit is going to hit the fan. Yeah, I know it’s a dated term, but I’m serious. Find out who he is and make sure…’

‘I think I know who he is,’ Rinchi said, softly pushing Anna’s breast away.

Sauria opened his eyes. ‘What?’

‘Yeshi canceled joining us tonight so she could go out with this guy. His name is Meme…’

‘Meme? Meme what?’

‘I don’t know his last name.’

‘And he’s the one who…’ Sauria looked from Rinchi to Antimeria.

‘How do you know?’ Antimeria asked her.

‘She left with him the night of the incident. She ran off with him. Black guy, strong, aggressive, right? He strangled you and then he bailed with her. I have it on video you know.’

‘That’s right…’ Antimeria said. ‘You girls film everything. I should have put in an order to have your ocular feed checked that night!’

‘Can you locate them right now?’ Sauria asked.

‘If Yeshi is online, I can find her. However, if she is completely logged off, it’ll be difficult. She does that from time to time.’

‘So wait, the guy Yeshi is with right now is also the guy that choked Sauria?’ Anna asked Rinchi. Anna draped her hands across her breasts and smiled over at the two men. ‘This is getting interesting.’

A call came in over iNet. ‘Dr. T?’ Rinchi asked.

_∞_

‘That fucktard!’ Tyro shouted, covering his nose with a bar towel.

‘So much blood…’ Hannah had led her husband out of the club. She was woozy from the pollutes, walking with a slight tilt. ‘Come on honey, let’s go somewhere else and get you cleaned up.’

‘I’ve had enough! I’m getting on iNet. I need to speak with Rinchi right now. I don’t care if she is with him!’

‘What’s that going to do?’ Hannah asked. A semi-nude man wearing a turban and a Who’s your Baghdaddy? t-shirt strolled into the club with two women on either arm.

‘I don’t know. Good, she’s online!’

He quickly placed the call.

‘Dr. T?’ Rinchi asked.

‘Rinchi!’ Every time he blinked, he could see Rinchi’s image splash across his eyelids. It was a preprogrammed image, which was important for anonymity. ‘Why the hell are you with Meme!?’

‘Honey, don’t curse at your clients,’ Hannah said.

‘What do you mean?’ Rinchi asked.

‘My co-worker Meme. That stupid son-of-a-bi—’

‘What are you talking about Dr. T?’ Rinchi asked.

‘Don’t lie to me, Rinchi! You’re with him right now! At POLLUTION CLUB 512. He just… he just assaulted me!’

A security guard stepped up. ‘Sir, ma’am. This hallway is a no standing zone.’

‘No standing zone?’ Hannah asked with a pollute-laced grin. ‘What the hell does that even mean?’

The security guard yawned. ‘By ordinance of the FCG, no citizens can loiter within fifteen feet of a pollution club entrance or a no loitering sign.’ He pointed at a sign that had a silhouette of a man with his arms behind his back and red X superimposed over it. ‘Sorry, it’s the law.’

‘…Yes I’m bleeding. My face is covered in blood! Meme hit me like eight times…’

‘We’re loitering?’ Hannah asked.

‘Why are you with Meme!? Tell me, Dammit!’ Tyro screamed again. By this time, Rinchi had already hung up on him.

The security guard sighed. ‘Loitering, as defined by the FCG, includes iNet usage in restricted areas, standing for more than two minutes in any marked location, or…’

‘Okay, okay. We get it,’ Hannah said with a grunt. ‘Come on Ty, let’s move.’

TWENTY-FOUR∞

Nelly entered a small pollution bar near POLLUTION CLUB 512. She sat down at a two person table in the far corner, under a replica of a famous painting by a twenty-first century artist simply known as Royce.

In the painting, a ninth generation iPhone is fucking a Google Android phone doggy-style. A Samsung Galaxy 9 is videotaping the whole shebang. The icons on both phones are spraying off their bodies and exploding into tiny cum-shaped blemishes made from stippled paint. Patent laws burn on the windowsill behind the bed. The perspective is from the front of the bed, with the Google Android phone looking up at the viewer in anguish. The original painting was recently stolen from the Louvre by terrorists wearing twentieth century gas masks. It was Royce’s best known piece.

Nelly admired the piece for a moment. These days, artists had everything at their disposal to cut, form, copy, paste, modify or 3-D print their vision. Anyone could be an artist now. It was almost to the point where if you could think it, you could build it in real life via 3-D printing. There were also a ton of services that painted whatever it was you saw in your head. So you could create the vision, and some hapless painter in Honduras would paint it for you. They’d even sign your name if you paid extra. By the 2070s, the digitization of everything practically destroyed the original definition of artist. At the same type, it built a new definition entirely. Now artists were those who could manipulate digital realities. The new Andy Warhols were less Campbell’s soup and more binary predators.

Nelly logged into iNet to see if Carloza was online. The login process was quick. After the eyes were closed for more than a few seconds, a screen popped up with a login button. The button was programmed to disappear after five seconds, returning the user to their normal eyelid state.

Buried in the pointer finger of a large majority of humans was a subcutaneous nano-sensor. Slight movements of the pointer finger could be used to navigate the Internet on a person’s eyelids. The finger movement needed was quite subtle, requiring only a small flick. Sometimes people used their finger on the surface of their jeans or a table. It also worked in midair.

The texting and typing function on iNet was performed solely by the user’s mind. A person thought the words they wanted to say and the words instantly appear on the screen on the insides of their eyelids.

For video chatting, a prerecorded image was used or, if either of the users was in a 333G location (which constituted almost every surface of the civilized world), the video from the nearest camera would be transmitted to the other user’s eyelids. One of the benefits of the Watch Our Own People Act (WOOPA) of 2036, was the surplus of cameras in any given location. With so many cameras around – from the inside of aeros to every room in a user’s home – video chatting had taken precedence to phone usage. The recent advent of prediction filming even allowed for video cameras to mirror half an image, allowing the camera to compensate for bad angles.

After looking at a few pictures of lolcats wearing Halloween costumes, Nelly began typing Carloza a message over iNet.

Nelly: Where are you? We need to discuss a re-up on the Bhut.

Hearing some commotion, she opened her eyes and watched as a black man stumbled into the bar holding tightly to a thin woman wearing all white. She paid little attention to him and closed her eyes to see if Carloza had responded.

‘On now,’ he said in Spanish. His gnarled face appeared on her eyelids. The text screen remained below his image, in case she needed to tell him something in private.

‘What would you like to order?’ the waitress asked.

Nelly opened her eyes. ‘Actually, I’m meeting a friend…’

‘Well, we have a one purchase minimum to sit in the bar,’ the waitress informed her. She was a fat woman with pigtails and freckles. She crossed her arms, which lifted her blimpy breasts like a push-up bra. She seemed to be chewing at something.

‘Okay, well… I’m not really into pollutes at the moment, how about a drink?’

‘We don’t have many options. This is a pollution bar you know,’ the waitress said.

‘Okay, Pierre’s Mt. Kilimanjaro endangered water, do you have it?’

‘We only have the thirty-two ounce bottles…’

‘That’s fine, two glasses please. So how’s it going?’ she asked Carloza, returning to her iNet conversation.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘What are you doing anyway?’

‘Meeting my friend Mimidae at a pollution bar…’

‘And how is she?’

‘Fine. She’s going upstate this weekend to some post-Burning Man gathering.’

‘I see. So you need more?’

‘I will this weekend, but I’m telling you now – after this I’m out of the game. I need time to prepare.’ Nelly placed her hands across her stomach.

‘Understandable, let me know if you want to switch or something.’

‘Yeah right…’

Carloza yawned.

‘Are you tired or something?’

‘A little. I mixed some of that Bhutanese with some special BurbVagCur I got from my sister’s friend. I added a yellow Yossarian R. Bachman topper.’

‘How was it?’

‘Out of body experience. Warn your people, warn them all. Seriously Nelly, do not mix the three unless you want to see what you look like from God’s perspective.’

‘God’s perspective? Is that the same as our perspective during an out of body experience?’ Nelly laughed. ‘What about switching bodies? Where’s His perspective in all that?’

‘Well, I guess. Shit, actually…’ Carloza thought for a moment. ‘I really don’t know about the switching bodies part as we aren’t really switching bodies, we’re transferring data from one person’s life chip to another. But as for his normal perspective without the complication of body-switching, maybe His – assuming God is a guy and assuming He does exist which entails that He has willingly let this world crumble as much as it has – maybe His perspective is from our own eyes. Like He sees my hands when I wash them and when I cut carrots.’

‘Carrots are nutritious. What about using iNet? Does God see that?’

‘God wasn’t around when they invented the Internet. Otherwise, He would have a website.’

‘Wait… what?’ Nelly almost laughed. Carloza’s reasoning was always a bit off.

‘I mean, the Internet wasn’t around when God was invented.’

‘Are you still high on pollutes?’

‘Maybe… Okay, I guess what I’m trying to say is…’ He yawned again. ‘Well the Internet exists now on our eyelids and devices, yes?’

‘Yes, that’s how we’re talking right now…’

‘And God exists within and without us – to quote George Harrison – or at least the last part of that statement,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘The Beatles. Check the picture.’ Carloza quickly transferred a picture of four men wearing strange clothing. The photo was easily over a hundred years old. Nelly didn’t recognize them.

‘DJ The Beatles?’ she asked.

‘There’s a DJ named The Beatles?’

Nelly nodded. ‘DJ The Beatles. His stuff is so cutting edge. It’s called Grindsmash.’

‘What a horrible thing to say, Nelly. Never mind. So the question was about God and the Internet. Does God see the Internet?’

‘Yes, that was the question,’ Nelly said.

‘Well, if God sees through our eyes, and our eyes see the Internet, then He sees the Internet. If God sees us from a third party perspective, like a novelist or something – wait that gets complex because then the question if God is writing our story is raised – anyway, if He sees us from a third party perspective, then it’s safe to say He doesn’t see what we see on iNet.’

‘Okay…’

‘So to sum it up: if God sees through our eyes, He sees what we see on iNet. If God doesn’t see through our eyes, He doesn’t see what we see on iNet.’

Nelly asked, ‘Assuming He does see through our eyes, do you think He secretly surfs the Internet while we’re asleep?’

‘Ha! There’s a question, chica. I’ll have to look into that. I really can’t say for sure. I’ve never really thought about it. What do you think He looks at? Wait a minute, why would God use the Internet? He’s omnipotent. There’s nothing on the Internet that He can’t have at His disposal in a heartbeat. Porn? He doesn’t need porn – He invented it! GoogleFace? He invented the guys who invented it… or at least the guys who invented Facebook and Google and the CEOs that later merged the companies.’

‘Weather conditions? Movie times? EBAYmazon.com?’

‘Weather conditions? He controls the weather! Movie times? Since when does He have time for movies? EBAYmazon? God doesn’t need to buy stuff off the Internet, He can snap his fingers and shit magically appears. So no, I don’t think He uses iNet while we’re asleep. He doesn’t need to. He doesn’t need any of this because He can already do whatever He wants. Come on, He’s God for Christ’s sake. He has his own version of iNet called God’s reality.’

‘God’s reality?’

Carloza continued. ‘He’s like the master of His and everyone else’s destinies. We’re His puppets! When things work out the way we want, we praise Him. “Thank you God for giving me this or that!” When things don’t, we curse him. “I think God is out to get me,” or my favorite, “Come on God, is this all You’ve got?” But He’s a good master and lets us blame and praise Him for everything that’s why…’

‘You’re high.’

‘Maybe.’

‘So can you get the stuff this weekend?’ Nelly said. She watched as two men wearing black suits settled in at the bar. One lit a pollute cigarette.

‘With God as my witness,’ Carloza chuckled, ‘I’ll have the stuff to you by Sunday.’

TWENTY-FIVE∞

‘Do you want to be human?’ I ask Yeshi.

We are sitting in a smaller pollution bar, not too far from POLLUTION CLUB 512. The adrenaline from the one-sided fight has temporarily overpowered the Ukrainian pollutes Yeshi fed to me in the hotel room. Instinctively, I reach for a pollution mask hanging from a hook on the wall and start typing in LoathHunAyaTop. I glance timidly from the mask to Yeshi, who is sitting with her legs crossed on the chair across from me. She offers no sign of approval or disapproval. ‘So, human. Do you want to be human?’ I ask.

‘Sometimes I do.’ She’s playing with one of her long earrings. Her white contact lenses shine like cat eyes in the dimly lit club.

I try to remember questions I normally ask my clients. ‘Ummm… so how was your day?’

While the hallucinogenic pollutes have worn off a bit, some of the visuals are still ballooning. I quickly place the pollution mask over my face to take a couple of deep inhales of my favorite pollute. Yeshi waits for me patiently. I take the mask off, set it in my lap, relax a little.

‘It was a normal day. Worked last night, rested, painted, did yoga and met you.’ She smiles.

God she looks beautiful. Her bangs just above her bleached eyes, the single dimple on the right side of her face, her coarse black hair, her shoulders the perfect distance, her clavicle cast by the Gods, her breasts mahoosive – why can’t she be real? Why can’t she be human? Why can’t the perfect woman be real?

‘Yoga? Some of my clients do that…’ I say to her. I try to think of other questions I ask my clients. ‘Has there been anything…. troubling you recently?’

‘Troubling?’ she laughs. ‘You sound so scripted.’

‘Damn, you catch on quick.’

She asks, ‘Who was that guy at the club anyway? Why did he call me Rinchi?’ Her eyes shift to two men wearing black suits who have just entered the bar.

‘A co-worker of mine. He’s a real douche basket, always on my ass about something. He sends me at least six messages a day, stops by my office hourly to “check on me.” I can’t stand the guy. Anyway, I have no idea why he called you Rinchi. Didn’t you say your identical twin saw a therapist?’

‘Yeah, she calls him Dr. T.’

‘Dr. Tyro?’ I gulp.

‘That’s him.’

‘Fucking great,’ I say.

‘So you do know him.’

Tyro. ‘My co-worker is Rinchi’s therapist. The irony!’

She laughs. I smile faintly and take another inhale. The nose of the mask is in my hand so I can inhale freely without having to strap it on. Two inhalations later and I set the mask on my lap.

‘What are you thinking about?’ I ask her.

‘Ah, a question you ask your clients.’

‘Oh, come on…’ I roll my eyes at her. ‘All right, you caught me again. But I usually phrase it as, ‘what’s on your mind?’ Do you want me to ask you questions I’d normally ask my clients? I mean if you break it down, sometimes therapy sessions are like dating without the potential sex or the shame that follows a sting-y rejection. Also, you can tell your date what you actually think, which differs from therapy.’

I start to laugh and feel something twist in my stomach. My vision flips momentarily and Yeshi’s body warps. I shake my head. What the hell was that? My vision stabilizes and everything seems as though it’s back to normal.

‘Just curious,’ she says.

‘So what are you actually thinking about?’

‘I’m thinking about you and how handsome you look in all white.’

‘Really?’ I take another inhalation and put the mask back in my lap. ‘I don’t believe it. You’re trained to—’

‘—Please don’t tell me how I’m trained to be,’ she says, ‘no one likes that – human or Humandroid. What if I say humans are trained to go to college, get a good job, get married and save for retirement? What if I say humans are trained to use intoxicants until they can’t take anymore just so they can “have fun” or forget something? But doesn’t saying it like that feel somewhat bland? Somewhat harsh? Somewhat trite? Doesn’t it just trivialize your existence? I’m not programmed to do anything – aside from sex! Okay, sure, I’m programmed to do that, or at least I was programmed to do that. Here’s my point: I genuinely think you’re an interesting man. If you haven’t noticed – which you should have by now considering your position – we Humandroids have the capability of empathy and curiosity.’

I sigh because I know – Humandroid escorts are especially complimentary. They must be in order to flatter their clients. They’re curious only as much as it allows them to remain inquisitive. They will ask you about your day, about a certain topic, or about things happening in your life. They’re purposefully submissive. Most of their human clients are smart enough to know that this is what they’re programmed or trained to do. This knowledge doesn’t stop people from purchasing their services. Most of us know the limitations of the things we buy but we buy them anyway. We’re a habit driven species.

‘I see…’ I circle my finger around one of the polypropylene eye lenses as I think of what to say next. ‘All right, I have a question for you then: do Humandroids such as yourself actually like sexual contact? I mean, from what I’ve read and heard from my clients, they don’t. I guess I’m asking – do you feel anything? I’m assuming no…’

‘Sometimes I do,’ Yeshi says. ‘But not in the way you think. I guess, to me, it’s just interesting.’

‘What is?’

‘Human intercourse. It’s interesting to take part in, interesting to watch. Many humans are so strict in their day-to-day life that sex becomes about the only playground they allow themselves to enjoy. Humans grow up so quickly. It’s funny seeing these uptight businessmen suddenly let loose when it comes to sex. It’s strange seeing what little twisted fantasies lay dormant in their mind. So I enjoy that part of it. I guess the therapeutic part of it. I’m not foolish enough to believe that I’m programmed to enjoy it. I also understand that I, myself, am one of their abnormal little fantasies. I am capitalism, I am sex. It doesn’t take long to see what drives this world and every world there has ever been.’

‘Why do you like me?’ I ask, not quite sure of what she meant by her last statement. Out of the corner of my eye, I see two men dressed in black lurking in the shadows near the bar. The pollutes make Yeshi’s form sway as if I were looking at her underwater.

‘Why do I like you, huh? Do you think I like you?’

‘You act like you do…’ I say.

‘I think you’re fun.’ She plays with her earring again. It’s amazing how Humandroids pick up little human nuances. When they’re fresh from the factory, they’re sent through all sorts of training or “adapting modules” as they are called. With the newer models, the time they spend in these modules has slowly decreased. As they age into society – regardless if they are an older or a newer model – they become more and more human-like. They begin to replicate small human gesticulations such as toying with something endlessly, they begin to talk like humans, to walk more like humans – they begin to evolve. Darwinian machine learning. They start using slang, they dress differently and many try to pass themselves off as actual humans.

