Ten Short Stories for Geeks

Volume 1: The Anti-Heroes

By Victor Hernandez

Copyright © 2016 Victor Hernandez

All rights reserved worldwide.

www.blogdeizquierda.com

www.toliro.com

Cover and book design: Victor Hernandez

First Edition.

Partial or complete reproduction of this book by any means without permission from the author is strictly prohibited unless in cases permitted by law.

Other books by Victor Hernandez

Sci-Fi novel in English:

Love Robots

Available on eBook at http://amzn.to/1Uls8f2

And on paperback at http://amzn.to/1pQdqAc

Art Photography:

Releasing the Nudes Part 1

Releasing the Nudes Part 2

Releasing the Nudes Part 3

The Virgin of the Path

Available on paperback and eBook at toliro.com/contrast

Humor in Spanish:

Antología del Albur

El Libro de los Albures

Available on paperback and eBook at

albures.net

Coming soon:

Fiction/Nonfiction:

The Unofficial Official Guide to Love Robots

For more information on other books by Victor Hernandez please visit:

www.blogdeizquierda.com/p/books.html

INDEX

Cover

Copyright and credits

Other books by Victor Hernandez

Fair Warning

The Stories

Moon Diving

The Cyborg

Alien Invasion

The Movie

Nanobots

Hydrazine Outpost

@TheRealYearbook

PainStation

Gyroscopic

The End of the World

More Sci-Fi from Victor Hernandez

About the Author

Fair Warning

The stories you are about to read are not stories of heroes with high moral values. Quite the opposite. They are stories of anti-heroes with no moral values whatsoever. Therefore, do not expect to find any redeeming qualities in here that uplift the spirit above and beyond with high values of leadership and examples of virtue.

What you can expect to find are funny, mostly sci-fi stories about everyday Joes and Janes. Well, everyday geeky Joes and Janes. What you will read are stories anyone can relate to, starred by mundane, imperfect, flawed characters who are selfish, cynical and egotistical. Just like everybody out there.

You will read about a salaried office worker on the Moon; A feminist questioned about software; An alien invasion that didn’t go as planned; How the afterlife deals with a certain kind of death; A nanobot experiment that defied science; A gas station clerk in space; A geek girl who snapped in high school; Security guards entertained by an old machine at an art gallery; A robotics engineer and his rival; And the end of the world on Mars.

All of these stories are intended to be humorous. If you laugh when you read them, their purpose will be served. If you find any important life lessons in them, then stop smoking whatever it is that you’re smoking because it’s affecting your brain.

But most important of all, just relax and enjoy the stories. They’re fun, they’re short, they’re geekfest galore, and you can read one each time you go to the bathroom. It will be the best ten loaves you will pinch this month.

- Victor Hernandez

Moon Diving

I told the guys at the office it wasn’t a good idea.

I really did.

But did they listen? No. They never listen. Ever since we got here they have never listened to what I have to say. Not once.

We shouldn’t even be here in the first place anyway. The point of setting up a station on the Moon was to train astronauts for interplanetary missions within the Solar System. Since the Moon has only 0.16 times the gravity of Earth, that makes sense if you want to send people to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, where the gravity is 0.14 Earth’s. But all of the fucking space missions today are to Mars, where gravity is 0.37 times Earth’s gravity. There isn’t anything scheduled for Ganymede for like 30 years. And why? Because rich people want to brag about how they went on a trip to Mars and drank real Martian water. But guess what? Ganymede has more water than Earth. Even the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It makes no sense to waste money on Mars if you have Ganymede except as an in-between port.

And yet, here we are anyway. NASA likes to brag about their Mars missions too. That’s how they get money from Congress. But money from Congress isn’t enough, so NASA partnered with a few corporations to fund the Mars missions. With just one catch: the corporations wanted NASA to build a station on the Moon first. So they built this shitty training station for 20 astronauts so they can live here for six months and then claim they’re ready for Mars.

In reality what the corporate suits wanted was to offer trips to the Moon to rich people and dentists with too much free time. They figured it’s cheaper and quicker than having them inside a space ship for months on their way to Mars. A couple of days to reach the Moon, a weekend on the station, and then back to Earth where they can brag they said “it’s a small step for man” like Neil Armstrong.

Problem is, after a few years the novelty of the Moon trips wore off and rich people and dentists with too much free time went back to killing lions and other unsuspecting animals in Africa from a distance with a rifle. So the corporate suits figured they should offer some sort of new attraction on the Moon to entice people again. And they did; ladies and gentlemen, I give you indoor skydiving on the Moon.

You’ve probably done it back on Earth. You put on a helmet and a jumpsuit and they put you inside this huge tube with a bunch of big-ass turbines blowing air upwards, so you’re sent “flying” with an instructor and then they drop you so you feel as if you were actually skydiving.

Well, some corporate creative thought it would be a great idea if they did that on the Moon. Hey, 0.16 gravity, right? So the turbines would need far less power to send you up; they can send you higher, and the drop would be far slower than a drop on Earth, you should really feel like you’re flying like a bird. A real adrenaline rush for people who want to skydive without having to get on a plane.

Obviously, somebody had to operate the indoor skydiving and somebody had to do the administrative work. That’s where we come in. Me and the guys at the office do the administrative work. What? You thought we were the operators? No. Not even close. We’re the pencil pushers. We do the accounting on site, we count the tickets, and we send the reports on revenue and expenses projections back to Earth.

It’s sooo fucking boring. We’re not even allowed into the diving tube. We have to stay inside an office on our desks and do our shifts looking at a computer. Or we can look out the window and stare at miles and miles of gray dirt and rocks.

We have to do it for six months. Then we can go back to Earth. They got us to come here telling us we got a free trip to the Moon. Who doesn’t want to be like Buzz Aldrin, right? So we took the bait. And now we’re stuck here for four more months.

So you can imagine how bored out of our minds we must be under such conditions. But that changed two weeks ago, when the corporate suits rotated the maintenance crew for the diving tube. Lo and behold, one of the new maintenance people (sorry: engineers) was a woman and one was a gay dude, which meant my two straight co workers and my two gay co workers, who happen to be twin brothers, officially declared open season.

To be honest, I’m perfectly happy watching porn on my tablet and jerking off. Besides, the maintenance chick they sent isn’t even that good looking. When I go back to Earth I’ll go to Vegas or to Tijuana and pay for some quality sex.

But these guys are just too fucking desperate, so they started to hit on the maintenance people as soon as they saw them in the mess hall. The gay dude told the twins to fuck off right off the bat. The guy’s married and he’s pretty old school, so he’s not going to cheat on his husband. The chick, though, did respond to my co worker’s flirting. However, she didn’t get in bed with anyone. She only made them more desperate.

How desperate? Desperate enough to offer her their dessert rations. Have you ever tasted space rations on the Moon? They’re pretty bland. It’s basically ramen noodles without the flavor packet. With lots of protein and vitamins and whatnot. But adding flavor is expensive. Well, not that expensive. But since it's for us low level pencil pushers, corporate HQ doesn't want to spend the money. Flavor is only for rich people and dentists. So instead of getting flavor we get a packet of “dessert” that’s just something similar to, what, pudding I guess? That compensates for the bland food.

The chick took the desserts, of course. And in exchange she gave them nothing. She’s good. She turned the tables on my co workers and they didn’t even notice.

My co workers, of course, are idiots. And instead of catching the drift that they were being played, they kept on trying to hit on her. This time with my co worker’s secret weapon; dessert alcohol.

Pot is not allowed on the station because they can’t just open a window to let the smoke out. And alcohol is confiscated because corporate HQ thinks it’s not a good idea to have drunk employees on the Moon. People on Earth would freak out and nobody would come here again out of fear of an accident.

But my crafty co workers found a way around it; add more water than required to their dessert packets and let it ferment for a month. It tastes like shit, but it does give you a buzz. How do I know that? Because they made me drink that crap. Why did they make me drink that crap? Because they were pretending we were having a party and they invited the maintenance chick. The bait was supposed to be the alcohol.

She didn’t accept the invitation because she had to cover one of her co worker’s shifts after he started to have some unexplained headache. Meaning he didn’t feel like showing up for work that evening. So she told my co workers to come by the diving tube later, as she was in charge of the turbines’ diagnostics.

Meaning she was now looking for a way to get her hands on the alcohol and then send my co workers straight to hell. But my co workers fell for it and went to the diving tube even though they were not supposed to be there.

And they somehow talked me into going as well. Well, not “somehow.” They offered to cover one shift a week for me for the rest of our stay on the Moon. That meant Fridays off. I’d had to be an idiot not to take the offer.

But I did tell them it was a bad idea.

Oh and it was. Worst idea ever. First of all, the maintenance chick didn’t even touch the alcohol. Instead, she talked my co workers into drinking half of it. I guess to see if they had put anything weird on it before drinking it. And of course, I had to go along with it. It was after all a “party.” So we chugged what felt like a liter of that horrible stuff between the three of us.

Once the maintenance chick noticed our faces were turning red (which meant the alcohol was indeed drunkenness-grade) she asked us if we’ve ever done a dive on the tube. Obviously none of us had. So she asked us if we wanted to try it.

I said no, but my co workers started the pushing and the bragging just to show off. This time I told them there are cameras on the tube, and if we got recorded we would get fired. But the chick said she had turned all the cameras off, including the security camera, because she had some maintenance tests to make. Yeah right. She probably knew she would get fired if there was evidence of her letting us in.

