[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 11

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It’s my fault for trying to make sense of it. None of this was the result of a rational decision making process, after all. I mentioned offhand as I browsed the bikes that I knew of a woman he ought to meet. I described the flat-earther whose vlogs I binge watched on the plane.

He seemed tickled. “Naw bro, if I was gonna get tied down, it wouldn’t be to some nutjob like her. Only fluorinated sheeple with calcified pineal glands believe the Earth is flat. That’s just a CIA psy-op to make alternative ideas about the Earth’s structure seem ridiculous to the public, so they will never discover it’s actually hollow and populated by advanced beings with a limitless energy source.”

Uuuhhhhhh huh. I slowly nodded, not breaking eye contact, then pointed to the bike I’d chosen. Out of them all, it looked the most like a real vehicle, the metal frame enclosed in a hollow plastic body with a nice wide pleather seat. The rest of the bikes more or less resembled scaled up toys. Some little more than motorized kick scooters with a seat, turn signals and a speedo.

“Yeah, this will do.” He hobbled over, put his hands on his hips and nodded in apparent approval. “Good eye, but those go for about 450 Yuan. You sure I can’t talk you into-” I glared at him. He played it off like a joke, now assuring me I could have the one I’d chosen. One minute a thug, the next minute a coward. Probably if I waited long enough he’d forget he owned any of this.

I gasped as the malformed conning tower of a poorly made submarine of some kind surfaced through the same hatch in the floor I had earlier. A ramp folded down. An acrylic bubble canopy opened up. Then a crew I assumed were just more of Crazy Dave’s buddies climbed out to help me load the heavy-ass bike into the sub, via a small indoor crane of the sort often used to lift battery packs or motors when working on cars.

“Drop him off at the harbor” Dave called to them in Chinese. Then he made a gun cocking gesture with his thumb and index finger at me, and winked. “Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya. That’s the Crazy Dave guarantee, you’ll never leave empty handed.” I forced a smile as the ramp folded back up, the acrylic bubble hatch sealed shut, and the sub began to sink.

It was roughly ten feet in diameter inside, packed front to back with yet more stolen ebikes. The mystery of how they transported the finished bikes back to land was solved, not that I particularly needed to know. Where’d they even get a sub? Is there anything these fuckers can’t get their hands on?

My bike was offloaded onto a concrete platform at the water’s edge, next to a drainage pipe just barely large enough to ride the bike through. Indeed, that turned out to be what they meant for me to do. “If this is how Dave treats his business partners”, I thought, “I’d better see to it that we don’t wind up enemies.”

Flecks of sewage splattered my face, thrown up by the wheels. My eyes were spared thanks to a pair of cheapo goggles I found in the flimsy little lockable storage compartment. That was the only mercy however, I couldn’t help but ride straight along the inch or so deep flow of dubious brown water which ran along the lowest point of the pipe.

As a consequence, by the time I emerged from the other end of the pipe into an open air concrete trough like the one I reached the bay through, I was speckled head to toe with…”dried residue”. At least the tide was low, such that the concrete trough wasn’t flooded. I doubt very much that this thing would float.

What I wouldn’t give for it to rain right now. Of course when you most need rain, it never comes. I couldn’t get into a capsule hotel or the net cafe to use the shower looking and smelling like this, so I instead resorted to spraying myself down at a charging station.

The pressure washer accepted D-coin so I didn’t wind up having to spange, and despite all the strange looks I got in the process, all I cared about was getting that smell off me. So this is what it’s like to start over at the absolute bottom. I know I did it once before, but must’ve repressed those memories. Now I see why.

The bike proved zippy enough to hold its own in traffic, and the wind at speed helped dry me off. Now that I was actually on it, I could see how shoddily manufactured it was. There were panel gaps large enough to fit a finger through, and through those gaps I could see some truly dodgy looking welds on the frame itself.

