A Broken Heart in Hell

The Death and Rebirth of Rick Pensky

 

T

he Wicked Witch of the West manually kicked them out of the Rainbow Bridge Please Fund Me site, and Rick found himself standing next to Mike in his bed, with his gravity vacuum diaper sucking away, and the good person that was Mike under that mountain of socially prescribed sloth shone through in word, “Rick, Bro, I’m so sorry.”

Rick intoned hollowly, “Can you get me in there before they kill her?”

“It will take me a couple hours.  I’ve been in and out of this site.  Any friction that might conflict with upload, once a patient has agreed—”

“Motherfucker, she’s a child!  Agree to what!” roared Rick.

Mike began to cry and started whining, “I knew it was bullshit, Bro.  I just want to be gone—it was nice to believe I’d be on a generation ship with Brill Yates.  Besides, I can’t use my body anymore and they tell you about how many African kids you can save with your organs being harvested to be reparations for the slavery—it made me feel like a little more than whale shit.”

“Motherfucker, how long!” snarled Rick, as his iron fingers squeezed into and through Mike’s massive arm and found bone, which began to bend and give and hurt.

Mike blubbered, “She is already sedated.  They are pressurizing the room, drawing down the temp and sending in the harvesting team.  They will not pull the plug until she is denuded of all internal organs, and her eyes—her skin will be used for sickle cell research…  Rick, buddy, she’s gone in ten minutes.  If you had a jet pack you couldn’t get there in time.”

Rick was streaming tears, red with rage and racked with silent sobs.

After a time, he looked coolly at Mike, and Mike knew fear, fear born of seeing a brokenhearted man, a super sweet guy—remaster his shattered self with a snarl, and a roll of his shoulders and wrists.  Mike thought to himself, Did I just see my only friend die inside and come back as a demon?

“What can I do, Rick?”

Rick stood, ominous in his brown shoe polish and intoned, “Who facilitates this?”

“The medical corporations, owned by the banks and the oil sheiks, the billionaires, the infotech moguls.”

Rick hissed, “How do they keep us inside, force our loved ones into hospitals, send lonely little girls across imaginary bullshit bridges—how do they do that?”

Mike thought out loud, running through the enemies list of humanity, or what was left of it as it teetered into oblivion, “Cops, safety officers, medical warrants—that means doctors—courts, the National Guard, all the intelligence agencies—its millions of willing executioners, Bro.”

Rick steeled, and his skin was less disturbed by the raised veins under his shoe polish tan.  His voice was like ice, “I don’t want your credit.  I’ve got today, maybe tomorrow.  Make me a cop, Mike.  Find me a fucking PIG my height and weight—if they aren’t all piles of blubber now, and get me his address.  A black cop.  The shoe polish might as well stay on.”

Mike whined, “Okay, Rick.  I need about an hour.  I’ve got some fried chicken on the way in ten minutes.  You can get into your role while I pick you out a live identity.  Bro, you kill this dude and you’re him, alright.  If you don’t mind, I’ll patch in through his body cam.  Fuck Rainbow Bridge!  We’re going to burn this bitch down.”

Rick looked straight into the screen as the roll call of potential live identities scrolled by and he pointed at a SWAT leader, about half his age, “Fuck yeah, Carl Weathers from the Predator movie.  That’s me, get me his file.”

Rick then absently handled Care Bear, picking him up, as his eyes and sinuses drained their last drops and the bear spoke in Dandelion’s voice, “Hello, I know who!”

“What,” asked Rick, “am I going insane?”

Mike blubbered, “Bro, you been nuts since 2021 as far as I can tell.  That teddy bear is part of the Cuddle Huddle series.  He recorded both of you, an interactive media companion.”

Rick looked amazed at the pink teddy bear he had so lovingly decked out after Mike had bought him for Dandelion and muttered, “Her voice, her words, at least some of them, some of her…”

Mike felt a fire light deep inside of his gelatinous chest as he watched in wonder at his elderly friend—the guy that once bathed him in return for online anonymity in his endless quest to stay free of medicine and government—now turned on those two vast monstrosities like some ancient hero shaking his fist at the gods and sharpening his sword.

Well, Mike mused to himself, a hero who fights gods and monsters should have a terrible, swift sword.

“Rick, fuck Rainbow Bridge and fuck this world—I’m in until they send a drone through that window—I’m your eye in the sky!”

