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?”