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!”