And again the bragging and the pushing. So I said fine. The chick brought three helmets and told us how to pose our bodies to get up in the air. She probably wanted us to get into the tube so we could get dizzy and feel like calling it a night instead of staying and keep hitting on her. But we put the helmets on anyway and we walked inside the tube. The chick started the turbines and the air pushed us slowly up. My coworkers started hooting and yelling and basically posing. But then the chick turned up the turbines and we shot way up in the tube. We couldn’t even see what was going on anymore because we were just spinning out of control.

And that’s when everything went to shit.

Literally.

Because as soon as we were up in the air the maintenance chick took a big gulp from the dessert alcohol bottle, but she found it so repulsive she spitted out all of it right into the tube’s operating console. That’s the only thing I was able to see; the moment when the spray of spit and shitty alcohol flew from her mouth and into the console. I’d imagine she might have said something like “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!” after spitting it. I told you it tastes like crap.

That was only the beginning. When the chick realized she had alcohol all over the tube’s console she ran to get a towel to clean it up. But in her haste while she was cleaning it, she pushed the button that rotates the turbines, which made us spin even more.

At that point, both of my co workers were pretty much in hysterics. I could see it in their faces. And I was feeling sick because of the dessert alcohol. I was about to throw up, you say? Guess again. Because when the chick finally managed to slow down the turbines and we started dropping from the top of the tube I nearly shat my pants.

I say “nearly” shat my pants because out of desperation for something to hold on to, one of my co workers grabbed my pants by the waist when we started falling and my pants came down.

So I shat all over the tube.

Even from the bottom you could see the streaks and splashes of shit all over the tube. My co workers, of course, had shit all over their clothes and on their helmets. They were lucky they were wearing goggles, but they were very unfortunate for being screaming with their full mouths open.

Once we were at the bottom, the chick opened the door to the tube and yelled at us to get out. My co workers asked if they could have the alcohol back but she yelled again to get out.

And off we went. Without alcohol.

What I heard afterwards was that in order to clean the shit from all over the tube the chick had to bribe two of the guys in the maintenance crew with a blow job per week for a month. Else she could be liable for millions of Dollars in damages. My co workers, of course, got nothing and, instead, were blackmailed by the maintenance chick, who threatened she would accuse them of trying to get her drunk so they could molest her, unless they gave her all of their dessert packets from now on. So no more dessert and no more alcohol for them.

I’m under the impression some of the shit also got into the turbines and it couldn’t be fully removed. I say that because I’ve heard comments from people who have gone Moon diving about the fact that they think they smelled something funny in there, but then thought it was the instructor passing gas.

But hey, I did tell the guys at the office it wasn’t a good idea.

--

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote this short story while I was waiting two hours for a flight. I was bored out of mind, so I thought this would keep me entertained. I came up with the idea because four days before I wrote it I did the indoor skydiving thing. On Earth, obviously. No diarrhea, though.

The Cyborg

“And so, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

The audience applauded except for a young woman in the front row who, instead, kept her hand raised while everybody else clapped.

“Uh… yes?”

“Yeah, quick question. You said in your essay that, and I quote, ‘cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualism in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.”

“Right?”

“Yeah, so I was wondering, Mac or PC?”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah, which hardware would you use to be a cyborg? Mac or PC?”

“Well, I…”

“And what OS would you use for any mobile components? iOS or Android?”

“Uhm… I…”

“And if you picked PC, what processor? Intel or AMD?”

“The… say that again?”

“Yeah, and what about the graphics card? nVidia or ATI Radeon?”

“What’s a graphic…? What?”

“Yeah, suppose also that cyborgs only used digital money. Bitcoin or Litecoin?”

“I’m not sure I…”

“What about the speakers? JBL or Harman Kardon?”

“Er...”

“The camera sensors? Canon or Red One?”

“I really don’t understand where you’re trying to get at with these questions.”

“Yeah, a cyborg is made of organic tissue, hardware and software to operate the hardware. I’m just asking which hardware and software would you use in order to be a cyborg. Mac or PC?”

“What’s a PC?”

“Personal Computer. It’s the nickname given to computers that use Windows based operating systems.”

“And a Mac?”

“Apple brand computers.”

“Well, the essay is not about brands, but about the issue of overcoming the duality in the perception of our bodies and…”

“Yeah, so Mac or PC?”

“I just don’t see how is that relevant.”

“Well, you can’t use Mac software on a PC and vice versa. They’re not compatible.”

“The essay is not about computers. It’s about our bodies and…”

“But you did say you wanted to be a cyborg. Cyborgs by definition require hardware and software. So which one would you rather use? Mac or PC? iOS or Android?”

The speaker exhaled deeply and looked down at the papers in the lectern to try to hide her exasperation.

“Look, I really don’t know. Something in between I guess?”

“But there isn’t anything in between. Unless you want to use a third party OS like Unix, but then you also need specific hardware for Unix. Or unless you want to run Linux, but then you need to use a PC because running Linux on a Mac is not that simple.”

“Okay, I don’t know. What do you want me to say? I don’t know.”

“But you wrote about cyborgs. That’s the title of your essay, right? A Cyborg Manifesto?”

“God… Look we’re really out of time. Thank you all for coming. Good day.”

“Miss Haraway? Hello?”

“She’s gone already, kid,” a woman told her as she got up from her seat.

The girl who raised her hand and made questions also got up from her seat and walked smiling into the bathroom. She entered the stall and typed something on a pad. She vanished out of thin air and reappeared inside a control room.

“You’re such a prick, Elsa,” another young woman said to the one who had just materialized in the control room. “You know perfectly well Donna Haraway wrote that essay in the early 1980s to try to get feminists to think about mixing ideas of what a woman could be instead of picking just one archetype.”

“Well, she should’ve done more research, Zoe. I mean, jeez! Who the fuck picks computers to fight duality? She had IBM and Apple right there as an example. It’s SO fucking stupid!”

Zoe rolled her eyes and typed something into her control station.

“Where do we go now?”

“Let’s go to 1979. I want to heckle feminist artist Judy Chicago during the opening of her The Dinner Party installation.”

“What?”

“Oh come on! She put a bunch of sculptures of vaginas on plates on three tables arranged to form a triangle. That was her ‘epic’ installation. Wouldn’t you just love to ask her if feminism means eating pussy?”

“You’re such a prick, Elsa…”

“Third-Wave feminist with a time machine, if you please.”

--

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I learned about the Cyborg Manifesto and about Judy Chicago in my art classes when I was in college. The Cyborg Manifesto has always seemed really dumb to me because there isn’t compatibility between operating systems and sometimes between hardware, so one has to pick one or the other, completely contradicting the point Haraway was trying to make. As per Judy Chicago, well, I thought her Dinner Party was funny and her brand of feminism quaint. I prefer Third Wave feminism and I consider myself a Third Wave feminist. Judy Chicago fits in what is known in Women’s Studies seminars as Second Wave feminism, which a pretty narrow view of what women are. Third Wave feminism is much more open and flexible to women’s view of themselves, establishing that women should be able to decide what to do with their lives without anyone telling them not to. Even Second Wave feminists.

Alien Invasion

The chatter at the conference table abruptly stopped when Emperor Keffat walked into the room. All of his most trusted generals and advisors stood up and saluted in typical formal fashion, extending their left arm and opening their hands, a symbol of submission to the stronger opponent, as it showed them unarmed and asking for mercy.

“Be seated,” Keffat said before taking his own seat at the largest chair in the room. “Effective immediately we are at war with planet Earth. Prepare our forces for invasion,” Keffat added.

The advisors looked at each other somewhat perplexed. The generals applauded. One of them, however, general Demuri, simply raised her hand.

“Yes general?” Keffat said. “You have a question?”

“With respect, your highness,” Demuri said. “Why are we invading Earth?”

“We need to expand my Empire,” Keffat answered. “Our scouts report Earth has about six billion people, water, hydrocarbons and radioactive minerals we can exploit for fuel. I also understand the place can be used for farming. The people of Earth will be my new slaves and their planet our new colony. You do not agree with my assessment of the planet?”

“No no no, you’re absolutely right, Sir,” Demuri said. “Earth is a great target for the Empire’s expansion. Is just that… I think there’s a risk in invading it.”

“What risk is that?” Keffat asked.

“Well, Earth is a very primitive planet, Sir,” Demuri said. “They can’t even travel from one planet to the next within their own star system. Their weapons are laughable at best, and according to our scouts some of them will actually line up with us just to overthrow their own local governments.”

“And?” Keffat asked.

“Doesn’t seem like much of a challenge against a superior civilization like us, the Alcorans. We could crush Earth in a matter of hours. I mean, we have space warping technology. We can literally bend space to travel from one galaxy to another. Earth barely has long distance communications and some silly weapons that work with explosions. Our photon cannons would burn down every single one of their weapon silos in minutes.”

“And your point is?” Keffat said.

“Well, think about what your political enemies will say if you announce you invaded a planet that’s so easy to conquer. They will start rumors that you are losing strength, so now you conquer planets that are the equivalent of a nest of Brintorian hamsters. After all, why invade some measly planet in the middle of nowhere when we can bend space?”

The generals and the advisors immediately tried to shut Demuri up by saying that she was wrong, and that any expansion of the Alcoran Empire was a symbol of strength, so Keffat’s plan was indeed masterful.

“What part of water, hydrocarbons, radioactive minerals, farming and six billion slaves you didn’t understand, Demuri?” Keffat said. “If anyone tries to spread rumors against our latest conquest we will launch a media campaign showing the spoils of our invasion to Earth.”