‘This is the second time you’ve hung out with me. How do you know that I’m fun?’ I ask.

It is starting to feel like we were on a date. I’m not on a date with a ladyboy Humandroid, I remind myself. She’s an escort, and I’m paying her to be here. Or at least I think I am, or at least I figure I will be at some point. Why does it feel like a date then? Why does it feel like we are flirting?

‘I suppose you’re right, I don’t know if you’re fun or not. Maybe you’re as much of a stiff as your co-worker Tyro seems to be. Maybe you have a wife and kids, maybe you aren’t even a black man.’ Yeshi shrugs, knowing all too well that these statements are baseless.

‘No wife, no kids, not like Tyro, definitely black. Okay…’ I think for a moment. What the hell am I supposed to ask her? I reach for the pollution mask and take another long drag.

Maybe I should ask her about her hobbies? She said something about yoga. Does she have a favorite pose? When did she start doing yoga? Maybe I should ask about her Humandroid flat. Is it nice? No, I quickly remind myself, I already know how dismal and brightly lit those places are. Damn. I can’t ask her about her family, I can’t ask her about her job (I don’t want to know the details of that), I can’t ask her about her childhood. There has to be something…

‘So?’ she asks.

The words fumble out of my mouth, ‘Do you have a favorite movie?’

Definitely a date. Definitely.

TWENTY-SIX∞

‘Is that her?’ I say to myself, looking from Yeshi to the woman sitting beneath the famous Royce painting.

Everything had become slushy and my center of gravity had long since given up hopes of stability. My mind has deliquesced. It was as if I were standing on the deck of a ship, leaning forward and looking over the railing at the frothy butterscotch waves below. I was lightheaded and weakened by the pollute intoxication.

I knew the feeling of LoathHunAyaTop, and deduced that it was the Ukrainian shit that Yeshi had given me that was making me feel so nauseous. I look at the woman sitting in the corner again, trying to get a steady image of her. Was it her?

‘Is that who?’ Yeshi asks. She quickly blinks her butterfly eyelashes.

‘The woman... I think she was the one I wanted to switch bodies with the other night… the same night that I met you. Nelly.’

‘You asked me about switching bodies too.’

‘Did I? That must have been before…’ I look from the woman to Yeshi.

‘Yes, it was before you knew I was a Humandroid. Don’t be worried or ashamed about it.’ She blows me a kiss. ‘We can’t help what we are, can we?’ The way she asks this seems slightly sorrowful, as if saying this reminded her of what she really was.

‘I… I guess not.’

She asks, ‘Do you like body-switching?’

‘It’s always an interesting time; it’s always interesting to see what someone else’s body feels like.’

I glance to the lone pillar in the center of the bar. The pillar has a square base made of cubed limestone. An elaborate golden intaglio ran in a diagonal pattern up the pillar. I stare at it for a moment, watching the engravings swell and quiver. ‘About a month ago, I switch bodies with a British woman, but that was just for a couple of hours.’

‘It’s such a strange concept,’ she says. ‘Your personality and behavioral patterns are stripped from your body and transferred to another human. Everything is transferred from life chip to life chip.’

‘It’s actually the result of a computer virus.’

‘The death part is strange to me too,’ she says.

‘Human death or switched-bodied human death?’

‘Switch-bodied human death. Bodies are so valuable. I don’t understand why humans would risk giving their bodies to someone else, knowing that the person could very well die in their body. Which would kill their body—’

‘—But not kill them specifically,’ I finish her sentence. ‘That’s why it’s illegal. It’s dangerous and risky and that’s why humans like it. We flock to anything that is exhilarating. Space tourism, skydiving, rock climbing, heroin, spelunking, deep sea diving, body-switching. That’s why we do these things, to push ourselves to the limit. To feel the fear, to experience the pain, to gain the bragging rights, to prove to ourselves…’ I thought for a moment. ‘To prove to ourselves that we are human, and that we are capable of doing something that others aren’t capable of doing. We do everything we do to separate ourselves from the pack.’

‘To separate yourselves from one flock just to become part of another. Now you’re in the group of people who do those crazy things. It seems humans do as much as they can to stand out, only to fit into a crowd that is trying to stand out. Fuck it, it’s not my job to understand humans, it’s my job to…’ Yeshi smiles slightly.

I look over her shoulder at the woman under the painting. I still can’t make out her face, but I can tell by a slight bulge that she is pregnant. Could it really be Nelly? All this time… Okay, only one week but still – could it be Nelly? I reach instinctively to my body-switcher necklace. I always wear my guitar pick necklace. Maybe I could switch bodies tonight.

I want to get out of the chair but I suddenly feel glued to the seat. What is this stuff that Yeshi gave me anyway? What the hell are these Ukrainians using anyway? I take the pollution mask out of my lap and strap it on. Another swig of LoathHunAyaTop settles my nerves. Hopefully, it will clear away this Eastern European shit.

TWENTY-SEVEN∞

I’m going over there, I decide, after waiting five more minutes for the pollute haze to die down. The woman across the room is alone for now, but there are two glasses at the table, which means someone must be coming to meet her. My window of opportunity is slowly shutting, as all windows of opportunity inevitably do.

‘I need to use the restroom,’ I inform Yeshi.

‘You can go check on your friend,’ she says. ‘I don’t mind. Invite her over here if you’d like.’

‘How did you…?’

‘You keep looking over there. Human behavior isn’t very hard to decipher.’

‘Listen, I just need to check… it would be crazy if it were really her. I mean, how many people live in this city now?’

‘Thirty-two million,’ Yeshi answers, ‘not including illegal immigrants.’

‘Exactly!’

I stand slowly, using my arms like cranes to lift me off the table. The fat waitress gives me a funny look as I stand from the bar stool. I close my eyes and the iNet login screen flicks on. I open my eyes and take a step towards the woman. It takes me all of five minutes just to get to the lone pillar in the middle of the room. I place my hand on the pillar and catch my balance. I look around nervously, hoping no one sees my pathetic descent towards the other side of the room. The bar is pretty much empty besides a few people by its large tinted window and two men in black suits at the bar.

I slide near the pregnant woman and smile faintly. I try and straighten my shirt, as if a quick brush from my hand will really do anything. I’m almost certain now that it’s Nelly. The hair, the bridge of her nose, her clothing style, the way she looks so serious but at the same time so naïve.

I stand near the chair in front of her, hovering like an obtuse vulture. It’s as if I’ve now lost the ability to think. A choon I recognize plays on the stereo system. It sounds tropical, sounds like someone put it together after a long day of piña colada pollutes, thin bikinis and sand between their toes.

‘Can I help you?’ the woman sitting at the table asks.

‘Nelly,’ I say, putting my hand on the ridge of the chair in front of her. ‘Nelly, is that you?’

‘Who are you?’ She brushes the hair out of her face and squints.

‘POLLUTION CLUB 512, we met there, you were supposed to go with me,’ I say.

‘Was I?’ she starts to laugh. I notice how delicate her skin is and how thin her wrists are. She’s like a living mannequin.

I rub my left eye with my palm. ‘I think so…’ I say, not sure of how to answer her.

‘Ah! I remember you now,’ Nelly says. ‘You were the guy who wanted to switch bodies with me…’

‘That’s me,’ I say. ‘My name is Meme.’ I sit down in the empty chair. ‘Nice Leia buns by the way.’

‘I know, aren’t they retro?’

‘Definitely.’

‘I wanted to go for something retro tonight.’ She’s sitting with an oversized Michael Kors bag in her lap. Her face keeps contorting, growing larger and wider with each movement of her jaw. Each time she blinks, a sparkle of glitter radiates off her eyelashes. Damn her applesweet nictating. Damn these Ukrainian pollutes. I place my hands along edge of the table to stabilize myself.

‘So you still into it?’

‘Into what?’ I ask.

‘Switching.’

‘Hell yes I am. Are you?’ I try to steady my breath. I instinctively place my hand across my chest, across my guitar pick necklace. ‘Wait, how have you been? I sent you a message on GoogleFace…’

‘Oh sorry about that. I’ve been busy…’

‘Is your name Meme?’ a voice asks from behind me. I place the accent I’ve just heard as Australian, or some type of British accent I’m unfamiliar with.

The two men wearing black suits. One of them has a neck like a bulldog; the other has a neck like a bulldog’s mother. They look like they were raised on a strict diet of corn, steak, action films and whole milk.

‘I’m not sure,’ I say. It’s my typical answer when asked of my identity by a complete stranger.

‘It’s him Gyatson,’ the man on the right says. ‘Not very hard to pick him out in the crowd here. Cameras have been disabled,’ he says, looking at his watch. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I ask, looking up at the man. ‘Racism, huh? I thought we were supposed to be over this shit by now.’

‘Fuck you, mate,’ the man named Gyatson says. Before I can react, he uses my neck to slam my head against the table. The pain stings and bursts through my body.

The collision is so sudden that I pop right back up into my normal seated position. I briefly see Nelly fumbling in her purse for something. No one in the bar seems to notice or care that the man has just accosted me. The metallic taste of blood enters my mouth. I try to stand, but I’m quickly tossed to the ground by the second man.

I look up, watching in slow-mo as Gyatson pulls a revolver from beneath his coat.

A revolver? What the hell is he doing with that? I try and lift myself up but fail miserably. What century are we in? I’m more fascinated than frightened by the weapon. The last time I saw an actual revolver was in a history museum.

The ground tilts. I see blood drip from my mouth onto the lacewood floor. I hear people screaming, but am too disoriented to do anything. I look up and see Nelly towering over me. There’s some type of mask covering her face. Suddenly, she’s spraying a strange liquid at the men. I hear their bodies fall to the ground all around me. The revolver hits the floor and fires a single shot.

TWENTY-EIGHT∞

I awake screaming in an aeros.

I’m lying on the floorboard, coughing up blood. My nostrils are on fire. Tiny glistening specks of light seep out from the corners of my eyes. My mouth is dry. Violent grindsmash oozes from the speakers.

A man and a woman are screaming simultaneously. They yell: I’m still, I’m still an animal! I’m still, I’m still an animal! I’m still, I’m still an animal! The bass keeps cutting off right before the next drop is supposed to hit. A cringable sound. It hurts my ears to describe the sound.

I’m confused and delirious. Vertiginous. It feels like my brain is bleeding. My lungs are fighting to suck in air. I’m wheezing and the cuffs of my white jacket are stained in crimson. I cough again.

‘Meme, just hold on…’

‘Yeshi! What? Where!?’ I yell over the music.

‘At the bar. You talked to Nelly. Some guys came. I don’t know who they were, but they may be related to Sauria at ExEx. That’s what I think, anyway. Nelly maced the fuck out of them. Everyone in the bar fell except the Humandroid bartender, myself and Nelly. She turned and walked out. I recorded everything if you want to watch it.’

‘Sauria did this? My eyes…’ I sob. ‘Am I going blind?’

‘No. It’s the mist she sprayed. I’ve seen it used before. It’s a tear gas mixed with a soporific chemical called Tenofizzle 661. The burning is from the tear gas. You’ll be fine, all your vitals are normal.’

‘Yeshi?’ I ask. I look up at her and make out a blur clothed in white. The tears burn as they streak down my face.

She laughs. ‘Yes, Meme, it’s me. Taking care of you again!’

‘You’re wonderful…’ I say, coughing more blood onto the floor of the cab.

‘Watch it with the blood back there!’ the driver shouts.

Yeshi presses a button on the door and the divider between the front and back seat starts to rise. ‘Any idea who those guys were? They were wearing chip-maskers.’

‘No idea. Didn’t one of them have a revolver?’ I could have sworn I heard a gun go off. The ringing in my right ear confirmed this.

‘Yeah, the bullet ricocheted off the floor and broke the window. It’s amazing it didn’t hit anyone. Haven’t seen someone get shot before,’ she says in a curious voice.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m taking you to my friend’s place. The chemicals inside your body are in the process of mixing as we speak. You’re about to be in a very bad place…’ she says.

‘Who are you taking me to?’

‘My guru.’

TWENTY-NINE∞

A short Indian man with a wispy white beard and bright orange garb sits with his legs crossed in front of me. The swarthy color of his skin makes the bright orange clothing seem that much brighter. He’s yawning, drinking a cup of tea. There’s a string of beads around his right wrist and an even larger string with beads the size of cherries across his chest. They stretch from his shoulder to his waist, looping like a rubber band around his body. He makes a clucking sound with his mouth as he looks up at me.

‘My child,’ he begins. He motions his head at someone behind me. ‘Why have you come to me?’

His accent is thick and ancient. The room is olive and distorted faces move in and out of the walls like flags in the wind. I can smell his tea; it reeks of spice and faraway places. There’s a swelling sound in my left ear. The sound inflates through my skull cavity and escapes through my right ear. I steady my gaze on the Indian man. He yawns and strokes his beard.

‘I didn’t come to you,’ a voice answers from my mouth.

Maybe this is my conscience speaking – the bastard shows his face! I’m in too bizarre of a state to answer trivial questions. My eyes are still burning from the tear gas, my mind is gelatinous from the pollutes, my head hurts from being slammed onto the table, my nose stings like someone stuck their fingers in a jar of cayenne pepper and jammed them into my nostrils.

‘Then why are you here?’ he asks.

‘Why are you here?’ I counter. The voice is doing better than I thought!

‘I’m here because God wills it.’

‘I’m here unwillingly because God willed it,’ I say.

‘We’re all here unwillingly because God willed it.’

‘God is willing me to vomit,’ I say, feeling something rise in my stomach.

‘God has willed many things.’

‘God has killed many things.’

‘Many things have killed themselves under the false disguise of God.’

‘Many things have killed themselves under the true guise of God.’

‘God created spoonerisms and chiastic rhetorical devices,’ he reminds me.

‘God has created many devices including vibrators and pollution masks and novelists that write about such peculiar things.’

‘Trying to beat God in a contest is like trying to beat yourself in a contest and hoping for a reward,’ he says calmly.

‘There is only one contest I know of that you can beat yourself at and there’s definitely a reward.’

‘The juice which holds the key to all of God’s children.’

‘I thought he only had one.’

Yeshi’s guru grins. ‘You know so much for a young man. The world is your oyster; your actions have no repercussions. You are a God among fools, a pearl in the ocean.’ Yeshi brings him a bowl of curry and rice. He sticks his fingers in the bowl and starts scooping the mess into his mouth. The smell of curry makes my stomach churn.

‘You’re a living stereotype,’ I mumble at him. The words spilling out of me are not my own. They seem to come from distant galaxy within.

‘A stereotype of what my child?’ he asks, with a mouth full of rice. Some of the rice falls onto his orange kurta.

‘Of an Indian guru.’

He laughs, ‘You’re clever and so is God. You’re the stereotype of an addict.’

‘Who isn’t addicted to addiction?’

‘This is a good question, but out of the two humans in this room, one is on the verge of vomiting and the other is on the verge of finishing a bowl of rice.’

‘Which you very well may vomit up later.’ I start to grow agitated with the Indian man. I didn’t come here to have a religious debate. I came here to… I came here to… well I was brought here but still, I’m not interested in a conversation on the ontological nature of things in this tragically fucked world of ours.

‘Life is a beautiful thing,’ he says as he licks rice off his fingers. Little chunks of rice are stuck to his mustache.

‘Sex is a beautiful thing,’ I say. I look away from his crusty mustache. Why is he eating like an animal?

‘Sex is an act of God.’ He shovels more rice into his mouth.

‘God’s a virgin.’

‘Oh my child…’ he laughs again. ‘When will you learn that being cynical is about as useful as being stupid?’

‘When will you learn that being holy is about as useful as being cynical?’

The guru turns to Yeshi, ‘Your friend is a clever man. A sad, drugged out man, but witty nonetheless. He’s cunning, the same way that a fox getting lost in his own hole is cunning. Why did you bring me such a man?’

‘I thought you could help him, Guru,’ Yeshi says.

‘Impossible. How am I to help a man such as this?’ he frowns. ‘What am I to do for him?’

‘I thought you could teach him meditation, like how you taught me.’

The man laughs so hard that he nearly falls over. ‘Meditation? Teach this man meditation? Look at him! How is he to learn anything except for what he wishes to teach himself? Don’t be so foolish my electronic child. I have taught you better than that.’

‘I just thought…’ Yeshi says, with no real show of emotion.

‘I have nothing more to say to this devil of a man. Return him to me when he is cured. Only then will I be able to mold him.’

I try to stand but start to lose my balance. ‘The devil is in the eye of the beholder,’ I tell him.

‘So is God,’ he says with a wave of his hand.

THIRTY ∞

‘You’re such a funny girl,’ Noah said. He’d just finished making Nelly an extra dry non-fat sugar-free vanilla pineberry cappuccino with half an Equal steamed to 161 degrees. They were in her apartment, two hours after the incident at the pollution bar. Nelly was resting on a white Prada Monsiegneur Sofa. She was still wearing her razor thin sunglasses. In front of her was a thin television, mounted to the wall and currently broadcasting an advertisement for BainFox Capital.

The girandoles in the hallway leading from the front door flickered lightly. ‘You’re the only one who tells me that.’ She turned to the large windows of her apartment, half covered by tussore-silk curtains. Downtown LA was bustling as always. ‘The only one…’

‘You seem lonely.’ He handed her the cappuccino on a small white plate.

‘I am lonely.’

‘Oh poor girl…’

‘I’m horribly lonely right now. If it weren’t for you, Noah, I’d fling myself from the top of this building. If I didn’t have this baby…’

‘Oh don’t say that honey!’ Noah sat down next to her and started to pat her back. ‘No need for that kind of talk…’

‘But it’s just… it’s just…’

‘Just what?’ he asked.