And Mike’s fingers twitched as fast as his fat-fueled mind could send the impulses.  The logistics of the Medical Social Safe Space streamed by on the screen, mesmerizing the savage bodybuilder standing with the teddy bear as the full array of military and law enforcement and medical hardware scrolled ominously down and across the screen on Mike’s furious tour of the soul-eating Machine that had once been a thing called America, a supposed home of the free and land of the brave—now a thing that ate children like a fiend in its echoing cave.

Care the Bear

 

July 4, 4:20 P.M. EST
Children’s Hospital Pittsburgh

 

D

andelion Machi had lain alone in this bed all day since the nice little man brought her medicine and lime Jello.  Before long the not-so-nice lady, the big one, would be along with her soup.  It was always like that, Jello and soup.  It was so much nicer back before her parents went over Rainbow Bridge.

Mom and Dad used to argue with the hospital ladies all the time until one of them could be suited up safely and be let in to see her.  Since Dandelion had ARDS—the kid’s version she called it—she couldn’t get hugs or kisses or even her hand held, except by a gloved hand.  It had been hard for Dandelion to understand that she was so dangerous to adults, and at the same time, that they could make her sick somehow when she was already sick.

“Grownups,” as Uncle Rick had often told her, simply “sucked,” and were impossible to figure out.  This was an interesting thing to hear from the most grownup of grownups, for nobody Dandelion had ever met was older than Uncle Rick.

She well remembered Uncle Rick sneaking out of grownup hide-and-go-seek with the police and ARDS-chasers from the government to come take her for secret walks by night, on his big shoulders, where no one could see, not the ARDS-chasers, not nobody!  He would tell her about raccoons, possums, rabbits, squirrels, foxes and owls.  They would even play soccer in the yard by night, once even made a snowman.

Then she had got the ARDS, which the mean lady said, over, and over again, was short for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.  Since Mom and Dad had gone over Rainbow Bridge without her she was so sad.  The nice little man with the food was not allowed to talk to her and smiled a lot to make up for it.  He was a little tan man in a blue uniform.  He had tried to speak with her but his English was really hard to understand and then the mean nurse lady, almost the same color as her white uniform, had chased him off.  That lady, from behind her hawk-like nose, down which she peered like a monster, kept telling her that the other lady, the one in the suit who looked like a boy, would be back to sign the Rainbow Bridge release and then she could leave and be with Mom and Dad.

With the ARDS she was not allowed to leave except by Rainbow Bridge.  This confused her, because the little kids with the nice skin and the dark eyes, who weren’t all pale and freckled and pasty like her—with her sick eyes like a winter sky—they would sneak in for visits and play with her and tell her about the new parents they were getting from the hospital.  They had somehow recovered from the ARDS.  It seemed that she was especially sick.  The little girls felt so bad for her, that they even lied and told her how pretty she was even though she was almost the color of the bed sheets and felt ugly amongst them as they smiled and giggled and brought her their extra chocolate milk.  They seemed genuinely sad about Dandelion not being allowed to leave or have new parents.

“I wonder when you guys will sneak out again and come see me?  Or did you get your new parents already?”

As if the TV was listening to her—not that she had any idea why it was called a TV, though it seemed to have a lot of ideas about her—it turned on and the great Rainbow Bridge opened before her on the screen, the kind mommy voice of the unseen speaker announcing, “Dandelion, you have a visitor.”

The screen spiraled into a rainbow swirl and opened up like a flower and there was… a teddy bear.  This was no ordinary teddy bear.  It wore overalls, like the overalls that Uncle Rick had made for her from one of his warm shirts.  It had little black buckle shoes like the shoes that Uncle Rick had brought her from grownup hide-and-go-seek ARDS-chasers.  The bear was, of course, pink and had a fancy hat like Uncle Rick wore as a disguise one time, with a green Molly feather in it—Molly the hero parakeet who tricked ARDS-chasers!  And, to identify the messenger for sure—because you had to sneak to be near the ones who loved you in hospitals and among grownups in general—the bear had a dream catcher made by Uncle Rick’s own caring hand.  For Uncle Rick brought a dream catcher for Dandelion every time he had come to visit, for all of her eight years of life.  This made her smile and brought back the memory of Uncle Rick making her a dream catcher out of dandelions, despite the fact that it was against the law to go on the grass at the park without a mask—but Uncle Rick didn’t care about laws.  He just cared about Dandelion!

The teddy bear then spoke, spoke in that voice equal to three dads, like the voice of a police that was not a mean ARDS-chaser, that was not a lock-you-up-until-you-are-better safe spacer, a voice that was like an unstoppable machine, the voice that always came back for her—the voice of Uncle Rick:

“Hello, Dandelion!”

“Hello, I know who!” answered the little girl, suddenly alive with color.

