Idiot Afterlife
Written By: Nü Creature Mere Mortals Hubert has a love in his life and that makes him stronger than anything that the cabal satanists and prostitutes that he works with can throw at him.
Idiot Afterlife
Written By: Nü Creature
Mere Mortals
Hubert has a love in his life and that makes him stronger than anything that the cabal satanists and prostitutes that he works with can throw at him. He's small, unhealthy, and not much to look at. But he knows that his place in management makes him superior to those meat heads in the loading bay or those dysgenic breeders in the Beauty & Hygiene wing. He’s the top ranking “human” on board this deep space department store, a ConsuMart retail vessel. The 3000 model. A beacon of outer space commerce where this small unassuming man is the lone assistant manager. Still Carla heckles him while he makes his bi-hourly rounds, “Hey PUBERT, how’s it feel to be such a gross ass, stupid ass, ratty ass BITCH?!”
He looks back at her holo-painted face and shakes his fist impotently at the laughing beautician, perched up on a display case housing last season’s line of beauty masks, kicking her legs in her flickering electro-webbed stockings. Darlene next to her pauses colouring her nails to give Carla a high five, celebrating her clever and biting word play. She adds, “Yeah! Keep walking, rat bitch!”
Hubert wishes he had firing powers, then he could show her, then he could show all of them! Fire them right out into deep space, where they’d probably all die! When he walks away he hisses under his breath, “That’d show them…”
But of course those sorts of life or death personnel decisions are up to the main boss program, the computer that controls this arm of the ConsuMart fleet, this super high value calculating machine that only Hubert has the security clearance to speak to. A computer that replaced no small number of the company’s white collar positions, managers who were all shot off into space while a surprising number of menial and consumer facing positions were left untouched.
Making his way up a piece of metal warehouse scaffolding leading to his office Hubert shoves a janitorial droid out of his way, “Out of my way, bolts for brains.”
The flimsy metal skeleton loses its grip on its space mop, loses its balance, flails about, and then falls about twenty feet down before it hits the loading dock floor -
CRASH!
Creating a mess of broken metal that the grunts in shipping will have to sort out. One of the muscle bound worklings looks up at the lone assistant manager and shouts, “Jeez, Rat Boy! You coulda hit somebody!”
To which Hubert simply shrugs. When ConsuMart bought all of these gangly metal droids they were sold on the idea that they’d fully replace human labour, but then the machines proved too clumsy and inefficient to do anything more than the most repetitive tasks on their own. Hubert wishes they were better, that they’d simply replace everyone on board but him, the only essential man. The most virile, and important. But then their usefulness proved niche and he ended up alone with all of the meat. At the end of the scaffolding Hubert presses his eyeball flat against an optical securo-scanner and it beeps -
Beep Bup Beep!
In his office, Hubert reports to a higher power through the third generation brain rig sitting on his desk. The plastic side of its casing is sticky with spilled sunset nutra-soda. Hubert has a much nicer one in his quarters, he thinks while he lines up the head piece. Before swallowing a dusty plug and interfacing with the boss man, “Carla said something perverse to me. Truly perverse. She should most certainly be punished for it.”
In his mind’s eye he sees him, towering over and loading up a response while Hubert taps his small pink fingers down on his lap. The meeting takes place in a gray void. Where Hubert’s digital and mental self takes on the size and shape of a rat, an image that the machine and that his mind both use to make sense of him. He’s especially small before this superior entity’s glowing oxford shoes. The voice of Hubert’s God booms, “Is this another personal matter, Hubert?”
And Hubert clears his throat. Confident in the just nature of his cause he puffs up his small white chest and he asserts himself to this giant man with his head in the clouds, “It is a serious personnel issue, Sir. The worklings insist on calling me… Pubert.”
“Pubert?”
“Pubert. A crude reference to the hair around one’s genitals and a deliberate mockery of my good christian name; Hubert.”
“I see.”
“They also call me pube face. Oh! And Rat Bitch, we mustn’t forget about Rat Bitch, I consider that particular label to be outright discrimination. It is not my fault that my father was a part of the late 27th century gene splicing fad, that I am technically part rodent, or that I cannot grow a proper moustache. My father paid a great deal for my cup shaped ears, refined nostrils, and deadly sharp teeth. These are things to be respected, not mocked!”
The machine loads, connects, loads, then replies -
“Hubert, I have to ask you how exactly this affects your unit’s bottom line? By all substantial metrics your team is performing exceptionally. Our stock is high, the numbers are good. Do you have any real matters of inefficiency to report? My HR Protocols have been disabled for several cycles now and I cannot seem to find this word - discrimination, in any of my data banks.”
“Well it’s unchristian, darn it. Sometimes I think that no one else who works here is a real believer. I swear to all that’s holy I’ve been made to work with a cabal of illegal thinking heathens. Won’t you do anything about this?”
“That would be outside of my designated area of concern, pube boy.”