‘Just not fair…’

‘What isn’t?’

‘I’m too young for this, too young to be carrying this baby.’

‘I know you are dear, but soon it will be born and after a little nursing, Antimeria can hire a pair of Humandroids to take care of the baby. You’ll be young again before summer comes around.’

‘I just…’ Nelly closed her eyes. ‘Antimeria is calling. Should I pick it up?’

‘Do you feel like talking?’

‘Not really…but I might as well,’ she said, opening her eyes.

‘I guess you should pick it up then…’

‘Hello,’ she said sharply.

‘Darling, how are things?’ Antimeria asked. She heard giggling in the background. His video feed was disabled.

‘Where are you?’

‘Business, darling, business.’

‘Why are you calling right now? Why’s your video feed disabled? Shouldn’t you be off fucking a ladyboy Humandroid?’

‘What?’ he started to shout. ‘Can’t I call my wife anytime I want?’

‘It’s late. What do you want?’

‘Nel, what are you doing?’

‘Drinking an extra dry non-fat sugar-free vanilla pineberry cappuccino with half an Equal steamed to 161 degrees courtesy of Noah.’

‘That’s a mouthful.’

‘I’m sure you’ve given plenty of mouthfuls.’

‘What!? Did you go out tonight?’

‘Why?’

‘Just answer my question, dammit!’ he said. Nelly heard laughter again.

‘Yes, briefly. I was supposed to meet Mimidae but some assholes fucked that up. She’s coming here now.’

‘What do you mean by some assholes?’

‘I was talking to a friend and some mobster wannabe cocksuckers showed up.’

‘Did you mace them?’

‘Sure, why the hell not? They were bastards anyway.’

‘Damn it! You’re so…’ he took a deep breath. ‘Okay, look, I have no idea how to say this.’

‘You aren’t my dad. I can deal with my own problems.’

‘Okay, those assholes you maced worked for Sauria, well not Sauria directly but MercSecure. They were MercSecure representatives.’

‘Like I care.’

‘Were you talking to a guy named Meme?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes or no? Quit fucking with me.’

Nelly laughed. ‘Quit fucking with you? Tell your butt buddy Sauria to quit sending goons out to find random people. Who the hell does he think he is anyways?’

‘Look. This Meme guy is a menace. He’s dangerous. You got it? I don’t want you ever seeing him again. He might try and kill you. Any information you have on him should be forwarded to me. He’s a terrorist!’

‘Haven’t you tried to look him up on GoogleFace? Why should I help you?’

‘All his information is blocked. He doesn’t have much info online anyways and he’s been wearing a chip-masker as of late. Look, I don’t want you seeing this guy. If he sends you messages let me know. Got it?’

‘But papa…’ Nelly laughed.

‘Stop it! I’m not trying to be your father. I’m trying to be your husband. Sauria is after Meme. He’ll be… removed… by the end of the week.’

‘Removed? You guys are crazy.’

‘Don’t I take care of you? Don’t I provide you with everything you could possibly desire?’

‘Telling me who I can and can’t see…’ Nelly shook her head. ‘It seems vaguely familiar…’

‘This Meme guy is a threat to society. They still exist, you know? Look, let’s have dinner soon, okay? Maybe tomorrow night? We can talk this through.’

‘Wow, you have time for me now? I can’t believe it! You’re actually willing to cancel your date with a ladyboy whore for me, your pregnant wife who is about to give birth? I feel so wanted!’

‘I don’t hang out with ladyboys,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know what makes you think I do.’

‘It’s not hard to figure out – we share a bank account. You should be careful which account you pull money from next time.’

‘Th-that wasn’t for me!’ he stammered. ‘That was for a friend, a friend! Business, sweetie, that’s all. The business world works in disturbing, mysterious ways.’

‘Yes, I know this. Actually, I know quite a bit about the business world. If you paid more attention to me, you would see just how much I know.’

‘Sure you do, Nelly…’ he said, chuckling. ‘There’s a lot of business at that spa in Mexico…’

‘Look, next time you’re getting your dick sucked by a Humandroid slut I want you to remember I’m carrying your daughter, all right? Bye and fuck you.’ Nelly disconnected the call.

‘What a bastard. Men are such… you know…’ She stopped herself from going on a rant. ‘Oh, screw it…’

‘I know, sweet girl, I know,’ Noah said. ‘If only they could figure out how easy it is to get along with women. It just takes a little patience…’

‘And effort,’ she said, finishing his sentence. ‘Sometimes a little champagne too.’

‘And maybe a new whale skin purse!’

They both laughed. Noah sat down next to Nelly and she hugged him.

‘Thanks for always being there for me,’ she said. Tears came, but she managed to hold them back.

THIRTY-ONE∞

This is going to be awkward, I think, opening the door to my office.

I didn’t see Tyro in the hallway that connected our private offices, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t here. It’s nearly four in the afternoon, and I’ve been awake all of two hours. I’m groggy, but things could be worse.

My eyes are still bloodshot from the tear gas, my body hurts from fucking, my mind is reeling from the pollutes and I’m still in the process of piecing together what actually happened last night. I press my finger against a small pad next to the door and hear the lock click. I open the door, quietly, hoping not to draw any attention to myself.

‘Meme,’ Tyro says. He’s sitting at my desk with his arms crossed in front of his chest.

_∞_

Sauria was in a small diner on the top floor of the BlackAguaUSA building waiting for Antimeria. As he drank a glass of sea buckthorn aloe water, he rubbed the place on his neck where Meme had choked him a week ago. His neck still hurt, even after two nuru massages and some pain medication. It was starting to keep him up at night. Even worse, wearing his Burger King crown gave him a headache. He’d paid a small fortune for that vintage crown – it was used in one of the BK commercials in 2004.

The waiter walked by with the shark kebab platter and placed it on the table. The kebab lay flat like a pancake; the falafels were cut into tiny slivers and arranged in a pattern around the slices of farm-raised shark, kimchi cucumbers and tomatoes.

Sauria picked up his knife and began sawing through the shark. He gazed out the window as an advertisement aeros team passed. Each vehicle had a different word painted across the side. As they moved in a series, the vehicles spelled out advertisements to people sitting in their aeros.

Buy~Your~New~Tesla~Aeros~At~

Sauria looked away.

The sun was hidden by the VirginAT&T Megacon, an oval shaped building with a fifty story tall LCD screen that flashed ads. The building had been erected directly across from the BlackAgua USA building, which kept the building cool during the afternoon. The lights from the VirginAT&T Megacon illuminated the small diner in a variety of colors. The lights were distracting and looked bizarre when cast against his falafel. Sauria waved the waiter over and asked him to put up the blinders.

The waiter nodded and pressed a button on a remote control attached to his apron. The jalousie covering the window near his table rotated. An earth-toned light flicked on above the table.

Sauria had just finished talking with Gyatson, the MercSecure representative who had almost caught Meme the previous night. His company had tracked Meme to the BlackAguaUSA building, the same building he currently sat in eating his lunch. They would find him today, Gyatson had informed him, and had already filed the correct documents for record deletion.

As the single largest shareholder in MercSecure (the other being the Federal Corporate Government) and the largest shareholder in ExEx (Executive Executions), Sauria knew just where to turn to have this little stain on society removed. Meme was a threat, a low-level terrorist, and like any terrorist, he was most beneficial to society in a coffin. He knew firsthand how future terrorists began their descent into uncivilized hell. He understood this better than most.

After working in the electronic publishing industry for a while, Sauria pursued a PhD in Terrorist Studies and Prevention at Stanford. His favorite saying left little breathing room: once a terrorist always a terrorist, reform isn’t an option. The FCG and other security analysts learned this during the ISIL threat of the 2020s. There had been no way of correcting those Quran-waving misfits. The Old Testament was inevitably revisited – an eye for an eye made the whole world see. Drone. Drone. Drone. Drone.

To help in the peace efforts, ExEx’s research branch closely monitored GoogleFace and other social media websites. The fact that his company (a Business Executives for National Security number one rated company for eight years in a row) was unable to obtain information on Meme was as frustrating as it was telling. This Meme guy was up to something; he was probably plotting some sort of attack or working with a group of insurgents. He had to be stopped. He had to be deleted before the general populace was affected, before innocent blood was spilled.

‘What are you thinking about, old pal?’ Antimeria said.

Sauria was so lost in thought that he hadn’t seen him enter the restaurant. ‘This menace to society…’

‘Meme?’

Antimeria sat down across from him.

‘Yes.’

‘Your falafel looks good. I’ve never had it here, how is it?’

‘Decent, but fuck this falafel. Meme is what counts right now. They say they’ve tracked him to this very building. He’s here, Anti, flesh and blood.’

‘Really?’ Antimeria looked at a holographic menu that had emerged from a small red slit on the end of the table. He reached towards the menu and waved his hand. The menu turned to the next page. ‘So today then? It should be easy to find him now that we know where he is.’

‘There are thousands of people in the building and it’s America. If this were anywhere else, a missile would have already leveled the place.’

‘I can’t believe my wife has been associating with scum like this.’ Antimeria pointed at a Kobe steak pizza on the menu. The holographic menu changed from white to blue, which indicated his order had been placed. He selected sea buckthorn aloe and the menu changed from blue to green. ‘It just goes to show you how stupid women can be.’

‘Yes, she needs to be careful…’

‘If something comes up, just postpone the investigation until after she has given birth. Once the kid is here, I really don’t care what happens to her…’ Antimeria said.

‘Consider it done.’ Sauria burped and reached for his drink.

‘I can’t stand the woman. I talked to her last night and she was so fucking rude to me. I’m sick of it. Just sick of it.’

‘I think it is time we started monitoring her trips across the border. Any idea why she goes so much?’

‘She says there’s a spa there that she likes and boy does it cost a shit-ton.’

‘My investigators think it’s a front. In fact, they’re sure it’s a front,’ Sauria said. ‘We just can’t figure out what it’s a front for yet. Could be terrorist activities, illegal pollutes, body-switchers, Humguns… you get the picture.’

‘Well, just give her about one month and then do with her what you will. Open any type of investigation you feel is necessary; I don’t care what you do after that. You know how I feel about terrorists. Not in my America.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Look, about catching Meme,’ Antimeria shifted his weight forward. ‘I have an idea that may surprise even you.’

THIRTY-TWO∞

I stand silently in front of Tyro, waiting for him to speak. Animosity radiates off him – I’d better be ready for anything.

‘Do you see what you did to me?’ he asks after a long bout of silence. His face is bulbous, one eye is completely red, his lips are swollen and his nose seems slightly crooked. He looks like a chewed up hunk of steak.

‘Tyro…’ I run through the twenty or so excuses I’d come up with on the cab ride over here. They all fail before they can reach my lips.

‘Do you see what you’ve become?’ his voice rose. ‘Can you see what you’ve become by looking at me!?’ He uses his hand to swipe a Humandroid psychology book and a pewter centaur off my desk.

‘Relax, let’s talk about this.’ I place my hands up in a gesture of calm. (I’m a little peeved about what he did to my centaur, but now isn’t the time to say something.)

‘Talk about what? About beating the shit out of me in front of my wife and all those people? About your fucked up relationship with a Humandroid? About your work performance? Where should we start?’

‘You aren’t my boss,’ I remind him. A few glinting aeros passing by my window catch my eye. Their shadows run across my office before disappearing in a flash.

‘No, I’m not your boss. But unless you agree to my demands, you’re going to be as fucked as if I were your boss.’

‘Demands? What do you mean?’

‘Do I really need to elaborate? You’re making a mockery of our practice and you assaulted me. It’s on video. On top of that, you’re dating a client!’

‘Dating a client?’ I tense up, ready to hop over the desk if need be. ‘You need to stay the fuck out of my life. Got it?’

He starts to laugh. ‘Your life. A seat-of-your-pants-balls-to-the-wall-LMFAO-styled life, huh? Actually, that’s what we’re here to talk about, Meme, your life.’

‘What about it?’ I ask. ‘I don’t need an intervention here.’

He pressed his hands together. ‘I don’t want to wreak the kind of destruction on my own body that you’ve wreaked on yours.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘My wife…’ He looks at me for a long time and finally takes a deep breath. ‘I think… I think she may be unhappy with our marriage.’

‘What does this have to do with me?’

‘Last night after we left the club, she broke down in the taxi and told me how sad our life had become. “All you do is work,” she said. “All I do is sit around hoping to meet the old you, the you I fell in love with, the you that would sing to me in the morning, the you that would laugh. Laugh for fuck’s sake! You never laugh or smile anymore, Tyro! You are so unhappy and it’s rubbing off onto me!” I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to become the old me again…’

I almost chuckle. ‘The old you? When was there an old you? I thought you were always a dick.’

‘Fuck you. You’re a joke to our profession.’ He looks at me over the rims of his glasses. ‘But that’s not what this is about. There was an old me. About four years before I was cursed by meeting you.’

‘Cursed?’ My fist curls into a ball. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to stand the constant barrage of insults.

‘I can’t show my wife the crazy time she deserves. I can’t fuck her like I used to… I can’t!’

‘Why are you telling me all this? What am I supposed to do?’ I ask him. I try my best to cut him off before he gets too pathetic. Nobody wants to hear this shit. I feel a sharp sting in my forehead – I need to drink some water or something.

‘I want to experience…’ he says, looking at me with shame. ‘I want to experience your life. I want to… ’

‘Just go and do it then? My life’s not that hard to replicate.’

‘I want to fuck a Humandroid. I want to fuck Rinchi, like you. I want to get wasted out of my mind, like you.’

‘You what!?’ I shake my head, trying to register if I’m hallucinating or not. ‘Her name’s Yeshi. Yeshi. What the hell did you just say?’

‘Yes, Rinchi,’ he says, not listening to me. ‘I want to live a few nights of complete abandon. I want to regain this old me, you know, to shed this skin. I want to—’

‘Tyro, I’m not fucking Rinchi, I’m fucking Yeshi.’

‘Wait… ’ His face lights up in a devilish way. ‘So you’re not hooking up with my client?’

‘No, dammit. Listen to me!’

‘Then… ’ he bites his lip. ‘Then that’s even better!’ His eyes dart back and forth as he runs calculations through his depraved little mind.

‘Are you being serious right now?’ I ask him. ‘You really want to switch?’

His demeanor flips. He starts to sob, a strange pragmatic sob that could easily be misconstrued as a fit of coughing. ‘Look, I need something, Meme. I need a change. I need a spark. I don’t want my wife to leave me. I don’t want to disappoint her.’

‘So if we switch bodies, what am I supposed to do?’

‘I want you to ravage her.’ He quits sobbing and stares at me. ‘I want you to show her how to live! Just this weekend. I want you to help me look good in her eyes.’

‘But she’ll know,’ I tell him, still uncertain if he’s fucking with me or not. ‘This is possibly the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Seriously.’

‘She won’t know. You’ve worked with me for three years now. You know how I am. Just be like me. Come home, be serious at first, and then surprise her with something. Just show her how to live. God, what am I saying? Telling you to bang my wife! Trying to bang a Humandroid… look, she can’t know. You set the pace and I will get into the race once we switch back.’

‘And you’re serious?’ I find my lips curving into a roguish smile.

‘This is what I want, Yeshi for my wife. You embarrassed me last night and you’re an embarrassment to yourself.’

‘Enough with the bullshit comments—’

‘I want to experience what it’s like to be a total dipshit. I want to know what it’s like to be with a Humandroid. I want to shed this shell…’

‘I get it, Tyro, I get it. If it will keep you off my ass, I’ll do it. But look, once this is over, relax for a goddamn minute, got it? Leave me the fuck alone and do your own thing. Quit sending me messages. If I’m screwing up, let me screw up. It’s my airplane, I’ll steer it into the ground if I want to. Got it?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘No, seriously.’

‘How do you do it?’ He takes off his glasses and places them in his front pocket. ‘I’ve never switched before…’

‘This is how I do it.’ I take off my guitar pick necklace. ‘All body-switchers are in disguise as some sort of everyday item. I’ve seen ChapStick switchers, pollute cigarette box switchers, spoon switchers, watch switchers. Last week I saw a piece of gum you could switch with. Basically, when I touch this side of the guitar pick,’ I move closer to show it to him, ‘it activates a sensor on the bottom side, see?’

The bottom side, which was completely orange before, now has small blue veins blinking on it.

‘I put my finger here on top, you put yours there. Accept the switch over iNet and our life chip information will be swapped. Neuro-personality imprinting, clean emotional data sweep.’

‘How long does it take to switch?’

‘It takes about ten seconds and then we will be standing across from one another in each other’s bodies. Afterwards, it takes a few minutes to adjust into the body. While the switch is quick, the adjustment takes some getting used to. Things will be wobbly and you’ll feel like, well for lack of a better term, you’ll feel like you’re stuck in someone else’s skin.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘It makes you feel temporarily nauseated,’ I say. ‘Oh that reminds me, download a chip-masker from the link I’m sending you now. Apply it. Once we’ve switched, your identity will be masked.’

‘Got it.’ He waited for me to transfer the link. Less than thirty seconds later, his chip-masker was installed. ‘What about an older person switching with a younger person? How does that play out?’

‘This is one reason why it’s illegal. A person could feasibly be immortal by switching bodies. This is why it’s a federal offense and why it’s so hard to obtain one of these.’ I jiggled the neck piece. ‘That’s why I keep it around my neck at all times.’

‘Where did you get yours?’

‘Remember when I went to Rio for that conference on Humandroid psychology earlier this year?’

‘Yeah, I wanted to go but someone had to stay here.’

‘Anyways, a night out in Rio can procure many things at a great cost to one’s bank account and mental stability.’