Uncle Rick’s voice came from the moving mouth of the bear, “That’s right, Dandelion, I’m the Bear that Cares.  Call me Care Bear!”

“Oh, Care Bear, thanks for visiting me.  It would be so nice to have a hug.”

“One day, Dandelion, we will have a hug!”

“Oh, Uncle Rick I miss you!”

The bear then shook and spoke, “Care Bear, I am Care Bear!  I love you, Dandelion!  I will be there.”

“Really?” she said, amazed.  “They told me that Mom and Dad are waiting at Rainbow Bridge.  But they didn’t say anything about you, Uncle Rick—I mean Care Bear.”

“Uncle Rick?” came the voice of the mean nurse lady with the eagle nose as Dandelion felt a gloved hand pinch her thigh through the bed sheet and saw the face shield of the mean lady fog in anger and then her non-pinching gloved hand reached for the remote stem.  Dandelion snatched her TV controller back and let it drop off the right side of her bed as the mean nurse lady glared into the TV screen and began touching the screen itself, bringing up various images of Rainbow Bridge officials, doctors, police and barked in her shrill voice, “The Rainbow Bridge account of Dandelion Machi has been hacked by an ARDS-denier named Rick.  Alert Safety Officer on duty.”

The Rainbow Bridge screen was now replaced with the heads of these terrible grownups as the mean lady responded to the boy-looking lady in the suit who worked for Rainbow Bridge, “Yes, Facilitator Landry, I am initiating sedation while downloading authorization.”

The lady then pressed the screen and it was filled with the face of a triple-masked man who spoke clearly, “The harvesting team will be bed-side in twelve minutes.  Initiate pressure-lock and reduce temperature.”

Dandelion did not understand these words.  But the adults who ganged-up to chase Care Bear and Uncle Rick’s voice from the TV were mean and that made being little, ARDSed-up and alone all the more unbearable…

The pressure in the back of her left hand brought Rainbow Bridge leaping into view all around as the rushing of cozy sleep waters came to her on her lily pad as she floated up and over Rainbow Bridge—and there, across the way stood Mom and Dad, their arms wide open, both dressed up in the wedding dress and tuxedo they had been married in long before Dandelion came along…

Rainbow Bridge

 

What the Fuck Is It?

 

“Rick,” blubbered Mike, “please, come ‘ere and sit down in your chair and look at the monitor.  This is what I’ve been looking for to release me from this earthly prison.  I’m sure it’s not for you.  But with my social justice score and my credit rating, and my weight and health handicaps, I’m a prime candidate.  And—check this shit out, Brother—since I have a 157 IQ, 27 points over the minimum requirement to gain a berth in the Counsel of Angels alongside Brill Yates himself—who has already achieved pre-mortem upload, there is no need for me to stay on this dying planet.” 

Rick could hardly believe his ears even as his eyes took in the graphic presentation of the sick and dying, the depressed and the brilliant, the environmentalists and the idealists, reaching out from their medical beds, intubators, incubators, playpens, lonely safe spaces, and even professional athletes running and biking and swimming and diving and jumping into a spherical and welcoming spinning database which was then cast into orbit, where the minds would be curated as a base collective, serving the earthbound living, advising and guiding people still damned within their wretched and disease-ridden bodies… and, and, with sublime and Godly fanfare, each hundred morally-inferior high-IQ data-based minds, along with the morally-superior souls of low-IQ minds are gathered each in a folding chrysalis of cosmic hope, wrapped in the solar sails and launched towards the distant planets and even the stars!

Rick wanted to vomit.  This had “scam” stamped all over it.  He’s sure that his long dead friend Jim would have been able to articulate why this was bullshit.  But that asshole died in hobo infamy long ago and had left Rick alone, well, he did have Mike, to deal with this messed up world.

He wanted to object.  He turned to Mike and saw an unusually vibrant glow on his face, a wonder in his eyes, aching hope in his bedridden soul, and knew that the most he could do was ruin this moment for his last remaining friend.

The screen before them expanded inward, rosy clouds of stardust gathered to embrace the teeming and suffering billions confined to safe spaces and ghetto places and wastelands across the world, as the face of Brill Yates smiled serenely as a tiny sphere at the bottom right of the screen.  Expanding bubbles of smiling children rose from the cities of the world, Africans delivered from starvation and beamed up into orbit from the locust-plagued Sahara, Amazonian children floated into orbit from the charred and smoking ruins of their great forest, home to one last, final tree, Russian women embraced the orbital light as their husbands stopping beating them with empty vodka bottles, Chinese soldiers laid down their weapons to grasp bubbles of hope that bore them into orbit, dull-faced Christians closed their bibles for good and embraced the light as it beamed them up into welcoming, pink-hued Eternity…

Mike was sold.