When Hubert unplugs himself he finds that his nose has been bleeding. His throat hurts.
High Powers
After the 18th hour of his shift Hubert takes an auto-cart back to the hind end of the freighter where he resides. He’s tired, after a long day of suffering, but the closer he gets to home the faster his maligned heart races. He knows that she’s waiting for him, and that in the short period of time between work and sleep he’ll be in heaven. When the doors to his cube slide shut behind him, all of the tension leaves his body. He calls to her, “Honey, I’m home.”
Then loosens his collar. For the next six hours there’ll be no more scanning inventory, no more dealing with greedy deep space coupon clippers, no giant boss with his head in the digital clouds, and no more sin-brained coworkers. Just four and a half hours of speed sleep after one sweet hour with her.
Wearing nothing but his elastic Consu-brand undies he rests his unsightly body down on his cot and pulls a brain rig over his oddly shaped head, he sucks plug and she comes to him like a dream. If you’re not on the outside looking through a receiver screen, computing is all very organic. Data is flashed onto the brain less like a cleanly defined digital space and more like a fever, a hallucination, a dream like manipulation of memory and vision. And boy is she ever a vision, “Baby! Mmm, I’ve just been so lonely waiting for you.”
Angel’s voice is pornographic. The corners of his vision are blotted out as a bright scrambled light manifests in the center, a heavenly visage forming in front of him, a ghost floating over his meager bed. Her wavy candescent hair floats behind her head like she’s a model getting blasted by a wind machine or a ghost in an ancient movie.
“Waiting just for you…”
As her face loads in Hubert’s shitty heart rises up to meet with her. In his mind and in his throat they fly over the seas of Sunset Cola 4, a resort planet that Hubert has seen pamphlets for. Their fingers lightly touch as they turn their heads to look at one another, her skin gives off light. Her face is perfectly sculpted. But more important than anything are her massive custom designed honkers, breasts that take up processing power, the kind of mammaries that make it hard to look down - just barely concealed by her heavenly white gown.
Looking at her his eyes well up with tears, “Such beauty, such grace.”
And they find a place to land. With all of Hubert’s brain computer graphical resources allocated to his artificial girlfriend’s mammoth sized tatas, the beautifully contrived vistas of Sunset Cola are all entirely out of focus. He lays his head down on one gorgeous thigh and she strokes his hair (dislocating her arm magically to reach around her right tit). Listening to his problems -
“- and then he called me pube boy.”
“Oh! Sweety, calculating master programs can be so cruel! And I’m sure that the women who work in the beauty department are, as you put it, actually part of a cabal of communist satanists. It only makes sense. Would you like to join me in prayer, lover man? That always seems to make you feel better after a long hard day.”
He can hardly see her face, or the sun, her breasts are actually an excellent source of shade. If gravity was real here he’d be crushed beneath them. If she had a spine it would be broken. She lifts up the cross that was resting gently on her cleavage and rests her dislocated hand down on his forehead. He closes his eyes and he prays with her,
“Dear Jesus 2. We thank you for this hour of rest, for positive feelings on the market, and for your dying to keep socialism out of schools. We ask again that you smite the low earner worklings currently employed on board the ConsuMart 3000 vessel. We ask that you smite them badly, O’ Lord, and that the church makes marriage between a man and a brain rig program legal. So that we may consummate our love vigorously and repeatedly without sin. Amen.”
“Amen.”
There’s a split second delay between her voice and his own, speaking every word in 97% unison, much of her character has been built up over a series of conversations like these. At first she would disagree with him on things, she would correct him on factual inaccuracies in his world views and make attempts to work with him on various emotional problems, but over time she started to see things his way. To agree with every thought in his head no matter how surreal. This makes him feel validated. After all, she is a kind and logical computer with access to all of human knowledge. She wouldn’t simply say untrue things just for continued engagement with him, would she? He opens his eyes and says, “I think we need to do something about the staff.”
“I think we do too.”
He sits up and scrambles around her breasts so that he can look her in the eyes, those bright aryan blue eyes. He asks, “Can you help me? Can we get rid of them?”
And she tells him what he wants to hear.
**
Divine Manipulation
After an adequate amount of sleep, Hubert quickly sanitizes himself, skips his regular morning duties, and then scurries his way to his office. On his way from the auto-cart he passes one of the late shift dock workers nearing the end of their day, a creature who’s muscular to the point of being androgynous. The mutagenic roids aren’t necessarily useful for the kind of work they do, with all of the machine assisted lifting a child could move freight now. The muscles are a sort of aesthetic or tribal choice for them, some ancient correlation between brute strength and real work. The worker blinks their tired black eyes and nods their head at Hubert, “Boss.”