“That’s the thing Sir,” Demuri insisted. “Your enemies will probably counter that campaign saying it was cheaper to take the water from some of the moons in Earth’s star system. One of them, if I recall the intel from our scouts correctly, a moon called Ganymede by people on Earth, has even more water than Earth. Another moon called Titan has lakes of hydrocarbons. And the elements in some of that star system’s planets and moons have the components to make even more efficient fuels. We can even harness the radiation from the largest planet in Earth’s star system. The fifth planet, Jupiter I think it’s called? As per the farming, well, our scouts mentioned Earth’s weather is so unstable right now because of pollution it will be very difficult to adapt our crops to its environment for growing any meaningful amount that could be of use to us. Terraforming a planet in any of our neighboring star systems would be much cheaper in the long run. They will accuse you of squandering our economic resources in a planet that’s too far away when it’s not necessary because our technology allows us to do better things in our own galaxy. And about the slaves, people will start asking why aren’t we just using our mechanical units to do the labor if it’s cheaper, faster, and more efficient than using slaves that will hardly be able to keep up with our pace. After all, the people of Earth are barely half our height. Why use slaves if have the power to travel from galaxy to the next? Your enemies will start spreading rumors claiming our economy is in such a bad shape we can’t even produce enough mechanical units anymore and therefore we are being forced to use inefficient slaves. And again, think about the damage your enemies can make to your image if they start saying it’s ridiculous to invade a primitive planet when we have the technology to terraform our own galaxy.”

“Sir, I must object to Demuri’s evaluation of your glorious plan,” said Timerna, another one of Keffat’s generals sitting right in front of Demuri. “Not expanding the Empire will be seen as a sign of weakness. We must invade Earth.”

“I have an alternate plan, Sir,” Demuri said addressing Keffat and blatantly ignoring Timerna. “A plan that will, both, expand the empire, and immortalize your greatness.”

“Really? Do tell, Demuri,” Keffat said.

“We haven’t settled the Yingrel star system yet. It has has been in our list of systems to settle for a long time but we haven’t because have been conquering the Utfilos system. The last remaining opposition in Utfilos was defeated last year. So now we can focus our resources on settling Yingrel.”

“And what would be the point of that, Demuri?” Keffat asked with a hint of sarcasm.

“You could send some of the people in the dissident suspect list to colonize the sixth planet of the Yingrel system. You know, supervise the terraforming, setting up the first settlements, that sort of thing. Then, a year after, when the planet is up and running, cut off their fuel and weapons supplies claiming they are under suspicion of treason. When they protest, cut off the rest of their supplies and suspend their political rights as a preventive measure. That will surely cause them to declare themselves an independent system and they will no longer recognize your authority. When that happens, you can launch a full invasion force against the settlement in Yingrel 6. Now THAT would be a challenge. You would be fighting against a force of equal size, equal strength and equal technology. And you will be seen as a defender or Alcoran sovereignty. The people will see you as a hero and protector of Alcor. Your glory would be immortalized in monuments. Keffat the Conqueror will be the most important figure in Alcor’s history.”

“Your highness, I must protest Demuri’s insane plan,” Timerna said. “I recommend that you…”

“I like your plan, Demuri,” Keffat said without paying attention to Timerna, who went quiet and looked down on the table. “Lets start making preparations for Demuri’s plan, people. Oh, and cancel the invasion of Earth. That seems quaint now. Dismiss.”

Keffat got up from his chair and the generals and advisors did the same. After Keffat exited the room and the rest of the people on the table moved out, Demuri walked into an elevator, only to be followed by Timerna, who got into the elevator with her.

“That was a cheap shot, Demuri,” Timerna said visibly irked.

“A bet is a bet, Timerna,” Demuri said.

“You got Keffat to suspend a planetary invasion just so you don’t have to clean up his latrine. You’re unbelievable.”

“What’s unbelievable is much that latrine stinks and you know it. Ever since he started eating that Lijari pork with Kowota onions it’s worse than an air transport bathroom after somebody uses it in mid flight. And you know it. Every single general who has to clean it can barely keep himself from vomiting and they all end up with irritated eyes and noses.”

“But it’s an HONOR to clean up the Emperor’s latrine, Demuri. And it is the duty of every general to protect his integrity by cleaning after he is done relieving himself.”

“Oh, is that why you took my bet that if in today’s meeting I got him to change his mind about the planetary invasion we’ve been hearing rumors about you would take my turn at cleaning his latrine for a year, and if I didn’t I would you take your turns? You can’t stand the stench either! And may I remind you that because it’s supposed to be an honor to clean up his latrine we’re not allowed to use respirator masks while we deal with that pile of excrement he clogs the latrine with every single time. There’s visible steam coming out of it even under water!”

Timerna grumbled and exited the elevator. Demuri simply smiled and thought about how lucky the people of Earth were without even knowing it. After all, how many planets have been spared before because of somebody’s irritable bowel syndrome?

--

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The idea of a civilization advanced enough to travel across galaxies just to invade a planet as shitty as Earth makes no sense to me. Right, so you have the power to bend space so you can travel from one galaxy to another. What the fuck would you need Earth for then? Natural resources? There’s way more water, hydrocarbons, and other resources on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn than on Earth. Why bother with Earth then? Politically it makes no sense either. Invasions tend to backfire in the long run. I suppose alien invasion stories were supposed to be some sort of allegory for colonialism, but that doesn’t work with aliens. On Earth, colonialist nations invaded other places for their resources, but they would not have done it if they had other sources for those same resources. Aliens who can bend space have an entire universe to pick resources from in larger quantities. So again; if you are powerful enough to bend space, you don’t need Earth. You can get larger quantities of anything anywhere else.

The Movie

“What the fuck?”

“Language, sir.”

“Language? Where the FUCK am I?”

“You’re in the afterlife.”

“Whaaa… as in ‘Heaven’?”

“Yes.”

“Me. In fucking Heaven. Me.”

“Yes.”

“And you must be… Saint... Peter?”

“You can call me that if it makes you feel comfortable.”

“Comfortable? Are you fucking kidding me? I. AM. IN. FUCKING. HEAVEN. I didn’t even think I was going to end up here!”

“Well, you certainly weren’t on the list. Your life was filled with pretty unpalatable acts.”

“Hey, it’s a free country. I can do whatever I want!”

“Well, technically yes. You were endowed with free will and the laws of your country of origin, a United States of America? can only punish you if they find you guilty in a court of law. So as long as you don’t get caught, well, I suppose you could technically could do whatever you wanted.”

“WHOOOO! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”

“But that didn’t mean it was okay for you to be a bully, or to be a bad person to other people. We take that kind of behavior quite seriously here.”

“It’s darwinism, man. Survival of the fittest.”

“Uhm… Darwin didn’t mean it like that. His theory of evolution meant that the species that were better adapted to their environment, not the strongest, were the ones that survived. Otherwise the dinosaurs would still rule the Earth.”

“Whoa! So God supports evolution? The religious crowd is full of shit?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Ha Ha! In your FACE, Preacher Tomkins!”

“Ah, Harold Tomkins, your town’s preacher. You know, having sex with his daughter was fine, but then having sex with his wife was not well received here.”

“Best MILF booty ever, man! And the guy was a prick anyway.”

“Yeah... but then you got the daughter and the wife pregnant and you moved out of town, leaving them to deal with the problem by themselves.”

“They should’ve been on the pill, man! Not my fault.”

“They would’ve if they would not have been intoxicated with the heroine and the ecstasy pills you provided for them.”

“What was I supposed to do? A guy’s gotta make a living. Besides, I gave them a discount for the meth too.”

“Right… well, about that; That meth lab you had in your mother’s basement was found by the police when Tomkins denounced you to the authorities, but the one who went to jail was your mother because it was in her property.”

“Bitch deserved it. Always getting on my case about dropping out of high school. The cunt wanted me to enlist in the fucking Army. Can you fucking believe it?”

“Uhm… actually yes. Look, all of that was not taken lightly here. Neither was the stealing of elementary school children’s lunches, nor the stealing of motor vehicles, nor the hijacking of private residences to steal their personal items and then leaving spreaded canine feces on the living room’s couches as a calling card, nor was the selling of crack cocaine to underage high school girls in exchange for oral sex, nor was the armed robbery to convenience stores, nor was…”

“Okay, okay, I get it. But I didn’t get caught, right? YOLO!”

“Actually that’s why you got cancer.”

“What?”

“We gave you cancer.”

“You fuckin KIDDING ME?? You gave me fucking lung cancer??”

“Well, technically yes, because we were the ones who sent the person who gave you cigarettes in the first place. But also technically no, because the one who didn’t quit was you. I think the word you used was also ‘YOLO.’”

“I’LL KILL YOU! I’ll fucking cut your balls and feed them to yo momma!”

“Not likely. We’re immortal. And omnipotent. But anyway, that’s why you were not on the list.”

“Motherfucker… but I WILL be in Heaven, right? I mean, here I am.”

“Yes. That is correct. You used to be in the list for Hell but that changed.”

“Wait… is this a trick? Are you going to punish me more?”

“No.”

“No? I… But I was an asshole. You said it yourself.”

“Yeah… technically, yes. But then the doctors told you you only had a month to live and you made that final request.”

“What? The movie?”

“Yes.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“When you were seven years old you followed some of your classmates to the premiere of Return of the Jedi because you wanted to bully them. Your plan was to drop ice-cold soda inside the back of their shirts during the movie. Instead, you became enthralled with the film and came back to see it again the following weekend. Then, the following year, you begged your parents to rent you the VHS versions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. You liked them so much you lied to your parents and told them the tapes had been stolen, so they had to pay the video store for the copies that you ended up watching in secret.”

“Oh, those movies were so sweet, man…”

“Then in 1997 you sneaked into the theater for the first showing of the Special Edition of Star Wars Episode IV. You also sneaked in to see the Special Editions of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.”