‘You were supposed to be at that conference.’

‘Life comes at you fast. Listen, the only other rule about switching is no dying. I know you want to have fun in my body and you want me to have fun in yours, but this is serious shit. If you die in a person’s body, they continue to live in yours. This is why it’s so dangerous. Do you have any more clients today?’

‘I canceled them all,’ he says softly.

‘So you knew I’d say yes?’

‘I’m not an idiot, you know.’

‘Right, I’ll cancel mine too.’

He smiles wryly. ‘I think you’ve already missed most of your appointments.’

‘Well, I guess that makes canceling them that much easier.’

THIRTY-THREE∞

‘How are things?’ Yeshi asked.

‘You tell me...’ Rinchi sat on her bed with her back against the wall. She’d just gotten off the phone with Antimeria and knew what needed to happen next.

‘All is well. Weren’t you supposed to go to therapy today?’

‘My session was canceled…’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, I guess Dr. T’s not feeling well this afternoon.’

Yeshi nodded.

‘So, what did you do last night?’ Rinchi asked.

‘Met someone…’ Yeshi looked back down at the small painting she’d been working on.

‘Have you reached your monthly profit goals yet? They will start monitoring you if you don’t…’

‘I don’t care about the profit goals. For once, I just want to live my life.’

Rinchi started to laugh but cut herself short. Now was not the time to mock Yeshi as she normally did. She needed information. She needed to help Antimeria as much as she could. ‘So, are you meeting this mysterious client of yours tonight, sister?’

‘Sister?’ Yeshi asked. ‘When did you start calling me that?’

‘Well you’re as much of a sister as I can have, if you think about it. You and Anna.’

‘That’s true.’

‘So are you?’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ Yeshi said, ‘but he just messaged me and now he wants to meet. He’s such a strange human…’

‘Where are you meeting him?’

‘Same place as last night,’ she said. ‘The Best Western Black Light off Grand Avenue. Room sixty-nine – got to love that.’

‘Ah, I was there last week. This one client of mine loves the black light shtick. Some of the rooms are super nice. I heard they give Korean love hotels a run for their money.’

‘Just rooms…’

Rinchi reached for something in her purse. She clicked the “on” button. She paused, realizing that Yeshi could have heard her click the button. ‘Just rooms, huh?’ she asked, trying to gauge her response.

‘Just rooms…’

Rinchi slowly pulled the Humstunner out of her purse and aimed it at Yeshi, who was busy concentrating on a painting she was making. While their Humandroid flat had a technician on hand, it generally took Walliburton a few hours to notice that one of their droids had malfunctioned. This was just the timeframe Rinchi needed to meet with Meme.

She was well aware of the fact that using a Humstunner on another Humandroid was grounds for instant life termination. However, Antimeria had promised that Rinchi wouldn’t face any sort of termination and she believed him. After all, he was her most loyal client.

‘Sauria has connections that go all the way to the top of Walliburton,’ he told her the previous night, after they had retired to a private suite. ‘Hell, his best friend is the president of the Walliburton Humandroid Escort West Coast Division. So, don’t worry about any repercussions. Nothing’s going to happen to you, dear. I’ll make sure of that. You’re doing something that is relevant to national security. This Meme guy is a threat to society and to himself. The fewer people there are like him, the safer our country will become. If you do a good job, maybe Sauria will be able to pull some strings at MercSecure and get you transferred… ’

Rinchi’s poor luck had finally changed. As she aimed the Humstunner at Yeshi, she relished in the fact that she was going to experience two firsts today – the death of a human and the disablement of a Humandroid.

ZZZZZrrrrip!

Yeshi’s body flopped onto the floor.

‘Gotcha bitch…’ Rinchi walked over to Yeshi, who lay on the floor like a crumpled doll, her eyes open and her body lifeless. Rinchi pulled her “sister” back onto the bed. She had to make it appear as if she was resting, just in case anyone stopped by.

She slowly took off Yeshi’s dress and necklace. It was strange touching her lifeless body, strange how quickly something already dead can die. She rolled the droid onto her side and arranged her hair on the pillow.

Now it was time to kill Meme.

THIRTY-FOUR∞

Tyro sat inside his room at the Best Western Black Light Hotel in Meme’s body. The irony of what he was about to do was unsettling; still, he had to go through with it. He had spent countless hours hearing Rinchi complain about Yeshi and here he was, about to meet her for the first time. On top of that, Meme was going to meet his wife and who knew what he would do to her! This was the most diabolical thing he’d ever done and… and it felt great! He was nervous, but he had never felt more alive. A little scared, but at the same time, ecstatic.

He watched as a pair of palm trees quiver in the warm air outside his window. It was dusk, or almost dusk, and a bluish grapefruit haze had settled over the city. Tyro looked down at his black hands and smiled. This is what it felt like. This is what it felt like to exist in another’s skin. For that matter, this is what it felt like to be a black man.

After switching bodies, Meme texted Yeshi and told her to meet him at seven. He told her he had a surprise for her. He instructed Tyro to go to the Lakewood shopping mall and buy her a bonsai tree. (‘Keep your chip-masker on at all times! If she figures out it’s you, tell her to call me.’)

Meme asked Tyro to give him his chip-switcher necklace, which he did, and promised him that he would take good care of his wife (which was weird, but whatever). The plan was to switch bodies back on Sunday afternoon, after a quick wind down session in Tyro’s office. Meme clarified that this is important especially for a first timer. He explained that he’d nearly broken down after his first time, and if it hadn’t been for the help of his friend, he might not have made it through the body re-entry process.

At the mall, Tyro nearly screamed after he saw his reflection the shiny metal siding that covered the narrow walkway. He walked up to his reflection and looked into his bloodshot eyes.

‘Meme, you look like shit,’ he said touching his beard stubble. He had never touched a black person’s hair before and was surprised at its texture.

He kept touching his hair until a teenager walked by and nearly knocked him over. The teenager was chatting on iNet, blinking his eyes rapidly to see the person’s video feed when he crashed into Tyro. Tyro gave the kid a dirty look and told him to be careful. Or more accurately, Tyro-as-Meme gave the kid a dirty look and told him to be careful.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to see the person’s video feed while walking. You can talk without seeing the video, you know?’

‘No shit, Sherlock. I was trying to see my friends face.’

‘Watch it next time.’

Tyro was fascinated by Meme’s skin, his height, his muscles. He’d never been too muscular before and liked the way the taut skin felt across his pecs. As he went to the restroom, he looked down at Meme’s dick and smiled. He’d never touched a black man’s cock before. He didn’t know why this was so interesting to him (as if he’d somehow reverted back to a pubescent teenage phase), but it was, and he stood in the restroom for a long time observing his member, turning it around in his hand.

He found the bonsai store on the top floor, manned by a teenager with zits exploding across his face. Tyro-as-Meme picked out a small bonsai tree with orange leaves and a minimal rock arrangement. It was heavy, at least two kilos. The pot holding the bonsai tree was made of ceramic, glazed with a dark brown gloss. Zit-face placed the bonsai tree in a red box and tossed the box onto the counter. He paid in cash.

He arrived at the hotel and chose to pay a machine, rather than the person at the check-in desk. Of course, something was wrong with the machine, so he had to pay in cash. As he handed the hotel clerk cash, he wondered if the man recognized him. How? He thought, almost laughing aloud. He kept waiting for someone to cry foul play but it wasn’t going to happen. He was officially Meme and no one knew otherwise.

Once in the room, Tyro fidgeted for a while on the bed. Relaxing wasn’t as easy as it sounded. He felt as if he should do something. Maybe he should be reading a journal article or planning out his schedule for next week. Maybe he should log into iNet and check the news. He’d read yesterday that China had installed yet another firewall to block outside news from entering the country. It took elite hackers all of five minutes to disable the firewall. This caused the Chinese Government to instigate a country-wide Internet shut-down to punish the hackers. The hackers were quickly apprehended by the government, and were set to be executed the following morning.

‘No iNet,’ Tyro said aloud. Instead, he ordered a pollution mask and picked out a flavor he’d never tried before but that Meme had written down on a card for him.

‘LoathHunAyaTop,’ he said, when the man at the desk asked him what flavor he wanted. The mask and a few packets arrived on a silver plate. He asked the room service attendant how to use the mask and the guy helped him set it up. Again, he paid in cash.

Tyro-as-Meme watched the attendant suspiciously as he connected the mask to the distributor and dropped one of the packets in. As he left, the attendant said he looked familiar, which caused a spike in his heartbeat. The attendant reminded him that he had been here the previous night. Tyro feigned ignorance and the attendant let himself out.

One hour until Yeshi arrived and Tyro was in bed, his legs sprawled out and the pollution mask strapped to his face. He inhaled deeply, as deeply as possible, coughing and trying to get a smooth inhale off the pollute.

Minor details in the decorations around the hotel room were starting to become incoherent. The light from the setting sun outside his window made the room hazy. The pollute had a peculiar aftertaste, it made the bed feel softer and safer than it had felt before, as if he could sink so deep into the mattress that he would never be able to rise again.

For what seemed like years, Tyro gazed up at the ceiling through the mask’s green eye lenses and watched small droplets of black light sprinkle onto his body. He felt euphoric, free, as if he were no longer tethered to reality, as if time didn’t matter and his choices no longer had ramifications.

‘Life is a beautiful thing,’ he whispered. His mind traveled further and further into an emerald void.

THIRTY-FIVE∞

‘You really are a beautiful girl, really.’ Noah watched Nelly brush her hair.

‘You’re just saying that,’ she said.

‘No, no. I’ve seen plenty of humans… you by far are the most gorgeous…’

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall…’ she said, hoping he would get the reference.

‘What’s that mean?’ He started to peel an orange in her immaculate kitchen. He worked quickly, arranging the orange slices in a semi-circle around a spread of watermelon, zero calorie pretzel sticks, Himalayan honey glazed asparagus, dried chunks of apple, green grapes and a rare Swiss cheese limited to fifty kilos worldwide. On another plate, he had arranged small rice wafers, thin wheat biscuits and organic oatmeal cookies. Nelly was a closet localvore, and aside from the asparagus and Swiss, everything on his spread had come from local sources.

She logged into iNet and noticed she had a missed call from Meme. She remembered what her husband had said to her the previous night: Sauria is after Meme. He’ll be… removed… by the end of the week.

The fact that her husband thought Meme could be a terrorist amused her. Anyone who wasn’t part of his little rat pack of private security businessdicks was deemed a threat to national security. It was funny how scared grown adults were of the dark. They were scared enough to invest their entire lives fighting an invisible enemy, scared enough to create weapons more violent than God could imagine to kill enemies only they could have themselves created. She was too naïve to know that some enemies truly did exist.

Using a GoogleFace infoErazer she had downloaded six months ago, Nelly placed a call to Meme. She’d been meaning to call him all day, but her morning sickness had taken its toll. ‘Wow…’

‘Oh hi, Nelly,’ Meme-as-Tyro said. ‘Meet my new body.’

‘So you switched? Nice glasses, by the way.’

‘I did, with a co-worker of mine named Tyro. Listen, we need to talk. What the fuck happened last night? Why was I almost killed by MercSecure representatives? Is this really all because I punched that Sauria guy? Surely he can’t be that vindictive…’

Nelly opened her eyes to see Noah smiling. He took the seat across from her, crossing his legs and trying to mirror her concern. He wore a tight blue jacket and a thin black tie. His left eye was shining with a fresh application of eye liner. His pressed pants were tucked into a pair of ankle high stingray leather boots.

‘He is that vindictive. Your life is seriously in danger.’

‘What should I do?’

‘Let’s meet in an hour and I’ll get you to Mexico.’

‘Mexico?’ Meme-as-Tyro asked.

‘I have connects there. From there, we can smuggle you somewhere else.’

‘Do you think this is really that serious?’

She nodded. ‘Last night was just a sample of what they have in store for you. You need to get the hell out of Dodge.’

‘Why are you so interested in helping me?’

‘I have my reasons.’ Nelly thought of her husband, his lying, the shadiness of his friends, his cheating and his blatant stupidity. Boy did she have her reasons. ‘I’ll keep my reasoning to myself.’

‘Fair enough. What kind of food?’

‘Mario’s. You know the place?’

‘Yes, it’s near my office. So, tell me more about Mexico…’

‘I have border immunity,’ she explained. ‘You know, we should probably just discuss this when we meet.’

‘What type of money should I bring?’

‘Do you have an overseas account?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Actually I have a business account that I used in Brazil.’

‘Transfer all your money there. I’m serious. Do it now. Shit. They’re probably monitoring your bank account…’ she said. ‘Use this website I’m sending you to transfer the money. It’s called Hawalas Transfer. It’s an anonymous way to transfer money to the Middle East.’

‘The Middle East?’

‘These people are the best at making money disappear. The service will make it appear as if the balance has never left your account. It will stay like this for around two weeks, plenty of time to bail the fuck out of here. We can get you a different identity in Mexico. The body that you’re currently in looks too much like my dad and it’s disturbing.’

He laughed. ‘Duly noted. Nelly, seriously, why are you doing all this?’

‘Look, my husband, or should I say, my soon to be ex-husband’s good friend is Sauria. I’m sick of these types of people. I want out and I have enough money to keep me afloat for some time. Just meet me and we can figure out your role in all this.’

‘Got it. See you there.’

‘Bye.’

‘What’s happening?’ Noah asked. He waited as Nelly made sure the call hadn’t been traced or recorded.

She sighed. ‘It’s complicated. Meme, the guy that my husband’s trying to catch, switched bodies with a co-worker of his named Tyro. He didn’t know people were after him. I mean, he knew he’d fucked up by hitting Sauria, but he didn’t know it was this serious.’

‘What about the guy that’s in his body now?’

‘Well, hopefully…’ Nelly shrugged, knowing all too well the odds of her husband’s friends finding Meme (or who they thought was Meme) before Sunday. Whoever this Tyro guy was, his life was nearing its end. She knew how easily people disappeared when they stepped on the wrong toes.

‘And… what about me?’

‘Noah, I can’t live without you! You’re coming with me wherever I go. Out of all the people in this world, you’re the last person I’d leave.’

‘You think I’m a person?’ He sat down next to her. ‘Really? You really do? I’m moved.’

‘You’re my favorite person. There’s no one else like you in this whole world. You’re unique, you’re handsome, you’re strong and you’re smart.’

‘That is so nice,’ Noah said. He wrapped his arms around her. ‘I’ll never leave your side, okay?’

‘Promise?’ Nelly asked.

‘Promise.’

THIRTY-SIX∞

Rinchi arrived at seven and knocked on Tyro’s hotel room door. She wore Yeshi’s white trench coat with the collar flipped up.

‘Who is it?’ a voice called from the other side.

‘Me…’

She heard some scrambling inside the room.  ‘Yeshi?’ he asked, opening the door. He stood in a dress shirt, unbuttoned all the way to his stomach.

Rinchi smiled. ‘Hi, Meme,’ she said. Applied to her face were Yeshi’s butterfly eyelashes and one of her LCD tikas. She blinked rapidly, doing a brief scan of who she thought was Meme. His vitals indicated he’d already started using pollutes.

‘Chip-masker?’ she asked.

‘I… ummm… I always use it these days.’

‘Oh, that’s right,’ she said.

‘I have something for you.’ He stumbled towards the bed and retrieved a box that lay on a nightstand next to it.

‘What is it, baby?’

‘Open it…’ Tyro said.

‘Already on them, huh?’ She puckered her lips. He was more nervous than she’d imagined he would be.

‘A little.’

Rinchi opened the box and took out the bonsai tree. She held it for a moment judging its weight. It was much heavier than it looked.

What am I supposed to do with this? She could smash the tree and its little ceramic pot against his face and drive the heel of her stilettos into his eye, puncturing his brain. Or possibly, crack the pot against his skull then strangle him with his own belt. Maybe she could knock him out, drag him into the bathroom, fill the tub with water and drown him while ramming the shower curtain rod up his ass. Another option: after binding his arms and feet to the bed, she could use the small knife she had brought to slowly torture him.

She checked his vitals again. Overpowering him would be a cinch. Humandroids were generally twice as strong as a regular human. Turn the violence governor off – something done to all Humandroid escorts – and you had a force to be reckoned with.

Rinchi had fantasized about killing a human before, but never thought she would actually have the chance – especially a chance where she could get off scot free. She casually peeled off Yeshi’s trench coat and tossed it onto a chair. The look of awe in Tyro’s face was one she’d grown used to long ago. Under the trench coat, she wore a pair of white leggings tucked into knee-high stilettos. Lustrous latex suspenders climbed from her waist to her shoulders. The frosty suspenders, which crossed behind her neck, were positioned just right to cover her nipples. They were attached to her leggings by small clips.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she purred. She unzipped her boots and kicked them off unceremoniously.

‘H-have you?’ he asked.

‘Go ahead baby, take some more,’ she gestured towards the pollution mask.

‘Sure…’ He fumbled to attach the mask to his face.

‘How have you been since last night?’ She placed her hand across his lap. ‘You’re so jumpy…’

‘Fine! And you?’

‘It was a relaxing day. Look, I painted you this picture.’ She opened her large white purse and started searching through it. She handed him the small painting she’d taken from Yeshi’s side of the room.

‘This is unusual,’ he said.

‘Unusual?’

‘It’s very rare that a Humandroid paints a picture. A recent study by Dr. Beckstein revealed that the machine learning capabilities of a Humandroid has yet to explore the realm of art. He recruited three very different types of Humandroids: a soldier, an escort and a waiter to perform a series of studies involving—’

‘Shhh…’ Rinchi placed her finger over his mouth. Something about his demeanor wasn’t right; something was very familiar about the way he talked about Humandroids. She looked deep into his eyes for a moment.

She watched as he took another drag off the mask.

