[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 5

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Shame I couldn’t afford to eat here. After the cost of the plane ticket I’ll be lucky not to sleep on the streets my first night in Shenzen. If I begged Dad for some money I’m sure he’d come through.

He’d lecture me first about the satisfaction of spending your own hard earned money, personal responsibility, financial planning and whatever else he felt I ought to hear, but then he’d open up his wallet. That’s just kinda how he rolls, like a grouchy Santa. He always helps, but also makes it such a headache that I’ll only ask again when I really need to.

That’s such a stereotypically Dadly thing to do as well. I’d probably have morphed into him completely by now if I’d ever made the mistake of knocking anybody up. What is that shit about, anyway? The man who thought bringing a child into this world was a good idea, lecturing me about fiscal responsibility?

I took my seat among the throngs of weary, disinterested travelers. Mostly conshelfers judging by their clothes but also a few that looked to be here on business, and some wealthy tourists.

Then there was a dolphin. The security gynoid’s question suddenly made a good deal more sense. It was strapped to some sort of motorized gurney with misters periodically spraying little puffs of water vapor onto its body at various points.

A little tongue operated joystick just beneath its beak made sense of how it could move about. What didn’t make sense is why a dolphin would need to fly anywhere when swimming is free.

Everybody was zoned out, staring into space. Playing games or watching films on their interfaces, like I did on the way here. It made for a comical scene I imagined Dad would make some snarky, disparaging “Back in my day” comment about.

Nothing wrong with escapism in a place like this. I followed their lead, leaned back and engaged my own interface. First order of business was to update my ad blocker. The next level of service required a subscription fee though, so I put that on the back burner for the time being.

This body turned out to already have recurring subscriptions to a bunch of Chinese services unfamiliar to me, so I laboriously went through them one by one to cancel. They don’t make it easy.

I kept a few of the free apps though. Including “Ultimate Redneck Battle Gaiden”, some sort of Chinese online game based on their impression of everyday American life. The prior owner of this body was evidently a level 28 “Donald Ray Johnson Jr.”.

I started it up looking to jump into some pvp. Instead I was confronted with a splash screen notifying me that new DLC was available. Three new free-for-all maps: “Wal-Mart Parking Lot”, “Cracker Barrel” and “Church.”

I clicked past it and set about customizing my character to my own liking. He’d really gone to town, buying lots of expensive vanity items. I scrolled through a surprisingly large selection of mullets before choosing the one I thought looked trashiest.

The match started, and immediately I was ganged up on by two Jimmy Dee Williamses sporting bigger, flashier mullets than I ever thought could exist in this game. One had a two by four, the other a shitty replica sword like the ones you see idiot teenagers buy in malls so they can pretend to be vampire hunters or whatever.

We were soon joined by a level 54 Rufus T. Jackson who began picking away at the health of the duo attacking me with long ranged hunting rifle shots. He used his duck call, and suddenly the sun was blacked out by a flock of murderous ducks which swarmed the Jimmy Dee Williamses.

One rage quit, the other wasn’t fast enough and died, dropping a wealth of mid tier loot. I took a pound of meth from his body, a crack pipe, a King James Bible, two shivs and the tattered card of a local strip club, “Titty City”, where I could evidently replenish my arousal meter.

My what? Sure enough, there it was in the corner of my vision. Somehow it had escaped my notice along with the warning message that since I had an ingame wife, visiting the club’s champagne room would deplete my marital fidelity meter...and I only have one free divorce remaining. This game has the deepest lore.

I thanked the Rufus for intervening and offered him half the loot. “Rufus don’t fight for loot” he replied. “Rufus fight for the glory of battle, and love of the game.” He then climbed on one of those three wheeled motorcycles with a few missing body panels and a fading “Rufus T. Jackson’s All-You-Can-Eat Waffle House and Discount Abortionarium” promotional sticker on the hood, whereupon he rode off into the sunset.