“They were cool. Aside from Greedo shooting first and that awful ‘Jedi Rocks’ scene, the changes George Lucas made were fine. Actually, even ‘Jedi Rocks’ can be forgiven because of the hot Asian Twi’lek.”

“Two years later, in 1999, you traded some cocaine for tickets for the midnight premiere of Star Wars Episode I. Three years later, in 2002, you traded ecstasy pills for tickets for the midnight premiere of Episode II. And in 2005 you actually paid full ticket price in advance for the midnight premiere of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith on IMAX.”

“Totally worth it. The battle over Coruscant with the battle drums and the light saber duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan are gold. Even with the corny dialog.”

“Then you stole your neighbor’s cable so you could see The Clone Wars. That is, until you figured out how to download pirate copies. And when Star Wars Rebels came out, you actually seeded the torrents so other people could download it as well.”

“Yeah, I guess Dave Filoni was George Lucas’s Padawan from The Clone Wars and he did a pretty good job with the series without George.”

“You see, throughout those times in your life related to Star Wars, you showed for a brief few moments that you too could be a human being. When anything related to Star Wars was on, you didn’t think anymore about bullying people, or doing mischief. Nothing too terrible anyway. You let the child in you be himself and, for a couple of hours at least, you actually showed you could have hope.”

“Ha… Well, you know…”

“But then you got cancer and the doctors told you about the possibility of dying in a month. So you requested Disney to show you Star Wars The Force Awakens before it came out on theaters as a last dying wish.”

“Well, I heard that other guy who was also about to die requested it and Disney accepted, so I thought why not?”

“Correct. But when Disney showed up at the hospital with their lawyers and the copy of the movie, you actually got depressed. The more you saw the movie, the worse you got.”

“How could I not? It was TERRIBLE. It was a total ripoff of the original Star Wars but with a chick and a plot that made no sense whatsoever. I mean, Han Solo not knowing how powerful Chewbacca’s crossbow was after they’ve been hanging around for decades? AND he saw Chewie shooting an Imperial speeder bike with his crossbow in mid air when they were on Endor in Return of the Jedi. Gimme a fucking break! And don’t get me started on that lame Starkiller Base and R2-D2 miraculously waking up with the other piece of the map. Why do you fucking need a map to get to Luke if he could find Bespin just by using The Force in The Empire Strikes Back AND he could call Leia through The Force? Ohhh, and that GOD AWFUL Kylo Ren. That little bitch was far, far worse than Darth Vader’s ‘noooo!’ from Revenge of the Sith BUT FOR ALMOST THREE FUCKING HOURS! He made Han Solo’s death totally meaningless and stupid. Who the FUCK wrote that garbage? Disney executives? It makes the Holiday Special watchable! FUCK! But the worst part is that new chick who had all of the powers of a Jedi without a single day of training. Without training, even Anakin Skywalker, the most powerful Jedi ever couldn’t do anything other than be a good pilot. And Luke had to go through YEARS of training with TWO Jedi masters and he couldn’t control The Force. But this chick can have Force visions, use a light saber, do Jedi mind tricks, and beat a guy who was trained by Luke Skywalker himself just because Anakin’s old lightsaber ‘talked’ to her even though that lightsaber was just a fucking prop that Anakin lost in Episode II and then had to replace anyway. SHIT!”

“Yes, we noticed. And we also noticed that even though the chemotherapy would have maybe saved you, you just lost your willingness to live after watching that movie. Your body just plain gave up. And so you ended up here.”

“But why?”

“We think that watching that movie is more than enough punishment for anyone. Including you. Even with all of your mischief. It is just too much pain for any real Star Wars fan to have to go through that.”

“So what happened to the other guy who saw the movie before dying?”

“Oh, we compensated him by granting him another wish; hanging out for a day with Alec Guinness dressed up as Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“Ooh! I want to hang out with Peter Cushing dressed up like Tarkin! Do I get another wish too?”

“No.”

--

AUTHOR’S NOTE: No, I did not like The Force Awakens. AT ALL. I’m a life-long Star Wars fan and I’m deeply offended by the GARBAGE Disney and Jar-Jar Abrams peddled to millions of people as a “Star Wars sequel.” I also have a suspicion that Disney bought reviews and silenced critics for the movie so people would think it’s great when it isn’t. It SUCKS. No reviewer in his right mind could give rave reviews to it. At least not without disrespecting George Lucas’s original vision for Star Wars. So if the guy in the story was a complete asshole and a thug, but he died watching The Force Awakens, that’s more than enough punishment even for him and he has earned the right to go to heaven.

Nanobots

“It’s happening, Marcie! It’s finally happening!”

“Huh? Wha…? What time is it?”

“It’s 3:25 in the morning. But that’s not important. It’s finally happening!”

“God… What is happening?”

“You gotta come to the lab to see it.”

“You mean the basement.”

“Yes. You gotta see it!”

“See what? Daniel, it’s fucking three in the morning, jeez!”

“But you HAVE to see it. This will be the biggest scientific achievement in the history of humanity. I have taken the first step into securing immortality for the human race.”

“Fuck… Look, I’m going to take a look just so you let me sleep. You have five minutes to show me whatever the hell you’re doing and then I’m going back to bed.”

“Great! But just a fair warning; I only started the experiment. So it might take a while for it to be fully successful.”

“What did you do this time? Another one of your attempts at making a functional light saber?”

“Oh no, this is much, much cooler.”

“Then what is it?”

“I have found a way to make people immortal.”

“Jesus… You can’t make anybody or anything immortal. Even atoms have a half life.”

“Oh yes you can. Check this out.”

“A dead racoon? You woke me up at fucking three in the morning to show me a dead racoon?”

“This racoon, for your information, will be revived.”

“Revived. God… What the fuck are you doing now, Daniel?”

“Just hear me out. Zombies are basically living people who were infected by some microorganism, right? Or dead people who also got the infection and revived. So all we have to do to revive dead organic matter, or to keep organic matter from dying, is to infect it with something that will keep it from expiring, right? It’s like a vaccine against death. Imagine the practical uses for such a vaccine. The government would pay us billions for a vaccine that would keep soldiers from dying! I’m testing that vaccine in this raccoon I found in the backyard.”

“Vaccine? Are you out of your mind? What can you possibly put in a vaccine that would keep people from dying?”

“Nanobots! I programmed nanobots to keep cells from dying. All they have to do is to replace the damaged cells and the host will be able to stay alive. Humans will be immortals!”

“Nano… wait… You took my nanotech cells?? That’s my PhD project you asshole! I’m supposed to present it next week as part of my dissertation on how to fight cancerous tumors!”

“You don’t understand. This is a much greater achievement. Instead of chipping away tumors, why not just make people immortal? That way they can stay alive even if they have brain cancer.”

“I’m going to fucking kill you! It took me YEARS to develop those nanotech cells! And you injected them to a fucking dead racoon? Are you fucking kidding me?? You just ruined my PhD!! And for what? You can’t revive dead cells you stupid fuck!”

“You’re missing the larger picture, Marcie. All you have to do is to program the nanobots to replace damaged cells and organic matter than be revived.”

“Those nanotech cells were designed to KILL cancerous cells, you idiot! They do the opposite of replacing cells! The point was to kill cancerous cells so they wouldn’t spread throughout the body! You can’t replace dead cells with them!”

“Yes you can. And in fact I’ve already done it. Look. See what I have in the container under this cloth? It’s decaying organic matter that was injected with nanobots. After 24 hours the organic matter is actually moving thanks to the nanobots.”

“Daniel. That’s a turd. You injected my nanotech cells into a fucking TURD. Right now my jaw hurts from how much I’ve been clenching it. I’m going to fucking kill you.”

“And as you can see, it’s actually moving. I have brought organic matter to life from the dead.”

“Goddammit… That turd is not moving. It has maggots. Fly maggots hatch in 24 hours, you stupid piece of shit. The maggots are the ones that are moving on that fucking turd that you used to waste my nanotech cells. There’s no such thing as a zombie and you can’t revive dead organic matter. You’re a fucking idiot!”

“That can’t be right. Maggots? Let me get a closer look. I mean, it is a canine stool that was outside during the day, but… Huh… Well, what do you know… Those are actually maggots.”

“I’m leaving you. And I’m fucking suing you for the nanotech cells.”

“Wow. She’s really angry. But how can you be angry when you’re witnessing the research that will make humans immortal? I need to get new glasses, though.”

--

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I really don’t get the fascination people have with zombies. I just don’t.

Hydrazine Outpost

I’m the luckiest man in the Solar System. You may not think so because of my current situation, but I really am.

Oh, sorry. Let me introduce myself. My name is Frank. I’m the only attendant at the Space Bridge Corporation’s hydrazine outpost orbiting Mars just outside its moon, Deimos. This is the outpost that supplies hydrazine to other outposts orbiting the Sun along the asteroid belt and to ships en-route to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede and to Saturn’s moon Titan.

As you know, the distance between Earth and Mars is about a little over a half of the distance between Earth and the Sun. So it’s relatively easy to get to Mars with a single fuel tank. But if you want to go to Jupiter then you’re in trouble, because the distance between Jupiter and Mars is almost 3.7 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, or more than seven times the distance between Earth and Mars. Then, if you want to continue to Saturn from Jupiter, you need to travel 4.3 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, or about nine times the distance between Earth and Mars.

You can send a satellite to Saturn and beyond using gravity from the planets as a slingshot and “jump” from one planet to the next. But it takes years and only a relatively small craft can do it. If you want to do some serious interplanetary travel fast, you need a big ship and a lot of hydrazine.