It felt like riding something held together by glue and rubber bands. I don’t doubt that I’d find some of each if I opened it up. All the plastic panels and fairings rattled slightly from road vibration as I hurtled along, pedestrians occasionally leaping out of my path and shouting slurs at me.

Is this really what my life has become? I’m too damn big for this little plastic piece of shit. Like one of those bears that rides the tiny tricycle in a Russian circus. How did I get to this point? Seems like just yesterday I was the slickest thing on two wheels.

Now I’m riding what amounts to half a mobility scooter that feels like it may come apart under me at any moment, on my way back to that sad little cubicle. All so I can eventually move into someplace even smaller, packed together like sardines with all the other bottom feeders.

But it didn’t get me down. It made me hungry. Hungry for the finer things in life, to rebuild everything I’ve lost. Anybody trying to live this kind of life needs to be wired like that. So that when life fucks them, it makes them angry instead of sad. One man sees a tragedy, the other sees a challenge. It’s only the second man who can wrestle life to the ground and fuck it back.

I passed a bunch of other, similar ebikes. A few of them had motorcycle style bitch seats, which got a smile out of me. What woman would be caught dead riding on the back of one of these? I’d no sooner finished the thought than an ebike pulled up to the stop light next to me with a gorgeous, fashionably dressed girl of perhaps twenty perched on the back.

Well okay then, shows what I know. Above us, a skyway stretched from the skyscraper to my left to the one on my right. More upside down people, living upside down lives. Not a party this time though, what looked to be luxury apartments instead.

It hurt to look at, the more I contrasted my situation with theirs. “I’ll be where you are by next year” I thought, pumping my legs to help the motor up a steep hill. It felt oddly pleasurable. Muscle struggling alongside motor, each one picking up the other’s slack as needed.

Blue Moon was a damned sight faster, but it also did all the work for me. This ebike’s more of a cooperative experience. I didn’t appreciate that it was too small for me, or that it maxed out at 20mph unassisted. But I did appreciate how much less power it used to get the job done, compared to my old bike.

When you begin to value efficiency over raw performance, you know you’re old. I didn’t feel old right then, however. I felt as frivolous and carefree as I was when I built my first electric bicycle out of parts I scavenged from the junkyard.

There’s a well understood pleasure that comes from powerful motorcycles. But there’s a less well understood pleasure known to comparatively few. The feeling of lightness and freedom, of compactness and efficiency.

Like how the thrill of a powered hang glider differs from that of a jet. The immediacy of it, exposure to the elements and the minimum possible amount of materials keeping you aloft. This bike is built on an aluminum frame that weighs maybe twenty pounds.

Even with the motor, batteries, plastic and carbon fiber, I can still lift it myself. Not an ounce of it is needless. There is only and exactly enough here to constitute a useful vehicle, not a single gram more.

What to call this? The strange giddiness of vehicular minimalism? A feeling I’d never have discovered had my life not taken this otherwise miserable turn. It seemed to me one of many ongoing adaptations to my new conditions taking place in my brain since arrival.

Before, it was “work smart, not hard”. Now it’s “do more with less”. Arguably one in the same, just seen from different angles. I don’t need that gimmicky overpriced apartment, I thought. I don’t need anything except strength and wits...muscle and machinery.

I scoped out the net cafe from the pedestrian space up on a platform above it. The police drones were gone, and the ebike parking spaces were mostly full again. I pulled in between a gaudy pink and white sit-down scooter that looked like it was designed for a Disney princess, and a modest red and gold cafe racer lookin’ thing. Would’ve looked halfway nice if not for all the dried mud on it.

Both were plugged into the same post, blinking indicators on their dashboards confirming that charging was underway. I tugged out the retractable charging cable from my bike and plugged in at the next post over, double checking the little display between the handlebars to ensure it was receiving juice before dismounting.

My cubicle was how I left it, as I’d paid upfront for the full six days. The small island of comfort and security I was able to afford on what little D-Coin I still had to my name. I settled into the reclining computer chair, then ordered some baozi and a snow pear tea.