Rick had a need for diplomacy.  Mike was done, cooked, duped, ripped off, ruined and damned to remote euthanasia.

“Mike, what can I do for you, buddy?”

Mike looked at him with happiness in his eyes for the first time since he had known him, when their drug dealer, who supplied Rick with weed and Mike with coke, opiates, pharmaceuticals, and psychedelics as well as weed, had hooked them up as a mutual favor.  Back then Mike was getting too fat to get up out of bed and needed a rehab coach and helper and Rick needed an underground connection to the economy and the internet.  On that occasion Mike had smiled once, but not like this.

“Rick, that is so cool. I almost want to cry.  I was so afraid that you were going to judge me and yell at me and tell me what a fat piece of shit I was.  I was just going to have an uplink drone sent over, which would have basically cleaned me out, nothing left for you.  So, if you could dose me with the syntech and insert the uplink feed into my neuro-net and make sure it halos evenly, I’d really appreciate it.  After dinner though!  I have some fried chicken being delivered—stay for an early dinner, buddy?”

“Sure, Mike, sure.”

Mike smiled and began keying in his dinner order by twitching his fingers and activating the leads over an imaginary keyboard and asked, “Rick, what can I do for you?  I set up a crypto-credit debit account for you—you’re already in.  It should be enough to feed you and get you transit for the next two years.”

Rick was smitten with gratitude, “So you remembered why I’m staying alive, why I treat this old body like a prize machine?”

Mike answered, “The last we checked, Dandelion had two years left on her prognosis, and her parents are both passed from the Vid now—at least that’s how its recorded, though I think the numbers have been manipulated all out of proportion.”

“She was in a diabetic coma and he overdosed,” Rick said.  “But they had both had the cold, or at least a positive test… basically murdered by the medical system.”

Rick took out the bear with the overalls and fedora and said, “I tried to deliver this today to Children’s Hospital and they tried to arrest me.  Could I get it to her, at least on video?  Could you patch me in some way to talk to her?  That little girl is all alone, Mike.  I have to do something!”

Mike

 

July 4, 2041, 1:41 P.M. EST

 

R

ick had maintained his health, his drive and his privacy—a thing that was now virtually against the law—through Mike, his interface.  In the 1980s and 90s, when he was a young man banging steroids and strippers with a hard-on you could cut diamonds with, bulked out to 250 pounds and doing flies with 150-pound dumbbells, he had had to break the law then to get his juice.  Then, after getting involved in natural medicine and longevity fitness, getting raided by the fucking feds and then having to interact economically with a world that wanted you to be like Mike—well, that meant you needed Mike…

The towering office building and apartment complex had a pleasing view of the mighty Ohio River.  Only two other pedestrians in safewear [known in a previous age as a hazmat suit] were out and about.

What day of the week was it?  He could not remember.

Days didn’t mean much anymore—it was all dates and times, every day bleeding into the other as life droned on one isolated soul at a time under the grey, electric-spangled sky.

A cop, a University Hospital cop, hummed by in his electric car down the deserted street.  PIGs had always pissed him off, hassling him since he was thirteen years old in Washington, PA, arresting him in Las Vegas, messing with him his entire life, citing him for starting his truck in his driveway twenty years ago now, and grilling him every time they saw his pasty face on any street in any town in America he had been to, constantly up his ass about not wearing a mask when he was alone in public.

PIGs pissed him off so much!

But, as usual, when he was in brownface, disguised as an African American, and dressed like a Modern Reform Muslim in fitted hat and masculine hijab, the PIGs just glanced at him and kept going, looking for the next Native American paleface they could hassle.

So, on impulse, old Rick stopped and leveled the middle finger at the PIG, pale and fat in his rolling social distance observation post, and shouted in the most socially acceptable dialect, “Yo numba one muvafucka!”

Not only did the cop not stop, but he sped up, ramping that gay golf cart up to its maximum speed of 30 miles per hour.

Rick remembered with a pang the gas rationing, and then the government limitation on internal combustion engines to military, law enforcement and trucking that began with the Sino-African Crisis in 2030.  It had been over a decade since a regular American could drive a petrol-based car.

Up he walked to the lobby entrance and hit the buzzer with the back of his hand, cagey and careful not to apply his fingertips and the betraying fingerprints to any visual reader, and keyed in Mike’s address, 723, with a knuckle.