I ducked out of the match, convinced now that I’d need to do some grinding before attempting pvp again. A notification popped up, alerting me that my complimentary implant recharge had completed.

The coil must be built into the seat or something? Schwank. Do all the seats in the terminal have this? What about the seats on the plane? Probably too much to hope for in economy class.

Upon dicking around with the amenities menu, I discovered there was more built into the seat than just a charging coil. “Comfort options”, when selected, revealed a drop-down menu from which I could activate massage motors.

The massage zones were broken down by muscle group. Apparently my left buttcheek is 89% relaxed, while my right buttcheek’s only 62% relaxed, for an averaged ButtComfort™ rating of 75%. I selected the right cheek on the diagram and shifted around until positioned just right.

Vibrating motors did very little to make up for the narrow little seat, but at least prevented me from cramping up. I closed out of the amenities menu, then switched over to the news app. It wasn’t terribly encouraging, but then it never is. “Everything is fine” doesn’t pull in the ratings.

“The global manhunt continues for climate fugitives. A pocket of six were discovered working for Sky Disney using forged public profile identification data.” A grey haired overweight man in a Sky Disney staff uniform is shown being cuffed and led to a waiting police aircraft. He spits at the camera, and launches into a tirade.

“How was I supposed to know it would actually happen? Nobody knew for sure! It was all just Jewish Communist propaganda! It still is! Prove to me gas storms aren’t just a natural cyclical phenomena! It happened before in the Permian era, didn’t it? What about the medieval warm period, it was even warmer then!”

Cut back to the reporter. “Unfortunately for them, that defense is a popular but rarely effective one among surviving opponents of climate action. Seventy eight of the eighty two caught over the last five years were convicted on the grounds that there existed overwhelming credible scientific support for man made climate change which they ignored for partisan reasons in favor of disinformation propagated by fossil fuel industry lobbyists, think tanks, religious media figures and a few corrupted scientists.”

A series of mugshots scrolled by behind her as she spoke, with excerpts from their voting record and comment history stretching back decades that were used to secure their convictions. Underneath her in the portion of the broadcast set aside for real time audience commentary, I spotted “So-called global warming wrongly assumes that the Earth is a globe” followed by hundreds of people roasting the commenter responsible in a dozen different languages.

Out of curiosity I copied that user’s handle and searched it. I found nine years worth of vrlogs. Turned out to be a fairly attractive woman in her early thirties wearing a cap with “Flat Earth Truth” embroidered into it.

Mostly out of morbid curiosity, I clicked play on a video of her vacation to the first Lunar hab. “Those holographic windows on the so-called ‘space elevator’ and ‘interplanetary shuttle’ were really convincing, NASA” she sarcastically quipped, “but I know we never left Earth. This is all in Nevada somewhere and the windows are tinted to make the sand appear grey, and the sky black. You can’t fool me.”

In fact as I recall, they’ve got a dedicated dome up there set aside which simulates a desert on Earth. The staff make a point to ominously warn Flat Earther tourists to stay away from the fake airlock leading to it.

That way they exit into the dome thinking they’re being sneaky, feel vindicated, and don’t perish in the Lunar vacuum like the poor idiot whose widely publicized death (and resulting lawsuit by his family) caused that special dome to be built.

Suddenly it cut to a shot of her riding a pressurized tourist buggy out to one of the historical Apollo landing sites. “This shit is so fake. Wake up sheeple! How come we can see the stars, but there were no stars in the original photos of the moon landings?”

Over her shoulder I could see other tourists rolling their eyes and struggling to ignore her. The comments were evenly mixed between supporters and people ripping on her. It seemed to me like the ratio should be a lot more lopsided rather than 50/50.

I typed out my own comment. “The Earth may be flat but those titties ain’t. You’re stone cold retarded though and you don’t even know it. I think it may be contagious too, because you’re giving my dick special needs.”

