[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 4

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I grimaced, mentally working out an estimate of how long it would probably take me to raise the RMB I needed for a fullmetal body once I’m set up in Shenzen. This temporary return to the warmth and softness of biological frailty had already outlived its novelty, and overstayed its welcome.

After brief argument, Dad and I agreed to follow one wall until we made it out. The seafloor complex is larger than the stead above it, but still only equivalent to a few city blocks. The problem is the convoluted layout. Even so, we soon wound up at the docking terminal, and within a few minutes were once again boarding the makeshift aquatic elevator.

I chose a seat at the far end with my back to the hull, so nobody could get the drop on us and I could scope out everybody else who entered. I was expecting thugs. Instead, a muscular looking woman with angry eyes and a mess of black, curly hair stormed in.

“You think you slick? You think you sneak by me? Come here for brothel like always, bastard!” I looked at Dad, also baffled by the unfolding spectacle. “You pay child support! Three months no pay! You think I no find you? I know you come here for whore! Always with the whores, I tell parole officer!”

I slowly got up, holding my hands out in front of me in a futile bid to calm the furious hurricane of a woman. “Listen, I think you have me confused for someone else. If you settle down and explain to me what you-” She slapped me hard, surprising me more than anything as I instinctively expected her to injure her hand on a metal faceplate which is no longer present.

“Three months! No child support! Trash barge! Pig man!” I protested that I was transplanted into this body less than an hour ago, and the man she wanted is probably long gone. “I not fall for that again! You try that last time! Pay child support! Dongmei starting school! You pay for clothes! You pay for meals!”

My ocular implants auto-scanned her face and brought up all relevant search results, revealing that she’d once starred in a couple of VR pornos. I judiciously decided that now would be a bad time for a boner, and closed out of the search.

The entire time I was doing that, she just kept screaming insults and hitting me. I winced, the closed-in acoustics of the submersible hull amplifying her every shriek. I asked Dad if Alejandro gave him anything like a receipt. Of course he didn’t, not wanting a paper trail proving he’d worked on me. I didn’t want one either up until now.

I kept protesting that she had me confused with whoever’s body this was before. She wasn’t having it, so instead I started to play along. “That’s right! I came down here for whores! Is that what you want to hear?” She stared at me in shock, so I carried on.

“There’s nothing left for child support! I spent all my savings on a mountain of oiled up whores! Then I buried myself in it like a pile of freshly raked autumn leaves! It was like a cozy fort in there. I think the ones at the bottom of the pile may have suffocated, but they knew the risks!”

Her scowl slowly morphed into an expression of confusion, then placid sobriety. “You really not him, are you.” I held my hands out to my sides in earnest surrender. She sighed. “Didn’t think so, he would deny forever. Sorry for making scene. Now I never find that bastard.”

I offered her a DNA sample. She declined, explaining that he’d already left plenty of DNA all over her residorm through the years. That was the end of it. I’d have wished her well but she was so done with everything that she cleared out of the sub before I could say another word.

The ruckus deterred anybody else from boarding, so we had the sub all to ourselves on the way up. The same tedious docking process now played out in reverse. The inner hatch swung shut, locked tightly against the rubber o-ring.

Then the unseen outer door shut, signified by the dull thud I could both hear and feel through my seat. Brief, audible whooshing as the space between the closed doors equalized with the ocean and flooded with seawater.

Then at last, the now-familiar lurch as the sub pulled away from the docking collar. What an elaborate mating dance it is, all to keep us small soft humans insulated from the monstrous weight of the ocean.

I then heard and felt the ballast tanks purging, and the sub began to rise. I looked to Dad for explanation. “The cables mostly just keep the vertical path of ascent and descent aligned with the habitat. The ballast tanks still do most of the work of raising and lowering the sub.”

I expected the currents to become stronger as we approached the surface, on account of the storm. Instead the moon pool was perfectly calm when we surfaced through it. It didn’t make sense until Dad and I emerged from the stairwell into the sunshine.

“Where’s the storm?” Dad laughed and slapped my back. “That’s what I said the first time, too. The habitat is deep enough that it’s totally insulated from storm currents. Like two different worlds. No day or night down there, no indication at all of whatever’s happening topside.”

I wondered aloud why anybody would choose to live down there full time. “It’s peaceful” Dad objected. “I can absolutely understand the appeal, even if it’s not for me. The subsea crowd and the topsiders mostly keep to their own, like oil and water. Very different mindsets.”

I suppose there’s no better way to really get away from it all. I never really considered the option before...but then again, even in a place like this I managed to get noticed.

Dad made a few thinly veiled pleas for me to stay longer, as if I didn’t desperately want to. But he saw the same goons I did. He knows it has to be this way. I couldn’t very well get halfway around the world by air taxi, and so wound up taking a speedboat to a floating airport.

When I voiced my nervous feelings about the only recently abated storm, the captain of the sleek orange vessel assured me that trips were timed to avoid storm activity and gas ‘burps’ from the sea bed.

I had no reason not to believe him. Presumably this little gig is how he pays the bills, and he looks to be in one piece. Still, the man looked as ragged as a carnie, head engulfed by a ratty beard which at some point in his life had graduated to a full blown mane.

He and everyone else on the little boat wore torn, faded tank tops, swim trunks and flip flops. Something told me I would be too if I knew conshelf life better. Each also wore what looked like a soda can sized air tank with integrated regulator on a lanyard around their necks.