Mike’s massively obese visage, pale and blotchy, appeared on the monitor, asking, “Can I help you?”

Rick gave the password, “Food delivery from Hip Hop Hillel.”

Mike’s fat face, recognizing Rick’s voice and always a fan of Rick’s many artful disguises, split into a gelatinous grin and the door opened and his gurgle of a voice drawled, “Allahu Akbar, bring me a Butterfinger bar!”

Rick never took the elevator, conscious that these were used for netting thought crooks, social distance violators and disease deniers.

Up the stairs he climbed to the seventh floor and out the metal door and down the hall to room 724.

His presence before the door triggered the mirror-image of on the video monitor above the door to come to life and he held up his middle-finger, the visual code that gained access to his friend and interface, Mike Alban, the ether-genius and fat piece-of-shit through whom he bartered or bought all of the groceries and clothes that could not be had from the Nigerian Bazaar among the tents down on the Ohio or from the Somali cart peddlers across the river or the Pakistani fences up in Bellevue.

Rick did not technically exist, so he committed manual crimes like physical theft for ether crooks like Mike, moved his stuff around the apartment since Mike was bed-bound, and, before Mike got that gravity aqua diaper, even wiped Mike’s ass.  Rick was still strong enough to roll Mike’s 500-pound mass over and address his bed sores, change the sheets a corner at a time and provide the lonely man with company.

Company was mostly in the form of playing chess, with Rick moving both sets of pieces, as Mike was only fit enough to breathe, eat, evacuate and interface with his computer array verbally, through finger leads and most frighteningly through his neuro-net, the web of leads pasted to Mike’s head.  Rick also took care of that mess, removing the leads, bathing the massive fat head with alcohol swabs, and taking care of everything for Mike other than evacuation, feeding and sex, which was handled by a small Chinese girl that was sometimes seen leaving right before Rick arrived.

Mike had a few blonde hairs left on his 40-year-old head and was nearing critical system failure if he didn’t lose a couple hundred pounds.

Rick was bursting with urgency over the plight of Dandelion and could barely contain himself.  But he had an arrangement with Mike that Mike’s needs came first.  Besides, after Mike basically saved him from medical reassignment and psychiatric confinement he had to try at least one more time to get him on the road to health.

“Mike, your complexion looks terrible.  Let me help you get out in the hallway at least and we can start exercising.  I’ve been modifying my diet so that it will be doable for a person with your tastes.  How about it?”

Mike looked at him, tapped his left pinky finger for a dose of cocaine—which Rick purchased from the Mexicans for Mike—and smiled slightly, then drooled with some wan enthusiasm, “Rick, buddy, I really appreciate everything you’ve been doing for me.  As old and as crazy as you are, you’re my only friend in the whole world.  These people online mean nothing to me.  But, I’m headed across Rainbow Bridge.  It’s beautiful.  I can’ wait.  I’m uploading tonight.”

Rick could not believe his ears even as they began to ring with stress.

“What the fuck? What are you talking about?  What the fuck is Rainbow Bridge?” 

Pittsburgh Safety Patrol

 

Captain’s Desk
Shelia Dryfus Attending
July 1, 2041, 9:45 A.M.

 

R

ichard Wayne Pensky

Reporting Missing and Unrecovered: Orlando, Florida in January 2032

Suspect in the murder of Shah Ali Khan of Basra, Iraq, in Philadelphia, PA, June, 17 2041

Felony Warrants: Impersonating an Immigrant, Failure to await Safety Certification, Vacating the Scene of a Medical Crime 

Medical Warrants: Pandemic Denialism, Failure to Register Psychiatric Symptoms, Evading Contact Tracing [no statute of limitations applicable], Attempt to Violate Safe Space, Willful Child Endangerment, Failure to Comply with Face Covering Ordinance

Warning: Richard Wayne Pensky was a member of the militant underground bodybuilding cult known as Fit Grit, and is thought to have escaped an FBI raid on the gym he attended in Orlando in 2028 in Violation of Federal and State Wellness decrees.  He is thought to be the last of the seven Fit Grits who survived the raid to evade reeducation and medication.  The subject is therefore regarded as extremely dangerous, unnaturally fit, and likely to be a carrier of various pathogens to which his training regimen has given him unnatural tolerance, and should be assumed to be carrying influenza, cold, and other viruses likely to cause Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.  Though the subject is assumed to be unarmed, he is regarded as extremely dangerous, as he is suspected to be engaged extensively in such illegal disciplines as lifting free weights, occidental plyometrics, cage combat and boxing.  

Approach with extreme caution, only after notifying Overwatch and requesting Tactical Relief.