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.”
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