So NASA and Space Bridge Corp. figured the best way to do this was to set up a network of hydrazine outposts along the way. One right here in Mars; four at equal distances along the orbit right at the start of the Asteroid Belt, so there is always one “close by” no matter where Jupiter happens to be during its solar orbit; Four more at the end of the asteroid belt for the same reason; One orbiting Ganymede; Four more along Jupiter’s orbit; a really big one on Titan and another one orbiting Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Nobody actually wants to go to Titan. Well, not yet. But since it’s atmosphere is 98.4% nitrogen, and you need nitrogen to make hydrazine, Space Bridge mines the nitrogen, mixes it with the hydrogen from the water from Enceladus, and voilá; more rocket fuel for interplanetary travel. The remaining oxygen is taken to Titan for terraforming. Titan is, after all, technically a better place to have a human colony than Mars.

As a result of these constant trips to Jupiter and Saturn, hydrazine tanker ships are constantly coming by to refuel the outpost. After leaving a bunch of hydrazine here on the outpost from the Titan refinery, they go back to Earth and then back here to Deimos before going again to Saturn. They just stop by to refuel themselves and keep on going.

So you could say that with even my two PhDs, I’m nothing more than a glorified, lonely gas station attendant.

Oh, because I’m here just by myself. I did mention that, right? And I have to be here for three years.

So how does being here all alone in the middle of nowhere for three years and surrounded by tanks of hydrazine make me the luckiest man in the Solar System? Well, because of how I got here.

You see, I’m a convict serving a three year sentence for, and you’re not going to believe this, soliciting prostitution.

It’s a funny story, actually. You see, I started patronizing sex workers after I graduated from the PhDs in Astrophysics and Engineering at Caltech. Immediately after, I got a job teaching at Caltech because I was too lazy to find a job somewhere else and I made a reasonable amount of money. So one day I thought, hey, why not pay for sex now that I can actually afford it?

I have always been single. In part because of my obviously geeky looks. Chicks want hot guys when they’re in high school and when they’re in college, so there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m also single because, to be honest, I just didn’t have time for dating. I got both of the the PhDs in half the time because I always kept busy studying. But now that I had some free time and no dating skills I thought it would be cheaper and more efficient if I just paid for sex instead of finding a girlfriend. And I’m glad, too. Some of the other professors in my department used to bitch and moan about not having sex in years because their wives lost interest. I really don’t want to deal with stuff like that.

So I started visiting massage parlors. You know how it is. Pay at the entrance, get a massage, put some extra money in a drawer, and get some sex. But that’s relatively fast and it gets old after doing the same thing over and over after a while. So I started looking for sex providers with hourly rates and more adventurous attitudes.

First I tried driving to Nevada and going to a brothel. But it’s too long a drive from Pasadena to Vegas and the prices are way too high. Ten times the prices from Tijuana o more. And the sex workers don’t even keep all of the money. Half of it go to brothel. That’s terrible.

I’m also too far from Tijuana. I went there once but, like I said, it’s too far and getting back is a drag. You have to spend two hours stuck in line at the border, and then four hours driving back. It’s cheaper and closer than Nevada, yes, but it’s not my idea of weekend fun to stay six hours cooped up in my car.

So I said fuck it, I’m just going to start responding to ads online from sex workers. The prices were more reasonable, and I didn’t have to go far to get my weekly fix of sex.

The problem was I got arrested once after the police put a fake ad online. Since there was only intent and not actual sex being traded, the judge gave me a misdemeanor fine.

That didn’t stop me, though. Pretty soon I gathered a list of tried and true, real sex workers who would fancy my extravagant requests, like having sex inside an adult theater, in a back alley, or if I just didn’t feel like going out, back at my place.

Unfortunately, I got caught by the police a couple of my sexcapades. The first time was in a back alley. I guess it was stupid to go behind a donut shop. We were just begging to get caught. For that little stunt I talked my way into getting another fine and my drivers license suspended.

The second time was in an adult theater. I told some asshole he could not have sex with my sex provider while we were in the theater and ten minutes later the place got raided by the police. Of course, the rest of the guys who were jerking off watching us could just zip up. But I had my pants down and my provider was naked. They took us in, of course. This time I got a 45 day prison sentence in county jail. Lucky for me it was during summer break, so I didn’t get fired for missing work at Caltech.

But the third time was the last straw for me. I was already well into my forties. I had been careful not to get arrested for a long time. But then some asshole District Attorney wanted to appear on the news because he wanted to run for Governor. He didn’t have any big cases, though, so his chances of big media exposure were too small.

That is, until somebody told him about me.

I suppose somebody told him a Caltech professor had a thing for prostitutes, and catching me would give him a lot of media coverage. After all, local media in California is just bullshit police stories anyway. Like there’s nothing else of importance to show the public, like polluters and crooked politicians.

So this asshole DA set up a sting operation in my own home. He even put hidden microphones and cameras. That’s how he was able to record me in my own bedroom with two gorgeous sex workers who agreed to have a threesome for a very reasonable fee.

The moment I took out the money to pay them, the police AND the media stormed my place. This time they gave me six months in county jail and I lost my job at Caltech.

But guess what? That didn’t stop me! After I was released I started a media campaign to legalize prostitution in California and in the rest of the United States. I mean, why not? It’s ridiculous that California and the rest of the country legalized marijuana two hundred years ago, and cocaine less than half a century after,  but paid sex was still a crime.

So let me get this straight; it’s okay to buy and sell drugs that fuck people up and their families, but it’s NOT okay to buy and sell sex between consenting adults even though it IS okay to do it if somebody is recording it and the video is going to be shown to the public for a fee.

That is really fucked up. Sex workers provide a much needed service to a lot of people and in exchange they can put food on the table for their families. And no, I’m not talking about sex slavery or human trafficking. I’m talking about consenting adults making a choice about their bodies without anybody pressuring them.

So to get the media’s attention, I organized a rally supporting the legalization of prostitution and, as a protest, I publicly offered a sex worker her regular fee for sex.

I got arrested within three minutes of doing that.

This time, though, the judge had a bit of a problem on his hands. If he sentenced me to prison, I would become a martyr and rally more people to my cause. The judge was a Republican and even though I knew for a fact he liked to pay young men to suck their dicks at public restrooms, he wanted to sentence ME so he could get a shot at the Supreme Court. Asshole.

So instead of sentencing me to prison, he offered me a bargain. In exchange for erasing my supposed criminal record (fucking paying for sex!) I would do three years of community service… on Mars.

Since I had PhDs in Astrophysics and Engineering, I was a perfect candidate. All I had to do was to show up at Space Bridge Corporation and follow their instructions. I would get paid a pittance minus my meals for manning the hydrazine outpost at Deimos for three years. Afterwards, I could come back to Earth without a criminal record... and very little money for my work at the hydrazine outpost. Oh, but my resume would be fantastic, they said; spent three years on Mars!

Bullshit. All Space Bridge wanted was dirt cheap labor. Dirt cheap, highly specialized labor, that is.

But I took the deal anyway. Why they fuck not? Nobody was hiring me back on Earth anyway because of the bullshit prostitution “crimes” I had committed. I had some money saved, but if I didn’t spend anything in three years and lived off food rations in space, the money would last longer. At least until I found a new job after I returned to Earth.

Manning the outpost is fairly easy anyway. You just wait for tanker ships to show up and dock, keep an eye on the computer while it does the loading and unloading of hydrazine, and wait hours for the tanker to finish. Then keep an eye on the separation procedure and watch the ship go away.

That used to happen about once or twice a month. But when the Titan refinery started delivering the first hydrazine shipments, the trips doubled to one per week.

So I would spend about six days a week alone manning the outpost and then on the seventh day I would keep an eye on the computer while the tanker ship did its thing. Barely crossed words with the pilots, though. They just stayed in the ships and took a nap while the hydrazine loaded or unloaded.

But that changed three months ago.

I was about to celebrate my 15th month manning the station when a new tanker ship from Earth showed up requesting permission to dock and initiate the transfer procedure. I said my name and outpost title and I informed the ship the docking procedure was about to start. Usually I get an cold response from the pilot saying something like his name, the ship’s number and “acknowledged.” This time was different, though. Somebody from the ship actually said my name back.

“Frank? Is that you?”

“Who is this?”

“Hey, it’s Brenda! I mean... hold on. I’ll be right over.”

Brenda? The name did sound familiar.

As soon as the docking procedure was finalized and the hydrazine transfer started, the ship’s pilot and another crew member requested permission to come on board the outpost. I opened the airlock and the two crewmembers came on board. As soon as they took off their helmets I knew who they were; Peaches (or Brenda) and Violet (or Joan), two of my old sex providers back in Pasadena.

“What? What are you two doing here?”

“Same thing you’re doing. We got offered a bargain to do community service in space in exchange for erasing our criminal records.”

“You’re engineers?”

“Almost. I was in the Engineering program at Caltech. I enrolled after you said I might like it. Remember?”

“But that was like, what? Four years ago? I haven’t seen you at all since then.”

“Because you kept on calling our competitors, you jerk! Ha ha! No, I was really busy with school. I still worked, though. A couple of ‘dates’ a night paid for my education. My brain and my pussy at the service of science. Ha ha!”

“And you Violet, I mean, Joan, you too went to the Engineering program at Caltech?”

“No, I went to medical school. Also paid for my tuition selling some ass. No way you can pay for a college education these days with a minimum wage job. But the fucking judge won’t understand it. So he said I could go to space as a medic and keep an eye on the other crew member’s health. So Space Bridge put us on the same ship.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it sucks because we get a clean record afterwards, but no money. How are we supposed to finish our degrees? And if somebody hires us, nobody is going to pay us what our work is actually worth because we don’t have the degrees yet.”

