Thursday, April 19

same shit, different universe

taken as a whole, i'd say every single living species in my universe is incapable of learning from its mistakes. not only do we have frillions of epic poems, novels, sculpture, paintings, decoupage, semen-statues, plays, movies, holos, emographs, and quantum-injectable consciousness states detailing every sort of fucked-up, what-do-you-do, gods-are-punishing-me, which-baby-do-i-choose, is-glory-for-me, don't-play-god situation that we've ever, and are ever-likely-to face we still do the same stupid shit over and over.

why should your universe be any different?




i took him to zargle's, figuring that a familiar place ought to make this easier.
and i wanted to be somewhere i could easily get away if i had to.

we sat myself down in the back booth. zargle seemed non-plussed to see the two of us. fair enough.. he'd been selling that fucking starshine for so damn long he probably just assumed he was seeing double. same with the rest of the crowd... and i have a habit of talking to myself anyway, so... but nobody paid us no nevermind no how...

though it'd still be nice to be paid a little nevermind, yes how.

i looked at me, with those blood-shot blue eyes of ours...

i guess it's time to start this stupid story.

a little while ago, this station was acquired by some galactic-conglomerate corporation... you know the kind run by parasites... literally... fucking stemjockeys who attach themselves to management's brainstem and run their businesses that way...

what? what's a stemjockey? god damn this will take all day...

so a little while before the little while ago when this station was acquired, we had this huge robot labor movement... they were excluded from all real rights because they weren't seen as beings or people, which was whom those laws applied to.

so, after a particularly gruesome, bloody, and metallic war, robots got their rights... the laws were changed so that an individual was defined as single consciousness. this could be determined pretty easily with a modified turing test that involved inappropriate questions designed to gauge how quickly you got fed up with your interrogator.

and this is where the stemjockeys come in...

on any one of the backwater planets of this be-scatted universe you're likely to find pretty much any fucking form of life that you can dream up in that perverted little mind of yours. but this particular perversion could only come from the mind of corporate lawyers.

certain physicists of the late 20th century on earth had a theory that the universe did, in fact, conform with your desires... and that if enough people believed in something, it became true. this was known as the yulian principle. the yulian principle was not a big success, but, over time enough people began to think it made sense that it eventually became true. funny how things work.

any, their legal minds went straight to the, otherwise irrelevant, wording of the new law. a single consciousness defines an individual. so... even if you had multiple bodies, as long as they produced only a single consciousness, you'd have a single individual, subject to all the rules and regulations hitherforetotheretofore.

so the lawyers told their corporate patrons find yourself an alien that takes over another's brainstem and controls them, and you've got a way to print money and stick someone else with the tax bill... because come tax time, the alien just jumps right off, cash in hand. they act as a kind of consultant, albeit a bit more 'brains on.' there's also the guarantee that the person being controlled will do exactly as they say.

this was paradise. so they started looking and finally came upon some distant moon of some gas giant fuck knows where. and they found their guys.

about eight-and-half inches by eleven inche, paper-colored, covered in what looked like tiny little letters, it wasn't clear which was the mouth and which was the ass. or if it even had it. but... all you had to do slap one of those motherfuckers onto someone's neck, and they were yours for the fucking.

now... these little guys aren't stupid. not in the least. being sensitive to what people are thinking is in their dna... so they just played the dumb little parasite when the lawyers landed on their planet, and let themselves be scooped up by the millions.

and for a while, the corporations were having a gay old time...management consultants... financiers... governments... all those clowns bought stemjockeys , trained them up and let them loose...

but the stemjockeys had their own little plan as well.

so let's go forward to a little while ago...

the station was bought by some corporation that specializes in buying pieces of shit, then polishing the turd, and reselling that shit to someone slightly dumber with slightly more money than they had.

and as both of us know, this place is a complete piece of shit. after all, it's our job to keep it in shape.

so they came in, with all sorts of big ideas, five-year plans, and re-education camps down in the lower-lower-lower levels... typical corporate whatnot... who the fuck knows where they get these ideas.

all the people who were in charge, had those damn stemjockeys in their necks. their charge was to turn this place into a shining, clean, happy, well-managed, pleasant place to live and visit.

and fuck me... they did it!

everybody was happy. everybody was getting along... it was incredible. smiles, high-fives, cheerful faces... management had never been so helpful. the bureaucrats laid down their pencils. everything was going so great, so wonderful, so beautiful... we were trapped in a musical, wrapped in a children's show, stuffed up the ass of a drag-queen. i'd never seen anything like it. there was only one little problem with all of this.

nobody was visiting the station. business dried up drier than the withered teat of an old whore.

only i seemed relatively unaffected by all of this. so one day, the stemjockeys came to me. they explained to me that they'd been planning a way to break free from the corporate enslavement they'd been subjected to. that the purchase of this station was their hope to make a huge amount of cash and liberated themselves. they'd learned so much over the years working with the corporations, that they figured the same thing would apply here... only it wasn't. they'd cleaned it up, real nice, but no one was coming. everyone was happy except for me, so they figured i was either the problem, or the solution.

so, i thought about it, and then it hit me...


tourists don't want to come to some happydappyfunfuck space station in the middle of nowhere. they are coming here for the grit, the grime, the disease and unpleasantness. they don't want smiling food-service workers and soldiers... they want dirty boots, electric burns on the exposed-bulkheads and clangy metal walkways. they want to feel something dangerous, something to make them appreciate their nice happy homes when they're back in 'em.

this is their escape.

going on vacation to a place better than the one you live is torturing yourself. it's repeatedly going back to the stripclub where all the women are hotter than your girlfriend. it's working in a kitchen of a fancy restaurant and licking the plates clean every night.

it's the lie of hope.


he interrupted me...

'so you made a deal with the stemjockeys, to make this place more miserable, so more people would come to it, so they could sell it and be free?'

i catch on quick.

'so what's the simp got to do with any of this? surely you could have started robbing people harder, maybe set up some murders or something... stop painting the walls... not clean the lavatories...

'i never do that shit.'

'point taken.'

'anyway, it wasn't that simple. the people on the station didn't WANT to do any of those things. the problem was literally one of morale and will.

they had no willpower to be miserable.

the station was happy. actually, genuinely happy. yea... there were a few tiffs here and there, but people were in good moods. even i had a few moments of kindness, but they were weird... sort of phasing in and out.'

he looked at me with those drunken, half-lazy eyes of ours

'fuck... me... i'm in the per-verse, aren't i?'

'eh?'

'a little while ago, a nice version of me showed up on my station and wreaked all sort of havoc with my life... i had to banish him to the 'hole void.'

'you can clearly see i am not banished. that wasn't me or you... that was the simp. i sent him through and he must have ended up over with you.'

'you ever going to get to this fucking simp business or do i have to wait for him to show back up and fuck us all over again?'

'yea yea... lemme just get another drink...'



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