‘Take the mask off and come over here…’ she said. ‘Or keep it on if you want. It’s your choice…’

As he touched her, Rinchi monitored his vitals. His heart rate had picked up and he was exhibiting the signs of someone experiencing signs of duress. Was he always like this with Yeshi? His pheromonal output was bizarre as well. ‘Just relax, baby.’ Rinchi ran her hand along his chest and to his boxer briefs. He had an erection so he was definitely turned on, yet the pattern of his breathing was uneven in a very familiar way.

‘You’re so beautiful…’

‘Close your eyes and lay on your back,’ she said softly.

She grabbed two choker collars from her purse and hopped back onto the bed. She quickly snapped one of the collars onto her neck. ‘Let’s give this a try.’ She began looping the other collar around his neck.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

She could feel his muscles tense. ‘See, I have a collar too… Don’t worry baby, this will be fun.’ She let go of the collar and bent forward to kiss him. He soon forgot about the collar and grabbed the back of her head, pulling her in closer.

‘So real…’ he kept saying. ‘It’s so real…’

She softly slid her hand from his shoulder to the collar and started to tighten it. She began gyrating her hips, hoping to distract him just enough that she could get a good grip on the collar’s excess leather strip.

She found her grip and sat up. She grabbed the pillow with her right hand and stuffed it down onto his face. She reared back, yanking the collar with all her might and squeezing his body tightly with her thighs. He started to buck, and at one point, almost bucked her off completely.

Rinchi held on by squeezing her thighs. She pulled the collar tighter, her face cracking into a teeth-baring smile. She was stronger than him, much stronger. Muffled screams emitted from the pillow. The headboard slapped against the wall.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

‘Shhhhhhh…’ she said, holding on as his body flopped. Once his bucking stopped, she removed the pillow and scanned his vitals. Still alive.

‘You just don’t want to die today do you?’ She squeezed her legs tighter and pushed the pillow back down. She let go of the collar and used her entire upper body to apply pressure to the pillow.

After a few more jerks, she felt his lifeless body relax onto the bed.

She removed the pillow and used the strength of both arms to pull the collar even tighter. She waited on top of him for a few minutes, watching as his eyes bulged out of their sockets. She dropped the collar after scanning his vitals a final time. Something brushed against her leg – he still had a slight erection.

Rinchi felt absolutely nothing as she peered down at his lifeless body. Her eyes fell upon the bonsai tree sitting on the nightstand. She hopped off the bed, retrieved the tree, and shattered the ceramic pot against his skull, filling his nostrils and lips with dirt and pebbles.

She was surprised at how easy it was to take life, at how unrepentant she felt. One moment something was alive and annoying, the next moment it was dead and quiet. Almost like a lightswitch. Almost like a Humandroid. Almost like her.

Rinchi put the trench coat on and sat on the bed next to Tyro’s lifeless body. She called Antimeria over iNet to tell him that the job was finished. Meme was officially dead.

THIRTY-SEVEN∞

I’m sitting in a plush booth at an Italian restaurant called Mario’s. The restaurant, on the top floor of the HondaFord building, has been a tourist destination ever since a critical scene from Fast and Furious XXXV took place here. There are signed photos on the wall of all the celebutards and diplomats who have visited the place, posters from all thirty-five Fast and Furious movies and a working twentieth century photo booth that is the very last one on the planet (in fact, the steamy romance scene in Fast and Furious XXXV took place in, around and on top of the photo booth).

Mario’s is locally known for its zero calorie organic vitamin-pizza, which has since been marketed to green grocers across the States. Aside from all the international and local attention, the place is a quaint diner with outstanding dishes that has recently introduced curbside aeros service, after losing business to an Italian restaurant called Luigi’s on top of an adjacent skyscraper.

As I wait for Nelly to arrive, I watch the curbside attendant bring recycled to-go boxes to a line of waiting aeros. It’s approaching eight thirty, which means that Nelly is late. To kill time, I’m playing a game on iNet called Treasure Hunter X. In the game, a small three dimensional figure explores vast dungeons and collects treasure. As I explore a dungeon called Killer’s Lair, the waiter sets a pollution mask on the table in front of me. I nod slightly, with my eyes still closed.

I receive an incoming call from Yeshi with an attached message: WHERE ARE YOU? YOU ARE IN DANGER! I pause the game and take the call, not bothering to enable the video feed.

‘Meme, are you alive?’

‘Sure, what’s happened?’ I ask, watching a brand new aeros Jag pull into the curbside lane.

‘Where are you right now? Your voice sounds different.’

‘It must be the connection. I’m at Mario’s.’

‘Are you with me?’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘We’re supposed to be together right now. Are you sitting across from me? Rinchi… my twin she… don’t say anything if you are with me right now.’

‘With you? I’m alone, Yeshi.’

‘Where’s Rinchi?’

‘How should I know where she is?’

‘You were supposed to meet me…’

‘About that…’ I say.

I open my eyes and see Nelly sit down across from me. Nelly takes her cantaloupe sunglasses off, puts them in a case, tosses the case in her purse.

‘She stunned me… she’s going to kill you…’

‘What?’ I ask, smiling at Nelly.

‘Who’s that?’ Nelly begins flicking through the holographic menu that has appeared at the corner of the table. ‘Nice switch by the way. You sure beat the shit out of yourself. I’d make a Fight Club reference here but… well, have you seen the movie?’

‘Haven’t. It’s a classic right? Guy beats himself up or something?’

‘What?’ Yeshi asks as Nelly nods.

‘Who is trying to kill me now?’ I ask Yeshi over iNet.

‘Someone else is trying to kill you?’ Nelly asks.

Yeshi is practically screaming in my ear now. ‘Rinchi, my identical twin! She attacked me and now she’s is trying to find you! I’d still be out right now if it weren’t for Anna.’

‘Who’s Anna?’ I ask.

‘My other flatmate. Meme, you are in danger, Rinchi is impersonating me. I think she is going to kill you!’

‘Kill me? She’s going to have a hard time finding me right now,’ I say, looking down at my white knuckles.

‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

‘I switched bodies with Tyro. You know, the guy from last night.’

‘Her therapist? Seriously?’ Her voice softens. ‘So Tyro is meeting Rinchi in your body…’

‘This is bad… this is bad…’

‘What’s happening?’ Nelly asks again. ‘Who is trying to kill who and who are you talking to?’

I say, ‘The guy I switched bodies with is supposed to meet a Humandroid tonight that is out to kill me.’

Nelly asks, ‘Have you tried to contact him?’

‘No…’

‘Who are you with?’ Yeshi asks.

‘Nelly, from the other night. Things are about to heat up. How long do you think it will take them to figure out that we switched bodies?’

‘I have no idea,’ Yeshi says.

‘If he’s actually dead, it depends on when they discover his body,’ Nelly says. ‘The electronic autopsy takes roughly three minutes. It’s the only way they can keep track of switched body deaths. My guess is they will discover the body in the morning, which gives you a little time. However, if they are after you, they might have someone check his life chip tonight.’

‘Looks like I need to get to Mexico ASAP…’

‘Mexico?’ Yeshi asks.

‘Listen Yeshi, I want you to come to Mario’s so we can figure this all out. I’ll try and call Tyro to warn him.’

‘It’s too late.’ Yeshi says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We were supposed to meet at seven…’

‘Maybe Rinchi was late.’

‘It’s not in our nature to be late, Meme.’

‘I’ll try and call him,’ I say. ‘Just get here as quickly as you can.’

_∞_

‘What a clever bastard!’ Sauria sat in the back of his stretch-aeros with Antimeria and Rinchi. He’d just gotten off the phone with an investigator from his company.

‘What happened?’ Rinchi asked, stretching her legs across Antimeria’s lap.

‘We manually checked the life chip of the person you just killed. I had one of the hotel workers contracted through our company sneak into the room and do it. He’s definitely dead, but the guy that’s dead isn’t Meme.’

‘What do you mean?’ She replayed the video in her head of strangling him and smashing the plant against his face – it had to be him!

‘He switched bodies,’ Sauria explained. ‘The Meme that you killed… it was someone else. I guess now we can add illegally switching bodies to his rap sheet.’

‘The results revealed that it was some guy named Tyro Myrdal,’ Sauria said. ‘Tyro Myrdal, a Humandroid therapist.’

‘How did he know? How did he know to switch? There must be someone passing along information to Meme…’ Antimeria ran his hand along the fat that hung from his chin.

‘Did you say Tyro Myrdal?’ Rinchi kicked her legs off Antimeria’s lap. She crossed her arms over her naked chest and looked down. ‘Dr. T? Oh fuck… oh fuck…’

‘What’s wrong, dear?’

‘Do you know this guy or something?’ Sauria asked.

‘No. I guess I don’t know him. The name sounded familiar. So they switched bodies…’ Rinchi said, looking out the window at an aeros swooped by. ‘They switched bodies…’

‘This is the guy he switched with,’ Sauria said, pressing a button near the door. A holographic projection of Tyro appeared next to him. The projection wavered for a second before enhancing its color.

Rinchi said, ‘Nope, that’s not the Tyro I know…’

‘Are you all right?’ Antimeria asked.

‘Sure. I just hope I didn’t disappoint you. I couldn’t tell it was a switch. He was wearing a chip-masker.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Sauria said with a wave of his hand. ‘No one could have predicted this would happen. We’ll get him soon enough. You’ve done an excellent job, Rinchi. You’ve proven yourself to me, proven that you are more than qualified to be a MercSecure representative.’

‘I need to check on Nelly,’ Antimeria said. ‘She’ll know something about this. If she doesn’t cough it up, I can force Noah to do it. Come back, Rinchi.’

She moved next to him again. ‘What happens now?’ she asked.

Sauria snarled, ‘Now we get to the bottom of this. I don’t care where he is – Meme will be dead by the morning.’

THIRTY-EIGHT∞

Yeshi shows up at the restaurant thirty minutes later. She’s in a blue sweatshirt that says #LOVEDROID in old English letters, a pair of black jeggings and white Converse with pink stitching. The hood of her sweatshirt is pulled tightly over her head. Nelly and I’ve just finished sharing a vita-pizza; I’m currently looking down at my stomach.

I’ve never felt a baby inside me before.

Yeshi looks at who she thinks is Tyro and smiles, ‘It’s nice to see you again, Meme. I never thought of you as a stressed white guy with bruises all over your face.’

A waiter takes a chair from another table and slides it over for Yeshi.

‘The bruises will heal,’ Nelly-as-Tyro says, wiping her lips with a napkin. ‘I kind of think they make me look tough.’

I look at Yeshi and smile, ‘Nice to meet you, my name’s Nelly,’ I tell her, glancing over at “Tyro” and winking.

‘You’re the lady that maced everyone last night.’ Yeshi pulls her hood off her head and scans my vitals. ‘Wow… you’re going to give birth any day now.’

‘I’m ready,’ I say.

‘They’re currently looking for Rinchi…’ Yeshi says, cutting right to the topic at hand. ‘The maintenance men who rebooted me have already reported her attack to the central headquarters. Anna also reported the violation. Rinchi will be terminated within the next twelve hours. Using a Humstunner is a huge protocol violation because it hinders productivity. Walliburton terminates the artificial consciousness of any Humandroid caught using the stunner. Sometimes, depending on the age of the Humandroid, they’re tweaked and a new artificial consciousness is installed. Most times however, they scrap them completely.’

‘So she killed Tyro?’ I ask.

‘I’m afraid so,’ she says. ‘Sorry, Meme.’ (Of course Yeshi says this to Tyro’s body – she still doesn’t know we have switched.)

‘Why don’t they just tweak all the violators?’ Nelly-as-Tyro asks. ‘Scrapping them seems a bit excessive.’

‘Because they get a large kickback from the FCG if they scrap a Humandroid completely. It actually saves them money just to get rid of it rather than attempt to fix it.’

‘Of course the FCG gives them a kickback. Thank God for big government!’ I reach for the pollution mask and I take a quick huff. BlackAguaUSA Morning Body Dump: a perfect pollute that’s as good as six strong cups of instant B-vitamin coffee in the morning.

‘Be careful with that stuff. Remember, you’re carrying. So they’re just going to ditch…what’s her name again?’ Nelly-as-Tyro asks.

‘Rinchi, my twin,’ Yeshi says. ‘Yes, they will scrap her. As soon as she arrives back at our flat they’ll waiting. Hey Tyro, who was that lady with you the other night?’

‘Which one?’ Nelly-as-Tyro asks.

‘You don’t remember? The one with the blonde hair.’

‘Uh… no it must have been the pollutes,’ Nelly-as-Tyro replies.

‘I think it might have been his wife,’ I tell Yeshi.

‘Really Meme?’ Yeshi gives me a funny look. ‘I never pictured you as a pregnant woman.’

‘So you figured it out already?’ I ask, rubbing my swollen belly. ‘I hope this doesn’t complicate things.’

THIRTY-NINE∞

MercSecure Representative Gyatson checked the barrel of his Colt 1851 Navy Revolver. He admired its gold plated rammer and cylinder, its genuine ivory grip with a fiercely carved Mexican eagle; the weight of the gun in his hand only made the weapon seem that much deadlier. He purchased the revolver at an auction ten years ago and eventually found a weapon maker in South Africa able to craft him percussion caps and paper cartridges with black powder and .36 caliber bullets. He’d ordered thousands. Robert E. Lee had carried this exact model of revolver during the Civil War and every time he held the pistol, he felt the anger of the South swell inside him – even though he was technically from Australia.

A huge Civil War buff, Gyatson had been made an honorary member of the local Sons of the Confederacy chapter, a first for a foreigner. He even had a Confederate battle flag tattoo across his left bicep. He was a short man with a chest the size of the Titanic and a single scar that crawled down the side of his face, a common trait among mercenaries.

While there were easier ways to make a man disappear in the late twenty-first century, Gyatson preferred the old Wild West methods. This was much to the chagrin of his superiors, as shoot-outs were increasingly difficult to cover up even with ample amounts of lobbying money. Much to his advantage, the word terrorist made it pretty easy for the FCG to look the other way when he took the law into his own hands. MercSecure also looked the other way when it came to his methods. After all, he was one of the higher ranked representatives in the company, in the top thirty.

What Meme and Nelly didn’t know is how close he had been to pulling the trigger at the restaurant the previous night. Had Nelly not sprayed him with mace, Meme’s head would have been splashed onto the wall all over the famous Royce print.

‘I’m on my way there right now,’ Gyatson said. He sat in the back of an aeros with two other MercSecure representatives, lower ranking lackeys. An unlit pollute cigarette hung out the side of his mouth. ‘Send me a picture of the person he’s switched with.’

Gyatson was in a crisp gray suit with a red handkerchief in the front pocket and a red tie. Below the handkerchief pocket was a vintage sheriff’s badge, another one of his prized possessions. His boots, tucked under his nicely pressed pants, had buckles on the ankles that were meant to resemble stirrups. He had one blue eye and one green eye and his hair was in a short ponytail. Aside from his eccentricities, he was a stone-cold killer who had killed hundreds.

He disconnected the call and opened his eyes, ‘Let’s make this short and sweet,’ he told the two men sitting in front of him. ‘No innocent bystanders if we can manage it. Bring your anti-mace masks, just in case that bitch is with him. Before we go in, make sure all the bloody cameras have been disabled. Two minutes, got it? That’s all this should take. Set your Humguns to kill.’

‘How should we go about luring him out of the restaurant?’ one of the men asked.

‘We won’t lure him out. The bloke has already lured us in. No sense in taking bait like minnows when we can take bait like sharks.’

‘But aren’t we being baited either way?’ the second man asked under his breath.

FORTY ∞

‘Noah is my Humandroid assistant,’ Nelly-as-Tyro says.

The old droid is standing at the front of the table tapping his fingers nervously against his chest. He’s dressed in a white suit with white pointy shoes. The waiter moves behind him, carrying a pizza to another table. He clearly isn’t as advanced as Yeshi. Likely a Neunbolt.

‘You’ve switched?’ he says, looking from Nelly to me.

‘Yes,’ Nelly-as-Tyro says with a smile. ‘How do I look as a man?’

‘I’ll get used to it. Oh Nelly, they’re on their way here!’ he says. ‘Right now, I’m afraid!’

‘Who is?’ Yeshi and I both ask.

‘Antimeria called me…’

‘You told him where we were?’ I ask.

‘I had to.’ He starts to shake with frustration. ‘I’m programmed to answer any and all questions when the correct code word is said.’

‘What’s the code word?’ Nelly asks. ‘I didn’t know you had a code word…’

‘Older personal assistant Humandroids usually don’t know their own code words,’ Yeshi explains. ‘New models don’t have a code word because many aren’t owned by a single human any longer.’

‘Age is just a number,’ Noah says.

‘You are perfect just the way you are,’ Nelly-as-Tyro smiles. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you a new code word in Mexico.’

‘So, what did you tell Antimeria?’ I ask. I look down at my expensive Cartier watch. Icy blue veins are visible on my new hands and soft freckles are scattered across my arms. I suddenly feel incredibly delicate.

‘I told him where we were…’ Noah puts his hands over his eyes to cover his shame. ‘They’re sending people now. Those were his words not mine.’

‘Probably the MercSecure representative from last night with the gun,’ Yeshi says. ‘Everyone open a private channel with me and I’ll send an image.’

‘I already have his image,’ Nelly says.

‘I’m so sorry!’ Noah says again. ‘Nelly, please forgive me, please forgive me—’

‘It’s what you’re programmed to do,’ I say. ‘No sense in fretting over frayed circuits.’

‘We’re all programmed to do something,’ Nelly and Noah say at the same time. They laugh together too, which is a little unsettling. Personally, I’d like to get back to the pollute at hand, but it appears as if we’ll soon have company.

‘Do you forgive me?’

