Thursday, July 1

heroes, heroes... every single fucking one of them is a hero

after thorough, repeated, sticky viewings of what are now known as the the 'spajjy vids,' i am convinced that dear old gear skip is not being used as a fuckbot. this makes me happy... because had i self-abused to a vid exploiting my missing damaged friend, i might have felt awkward. instead, i feel satisfied and well-rested... huzzah! the search, however, must continue... after this nap.

as you may recall, there are endless wars being fought all over the place in this irritating universe. most of the time, fought with robots... but fleshier sentient beings will zoom in at the last minute, get all heroic with their clean, unmolested with shit, blood or piss boot standing on some poor bot's head and get one of their overpaid, underbrained buddies to shoot a little vid of them looking like they did something other than play video games for two weeks while the combots blew the shit out of each other and slagged the planet they were standing on so no one will want to live there anyway.

support the troops.

if you are a combot, and you manage not to get too exploded, mangled, disemcircuited, or fragged so as to be sent to the wire hanger factory, you are given veteran status, a modest pension and a one-way gloryport anywhere you want. this was long fought for, i can tell you... it used to be that you'd be chucked in a garbage chute and melted into coins for whatever new republic you had just secured or fought against. unfortunately, anywhere you want to go is going to be too expensive on your shitty pension, so you gotta go somewhere cheap, sleazy and easy to hide in case another war breaks out and you get sucked into more pointless violence and short-circuits.

i wonder if there is a cheap, dirty, easy to hide place somewhere in the galaxy... i can't seem to think of one.

for whatever reason, these veteran combots flock to the station. which is cool because robots aren't stupid. they are in fact the exact opposite of stupid. they know good swag when they see it and they have lots of weird little hiding spots and bits they can reconfigure and most of them have injuries so they can secret it in plain sight as some war-deformity. not stupid at all. and this way, they supplement their shitty pension with various smuggling gigs, package deliveries and spying... who's gonna think the fucked up, one armed robot sitting in the main corridor on the upper levels, babbling to himself could possibly be recording every conversation that happens by him to then have someone like me pay him for all those tapes and figure out when certain captain spacefucks are going on vacations to certain beachy moons and leaving their fancy rooms unattended and unsecure? no one, that's who... aren't we so fucking smart?

yes, we are.

so... these guys, when not doing anything useful for me or society, tend to hang out, sometimes in the garden levels, playing some weird old robot version of petanque, or sitting around on crappy chairs in the lower levels, drinking and doing nothing. it seems relaxing. sometimes i wished i was a mangled robot with nothing to do.

but this got me to thinking... how do these guys end up serving in the military? i highly doubt they'd volunteer... who'd be that stupid... and i doubt they are built for it... they don't seem to be built to do any work at all... so what the fuck are they doing fighting each other? (incidentally, the combots seem to bear absolutely no ill will towards each other... in fact, you'll see combots from opposite teams hanging out, laughing, have a gay old time... very interesting)

i decided to press this point... maybe there was some clue to skip's disappearance there?

i put on my best tough face, went up to the garden levels and found the grizzled old bastards, limping about, arguing about how close one plasma was to another plasma... which is retarded because as robots, they can calculate it exactly, but i guess they all pretend to be damaged so there is some area of uncertainty... this also sounds familiar.

'ahoy combots... we need to speak. from whence did ye come to perform your noble duties?'
'fuck off, we've nothing to say to you'
not the welcome i had hoped for. perhaps they were having an off day. for obvious reasons, i don't think they care for us fleshy types too much. my experience had only been with a few of them. i had a plan, though.
'flapjack!'
strapped to the back of my trusted giant mongoloid friend were many gallons of cheap booze... just how the combots like it. this made their sad eyes leak lubricant and smile. when they spoke, different ones piped up, giving the illusion of a single brain controlling multiple mouths. a useful advantage for soldiers, i suppose.
'we were harsh, young man. youth should be tolerated... you have yet to live your life... we are sorry... please, sit down. what can we teach you?'
who the fuck knows?
'how come you to be combots?'
their moods darkened... this seemed a sore point.
'press-ganged'
'press-ganged? yer fucking kidding me? what is this the dark ages?'
'press-ganged. take a look at us, bucko... do we look like robots built for combat. fuck... half of us are re-purposed manufacturing equipment... but shooting bullets is about the same as shooting bolts. it's too fucking expensive to build a custom combot just to get killed, so there is a massive trade in stealing bots, quick-fix 'em with some guns and shit, then drop 'em into a combat zone. sometimes they offer you freedom... get out of this boring ass factory job, serve in this war and if you live, pension, easy life, plasmanque all day and booze all night. if you say yes, great. if you say no... don't fucking matter. you'll end up there anyway. only if you say no... you get hand-to-hand combat weapons installed, not a nice, safe, distance weapon... get my drift. some choice. death from afar or death from a near.'
shit... i asked if it was possible that skip was press-ganged into service.
'are you stupid?'
'yes i am'
'of course it's possible... anything is possible. but your buddy was primarily janitorial staff... those types are notoriously intractable and difficult to reprogram. and the kind of characters involved in this business don't want to make things hard on themselves... they just
'not just the robots... mwahahahahahaha'
'shut up. you garbage types aren't necessarily what they look for. so i would be surprised if he was sent to a war zone. and there's little point to stealing a broken, shitty janitorial assistant bot. even if he is your friend.'
'fair point.'
'we'll ask some questions... see if anyone knows anything. now leave us be to drink your booze.'

flappy and i left. and i thought skip was damaged... those guys are fucked.

1 comment:

what the fuck is your problem?