“I think they want to get rid of prostitutes by sending us into space,” Brenda said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“We’re not the only ones they’re sending out into space. I knew other girls at Caltech who also got the space bargain. Pretty soon all of Space Bridge personnel in space will be hookers and Johns.”

“You don’t say…”

“Yeah! And we can’t even make trades! Ha ha ha!”

Well… Actually I found a solution for that.

See, when they sent me to the hydrazine outpost I left half of my money in the bank and I took with me a memory drive with the other half of my money converted to digital coins. I separated it into QR codes with private keys for digital wallets with 100 Dollars each, and I kept it stored away. This was just a precaution in case they landed us on Florida after my return to Earth and I had to buy a flight back home or something like that.

But you know what? I found a better use for the money. I told Peaches and Violet I would pay them with the QR codes for a threesome right here on the outpost. At first they laughed, but after I made the case that this way they could make a little bit of money for when they finished their time in space. And they could make more when they returned to the outpost. What I was about to pay them was more than what they would get from Space Bridge after their term in space was over. So the girls agreed to my proposition.

Oh, and what a glorious threesome that was. I am now the very first man who is a member of the 140 million mile high club.

Not only that. Peaches and Violet also gave me a list of names of prostitutes who might be passing by to get hydrazine. And most of them seem to see me as a sort of hero for sex workers for promoting the legalization of prostitution. So I think I might get a nice discount.

Best part is, there are no cops to arrest me here for practicing my favorite pastime pretty much every week. Just like on Earth! The politicians can kiss my ass.

Oh, and wait till I go back to Earth. Peaches and Violet gave me permission to record our paid threesome and to use it to tell people how the space bargain is allowing prostitution to happen in fucking Mars even though is supposed to curb it in California.

See why I’m the luckiest man in the Solar System?

--

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I find it utterly ridiculous that while there’s a huge effort to legalize recreational marijuana, sex work is still a crime in most of the United States. But if you pay somebody to have sex, and you record the sex and you charge money to see the video, then it’s just free speech. So let me get this straight; People getting fucked up with drugs it’s good. But people using their free will to make money providing sexual satisfaction in private is bad. This society is FUCKED UP.

@TheRealYearbook

This isn’t justice, or some sort of moral act. It isn’t punishment either. This is me being pissed off because somebody fucked with me and I wanted to return the favor. No, it’s not revenge either. I see it more like a game. And from day one I intended to win it.

I suppose what they did to me and to others like me was a sort of goodbye spitting on our faces after four years of making us feel like shit. We’re all graduating next month. We’re 18 now and off to college. Well, some of us. Supposedly we’re adults, but some people just never grow up. Fine. Game on.

The game didn’t start in high school, though. It began years before. Lucky for me I realized early on this could have serious consequences if I didn’t find a way to deal with it and protect myself. So I read a bunch of psychology books in order to develop some form of mental vaccine against the crap you have to deal with when you’re young. I kept seeing in popular media how people go to therapy when they’re older because of fucked up childhoods. So I decided to do the therapy thing ahead of time. And it worked. At least to a point. It didn’t solve my problems and it didn’t keep me from being miserable, but at least I didn’t try to commit suicide or some shit like that.

If only the others would’ve read about psychology they might have survived this ordeal with only a couple of scratches, instead of being scarred for life. But what do I care? Quite frankly is not my problem. I just wanted to get out of this fucking ant hill they call high school and be left alone.

Marty Green wasn’t so lucky. He went into such deep depression his parents had to take him out of school and home-school him. Idiot. He should’ve realized high school is not forever, and once he had a job he could find a girlfriend or even pay for one if he wanted.

Odette Wood wasn’t lucky either. She developed an eating disorder and had to be hospitalized. Moron. She should’ve known women in their teens look different than what they will look like as adults. I know because my half brother is forty years old and has said many times the girls who looked really “hot” in high school ended up looking like hippos in college. Past college, only other fat guys would date them. Chubby girls, on the other hand, tended to lose the so-called “baby fat” after high school if they didn’t eat junk food and if they had a healthy diet. Last but not least, stick girls like myself tended to gain some weight after college. But since we were skinny to begin with, our bodies tend to become shapely.

Both, Marty and Odette, sunk into their respective mental turmoil not because of boys-turned-assholes making their every day miserable, but because a very specific group of little bitches; Jenny Garfield and her merry band of harpies.

Jenny Garfield became the alpha bitch in elementary school. You know the story; the “cute” girl boys drool after who personally hand picks a compact group of sycophants as her bathroom entourage. This compact group of beta bitches started in elementary school with Aileen Roberts and Romina Valdivia. Oh no no, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not accusing them of being racists. I’m accusing them of being bitches.

Then, in the ninth grade, the entourage was completed with Jasmine Miller and Erika Horowitz. I have to hand it to them; they were good. They laid low until the graduating bitches left high school and then they took over. Even the new senior bitches couldn’t keep up with them. All they had to do was to sit on a table near the new seniors during lunch recess, then get up five minutes after everybody sat down to eat and move to a table full of boys, who would feel so flattered they would get up from their seats just so they could talk to them. That is how they built their “popularity.” By calling attention to themselves and away from their competitors in the race for bitchdom.

Where was I in all this? I was minding my own business. I figured that if I wanted to make money for college I would have to work somewhere where the pay was more than minimum wage. So I read a lot about computer programming and I did some programming exercises in my laptop during lunch recess. With some luck, I could get a part-time job doing simple coding at a local company and get a degree in computer science at the same time. There was no way I was going to wait for some asshole to grant me the honor of being a housewife so he could fuck me in exchange for food.

I wasn’t unaware of what was going on around me, though. I saw how Jenny Garfield and her harpies crushed people just with a few well placed rumors, or by pretending to like somebody only to laugh at them when whoever was the target fell for it. But like I said, it wasn’t my problem. I took preemptive measures not to be affected by people like Jenny and her bitches. Jenny’s victims should’ve done the same.

So I survived relatively unscathed the four years of high school and, towards the end of my senior year, I counted the days before the last day of school. But one month before graduation, something happened that made me snap.

One day people received anonymous emails with links to a Twitter account with memes made with photos from apparently random people from our school. The photos showed the person’s face and a mean hashtag. If it was a chubby girl, the hashtag would be #MissPorky. If it was a skinny girl, the hashtag would read #OliveOilNoPopeye. Geeky boy? #Virgin4Life. Poor boy? #FoodStamps. And so on. The name of the Twitter account was @TheRealYearbook.

I didn’t get the link because I’m not stupid enough to give my real email address to high school kids. If I needed to I used an alternate email address for school assignments, but I never checked that account unless it was absolutely necessary. The reason why I found out about @TheRealYearbook was because I saw some kids looking at their phones and laughing as I walked towards the trash bin to throw away my trash from lunch. They were laughing at a photo of some boy with the hashtag #MouthBreathing. Not very creative. But hey, it made the peanut gallery laugh. None of my business anyway.

The strange thing about @TheRealYearbook was that you could only see it during lunch recess. Immediately after recess the account was deactivated. If you tried to access the account after recess you would get an error message from Twitter telling you the account had been deleted by its owner. But the next day, by lunch recess, the account was active again with new photos and new hashtags, only to be deactivated again after lunch recess was over.

At first that seemed odd, but then I realized why was the account deactivated for most of the day. Because that way if anyone filed a complaint with Twitter, Twitter’s staff would respond hours later saying that the account was no longer active and there was nothing they could do about it. Thus, whoever was behind @TheRealYearbook would enjoy full immunity for what they were doing and the account would never be deleted.

That whoever was clearly Jenny Garfield and her harpies. How do I know? Because they were the only ones who didn’t have any photographs with a hashtag in the account; Because their boyfriends from the football team didn’t have any photos either; And because whenever somebody laughed after looking at a photo in @TheRealYearbook they always snickered without looking at their phones. Meaning they knew ahead of time what people would be laughing about.

You may say that’s just circumstantial evidence. I thought so too at first. But a week after @TheRealYearbook started humiliating people I got my picture tweeted with the hashtag #ForeverAlone. I know it’s a stupid thing to get pissed off about. However, number one, I didn’t give anyone permission to take my picture and publish it. And second, why should I put up with that shit?

But what really pissed me off was the fact that I could tell from the angle of my picture that whoever shot it was sitting in the direction of the table Jenny and her harpies always used during lunch recess. There was only one more table behind them, but it was too far away and there’s no way somebody could’ve taken the picture without getting the alpha bitch and her bitchettes in the frame. That meant Jenny and her harpies had to be the ones tweeting our photos. What pissed me off about it was the fact that they felt sufficiently immune to consequences to do that shit in front of everybody. They ruled us. And because everybody let them, now they were fucking with me. That’s what really made me snap.

I didn’t say anything, though. I kept working on my coding and pretended everything was fine. But inside the only thing I thought was this: game on, bitches.

If I was going to retaliate I would need to gather some intel about my enemy first. That was actually pretty simple. All I had to do was to send an email to the parents of Jenny and the harpies with a Microsoft Office file. Perhaps a Powerpoint claiming it was an inspirational message or a Word document claiming it was a survey. As you know, Microsoft Office is a shitty program when it comes to internet security. You can code a trojan virus into an Office document with instructions to download a keylogger or a remote control command and virtually take over the computer. And the antivirus wouldn’t even detect it because it would think you’re allowing Office to execute valid commands. Microsoft sucks. That’s why I only use LibreOffice if I have to use a desktop Office suite. Aside from the fact that the program is freeware, LibreOffice gives you protection against MS Office targeted viruses. That’s because LibreOffice uses a different programming language than Microsoft’s Office. Also, LibreOffice turns off the code execution by default, so anyone sending you a virus in a .docx or .pptx or .xlsx file will fail to infect your computer.