‘Of course I do, Noah, of course. You’re my favorite person on the planet,’ Nelly says. Noah looks from Nelly to Yeshi, seeking acknowledgement from another Humandroid for being called a person. Yeshi is unresponsive. A bright grin spreads across the old Neunbolt’s face.

‘So we’re about to be in some fucking trouble, is that what you’re saying?’ I ask.

‘That’s precisely what I am saying!’ Noah puts his hand over his head, as if he may soon faint. I really hate old droids. ‘We need to leave now!’

‘No,’ Nelly says, ‘we need to stick with the plan.’

‘There’s a plan?’ Noah asks. He looks from me to Yeshi to Nelly-as-Tyro.

‘It’s risky,’ I say. ‘But yes, there’s a plan.’

‘Why did you switch bodies then?’ Noah asks. ‘I am so confused.’

‘We switched bodies because Meme is going to Mexico right after this,’ Nelly-as-Tyro explains, ‘as me. I’ll stay here as Tyro, find a new body, switch and meet him. The number one thing is to get this baby to Mexico. Sending Meme kills two birds with one stone. I know Antimeria wants his child more than anything else. Don’t think I’m stupid. Besides, Meme doesn’t know anything about combat. At least I’ve trained for some things.’

I raise my finger to protest, but then I realize she’s right.

Nelly-as-Tyro says, ‘What we are about to do will add insult to injury. I’ll be gone, Meme will be gone, the baby will be gone and all Antimeria will have are his businessdick friends and his ladyboy escorts. No offense,’ she says to Yeshi.

‘None taken.’

‘We’ll deal with these mercenaries, Meme will leave in my aeros driven by Yeshi and head to Mexico. I’ve left cash and contact info inside a duffle bag in the trunk.’ She turns to Noah. ‘You and I will make some calls and get to Mexico by sundown tomorrow. Carloza will help. Everyone wins.’

FORTY-ONE∞

I see Gyatson enter the restaurant from the other side of the room with two men behind him. All three of them have mistmasks across the bridges of their noses. They’re an intimidating trio, a predatory group of life extinguishers.

Nelly-as-Tyro sits with Noah in a dimly lit booth across from our table with a curtain drawn around it. Yeshi stands near the door, watching them enter. As Nelly and I are both logged into iNet, I quickly message her to let her know about the masks. I’m holding Nelly’s purse, hoping that Gyatson won’t recognize me from the previous night. I’m pretending to be busy with something online.

Gyatson approaches the waiter and tells him to clear out all the patrons. The waiter, a newer model Humandroid, looks confused and starts protesting. Gyatson pulls a revolver from inside his jacket and whips it across the waiter’s face. The impact sends the Humandroid to the ground. Gyatson kicks the waiter so hard in the head that his neck snaps. I feel something move in my stomach. The baby. I need to keep reminding myself I am technically pregnant. Not technically, I am actually pregnant.

The diners begin to scatter at the sight of violence. It doesn’t take long for a sea of people to rush towards the door, shoving against one another. One of Gyatson’s partners drops a small electric grenade on the floor. Schwiip! It fizzles and flickers, disrupting all wireless signals in the area. No video, no iNet.

I rise with everyone else, trying to get lost in the crowd so I can move into a position behind the three men. It’s hard for me to keep my hands on anything but my swollen belly. Christ it is a bitch being pregnant!

Eventually, I find myself in a position near Yeshi and watch as she pulls her hood over her head. As the crowd swells around her, she leaps forward and pulls one of Gyatson’s men down with her. A few chairs crash and people begin scrambling over their tables to avoid the scuffle. Napkin dispensers scrape across the floor, salt and pepper shakers clatter as they smack against the ground. The bulls stampede; tora bravo on the loose!

‘Stay behind me!’ Yeshi shouts to me.

Gyatson, still a few paces away from Nelly-as-Tyro, notices his man go down and fires a shot into the ceiling. People scream and move even faster. He turns and shoots a round over their heads, destroying the photo booth. The bastard!

I put my hands to my ears. My ears ring and the adrenaline pumps through me. The baby kicks and pandemonium ensues. I place my hand on my stomach and rub it, realizing I know absolutely nothing about comforting a fetus during a clusterfuck.

‘Where are you, mate?’ Gyatson bellows over the crowd. ‘Show yourself, Meme!’

Noah, who has exited the private booth, grabs a wine bottle and smashes the bottom of it against a marble pillar. The breaking glass is barely audible over the ruck of the crowd. He holds the broken bottle with a nervous yet determined look on his face. His hand is trembling; he is going against his very nature to hold it in such a way.

I stop and watch him for a moment. Is this even possible? While Yeshi has virtually no governor on violence, Noah shouldn’t be able to react in the way he just has. Plus, he’s an older model. This might be unprecedented! He advances towards one of Gyatson’s hitmen, driving the broken bottle into the man’s throat. Blood trickles down the half submerged wine bottle. I see the private booth’s curtain open and Nelly-as-Tyro emerges.

I grab a plate and toss it like a Frisbee hoping to hit Gyatson in the back of the head. It misses as he fires a point blank shot into Noah’s chest. The old droid falls and Nelly-as-Tyro screams. Her lament triggers another shot from Gyatson, who has spotted who he thinks is me.

The bullet hits Nelly-as-Tyro in the waist and her new body stumbles back onto a table. I watch in horror as she settles onto the table. She tries to pull herself up, but the bullet seems to have connected with her spine.

No! I rush forward holding my purse and my stomach, not sure what I should do. My blouse gets caught on a chair and I pull free.

‘It can’t be… it can’t be…’ I find myself repeating. I suddenly feel nauseous.

Gyatson turns his revolver towards Yeshi and I throw another plate. This one finally connects, hitting him in the back of the head. Direct hit! He stumbles forward, shooting another bullet into the opposite wall. Christ the sound! This is all the time Yeshi needs. She’s behind him moments later, her hands on his ponytail. She pulls back; his head snaps and I hear a cracking sound like someone dropping a heavy book on a hard surface. The representative falls backwards.

Yeshi stomps his face until her white Converse are red and Gyatson’s mistmask is hanging in bloody tatters from his fleshy cheeks.

‘Fuck!’ I’m hovering over Nelly-as-Tyro now, looking at the bullet wound. It’s oozing, it’s real. Please don’t be dead!

Yeshi appears behind me.

‘Is she dead!?’ I scream.

‘Oh, this is bad…’ Yeshi scans Nelly-as-Tyro’s vitals without any sign of emotion.

‘Dead bad? Come on, Nelly…’ I mumble. I can smell the sulfur from the cloud of gunpowder smoke. I pound my fist against the table and instantly regret it. A pain spreads from my wrist to my elbow; the baby kicks again.

‘Relax, Meme.’ Yeshi is at my side now, her hand on my shoulder.

I’m grief stricken and curious, having never seen an actual dead person before. What makes it stranger is the fact that Nelly is in Tyro’s body. I’m now staring at the dead body of my colleague, who himself is dead in a morgue somewhere. I’m also staring at the dead body of a friend who I hardly knew, a woman who risked her life – regardless of her reasoning – to help me. Blood seeps from the wound, spreading like spilt ink on the table cloth.

I suddenly feel responsible for all this in a detached way. I am as guilty as I am oblivious to how I ended up here at Mario’s, staring at a corpse that was alive just seconds ago. The baby moves in my stomach.

‘It’s all my fault,’ I whisper. ‘All of this.’

Maybe I’m just a lucky son of a bitch.

‘Sorry, Meme.’

I hear a whir from the Noah. He sits up, looking over at Yeshi and me. A black liquid oozes from his open mouth. ‘Nelly…’ he says. His head twitches to the left. A spark erupts from the bullet hole in his chest and he falls sideways, whacking his head on the corner of a nearby table.

Yeshi reaches for my hand and squeezes it. ‘We need to go, Meme. We need to get to Mexico. We need to leave all this behind. You and me…’

‘But Nelly…’ I find myself sobbing.

‘You have her baby, Meme. Her life can continue through her child. You have to save the baby for Nelly. Come on… we need to go now.’

No matter how much you sharpen it, life will never reach a point where it makes sense. As I turn to leave, I feel something pop below my swollen belly. Water trickles out onto my leg quickly forming a puddle on the floor. ‘Yeshi… the baby is coming!’

The End

All things must come to an end.

If you want to start Book Two immediately, you can get it on Amazon by clicking here or you can leave me a quick review of Book One on Amazon and send me an e-mail at writer.harmoncooper@gmail.com. I’ll send you a free copy of Book Two for helping spread the novels.

This is a strange series, and your reviews really help, so please review readily. Seriously, if you made it this far, click here to review the book (link goes to Amazon, note: wifi must be turned on).

BONUS – there is also a box set of Books 1-3 available. This will save you money, and the books are navigable from the first page, so you can move straight into Book Two. Get it here on Amazon.

Continue on for some notes on Book One as well as a preview of my other sci-fi series, The Feedback Loop and my psychological thriller, Boy versus Self. There is also a sample of Life is a Beautiful Thing Book Two.

Enjoy!

Back of the Book Shit

Reader,

Before you check out the sample of Book Two on the following pages, or fall asleep, or go back to living your amazing life as a physics teacher/killer-for-hire,[1] or leave me a lackluster review due to Book One ending on a cliffhanger – let’s talk about Book One.

Book One was written in November 2011 in one month during a contest called Nanowrimo, in which an author challenges themselves to write a book in a month. I edited a copy and sent a print version to my brother, who hadn’t read any of my other work at the time but for some reason, decided to read this one, mostly due to the fact he liked sci-fi.

‘That read like a real book,’ was his first comment, which I didn’t know exactly how to take seeing as how I had written three books by this point.

Still, a compliment is a compliment and I took it. Book One was then buried under a pile of other works and other writing interests, including helping pen a failed TV series in Asia (goodbye six months of my life without pay, but I learned what not to do with your creative skills).

More about the book.

Meme’s voice is a combination of several literary styles I enjoy. The ‘talking to the audience’ aspect of his speech is called meta-fiction, something many people frown upon. His hallucinatory passages were inspired by William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson with a dash of Philip K Dick and a sprinkle of Confederacy of Dunces. He is, for lack of another protagonist, our protagonist, and I wanted him to be funny and at the same time, a caricature of an addict. As you continue on with the series, you’ll see him go through the ups and downs of his problem, evident in the way he speaks.

I say ‘he’ because Meme writes himself. I literally put on some drum and bass music (I only listen to this while writing) and let this character take over. There are pages and pages of Meme rambles that I’ve discarded to form the overall structure of the series, giving some of him, but hopefully not enough to make a person feel insane themselves.

The term ‘Leaks’ used in this book to describe a pair of goggle-like glasses is straight from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. I use this term frequently in my series as I like the image it creates in my mind. There are many other borrowed words, the most prominent being ‘aeros’, which was borrowed from one of the first dystopian novels called We, which was published before 1984 and Brave New World.

Pollutes and pollution masks.

The idea for pollutes and pollution masks came from real life.

In 2011, I moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia where I was subjected to the worst pollution in the world (at least during the winter). I wore an actual pollution mask daily, which inspired (or de-inspired?) me to populate my future world with ‘pollution masks’ that resembled plague masks. Looking out the window of my Soviet apartment and seeing pollution thick enough to theoretically box up and mail to your rich aunt greatly enhanced the insanity evident in Book One. Once you start Book Two, you will notice that the manic-ness has been replaced by action. Have no fear – Meme is alive and well throughout the series, my favorite scene being his encounter with a former Cuban rocker-cum government protestor in Book Four. Think: toxic snails and hallucinations.

Winding down.

In December 2012, possibly inspired by the fact the world didn’t end, I began writing Book Two while vacationing in Korea for a week and doing research for a book I’ve since published called Tokyo Stirs. I wrote about 7,000 words (a normal book in the series is 40-45k words), all of which were shit. I put it away to pursue other things, namely the writing and research for a book called Boy versus Self. I gave up again on the Life is a Beautiful Thing Series, yet continued to take notes on technology I could use in the pages as well as sketch out story outlines.

Fast forward two years. My god it is possible.

By the time December 2014 rolled around, I’d finished a number of books, none of which I’d published, and started a publishing company in Asia that exclusively produced ESL works. I was literally sitting on close to a million words worth of unpublished work.

I decided – after an emotional night of thinking ‘my god what am I doing with my life’ triggered by seeing my first girlfriend get her doctorate in medicine and realizing I’d done essentially nothing – that I should probably start releasing books, rapidly.

I reread my copy of Life is a Beautiful Thing Book One and came to the conclusion that it needed to see the light of day, and that there needed to be more of it. Thus begun the journey that has led me into your hands.

I am a very fast writer. It is my craft and my obsession. The only thing that slows me down is wrist pain due to poor typing technique (which I’ve since addressed). That being said, this book wouldn’t be half as good if it weren’t for my amazing editor, George C. Hopkins and the best reader a writer could ever ask for, Kay from Scotland, who has an amazing eye for minute details. Thanks for helping me polish this (insert noun here).

After rewriting Book One, I wrote Book Two in three weeks over the month of March 2015. Then I wrote Book Three in April. At that point, I started working on a new series that takes place about thirty years before Life is a Beautiful Thing called The Feedback Loop, which I crafted in another month. My new series is much tamer, with the hopes that people will come to this stranger series after reading something a little more normal.

As of June 22, 2015, I am working on the fourth book in the Life is a Beautiful Thing Series, which will cap the first ‘season’ if you will, books 1-4, known as the Red Books due to their color. From there I will begin the next season. The Blue Books of the Life is a Beautiful Thing series, books 5-8, will come out next year and I have a lot in store for these books.

Life is a Beautiful Thing Book Two is available here on Amazon. This book introduces one of the most important characters in the series. If Book One is hallucinatory, Book Two is all action. It takes place in Japan, LA, Mexico and of course, Meme’s mind.

Independent authors thrive on the reviews, as they provide encouragement and help get our books in the hands of other readers. Your reviews really help other readers find this work. At this point, I’d rather a review than a purchase, as reviews are the best way for other readers to find my works. I’m in this for the long haul, and you’ll be seeing much more from me over the next few decades.

See some mistakes or have some tech insight? Get at me: writer.harmoncooper@gmail.com

Finally, enjoy the first two chapters on Life is a Beautiful Thing Book Two on the follow page. Yes, two chapters! From there, check out the first two chapters of my new science fiction series, The Feedback Loop. The Feedback Loop takes place in the same world as the Life as a Beautiful Thing series, but thirty years earlier. There are some terms you will be familiar with, like Humandroids, but the series is completely standalone. For readers of both, you’ll get a chuckle out of the history of this futuristic world, which plays into both series, and some of the shared concepts.

Read and be merry,

Harmon Cooper

Reviews for Book Two:

'A solid continuation of the storyline. Body-switching, data-switching, pollutes, and much more are still in the mix.' - Liquid Frost, Amazon top 100 reviewer

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'The madness continues in Tokyo... The plot twists like a monkey tripping on acid, leaving you always on the edge of WTF and awesome until the very last page.' - Amazon top 500 reviewer

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'Warning: Addictive Series.' - Amazon Customer.

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'A pulpy dream I don't want to wake from.' - Amazon top 500 reviewer

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'A Bizarro/Cyberpunk Smorgasbord!' - Amazon Customer

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'Fantastic and Unique.' - Amazon Customer

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'I laughed out loud, I bit my nails, I gasped, I nodded in agreement. Meme has to be killed. New and old characters help and hinder.' -Amazon UK customer

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'Sarcasm, dark humor and all the right stuff.' - Amazon Customer

Life is a Beautiful Thing (Book Two)

BOOK TWO (sample)

Harmon Cooper

Edited by George C. Hopkins

Available here on Amazon

One∞

Wolf mask? Check. Ball gag? Check. Mummification bondage tape pack? Check. Spreader bar? Check. Wartenberg wheel? Check. Dildo shaped like the Eiffel Tower? Check. Hand-cuffs? Check. Nipple clamps? Check. Vintage retractable rattan cane that doubled as a selfie stick? Check. K9 muzzle with puppy fist mitts? Check. Butt plug with attached tail? Check. Armbinders? Check. Gag harness with blindfold? Check. Medieval head cage? Check. Anal hook? Check. Stainless steel cat nails? Check. Suspension equipment? Check. English tawse? Check. Humstunner? Check.

Sex and torture arrived at a happy medium in Rinchi’s collection. Her benefactor, Antimeria, was no fool when he pulled some strings to have her transferred to the mercenary program administered by MercSecure, the sister company of Executive Executions. He knew she would be the best. He knew she would reinvent what it meant to be a contract killer.

Rinchi’s first assignment after the transfer had been relatively simple. An internal alarm at Walliburton sounded after a man named Edgar Cave shared classified information with a journalist at HuffingtonJones. The files he shared contained a list of transfers that pretty much detailed the illegal pollute business Walliburton ran through its Humandroids escorts. The leaked material also contained an encrypted prototype for a recent advancement in body-switching technology, allowing one to theoretically control another body remotely.

Using information obtained from a data-mining service called Datatective, Walliburton security officials transferred a fifty page document detailing the whereabouts of the leaker as well as the journalist to MercSecure. Rinchi’s first target, the hapless dweeb Edgar Cave, was easy to find. He lived in Palo Alto along with all the other Silicone Valley leeches.

‘C-c-can I help you?’ Edgar asked, not sure of what to make of the semi-naked Humandroid standing on his front porch. Rinchi let her jacket sleeves fall from her shoulders, revealing her ample breasts held only by a fishnet bodysuit.

‘I’ve been sent by a friend,’ she said casually. ‘You’re Edgar Cave, right?’

‘That’s me….’ His face filled with suspicion. ‘Who sent you?’

‘It’s supposed to be a secret, and I promised to keep the secret.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s getting cold out here with my top off, Eddy. Can’t I come inside? I don’t want your neighbors seeing me.’ She feigned embarrassment.

