The Death and Rebirth of Rick Pensky
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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.
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