I also ordered a distributed computing bridge. I knew I’d need it to get any use out of those trash phones. I’ve seen DIY masters use these things to build supercomputers out of everything from gaming consoles to “smart” coffee makers. Anything at all with a chip and a bridge port.

The upside is the bridge itself is fairly cheap, and you can add onto your total computing power one device at a time. Ideal for...shall we say, “urban scavengers”. Every new device I can put my hands on will help me mine coins that much faster.

About forty minutes after the overhead delivery arms brought my food and drink, I got a notification from the front desk that a delivery drone had dropped something off for me. I consented to the fee, then headed up to the front to fetch the package.

Smaller than expected, but the build quality looked good. I powered it on to make sure it worked before giving it four stars on the site I ordered it from. I next ordered a keyboard, mouse and fresnel magnifier so I didn’t have to squint at the shitty little screen on the main phone.

They arrived the same way within the hour, the manager giving me increasingly suspicious looks following each new package. “Hamburgers!” I explained in English. “From America.” A look of recognition and comfort replaced his suspicion.

“Ah yes, of course. You Americans and your precious hamburgers, ha-ha. Yee-haw, pardner!” He poked my admittedly conspicuous paunch. Despite not quite understanding what cowboy slang had to do with sandwiches, I rolled with it.

I guffawed, gave my tummy a big ‘ol slap and cracked another throw-away joke that pandered to his preconceptions of Westerners. I then headed back to my cubicle with the final package, peering over my shoulder a few times on the way to make sure he wasn’t watching me or talking on the phone with anybody.

The exterior feeds were still up. I peeked at them every so often to check on my bike. There’s no fancy app to monitor charging, just the LED on the dash that blinks when charging and glows steady when full. I could just barely make it out despite the grainy video quality.

Just then, there was an accident in the street. The feeds gave me a front row seat to it. A woman was struck by a red egg-shaped tuktuk. As I looked on with morbid curiosity, the driver got out to check on the victim.

She lay twitching in the road, obviously in need of serious medical attention. He ran his fingers through his hair. Then looked around, got back into his tuktuk and began slowly running her over. She cried out in pain, beating uselessly at the ungainly three-wheeler’s front bumper.

I’ve seen this before. The law here is unusually severe when it comes to restitution. Whoever is determined to be at fault in an accident must pay the victim’s medical bills for any accident related injuries...for the rest of their life, if need be.

This law had the opposite of the intended effect. Drivers commonly make sure to finish the victim off rather than suffer the financial burden of supporting their recovery for years or decades. An ethnically near-homogeneous country of two billion with some of the most extreme wealth inequality on the planet has perhaps an unsurprisingly brutal take on the value of individual lives.

I’m no great philanthropist. About the best I can say for myself is that I’ve never killed anybody, as blood makes me squeamish and murders attract a lot more police attention than robberies. But for all I knew I was the only witness, and that tuktuk happened to use onboard software I knew how to take control of.

The driver looked this way and that in obvious confusion as his own vehicle began backing off the woman’s broken body of its own accord. I locked all the doors to keep him from fleeing, and submitted both the relevant video excerpt depicting the crime and our address to Panopticon, flagged for urgent police review.

It took them over two hours. I went outside to check on the woman. To my surprise, it was the partygoer I’d spotted through the skylight on my way out to the bay. I don’t think she recognized me, but then she looked barely conscious.

I called an ambulance, which landed about a dozen feet away a few minutes later. Two sterile white medical robots loaded her into the aerial ambulance’s patient compartment before docking themselves to charging alcoves mounted to the outside of the vehicle in anticipation of takeoff.

There was no wind as it lifted into the sky, tangled lanes of flying traffic cris-crossing at various altitudes above it. Just a barely audible hum, and a prickly feeling on my scalp and arms. I’d assume it was magnetic, except in that case it ought to rip my prosthetics off.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 12!}