[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 23

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When I pulled it up in Google Earth after settling back into my cubicle, there was a dilapidated dock jutting out into the sea, but there didn’t seem to be any buildings nearby. Then again, there wouldn’t be if it’s a hideout. Not ones that are visible from orbit, at the very least. Under the jungle canopy, maybe? Or an underground bunker.

I fought the temptation to call him back several times throughout the afternoon. He’d taken a big enough risk calling me the once. For that matter, he wouldn’t have mentioned I was in Shenzen if they didn’t already know.

That’s right, Alejandro. He knew where I was headed, so now the enforcers do as well. I wonder what else he told them? Alejandro is a remarkably skilled surgeon, but never struck me as the sort of guy who could weather much torture.

My stomach growled, this time more insistently. “Just eat some of this, you piece of shit!” I commanded, pinching my belly fat. As I did so I grazed the edge of a port I didn’t even know I had, protruding from my hip.

It turned out to be for fat removal. Like most people with leg prosthetics, this guy apparently had some trouble burning as many calories after his legs were replaced. Now it’s become my problem, and the sedentary nature of my lifestyle ever since moving here hasn’t much helped.

After the suction finished, my skin hung noticeably looser around my trimmed-down midsection. “Would you like to donate your extracted cellulite to InterNourish?” the lipo kiosk asked. Interwho? I ran a quick search in my interface. Apparently it’s a company that turns surplus cellulite suctioned from first worlders into dehydrated emergency rations for starving villagers in impoverished countries.

A little inset video played, showing a dark skinned man in a tattered “Coca-Cola” t-shirt eagerly taking a bite out of the flaky rectangular yellow bar, row after row of dingy favelas stacked up behind him. There’s no fuckin’ way he knows what that’s made out of....is there? I’d have to be McDonald’s hungry to eat one of those.

“Then again…” I thought, picking at the styrofoam bowl of instant katsuo udon cradled in my left hand. I wonder what all this sodium and MSG is doing to my body. “My” body? What an easy mindset to slip into. But it’s not my body, is it? Never was. I’ll just throw it away when I don’t want it anymore, like the fat.

An excerpt from a press interview with the CEO of InterNourish now played. “Like many of you, I could never stand to sit by and watch children in under-developed countries go hungry. At first I thought, why not feed them to one another until there’s just one big fat kid left, then roll him into the sea?”

Quick cut to audience members slowly nodding, rubbing their chins thoughtfully. Then back to the sharply dressed CEO. “But then I thought, should we really run the risk that he could float to mainland America and resume feasting? Having already developed an insatiable hunger for human flesh?

As you know, I found a better way. An evolution, not a revolution. These fine people already survive by suckling sweet, lucrative carbon credits from developed nations. Even before that, they lived off our largesse as the single biggest spender on international aid.”

The audience clapped. Zoom in on one man with a red, white and blue baseball cap wiping a single tear from his eye. “So I thought, why not literally feed them our fat? They want to be included in the developed world’s basic income program. Well, what is basic income except the poor suckling the lard of surplus value from the bulging gut of this nation’s moneyed elite?”

The audience grew quiet, confused and uncomfortable. “And now a word from our newest partner in the fight against world hunger: Speed Foam!” Velocity Valerie seductively sauntered onscreen, then pointed and winked. “Speed Foam, yeah! When it’s gotta be fast, and taste good to the last, make it Speed Foam! When you’re fresh out of time, down to your last dime, grab some Speed Foam!” Oh, so it’s a snack or something? The jingle continued.

“When you’re down on your luck, and your handle is stuck, use some Speed Foam!” Handle? What does the handle go to? Your home? Car door? “When you need a quick fix, but nothing else sticks, try some Speed Foam!” Oh, alright, it’s a glue. But then why did she say it tastes good?

I kept waiting for answers but the jingle trailed off and Valerie exited to the left. I shook the liposuction kiosk in frustration. A few other cafe dwellers glanced up at me, then back down at their monitors. “Valerie you piece of shit!” I hissed. “NONE of that tells me what Speed Foam is!”

The next few days passed uneventfully, blurring together since there’s no indication of day or night in the cubicle except for the time readout in the lower right of the screen. I explored about as much of Shenzen as I cared to in that time.

More than once, I passed indoor parks. Some of them under enormous, sprawling transparent tents made from a material similar to vinyl. The billboards advertising the park claimed that interior air quality was guaranteed against gas storms.

The ideal place to bring a date, where you can ignore the ocean’s dying gasps. Where you can put the moves on some cutie, with a high degree of assurance that the sudden, eye watering stench of rotten eggs won’t ruin the mood.

Indeed, every time I rode by there were several couples inside. The landscaping was intended to look natural presumably, but it was so over the top idyllic that it wrapped back around to looking artificial. Like the rolling green hills from Disney movies. “Realer than real”.

The other type of park I saw frequently employed the same gravity manipulation fuckery as the upside down apartments. Only sideways this time, the lush green grass and bushes carpeting the sides of certain skyscrapers, sideways families walking along neatly trimmed paths with their children like flies on the wall.

While gawking at the spectacle, I spotted what I at first took for malfunctioning drones repeatedly entering the sideways gravity of the parks, retreating, then attempting to pass through it again. When magnified, I discovered they were in fact just some very confused birds.

The strange dream returned night after night. I’d initially been content to put it down to body hopping adjustment issues, but the persistence and suspicious self-consistency of the dreams soon led me to suspect there might be more to it.

With little else to fill my time with until I moved out of this shithole and into a slightly different shithole, I paired my interface with an app on my phoneputer. A cracked dream monitoring suite with some choice plugins for discreetly recording background traffic.

I leaned as far back as I could in the computer chair without falling over. I’d raised enough SeaCoin that I felt comfortable buying a jacket the other day, which I draped over myself as a blanket. My retrograde transformation from fullmetal to flesh blob naturally increased my appetite for creature comforts, though I couldn’t yet afford many of those.

The first night was rough, but since then I’ve grown more and more accustomed to falling asleep like this. Comfort is another thing I never had to worry about when I was fullmetal. I could just tuck my limbs close to my body and go dormant. I felt only as much or as little of my surroundings as I wanted to.

Flesh bodies, on the other hand, are seemingly never fully comfortable. When I finally did get myself situated just right, with my arms tucked under the makeshift blanket and my head propped up by the headrest so I was looking straight up...I had to pee.

For fuck’s sake. I reached under the desk and pulled out the bladder evacuation tube. I screwed the threaded plastic end into the appropriate port, then began the laborious process of getting comfy again as it emptied me out.

I left it attached so I wouldn’t have to bother with it again in the night. Though from what I’ve seen around here, most of the die hard types just have it hooked up all the time while they’re at the computer. I’m not quite that far gone yet, but it’s foreseeable.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 24!}