Fortunately, anyone who has bitches for kids is usually just as stupid as their offsprings. Which meant there was a very high probability the harpies’ parents had that shitty Microsoft Office at home instead of a better Office suite like LibreOffice. All I needed now was to get a hold of their email addresses. Which was relatively easy. Anyone can fucking hack the school’s server by injecting code and get anyone’s information. That’s how I got the emails for the parents of Jenny Garfield and her harpies.

I sent the emails with the infected Office documents to the parents towards 8:00 PM. That way there was a bigger chance of getting the parents to read the messages in their home computers and let three custom-made trojans into their systems. One of the trojans had instructions to hijack their modem and make a back door to any other computer that used that network. So if Jenny Garfield and her harpies logged on, I would get into their systems as well. The second trojan was the ninja: a simple keylogger that would get installed through the backdoor into all of the computers in the house. The third one was the cavalry: it would allow me to completely take control of their computers. I needed that for a number of reasons, but mainly to be able to wipe the trojans after they were no longer necessary and to be able to execute remote commands using their own home IP address.

With the trojans in place it was a matter of time before I could get all sorts of usernames and passwords for the bitches. And I did. I got their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail passwords within two days. But the one I was really interested in was their iTunes password. People like Jenny and her harpies have iPhones not because of the performance of the phone, but just to show off. If they had an iPhone, they surely had iTunes accounts with a password. Yup. I got it too.

The iTunes passwords allowed me access not just to their iCloud server, and whatever bounty was there to pillage, also to their phone’s GPS tracking. That way I could track where the little bitches were at all times. So as soon as I got the iTunes password for Jenny Garfield, I tested the GPS tracking for her phone right away.

It was a Monday night, so the phone didn’t move away from her home at all. But sometime around 8:30 PM it actually moved out of her house and it circled her block. It stopped for about a minute somewhere on the other side of the block, behind her house, and then it moved again back into her house.

That was odd. Just a walk around the block with a one minute stop? I didn’t make much of it at first, but after she repeated the walk around the block the next day I got curious. So I went to Google Maps and saw what was in her block, but there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. I took another spin around the block in Google Maps and this time I stopped at the spot where she spent one minute without moving. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. Just houses. Perhaps she stopped to chat with a neighbor? No, not likely. Why talk to somebody for just one minute? And she did it twice.

I was about to close Google Maps when, by mistake, I went to satellite mode. I zoomed in again and the Street View showed an angle that pointed towards the curb in front of the place where she spent a minute without moving. And then it hit me. Of course. How could I not see it? She was walking her dog. I completely missed the fact that she had pictures of that stupid Chihuahua all over her iCloud account.

How did I know she was walking her dog? Because right at the spot where Google’s street view landed there was a small skid mark. A small, dark brown skid mark, that is. Obviously made by a car that was parked there at night, but then was away in the morning, probably at work. Since the Google Maps camera drives by in the morning, it was obviously not going to photograph the car. But it was going to shoot the smeared shit.

No, it wasn’t mud. Mud turns light brown after it dries up. Shit, on the other hand, turns dark. That skid mark had to be shit. And that shit was left there by Jenny Garfield’s Chihuahua. Why else would she get near someplace where there was shit? Because there wasn’t any when she walked the dog every night. Her parents probably made her walk her dog every night, but she didn’t feel like picking up the shit after the dog pooped, so she trained the dog to poop under a car and right next to one of the wheels. In the morning, the car would drive over the shit, smearing it on the pavement. Thus getting rid of the dog poop Jenny didn’t want to pick up.

So not only Jenny Garfield was a certified bitch, but also a certified pig.

I have to say this actually gave me the idea I needed for winning the game. When I sent the trojans to hack the bitches’ computers I only had a vague idea about what to do next. Maybe delete the @TheRealYearbook Twitter account? Or publish some of their embarrassing photos? But this revelation of Jenny Garfield’s dog’s shit gave a far better idea.

Five nights in a row I waited till 10:00 PM and then walked to Jenny Garfield’s neighborhood. Lucky for me it wasn’t too far away. It was a good 20 minute walk, but it was reasonable. Then I walked towards the spot where her dog pooped and I picked it up. Then I went back home and I stored the poop in a Ziploc bag inside a paper bag in the back of my fridge marked “for science class.”.

In the meantime, Jenny and her bitches kept on harassing people with @TheRealYearbook. And I kept on playing dumb. Or actually, I kept on playing dumb while I hacked again into the school’s server so I could find out the bitches’ lockers’ combinations.

Once I knew the combinations, I waited for Sunday and I went to the school after 11:30 PM and then straight to the lockers. Then I went home and straight to my computer.

The next morning everything went on as always. The bitches and the rest of us mere mortals went to our lockers, picked up our books, and went to class. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. But then lunch time came along. I sat on my usual table, working alone on my coding, but keeping an eye on Jenny and her harpies. As usual, they would get out their phones at the same time. By now I knew that it was Jenny the one who controlled the Twitter account, while the photos of people in school were taken by her bitchettes. But this time when Jenny activated again the Twitter account everybody in the cafeteria saw something completely unexpected; several screen captures of Jenny’s harpies’ iCloud accounts with unedited photos of all the people they had photographed. Since the photos didn’t have the hashtags on them anymore, it was obvious they were ones who took the photos and uploaded them to Twitter.

But then the real fun began.

The next photos in the timeline were shots of somebody’s locker with an open book and a pile of shit on it with the following hashtags: #EatItAileen, #RominasLunch, #IownJasmine, and #ErikasSelfie. Conspicuously, though, there wasn’t a photo of Jenny’s locker.

All four of Jenny’s harpies stormed towards their lockers while everybody in the cafeteria laughed. Jenny didn’t move and, instead, kept tapping in her phone. I guess she wanted to delete her @TheRealYearbook account. Too bad. I changed the password while they looked at the new photos.

When the harpies got to their lockers they didn’t find any dog shit. Just like in the morning. But then they took out the books left in the lockers and did find shit plastered in the middle of the books they needed for the next period after lunch recess.

Here’s the best part: apparently all five of them knew each other’s locker combinations, because when they discovered the shit in their books all four of them went to Jenny’s locker and opened it, only to find there was no dog poop at all neither in the locker itself or in any of her books.

I thought the harpies were going to confront Jenny. But no. Instead, they went straight to the Principal’s office and said they wanted to confess. That yes, it was them who took the pictures of a lot of students to humiliate them in Twitter, but only because Jenny had ordered them to do it. It was Jenny, they added, the one who controlled the account and now, apparently, she was turning against them because she knew she was going to UCLA and they had to go community college first.

The Principal probably told them that in the morning he found a box with dog shit in his office and note that read “do a DNA test and compare it with Pinky,” next to a URL to a picture of Jenny’s Chihuahua, precisely named Pinky. Shit can be used for a DNA test. If it matched the DNA in the shit in the harpies’ lockers, and then actual fresh shit from Jenny’s dog, then Jenny had nowhere to run. So I guess the harpies must have told the principal that Pinky was indeed Jenny’s dog and then she got called to the Principal’s office.

When I heard Jenny Garfield’s name over the speaker system I nearly laughed, but I kept my composure. I was busy instructing my trojans to wipe any trace of themselves from the infected computers where they had been.

What I heard afterwards was that a few students actually sued Jenny for psychological distress. The school, of course, didn’t buy her story about somebody framing her and expelled her, leaving her without a high school diploma for at least a year and therefore cancelling her entrance to UCLA. Might as well. Her college fund had to be used to settle the lawsuits against her.

I got accepted to, both, Caltech and MIT, but I decided not to go. Instead, I’ve been ripping off alpha bitches and assholes online. All I have to do is to make fake profiles with the photos I steal from the Facebook accounts of good looking men and women from other countries like Italy or Estonia, where they don’t even speak English. You see, you can track a photo’s origin with Google if the photo exists anywhere online. But there’s only one place that won’t let Google search their images: Facebook. So if anyone tried to find out if I stole the photos in the fake profiles, they wouldn’t be able to find a single image anywhere else, thus falling for my trap and allowing themselves to be lured into sending me bitcoin that I then launder using a Chinese exchange.

I guess at some point I will be sending my resume to some desperate startup in Silicon Valley and get a nice paying job. I mean, people at startups don’t even care if you have a degree or not as long as you can code. But in the meantime I’ll just chill in Miami with the money I’ve been ripping off from the alpha bitches and assholes. Why? Because after I won the game, I liked the game. And I intend to win it every single time.

--

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Chronologically this is the last of the 10 short stories I wrote. I wrote it after two days of writer’s block without really knowing what to write next. I sort of played with the idea of a story about Twitter, or maybe something about internet privacy. Then I realized I didn’t have a lot of stories with a female central character. So I thought maybe I could write something with a female hacker in high school. But the story really took shape when I thought about the hacker figuring out Jenny Garfield was walking her dog at night and not picking up the poop. That’s when I thought there might be a good story to tell. So I wrote down a few sketchy ideas about what the story could be about and the next day I wrote the full story. I have to admit this story is the sci-fi or futuristic story aside from PainStation and that sort of makes me cringe, but it’s about hacking so it still works as a geek story.

PainStation

“Dude, dude. Check it out. Here come two more.”

“Oh jeez... Come on. This is getting old.”

“Ha ha! Don’t be a buzzkill. Switch the camera to the main monitor.”

“Fine… Camera 2 from hall B on main monitor.”

“The audio too.”