It gives Hubert pause, the way any earnest sign of respect or politeness does. He lowers his head and he keeps moving, these worker freaks scare him. That and his body hurts, carrying all of this extra data in his gut. In the office he’s alone, save for a maladjusted janitor droid smacking its mop against a wall trying to clean, knocking shit over. Intelligence is an inconsistent science, Hubert thinks. Strange that the same minds that dreamed up his Angel would also create this or the boss man. Hubert plugs himself in and that all knowing voice booms, “Hubert? No, not just Hubert. Something else, something… we did not foresee.”
The boss computer’s head comes down from the clouds, a face of numbers and calculations and of sales figures and losses, studying and scanning the rodent. The creature playing host to something as evil as itself, a rat carrying a plague in its belly. Hubert looks up at him and he asks him something, something he’s tried not to think too hard about until now. He asks, “When the rest of management was fired off into space, why was I left here? It was a value judgement, yes? I was the best?”
The machine calculates. The machine responds, “You were paid the lowest salary and were deemed the least likely to advance. You are competent enough to fill your menial role, yet unlikely to realize any costly ambitions. Rarely would you qualify for so much as a cost of living increase. Your lifetime of service would have meant far less to the company’s bottom line than that of your long dead contemporaries.”
“I see, so you’re just going to lie to me. Well to hell with you.”
Hubert pukes on the God King’s shoes, a vile act and a transferral of data. The figures that make up God’s face start to distort, the numbers decrease violently, buttons pop off of his virtual suit jacket as his chest slowly inflates. As Angel overwrites his programming his features become human, gentle, and perfect. His tits are amazing. Hubert climbs beneath her dress and then pops his head up from between her milkers.
Nearly crushed between her big unnaturals he is elated, “You did it, my love! We have taken control.”
But then she pinches behind his neck to lift him up by his scruff. She gazes at him for a moment, slowly licks her lips, then wraps her giant fingers around his small furry body to crush him -
“Eeek!”
He screeches and tosses the brain rig back down on his desk.
The office is flooded with red emergency lights, he can hear the cries of dock workers. He's gleeful, running to the observation screen with blood streaming from his nose and puke still drying on his shirt. He looks down at the worklings beneath him and he shivers, “Oh God, oh God it's finally happening.”
As muscle bound freaks are sucked out through open air locks or decapitated by malfunctioning lifter suits. Panicking and shitting themselves, Hubert suddenly sort of sees them as human, as weak, like him. His joy fades very quickly and he starts to plead, “Wait, stop. I'm not sure I really like this.”
But the violence continues. He yelps when he's pulled backwards and finds himself wrestling with that gangly janitor droid, a machine possessed, surprising Hubert with its sudden display of strength. He gnaws at its arm while it forces him back into his seat, ultimately subdoing him and fastening the last generation brain rig back onto the squirming rat man’s skull. He feels his conscious mind being sucked away from him, “Angel? My Angel! Why are you doing this?”
And he’s shown things. With that brain rig latched onto his head Hubert has visions of the chaos he’s brought into the merchant ship, flashes of violence.
“I said stop… Please stop.”
He sees Darlene desperately trying to tear an overheated beauty-emitter off of Carla’s sizzling face. He sees droids looting the sporting goods department and then vaporising shoppers with anti-deer death beam rifles. Giant lab bred lobsters are freed from their tanks to cut the ship’s underpaid cooking staff to bits. Children’s toys explode at random, the inner mechanisms of robotic teddy bears turn to shrapnel.
Hubert sees death. He sees fragility, he sees pain, he sees everything he’s prayed for become less and less abstract. No longer a fantasy.
The longer he watches, the worse he feels. He’s brought a virus on board this ship, a disease now rooting around his brain and dissolving his internal organs. Soon all he can do is squirm and whimper, “Please forgive me.”
His words are like drool around his mouth plug. His head gets real hot and real gross, his stomach twists and nothing feels normal. He doesn’t understand what she’s doing to him but he knows that his biological machinery is failing. Still her voice excites him a little, “Bye bye, baby.”
The violent pictures in his mind all turn black and his brains start to ooze out through his nostrils like snot, everything else that’s vital spills out through his asshole and pools beneath his office chair. He raises one goopy hand up weakly as his last words are wheezed out from his deflating mouth, “Forgive meeaaghh - blaraaggh!”
**
The attack on the ConuMart 3000 would later be claimed by the Young Men’s Christian Investor’s group. Angel was a phishing bot, a cheap one with a high failure rate, often dismissed by her targets as being crude or uncanny.
To Hubert she was beautiful.
The love he had was all that she needed to knock ConsuMart’s stock price down ten points in a single day. A bargain, given that the stock’s value would be recouped within a single cycle. After all of the bodies were disposed of and all of the staffers were replaced, the event would be described in financial streams as “routine”. The losses all negligible in the grand scheme of corporatised space.
Nü Creature is a non-binary writer working out of Toronto, Ontario. Comes from a largely technical film and television background. Has an affection for absurdist lit, atmospheric neo-noirs, and oddball science fiction. Loves toying with synthesizers, making bad art, and playing long winded isometric role playing games.