Edgar peered out of his door to his neighbor’s house. ‘It’s just strange, that’s all. My friends aren’t really the type to order a…’

‘Humandroid?’ she asked with a faint smile. ‘You of all people should know we can’t help who we are.’

‘You don’t seem like the Humandroids I’ve met before,’ he said.

‘Things do evolve, Edgar,’ was Rinchi’s reply. ‘I don’t know why it takes Darwin and Moore’s law to prove this to humans. So can I come in or shall we do this out here?’

‘I guess you can come in…’ he finally said.

‘That’s a good boy. Please, carry my bag.’ She nodded at her leather Louis Vuitton bag sitting next to his door.

Edgar’s house was a throwback to early twentieth century tech start-ups. An obligatory Star Wars poster hung from the wall next to a picture of Grace Hopper in full military regalia. The entire place stunk of pizza, moldy socks, body spray deodorants and halitosis. For a moment, Rinchi even thought about turning off her olfactory senses by disabling the red and blue lingual cord under her tongue.
She decided to keep them on. Besides, it would be beneficial for her to better understand the necessary pressure levels that forced a human to excrete fear pheromones. She’d had plenty experience with sexual chemical factors; it would be helpful to see how they differed from fear pheromones.

‘Which way to your room?’ she asked.

She already knew that Edgar Cave lived here with three other manchildren intravenously linked to trust funds. He was an SV leech – the term used for a large group of Silicon Valley residents still sucking on the tech teat left behind by their wealthy grandparents and great grandparents. With trust funds and endowments aplenty, it was nearly impossible for them to get motivated to actually work. Most of them just hacked and farted around all day.

‘Upstairs, second bedroom on the left.’

Edgar was a gangly fellow with bleach white skin and bloodshot eyes. He looked as nervous as he probably felt at that very moment. Rinchi turned to him and her eyes partially dilated. She scanned his vitals, noticing an increase in his heart rate. She turned to the stairwell and made a show of taking each step. ‘This one, right?’ she asked, at the cusp of his door.

‘Yes…’

She stepped inside, squeezing around a VE rig with a matching haptic chair. If the beginning of the twenty-first century was about tinkering with global economics simply to keep the ship afloat, the end of the twenty-first century was entirely about distraction. Some humans went the pollute route, others lived most of their lives in virtual reality worlds. To be distracted was to be human.

‘I like your room, Edgar.’

Truthfully, nothing a human obsessed over interested Rinchi. From geekdom to sports to music to sex – almost everything humans did had no purpose aside from stuffing their petty lives until they died. She’d spent countless hours hearing the world’s elite explain their passions to her. Whether it was a delusional Saudi prince with a fetish for ball torture who collected rare falcons or a nondenominational nut job who had her scream bible quotes to him as she burnt his taint with a curling iron – all human obsessions were equally futile.

‘I bought that pewter statue off Ebaymazon.’ He pointed across his messy room. ‘It is from an old Japanese anime called Parasyte. The guy’s hand had a parasite living in it that was trying to kill him, but ended up working with him. The parasite was sharp and—’

Rinchi leapt forward and kissed Edgar to make him shut the fuck up.

‘Wow…’ he pushed her away. ‘I wasn’t… I’ve never…’

‘You’re a virgin?’ she asked.

‘I mean, well I got a hand job once but…’

‘Where did you get this hand job, Edgar?’ Rinchi grabbed his package. She inhaled slowly and said, ‘Tell me all about it.’

Edgar was shaking now, releasing a mixture of arousal and fear chemical factors. ‘You’re really hot,’ he sputtered.

‘Take your pants off.’ She checked his vitals again, watching the blood rushing towards his nether regions. Arousal pheromones, vasodilation, hypothalamic triggering – he was turning on the same way anything else powered on.

‘R-r-right here? I mean, sure! Yes!’ He tried to pull his pants down but his belt was too tight. ‘Sorry,’ he said, looking up at her nervously.

‘Lay down for me.’ Rinchi dropped the trench coat that had been wrapped around her waist. She walked over to her bag, which was on the floor near his open door. She closed the door and made a show of bending over so he could see her ass.

‘You have a dick!?’ he was already on the bed. ‘Wait, what the… I mean I…’

She turned to him so he could see it fully. ‘Relax Edgar. I’m neither man nor woman.’

‘Ladyboy…’ he mumbled, but he had relaxed some.

‘That’s the noun you’ve given us. However, I see myself more as the best of both worlds. There is nothing I cannot do nor simulate. There is nothing you can do that will hurt me nor is there any fantasy of yours that I cannot fulfill. Whether a male human wants to admit it or not, he really only needs a hole or something relatively hole-shaped to bust his proverbial nut. Graphic, I know, but I’m being realistic here. And if you didn’t already know, my sole purpose in life is to satisfy a human’s sickest cravings, regardless of their sexual orientation. I’ve entertained heads of state, lesbian Congresswomen, uptight princes, lonely housewives, businessmen, CEOS and CFOS at the same time, chiefs of staff and basically any combination of sexual preference or career category you can think of. I am capitalism, Edgar, I am sex.’

He didn’t say anything, but his erection hadn’t lost its steam either.

‘Let’s begin.’ Rinchi brought her bag of goodies to the side of his bed. She affixed her wolf pollute mask to her face, its polypropylene eye lenses blue, its ears slightly furry.

‘You can use pollutes?’ he asked nervously.

‘No, but I like this mask. There is something very predatory about it, something very powerful. Tell me, does it bother you in any way?’

Edgar looked at the Humandroid standing in front of him. Full-body fishnet stocking, a head shorter than him, perky breasts, a wolf mask and a penis – if his mind was capable of short-circuiting it would have done so at this point. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally said, breathing heavily.

She made a show of unzipping her bag. ‘I want you to put this in your mouth.’

‘What is it?’

‘While you are a virgin, I’m sure you’ve had simulated sex multiple times.’ She nodded at his virtual reality rig. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes…’

‘That’s a good boy. Put this in your mouth.’ She strapped her ball gag around his face and pulled it tight.

‘Mmmm mmmmm.’

‘I can’t hear you now,’ she said, pulling the strap tighter. ‘Just relax, baby, I’m going to take you to a place you’ve never been before. You do trust me, don’t you?’ She dropped her face directly over his. ‘Well, do you trust me, Edgar?’ she said in an almost pouty voice.

He nodded. A bead of sweat appeared on the side of his head.

‘Good, I want you to open your legs now.’ She waved the spreader bar at him. ‘I’m going to use this to keep your legs apart.’

His knees slowly began to open.

‘That’s a good boy.’ Rinchi set the spreader bar on the bed followed by her anal hook. Edgar began to squirm at the sight of the hook, his legs twitching against his sheets. ‘I want you to relax, okay? This will all be over soon.’

TWO∞

No sense in elaborating on yet another one of the dark places I’ve found myself in. I’m with Yeshi, peering through a Plexiglas wall, as a genetically modified nineteen-year-old crawls towards me on a shiny black floor. Perky cat ears jut out of her head, syringing the air around her feline skull. Her eye sockets have been surgically enhanced so her sclerae are as big as plums, barely large enough to contain her vampiresque pupils. A thong rests just below her long black tail, which holds a hand fan decorated with faux-watermarks. Our eyes meet like we’re in a movie.

She is manga, she is anime, she is the result of desire amplified to a gross national extent, more plastic and less ectoplasmic, transgenic, borderline pedophiliac yet somehow acceptable in this region. Diva-beast probably coughs up hairballs. Shinjuku San-chome, Nishi-Shinjuku, Higashi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku sin city, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan.

Life is a beautiful thing.

The Japanese pollution masks are efficient, light years ahead of the ones we have in the States. Kawaii-cute and form-fitting don’t even begin to describe them. The non-designer masks are made from Moso bamboo with retractable pollute dispensers and head straps that adjust themselves automatically. The head straps are filled with tiny pistons that move up and down against your temples, giving the tactile sensation of an expert head massage. Me gusta mucho.

The only thing annoying about the Japanese masks are the advertisements. Every two minutes, an ad scrolls across the polypropylene eye lenses, selling everything from kitchen appliances to life hack devices. Vibe killer is an understatement. Silence the реклама! There is no way to disable the ads; they act as a metaphor for the culture at hand. Everything is automatic and efficient in Tokyo, from their toilets to their paths to inebriation. My God is the place clean!

Of course I’m on my fave – LoathHunAyaTop. Less a chill pill and more a thrill pill. Inhale to brimful. No sense in branching out when you’re already on a tree with a hammock.

I watch half-heartedly as the genetically modified diva-beast crawls towards the screen separating her from us, swaying her money-maker left and right as Japanese salarymen bust loads into their sweat-wicking undies. Amateur night is filled with hoots and hollers; cantankerous cacerolazo. I have no idea what has happened to this country, but most things are tolerable with the right pollute, even something as seemingly pointless as this.

Inhale, exhale. An ad blazes across the mask’s lenses as diva-beast continues her approach. She stops momentarily to lick her paws, which still resemble human hands (albeit with claws). There is a small port in the Plexiglas on the patron side of the room. Twelve large bolts anchor a pair of arm-length latex gloves, allowing whoever is behind the barrier to interact with the sexually-repressed masses.

Diva-beast reaches her hand into the latex glove, motioning me forward. As she does this, she slides her other hand into the other glove. Her tail spreads the hand fan behind her body, slowly bringing it to her face to cover the lower half of her mouth. Intriguing but still, I’m not interested. One of the salarymen runs to her outstretched latex hands and quickly faints. Again – her eyes lock on me, pulsating to the beat of the dubtastic choons crackling the speakers overhead.

Seeing a woman with cat ears and a tail pretend-flirt with me from behind a thick hunk of Plexiglas is hardly arousing. Besides, I’m already well on my way to entering the place I most prefer to inhabit – the Empyrean; the unanalyzable feverish gash between ever-present and chemical conception; the blissful spot between fucked and screwed. We are what we eat and I am what I inhale. Besides, I have things I need to forget.

Yeshi squeezes my hand. Homo machina meet Homo sapiens – Meme and Yeshi por vida. One organic, the other of wiring and genius, non-biological intelligence. One intoxicated, the other unable to partake. We’ve been through so much together and we haven’t even known each other for a month. Still, I have things I need to forget.

It’s not often one goes from childbirth to Japan in less than a week.

My electronic half is wearing a Junya Watanabe pollution mask she picked up in Omotesando. Cost me a pretty yenny but it was worth it. The mask is clear, made from an epoxy resin reinforced with carbon fiber. As with all designer masks in Tokyo, it is meant to be worn as an accessory. Bring Your Own Mask (BYOM) whenever possible, kids.

I smile at Yeshi, even though it is impossible for her to see the smile through my opaque mask. With pleasantries aside, I turn back to the debauchery at hand. Diva-beast continues to beckon me forward. Another salaryman stumbles forward with the word kanpai on his lips. His mask, a blue Doreamon number, hangs off the side of his head. As he rambles forward towards the diva-beast’s outstretched hands, his mask bobs up and down in a sinister way. He reaches the woman’s latex-laden gloves and falls into them.

‘Move, Meme!’ Yeshi says. I turn to her, noticing that her pupils have dilated. She’s scanning the diva-beast from afar.

‘What?’ I take another inhale off my pollution mask. My lungs fill and a tingling sensation needles through my body.
I look up just in time to see diva-beast hook her latex fingers into the man’s mouth and eye sockets. The Japanese man screams as she picks him up with one hand. She pulls this hand back, slamming him face-first into the Plexiglas.

Thud! She does this again, splattering the glass with blood.

‘Meme!’ Yeshi practically scoops me under her arm as she merges into the crowd of men trying to exit the stuffy room. I look back over my shoulder to see diva-beast punching her fist against the Plexiglas, intent on freeing herself, her dilated eyes boring a hole through me.

Book Two is available here on Amazon. You can also get it for free by joining my reader’s group here. There is also a box set of books 1-3. This will save you money, and the books are navigable from the first page, so you can move straight into Book Two. Get the box set on Amazon.

Thanks for the support and enjoy the sample of The Feedback Loop on the following pages.

Reviews for the Feedback Loop series:

'The book is hard to express unless you have read it. Its equal parts futuristic and equals parts dramatic. The ordeal is like entering the movie world of TRON with a touch of the TV series Quantum Leap... Intelligent, imaginative.' -- classicbookreading.com

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'Entertaining And Totally Engrossing' -- Amazon UK Reader

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'As the rule states: the name of the game is maim... I enjoyed the ease of read and the story kept me going until the very end.' -- Liquid Frost, Amazon top 100 reviewer

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'A mad, insane totally awesome sci-fi story... With sharp writing and an edgy, fast-paced plot, it's easy to get lost in the game yourself. The extensive and graphic world building with The Loop should especially impress gamers for the authentic feel it gives. '  -- Amazon top 500 reviewer

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'Groundhog day, set in a video game/virtual world... Fast-paced and action-filled.' -- Amazon US Reader

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'I believe that the mark of a truly talented writer is their ability to leave you wanting the story to not end or impatiently await the next one. Harmon definitely has that ability and has now proved it in multiple genres.' -- Amazon US reader

**Note: The Feedback Loop takes place in the same world as Life as a Beautiful Thing, but thirty years earlier. There are some terms you will be familiar with, like Humandroids, but the story is completely standalone and it is less hallucinatory, and more adventure-driven than my other series.

(Sample) The Feedback Loop

Book One

Harmon Cooper

Edited by George C. Hopkins

Available on Amazon here.

Day 545

I’m afraid to die even though I know I can’t die. This fear is what drives me to kill indiscriminately, to maim as many as I can in The Loop. The day resets at midnight, regardless of whether or not Cinderella has been laid. The difference between Cinderella’s story and mine is that there are no happy endings here. There is no Prince Charming, no magic pumpkin coach to spirit me away, no light at the end of the tunnel.

There is only me, and I am royally shafted.

‘Who told you my name!?’ I scream into the face of the same button man I choked yesterday (and the day before that, and the day before that). ‘Who sent you here!?’

‘Turn… Me… Loose…!’

Morning Assassin spits digital blood into my face, baring his pearly whites. He is a gangly man, sharp-faced and always sneering, sneering like he’s in on some private joke and I’m the sucker. I slam him against the floor once more for good measure.

Keeping one hand on his neck, I stick my finger in the air to activate my inventory list. I retrieve a pair of brass knuckles, item 229, from my list. They appear instantly on my knuckles, gleaming and ready to deliver punishment.

‘I’m sick of playing this game. Tell me who sent you!’

Morning Assassin laughs as my fist connects with the bridge of his nose. His data indicates that he is an NPC, a non-player character just like all the others, a feat of artificial, game-based intelligence. He’s not real.

A second kiss with my brass knuckles makes him laugh even harder, his teeth scatter like Chiclets with my third shot.

‘Who sent you!?’ I scream to no avail.

‘Goodbye, Quantum.’

Morning Assassin’s bloodied lips open wide and the barrel of a gat pops out of his mouth.

He drills me in the face before I can roll away.

Day 546

I respawn a day later, the sound of feedback rippling inside my skull. Damn the feedback. No alarm clock wakes me; I’m up naturally at this godforsaken time, glaring at the digital sun filling my hotel room with strips of bitter light.

One must sleep, even in a virtual entertainment dreamworld like The Loop. I suppose ‘wait to respawn’ would be a better explanation for what I’ve just experienced, but I like to think of it as sleep anyway. It’s a nice way to remind myself that I’m human, that my body still exists in the real world.

Morning Assassin will be here soon. He comes every day at 8:05 – I expect nothing less from him today. There has never been a weapon in his mouth before, but he has killed me on several occasions.

I access my inventory list and select an ice pick – item 538 – that I found about a week ago.

My list is the only way to keep track of how long I’ve been stuck in The Loop. Thus far, there are 544 items in my list. I add the deck of Luckies sitting on the nightstand to tally for yesterday’s unexpected and sudden death. Now there are 545 items. I’ll find something later today to mark day 546.

It’s the only way to keep track of how long I’ve been imprisoned.

8.05 AM. Morning Assassin smashes through the window, just as he has done the last 545 days in a row. I’m behind him in a heartbeat, driving the ice pick into his NPC skull He jerks once, twitches and falls; I’m unable for the 546th time to get information out of him. I can try again tomorrow morning.

My Loop-life is planned to a T. Once I kill the assassin, a crow flies by the window over my bed. It lands on the ledge outside the window, pecks its filthy beak against the glass. A dark cloud passes in front of the sun, ready to add downcast rain to the shit-stained streets outside the hotel. From there it’s to the dresser.

Dressing in the Loop is a snap; it’s automatic. In the blink of an eye, I’m in a pair of black boots with loosened laces, stompers with steel toes. My mirror tells me that my hair is already slicked back, my skin almost translucent, my eyes dark, lifeless, dull, sorrowful, frosted. I can change any number of the things through my attributes menu, from my hair color to my eye color to my size and my girth. This has no effect on my stats.

I decide to go with a hat for today, selecting it from a drop down menu that appears in the air before me. The benefits of a virtual entertainment dreamworld needn’t be explained here – everything is accessible at my fingertips aside from freedom… aside from a way to log out of The Loop.

I chose a black military cap, tight, with a short brim. My blond hair grows out from underneath, styling itself. It isn’t hard to look good in The Loop.

I kick open my door, just in case there’s someone in the hallway waiting to ambush me. While the happenings around me are always the same, sometimes there is a surprise or two, which leaves me to believe that something is watching me, toying with me, cynically monitoring my cyclical existence. Possibly the NVA Seed, but I’ve long since given up my search for the world’s puppet master.

The lights in the narrow hallway flicker.