I thought I’d had my fun, but I made the mistake of digging deeper into her uploads history. The earliest videos weren’t even flat earth conspiracy stuff, they were about her family. Then about her divorce.

I clicked on one, only to close it soon after because it was surprisingly difficult to watch a stranger sobbing, smeared makeup running down her pretty face. The picture became slightly more clear with each video I watched. In the ones after that she could be seen rocking slightly, grinding her teeth and various other visible signs that she’d become a tweaker.

Her children no longer appeared in any subsequent videos. I could guess why. Still, the divorce settlement must’ve been substantial as she seemingly still had the house in her newest videos and could afford fare to the Moon and back.

I’ve never been there and have no desire to. The two habs built so far are larger in terms of interior volume than the subsea habitat I came from, but that isn’t saying much. The newer of the two habs is much more liveable, but the first was more of an experimental, international venture. The interior of it is just a whole lot of bare concrete, exposed life support machinery and stressed out geologists.

Nobody lives there full time at the moment, although supposedly that’s the plan. Before prison, I remembered reading about a program to genetically engineer humans able to carry a fetus to term without defects despite the low Lunar gravity, along with a laundry list of other small adaptations to that environment. It’s been six years, I assume they’ve made some progress on that since then but I don’t really care to check.

I would sooner become a conshelfer than transplant my life to a barren, airless rock. I know I’m in the minority in feeling that way, but why do so many want to move further away from life, rather than closer to it?

Life, in the sense of biology. Of diverse, lush ecosystems. Living underwater moves you closer to the Earth, and surrounds you with beautiful living things. Moving further from the Earth, living the rest of your life in an artificial environment is a decision I’ll never understand. Then again, I am on my way to Shenzen.

I disengaged my interface upon hearing over the PA that boarding would soon commence. Everyone around me shifted in their seat, eyeing up everyone around them as if it would be a race. As if the order of boarding hadn’t been decided long in advance.

The fucking dolphin got to go first, to my consternation. It was such a tedious and elaborate ordeal to load his scooter dealie onto the plane that by the time the first set of human passengers were able to begin boarding, I was on the verge of nodding off.

Of course when I found my seat, I was right behind the damned thing. He was strapped in place facing towards the rear of the plane, leaving me little option but to stare him in the face. I couldn’t pretend not to notice him without it being obvious what I was doing, either.

As the rest of the passengers milled about, chatting and bickering, I gave the rolling dolphin carrier a closer look. Mostly because some of the water vapor was getting on my arms. Not that I really cared just then, but it seemed like something that would grow increasingly irritating over the next few hours.

“EEKKEKEEEEK-EK-EK” the marine mammal shrieked, promptly translated into Chinese, then into English after I dialed in that preference. “I can turn the front misters off if you like.” Suddenly flustered by the show of consideration given my uncharitable thoughts up to that point, I assured the streamlined mass of glistening grey flesh before me that it wasn’t a big deal.

“The plastic bag you’re zipped up into contains most of it” I explained. It actually did, about a centimeter worth of accumulated water sloshing gently at the very bottom where suction pumps recirculate it to the misters. But really, just not wanting her to think I was some sort of asshole. Or...him? I can never tell, and often catch myself assuming all dolphins are female just because of their shape.

“I’m not a separatist, if that’s what you’re thinking” it chirped, the synth English voice reading the translation sounding comically formal. I insisted I didn’t think anything in particular and don’t make a habit of assuming shit about strangers. Only partly true.

“I’m more afraid you’re going to spend the whole flight talking my ear off about the prophet Lilly” I muttered, and to my surprise the dolphin laughed. “I’m not a follower of his teachings, I must confess. The name I use with humans is Remble. Not my actual name, but that doesn’t translate to anything in English and it’s painful to the human eardrum.”

I reached out as if to shake its hand before realizing the foolishness of it. Instead I introduced myself and asked why I don’t meet many atheist dolphins. Remble hesitated before answering. “I never said I was an atheist.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 6!}