When I asked about that, the captain became visibly annoyed by the distraction but answered over his shoulder that anybody out here who knows their ass from their elbow carries at least a modest air supply on their person.

I sheepishly sunk into my seat somewhat and resolved to keep my trap shut for the remainder of the journey. I was now getting the occasional curious stare from other passengers who must’ve assumed by my appearance that I was an old salt, only to then hear me asking tourist grade questions.

Not even an hour away from Dad’s seastead and already I was attracting more unwanted attention. I learn quickly though, and resolved not to open my mouth going forward unless my immediate goals required it.

The silence gave me a chance to savor the feeling of salty ocean wind rushing through my hair. Of all the considerations when I had my fullmetal surgery, it somehow never occurred to me that I’d miss having hair.

Soon, the airport loomed into view over the horizon. A stunning sight, curvilinear white structural elements mounted to cylindrical concrete ocean spars swooping this way and that, coming together to support the tremendous flat deck which planes landed on and took off from.

As if arranged for our arrival, a plane eased into a soft landing at the far end of the platform. It abruptly slowed, presumably by the same type of capture harness I knew were used aboard aircraft carriers.

I heard nothing like the cacophony of jet engines. Nor had I seen the usual drum shaped protuberances slung beneath its wings. Thinking back to the electrically levitated air taxi, I realized yet again the extent of what can happen in six years and set about ordering a ticket through my ocular interface.

It spewed ads at me for all manner of foul, skinner box style freemium games in the process. My ad blocker killed most of them but I had to manually shut down the rest, including an obnoxious flashy pop-under for something called Speed Foam.

“Speed Foam! Yeah! It’s like Velocity Valerie, classic Speed Foam Mascot always says: “I’m Velocity Valerie, the classic Speed Foam Mascot”. YEAH! SPEEDFOAM!”

I was curious enough about what “speed foam” could possibly be for that I nearly ordered some just to find out. Does it make whatever you put it on faster, foamier, or both? But as yet, I had no permanent address and distressingly little coin to my name.

Under that was a tiresome wizard porn ad. Like these aren’t a dime a dozen. Like anybody pays for porn either. But they must, surely? Otherwise how would sites like this turn a profit?

The looping 3D video showed two lean, muscular old men dressed in elaborate wizard costumes rubbing their bushy white beards against one another. Underneath in blinking text it said “Beard-on-beard closeups! You can see every individual hair! Authentic wizard clothing!”

Authentic? Do they think wizards really existed at some point? Even I know better, and I slept through most of my education. Cheating my way past tests, “smart not hard” yada yada. As soon as I began running into professional barriers because of it, I just got a brain implant that fetched whatever I wanted to know from a whitelist of sites I trust.

Whenever I’ve asked Dad what the point of traditional education is when such implants exist, he can never seem to give a satisfactory answer. Something about blood, sweat, tears, elbow grease and various other fluids.

When he told me that he had to memorize the multiplication table even though calculators existed back then, I was like “Why though?” and just got more of that “satisfaction of learning” crap from him.

“Wizard Fantasy HDX is the premiere adult entertainment platform! Literally!” Sure enough, actual floating platforms appeared, on which various sex acts were being performed by wizards upon other wizards...or in some cases mythical beasts like manticores and gryffons.

That’s when I realized the audio was playing externally. I frantically closed the window and peered around to find the nearest passengers once again staring at me, if anything more intently than before. Except for one of them, who nodded slowly and smiled knowingly at me.

I angrily searched my body for any sort of speaker, unclear on why the asshole whose body I’m driving around now would even want such a feature installed. Maybe the type that imagines his taste in music is so sublime, it demands to be shared with everybody around him.

As unbelievably huge as the structure had appeared on the horizon, it just continued growing on approach, defying my understanding of what’s even possible to build on the sea with every passing minute.

We did not dock to the side as I’d assumed when studying the structure from a distance, but instead pulled in underneath it. There was a modest breakwater around the spars which provided reliably calm surface conditions for boarding and unboarding, a detail I appreciated as I followed the rest of the passengers off the boat and into the first stage of airport security.

“Hello sir” a laughably fake looking injection molded gynoid dressed as a stewardess said, in a voice sounding something like a drive-thru intercom. These things were more convincing six years ago. How could they have gotten worse in that time?

Then again most of the conshelf territories are considered one big backwater. Dad’s stead was one of the nicer ones, and even there the tech was a decade or more out of date. They just don’t care about staying current, and don’t throw anything away.

“Please disrobe for stage one weapons check.” Come again? I was directed to enter a cramped privacy booth nearby and take my clothes off. Well, whatever. It’s not even my junk, I don’t care who sees it.

Once the door shut, the booth immediately began to fill with some sort of thin, cold vapor. In a panic I pounded on the door, and was reprimanded by the indifferent scratchy voice of the gynoid not to damage airport property.

“You are simply being disinfected so that you do not transport on your body any of the known species of parasite unique to offshore populations.” Oh, well. If that’s all.

She then asked me if I am now or ever have been affiliated with any cetacean separatist groups. I laughed. “Dolphins? Really? Dolphins are blowing up planes now?”

I was urged to answer seriously, so I gave my honest opinion of dolphins and was then issued a .009 fedcoin citation for hate speech. I tucked it between my butt cheeks for lack of any pockets to put it in.

A quick and honestly somewhat refreshing anal cavity search later, I was dressed and set loose into the terminal. I’ve always liked airports. They remind me of cohab interiors with all the little shops, capsule hotels and restaurants.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 5!}