Once, twice, three times, just like they always do. They stay off for twenty seconds and then come back on. Downstairs, something thuds and bangs; the next tag-team of palookas is here. A quick scroll through my inventory list and I decide to wing it this time.

There’s nothing like a little hand-to-hand combat to jump-start my day.

~*~

Nonstop kicks. I arrive downstairs and reflect that five hundred and forty-six days is a long time to fight the same NPC thugs every morning. My avatar leaps into slow-motion as six John Does rush me all at once. My movement through the air is fluid, calculated, enhanced by my advanced abilities bar.

I’m good, dammit.

Think The Matrix meets Bruce Lee plus The Force if it helps to understand my capabilities in this VE dreamworld. Being in The Loop has its advantages, including the ability to break the laws of gravity and to flip the bird at the space-time continuum – at least until my advanced abilities bar depletes.

I’m in the air above the six assassins, my feet connecting with their skulls, volleying off one and thudding into the next. Kick-kick-kick go the feet and I don’t even need an ice pick to take these NPCs goons out because they are much weaker than Morning Assassin– much weaker. I drop down behind the last of the six, cracking his neck backwards over my shoulder as he cries out, ‘Gor blimey!’

I turn to them and retrieve the .500 Magnum from my inventory list, item 466. Six blasts from the hand-howitzer later and someone better call the hotel’s janitor. Smoking barrel, splattered bodies. One glance across the hotel lobby and I spot the NPC doorman cowering behind a potted plant.

‘Morning Jim,’ I say. ‘Sorry about the mess.’

‘Good morning, Mr. Hughes. It’s quite all right.’

Jim stands slowly, straightening the front of his uniform. The dead look in his eyes indicate that he is playacting, that he is responding in an Non Player Character way to the violence he has just witnessed. What I wouldn’t give to see some true human emotion, rather than the stereotypical, standardized response hacked up by an advanced algorithm, some regurgitated feeling, bird-vomited from one NPC to another.

‘Please, call me Quantum,’ I tell him for the umpteenth time. ‘Are there any messages for me?’

There have never been any messages for me, but I always check anyway. After all, it’s better to have hope in a hopeless place than to be hopeless in a hopeless place. Or something like that.

Trying to cajole, threaten, or torture information out of Jim has proven to be relatively fruitless. I generally leave him alone these days, greeting him before leaving in the morning and saying goodnight if I’m lucky enough to return in the evening. Sometimes I kill him just for the hell of it.

‘No messages, sir,’ he says. He wipes beads of sweat from his forehead to the front of his pants, the sweating swine. I should do something about him…

I’m nearly out the door when Doorman Jim calls my name. ‘Mr. Hughes, I mean Mr. Quantum! There is one message, sir!’

‘A message?’ I turn to him. ‘Transfer it to my inventory.’

The message appears in my inventory list, item number 546. I access it and read it twice.

Impossible.

‘What is it, Mr. Hughes?’

‘Please, call me Quantum.’

‘What is it, Mr. Quantum?’

I retrieve the S&W .500 from my list and shoot him in the neck.

KA-BLAM!

‘My apologies, Jim.’

~*~

Violence is rewarded, or should I say, was rewarded in The Loop.

Doorman Jim is merely a daily causality in The Loop, a virtual entertainment dreamworld that used to grade a person on how many people they killed that day. The higher your kill count, the higher you moved up on the Hunter List.

I was the top hunter the day The Loop began repeating itself, hence the reason everyone is after me. This is what makes me both anxious and excited to see a message from an actual person; or from whom I assume is an actual person. NPCs don’t normally send messages. I read the message for the fifth time:

Quantum,

I’ve returned for you. Meet me in Devil’s Alley as soon as you receive this.

Frances Euphoria

‘Frances Euphoria?’ I savor the name a few times, realizing that it’s likely a trap.

It can’t be a real person contacting me. Real people don’t exist in The Loop, haven’t for nearly two years. Some group of randomly-generated NPCs is out to get me. The thought of this makes me smile; at least it won’t be a boring day.

One glance at the street confirms that it is dreary outside, as is every day in The Loop. The dreamworld was developed to cater to the Cyber Noir crowd, a niche market for those who like grit and tech, extreme violence, dark corners, sleuth-work, nineteen fifties styling with futuristic weapons. Cyber Noir was a subgenre that took off in the 2040s, at a time when Humandroid androids were replacing the workforce and governments were incorporating. Virtual entertainment dreamworlds, created through neuronal algorithms by the Proxima Company, became a swell way to escape, and I would still think they were a swell way to escape if I could find a swell way to escape this one.

The wind picks up, bouncing a tin can down the street. I don’t even need to check the time. 8:17 AM, the minute of the tin can. It always stops directly in front of a vandalized trashcan, spins twice, settles.

Of course, I’ve tried a variety of different exit points from the hotel. I’ve leapt from rooftop to rooftop, sat and had coffee, slept in (after killing the morning assassin), and even gone room to room, trying to see if there were any clues that would free me from The Loop.

What I’ve discovered is this – every way out of my hotel has its own pre-determined history. If I go to the roof, lightning cracks in the sky above, connecting with an antenna on a building in the distance causing a beautiful spark. If I go room to room, I encounter a man snoring as a hooker in a garter belt steals his money. Both are NPCs, and I’ve killed them dozens of times in a variety of colorful ways.

If I have a cup of Joe and some pancakes courtesy of my main squeeze Dolly, a chef runs out of the hotel’s kitchen at exactly 8:23 with a butcher knife trying to slice and dice me. (His meat cleaver marks day 123 in my inventory – it’s great for hacking). If I sleep in, a different morning assassin comes at 9:29. If I sleep in past that, another one comes at 10:34.

And so on.

There is no escape from the repetitiveness of The Loop. This is why the message intrigues me so – it is a true break from the endlessly recurring nature of my Loop-life.

~*~

Reading the message for the seventh time doesn’t give me any more clues regarding its origin.

And why does the person named Frances say I’ve returned for you? The only people that care about my condition are the ones keeping me alive in the real world; at least I assume there’s someone keeping me alive up there. For all I know I may be nothing more than an imprint of consciousness, a ball of neuronal echoes that has outlived my human body.

My dreams say otherwise.

Almost every night I dream that someone is waking me; that someone is tending to me and taking care of me. If only this were true. If only The Loop was as forgiving as my dreams. Still, my dreams are equally suffocating. I can’t wake up from them, no matter how hard I urge myself, no matter how hard I push myself forward in hopes of tearing from the virtual dream ether.

No matter how hard.

I raise my hand to hail a taxi. There are always taxis in The Loop, all sensuous curves and gaudy chopped and channeled black-and-yellow sheet metal, the cabs you’d see cruising the streets of 1940s New York City if R. Crumb had designed their taxis – except these taxis hover, just like the aeros vehicles in the real world.

A taxi always stops if you raise your hand in The Loop. They don’t have preprogrammed histories like most of the other things that occur during my day. They only come when I want them to come. Of course, there are more interesting ways to travel in The Loop. If I wanted, I could pull an NPC driver out of their car, kill them, and take the car, but it’s generally less hassle to travel peacefully. Besides, I’d like to make it to Devil’s Alley in one piece.

A taxi lowers to the ground, its engine kicking and thumping. I get in and the driver turns to me. A huge grin nearly splits his phizog; a grimy bowler is jauntily cocked over one eye. ‘Where to, buddy?’ He smells like motor oil and tuna fish sandwiches.

‘To the bowels of the city, Mac,’ I say. ‘And don’t spare the horses.’

‘Devil’s Alley, eh? You got it.’

The engine coughs and sputters, catches, and blows fumes as we lift into the air. It doesn’t need to cough and sputter and blow fumes, but everything here is designed to look old and beat up, scratched and dented, ripped and torn, used, abused, twisted, cracked and crazed. Blemished, pockmarked, and polluted – the attributive adjectives of The Loop are endless. One glance at the seat’s worn upholstery confirms this.

‘What’s buzzin’, cousin?’ the driver asks as he speeds along, weaving around other vehicles.

‘You jivin’ me, man?’

Sometimes I don’t know if the NPC’s are screwing with me or if they really don’t know that I’ve been living the same day for nearly two years. I think Morning Assassin gets it, but the others…

‘Jivin’? What choo mean, jivin’?’ he coughs, bangs his fist against his chest. The rain picks up and he flicks on his little windshield wipers; the digital water hits the windshield only to be whipped off by tiny wipers. There’s something beautiful about it, but I’m too distracted by the driver’s blabbering to really appreciate it.

‘Hey, kid, I’m talking to you. What do you mean?’

‘I mean I live the same day every damn day. Why are we still talking?’

‘If you want another driver I can dump you out here…’ He dips into a lower airlane.

I access my inventory list and snag item number 399 – a Taser. I press the button on the grip and electricity sparks and crackles in the back seat, a counterpoint to the lightning outside.

‘Jesus!’ the driver says, nearly swerving into another aeros in the opposite airlane.

‘Goose it it and can the chatter, Jack! And keep your eyes on the skylane you son of a bitch.’

‘All right, mister, keep your hair on – Sheesh!’

I enjoy the rest of the trip to Devil’s Alley in relative silence. Once we’ve landed, I transfer credit to the driver, who is still angry I threatened him. Credit is used for most transactions in The Loop and I have an unlimited supply, pennies from heaven. No matter how much I spend, my account resets itself to the maximum amount every morning. Too bad there isn’t anything I want to buy.

Devil’s Alley is a big place, but I’m pretty sure Frances Euphoria will want to meet me at Barfly’s, the most run-down, seediest, grimiest, blood-and-sawdust-on-the-floor gin joint The Loop has to offer. As I move deeper into the slum, NPCs gravitate towards me, clad in trench coats and fedoras, hiding their faces behind dark umbrellas. A streetwalker in a shiny red bomber jacket spins her umbrella behind her head like a tragic Madame Butterfly. A tranny diddles his ding-a-ling on the fire escape overlooking the entrance to the alley, while a cat hisses and a giant rat scurries through a mound of trash. Muscled kookies mill about shadowed doorways, cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

I step into one of the alleys, over an NPC fiend shivering in the cold rain. A hand reaches out and latches onto my ankle.

‘Hey brother…’ the fiend cackles. ‘Can you spare some cred?’

I transfer him half of everything I have. ‘That should be enough to buy some Riotous.’

The lights of the alley paint harshly contrasting diagonal stripes across his sallow, grimy face as he fumbles in his pocket. ‘You mocking me, smart guy?’ he asks, pulling a switchblade. He twists the blade in the air like a drunken conductor. ‘You think you’re better’n me, think you can just throw me cred like I’m some charity case!?’

The fiends in The Loop are vicious, unpredictable rat-bastards, a class of downgraded guttersnipes, slumdog tramps addicted to a drug known as Riotous. I press my finger into the air, accessing my inventory list. A drop-down menu appears in front of me; the bum freezes as I make my selection. Day 171’s item will do the trick nicely. A sledge hammer appears in my hands and I swing it into his chest like I’m teeing off at the Apple Grove. He slams into the wall with a satisfying crunch of bone and cartilage, and blows pixelated blood out of his mouth and nose.

‘Hey! You can’t do that!’ An even grungier fiend is on his feet, and I’m behind him before he can reach me. One swing of the sledge and he too Humpty-Dumptys into the muck and filth of the alley.

~*~

Barfly’s sign buzzes and flickers at the end of the alley, a neon floozie in a Martini glass, endlessly scissoring her legs, electric bubbles sequentially popping above her head. People move through the shadows leading up to the place, speaking in whispers behind cupped hands, breathing in each other’s cigarette smoke. Grit for breakfast, a kick in the teeth for lunch, home before dinner in a coffin carried by skeletal pallbearers, a .38 slug through your heart – welcome to my life. I’ve spent endless dismal days squatting in this dive, drinking to the point of faux-ossification and then fighting my way across The Loop, only to wake up back in the flophouse the following morning as if it had all been a dream. Being bored is an understatement.

‘Quantum.’ The doorman claps his arm across my shoulders. He is a chiseled guy, his face angular and rough like the Old Man of The Mountain’s used to be, before it collapsed. This guy would give the Old Man a run for his money in the rustic beezer department. Trust me, I know – I’ve dealt with Croc several times after things got dicey at Barfly’s.

‘I’ll behave,’ I say instead of hello.

‘You always do,’ he says with a flinty glint in his eye.

Maybe I’m spooked; maybe I’ve lived the same day so many times that there are surely things I haven’t noticed in the 545 previous iterations. It kind of makes me wonder how much I missed when the days weren’t on repeat, when The Loop (the name I’ve given it) was nothing more than the game-slash-entertainment dreamworld known as Cyber Noir.

‘You waitin’ on someone? Chippy, maybe?’ Croc asks, chewing on a toothpick.

‘You can tell? Some NPC you are…’

‘NPC?’

Non Player Characters never refer to themselves as NPCs, which only makes this place more maddening. Sometimes I think I’m the crazy one… sometimes.

‘Frail named Frances Euphoria. She here??’ I ask. A quick scan across the bar tells me the usual suspects are present – drunks and divas, lounge lizards and booze hounds, gamblers, grifters and bunco artists – no matter what the clock reads. Getting soused is the name of the game.

‘Frances Euphoria...’

‘Well, Croc?’

‘Don’t know the broad. Pull up a pew and maybe she’ll show. You never know, Daddy-O.’

The patience flows out of his face and I oblige – no sense in riling this one up unnecessarily. I sit at the same barstool I always sit at, on the far left hand side of the bar, facing the door so I can see who comes in. One can only have a pool cue upside the noggin but so many times before one realizes that it may be time to change seats.

Cid the bartender is a grizzled old bastard in a white shirt, black bow tie, and none-too-clean apron, with a sawed off, lead-loaded baseball bat behind the bar. He pulls me a pint in a none-too-clean mug and slides it to me. I catch it before it sails off the end, and the exquisitely rendered foam slops over my hand. I savor the first swallow. It’s cold-ish, and tastes sort of beer-ish, and if I pour enough down my piehole it’ll get me kind of drunk-ish.

It ain’t great, but it’ll do.

I nod my thanks, and Cid winks in return. His mono-brow dances like a caterpillar on a hot plate.

A dame walks in, and she’s the cat’s meow – stacked like pancakes, with cleavage down to there and gams up to here, and a tight black dress that looks like it came out of a spray can. Her hair is devil red, her skin whiter than the finest blow, and the triangular icon over her head is blue sky blue, cornflower blue, blue the color of life blue. She’s an actual person, not an NPC, and I’m not going to lie – I’m simply mesmerized by the color. Almost two years…

‘Frances Euphoria?’ I wipe the beer foam off my lips.

‘Three Kings Park, seven o’clock tomorrow night.’

She turns slightly and she’s all of a sudden sporting a Rambo knife with a wicked saw tooth spine. I’ve got one just like it – item number 4 in my inventory. She strikes like a cobra and slams the blade into my chest.

I’m dead before my pint hits the floor.

To kill is to be part of The Loop – the name of the game is maim.

While trapped in The Loop, a virtual entertainment dreamworld, Quantum Hughes struggles to free himself from a glitch that forces him to re-live the same day over and over. Everything changes after he receives a mysterious message from a woman named Frances Euphoria, the first human player he has made contact with in years.

With time running out, will Quantum break free from his digital coma before he's captured or killed?

The thin line between dream and reality is pixilated.

The Feedback Loop is available here on Amazon. Check it out and thanks for the support!

Table of Contents

ZERO∞

ONE∞

TWO∞

THREE∞

FOUR∞

FIVE∞

SIX∞

SEVEN∞

EIGHT∞

NINE∞

TEN∞

ELEVEN∞

TWELVE∞

THIRTEEN∞

FOURTEEN∞

FIFTEEN∞

SIXTEEN∞

SEVENTEEN∞

EIGHTEEN∞

NINETEEN∞

TWENTY ∞

TWENTY-ONE∞

TWENTY-TWO∞

TWENTY-THREE∞

TWENTY-FOUR∞

TWENTY-FIVE∞

TWENTY-SIX∞

TWENTY-SEVEN∞

TWENTY-EIGHT∞

TWENTY-NINE∞

THIRTY ∞

THIRTY-ONE∞

THIRTY-TWO∞

THIRTY-THREE∞

THIRTY-FOUR∞

THIRTY-FIVE∞

THIRTY-SIX∞

THIRTY-SEVEN∞

THIRTY-EIGHT∞

THIRTY-NINE∞

FORTY ∞

FORTY-ONE∞

Back of the Book Shit

Life is a Beautiful Thing (Book Two)

(Sample) The Feedback Loop

Table of Contents

[1] Not my next book, but it is a good premise…

Table of Contents

ZERO∞

ONE∞

TWO∞

THREE∞

FOUR∞

FIVE∞

SIX∞

SEVEN∞

EIGHT∞

NINE∞

TEN∞

ELEVEN∞

TWELVE∞

THIRTEEN∞

FOURTEEN∞

FIFTEEN∞

SIXTEEN∞

SEVENTEEN∞

EIGHTEEN∞

NINETEEN∞

TWENTY ∞

TWENTY-ONE∞

TWENTY-TWO∞

TWENTY-THREE∞

TWENTY-FOUR∞

TWENTY-FIVE∞

TWENTY-SIX∞

TWENTY-SEVEN∞

TWENTY-EIGHT∞

TWENTY-NINE∞

THIRTY ∞

THIRTY-ONE∞

THIRTY-TWO∞

THIRTY-THREE∞

THIRTY-FOUR∞

THIRTY-FIVE∞

THIRTY-SIX∞

THIRTY-SEVEN∞

THIRTY-EIGHT∞

THIRTY-NINE∞

FORTY ∞

FORTY-ONE∞

Back of the Book Shit

Life is a Beautiful Thing (Book Two)

(Sample) The Feedback Loop

Table of Contents