“God… Fine… Audio too.”

“You’re so full of shit. When they brought the PainStation machine you laughed so hard you fell off your chair.”

“That was the first weekend. Hey, nothing ever happens at this fucking art gallery and we have to sit here for hours monitoring the security cameras. So it was funny at first. But it got old by the following weekend.”

“How can you say that? We have unlimited access to idiots hurting themselves over a game of Pong. Pong! The oldest of the video games. And they don’t even play for more than, like, five minutes before they start screaming.”

“Like I said. It’s funny at first. But after a few days you start asking yourself why are people doing it? They know they’re going to hurt themselves if they play with the PainStation machine. It says so in the big sign next to it: “WARNING: Playing this game can cause you third degree burns, bruises or skin cuts.” But that seems to make people want to play it even more. They know they have to put one hand on top of an oven-taser with a small whip. If they miss a shot while playing Pong the temperature rises and they get a burn, or get an electric shock, or a whipping. If they miss several shots their hand gets severely burned and they start screaming. And if they take their hand off the oven they lose the game. So they get burned, they scream and then, to everybody’s surprise, they laugh! I mean, what the fuck?”

“It’s art. Only sophisticated minds understand the subtle meaning of this avant garde art installation.”

“Oh, is that why you always watch reruns of America’s Funniest Home Videos from the 1990s?”

“No. Because I watch security camera videos that could be in a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos from the 90s. See? There’s a difference. What we watch is live. And therefore it’s a performance.”

“What? You could put this machine in a bar and drunk people would do exactly the same thing; try to play a game of Pong until they burn their hands.”

“Ah ah ah! Not Pong. It’s called PainStation. It was made by the group of artists at /////////fur//// Art Entertainment Interfaces in Germany in 2004. That’s a hundred years ago. That makes this machine a huge success. This isn’t a regular pinball machine for a bar.”

“No, of course not. Pinball machines are for idiots in bars and the PainStation is for idiots in art galleries. It’s the fucking same!”

“Don’t you get it? It’s a clever commentary on the mundane relationship of people and technology as they become attached to each other and abandon their basic physical sensation and replace it with digital information that…”

“OWWWWW! AAAAAARGH!! OWWWW!! MOTHERFUCKER!! AAAAAUGH!!”

“Sheesh… There goes today’s idiot burning his hand.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh man! Ha ha ha ha! He jumped! He actually jumped! Ha ha ha ha!”

“And now he’s kicking and hitting the machine.”

“Ha ha! Big deal. It’s pretty sturdy. Nice metal finishings. The plexiglass for the screen won’t break.”

“Wait, hold on… what the hell?”

“He’s climbing on top of the machine?”

“Fuck! He’s peeing on it! Let’s go!”

“Wait wait wait wait! Hold on!”

“What do you mean ‘hold on’? Let’s go!”

“What do you think it’s going to happen if we catch him?”

“He’ll get arrested and they will make him pay for the damages.”

“What damages? The machine is covered with plexiglass.”

“So they’ll arrest him and make him pay a fine.”

“And then what? Who’s going to clean up his pee?”

“Oh…”

“That’s right. We are. The gallery is not going to call the insurance company over urine. They’ll make us clean it so nobody notices the next time they use it.”

“So what do we do?”

“Forward the video to the guards at the entrance and tell them to detain him. That way the paperwork goes to them.”

“They’re not going to clean it.”

“Of course not. They’ll send a janitor and then a specialist to make sure the machine is working in order.”

“But the pee will dry up in the ovens and it will smell.”

“And I bet you fifty bucks people will still play with the machine just to burn their hands and have them smelling like pee for the rest of the day.”

“Wait. That’s what this is about? Getting people to smell like pee?”

“Ha ha ha! Wouldn’t that be the works? People would go ‘OWWW! MOTHERFUCKER! FFFFT!! SHIT!!!’ Who says avant garde art can’t be entertaining and funny? Ha ha!”

“Jeez….”

--

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The PainStation does exist and I saw it in action at one of the galleries at Mexico City’s National Center For the Arts. And yes, even though there was a HUGE sign telling people they would burn their hands or get an electric shocked if they played it, people played it anyway! As an art graduate, sometimes I can’t figure out if artists are the bigger idiots.

Gyroscopic

I hated Fred Morgan. I absolutely hated that prick.

Asshole.

The moment he was introduced to us as the new warehouse manager I knew he was going to behave like an asshole. And I knew it because I’ve known Morgan since we were in high school.

Typical meat head who always tried to impress a small posse of equally stupid sycophants by being a jerk and supplying daily doses of physical and psychological mistreatment to the weaker links. In this case, me and my two friends from high school. Yes, we were nerds, weird, and we didn’t follow convention, but goddammit that was our fucking First Amendment right.

Fortunately for us, high school only lasted four years. Four. Long. Miserable. Years. Then we went on to get degrees at places like MIT. You know, places where assholes like Morgan don’t have nearly enough brains to get in.

I went into robotics. My final project for getting my degree was developing a robot that could walk and pick up objects. I know, it’s not new. The Japanese have been making walking and dancing robots for a long time. But Gyroscopic (that’s how I called my robot, obviously because of the gyroscopes he used to balance himself) was different. He could receive verbal instructions from a person to find, pick up, and retrieve objects. You could also give him instructions with an app for your phone, but the point was to make Gyro (pronounced guy-roh, not gee-roh, like the Greek dish) as interactive as a person. You could walk to him, ask him to bring you, say, a package that was left at the front door, and he would pick up the package and hand it to you.

The cool thing about Gyro is how futuristic he looked. He had this 1980’s “boxey” look for his upper body. That’s because he didn’t need a head. Just a box with sensors and lenses for depth perception and to be able to recognize objects. His legs were made out of carbon fiber, polymer and latex. They needed to be sturdy so they could sustain his weight and the weight of the objects he was supposed to retrieve. Same thing with his arms and hands but with an important difference; his hands were designed to be much more sensitive to pressure, shapes and textures, so Gyro could handle objects with precision and just the right amount of pressure.

Don’t get the wrong idea. Gyro didn’t look human. That wasn’t the point. He looked like somebody had attached robotic factory arms and legs to a web server rack. He was visually clunky, if you will, but he got the job done. Form has to follow function.

Because of Gyro I was offered a job at Industrial Robotics, a startup in Silicon Valley that specialized in designing robots for factories and their assembly lines. Industrial Robotics wanted me to design a robot that could work at a warehouse 24/7. They were particularly interested in a robot that could manage entire warehouses for e-commerce websites with minimal supervision. The robot would receive the orders from online shoppers, and immediately go to the warehouse’s racks to pick whatever products were ordered, package them and ship them. If a single warehouse had, say, 20 robots doing the work, the delivery process would be 99 percent automated save for the human supervision of the robots.

So I spent about five months making a revised, beefed up, industrial strength version of Gyroscopic that was faster, more agile, and had a higher energy efficiency. The end result was Gyroscopic 2.0. He was a relatively small robot, about my height, but he was absolutely sleek and efficient in every imaginable way. He could pick up boxes and objects and place them in an assembly line for other robots to pack and ship.

Unfortunately, the day I demonstrated Gyroscopic 2.0 to Industrial Robotics, the company’s operations officer said just before my demonstration that the new warehouse manager for the company would be none other than Fred Morgan. Apparently he had joined the Marines after high school and he worked for a number of years at different military warehouses, which made him a perfect candidate for Industrial Robotics according to the operations officer.

I call bullshit on that. I’m much more inclined to think Morgan was fucking the operation officer’s wife and he didn’t even know it. Why do I think that? Because his wife happened to be one of the cheerleaders from my graduating class in high school. And Morgan was definitely fucking her back then. The wife probably got Morgan the job after he figured he was too dumb to make it to West Point and that way he not only had the operations officer’s wife’s ass, but also his money.

I didn’t say anything when the operations officer introduced Morgan, but he recognized me right away. I knew because of the look he gave me. It was that cold look predators give their prey right before attacking, only with a sarcastic smile.

And I was right. Everybody applauded my presentation of Gyroscopic 2.0, except for Morgan. Instead, after I was done with the presentation, he walked right to Gyroscopic 2 and he shoved him, making him fall backwards. Gyro 2 got up after falling, of course. I’m not dumb enough to make a robot that can’t get up after a fall. But that was enough for Morgan to claim the robot had a problem because a real person would not fall.

“But you shoved him with full force,” one of my co-workers at the robotics division said. I didn’t say anything. Morgan responded by challenging my co-worker to push him and see if he could making him fall.

That was a low blow. Morgan was almost six feet tall and full of muscles. All of us at Industrial Robotics were not even athletic. We were geeks. There’s no way we could’ve tip him over just buy shoving him.

So the operations officer looked at me and told me to figure out a way to keep Gyro 2 from falling. My co-workers objected saying he was designed to work at a shipping warehouse, so there was no chance of somebody shoving a robot. It would be a waste of time and resources just to make sure Gyro 2 could do something he didn’t actually need to do. Again, I didn’t say anything.

The operations officer must be really pussy-whipped, because he insisted on “fixing” Gyro 2 so he wouldn’t fall if somebody shoved him. Why else would he agree to something as dumb as Morgan’s opinion, a guy who knew shit about robotics? That only confirmed my theory that Morgan got the job through the operation officer’s wife and Morgan was fucking her behind the officer’s back.

So we went back to development for three more months. After we made sure Gyro 2 would not fall when shoved, we gave another presentation. Once again Morgan tried to push him. This time before we even started the presentation. I guess he wanted to embarrass me before I could get any credit for my work. But this time Gyro 2 didn’t fall. He just took a few steps back and regained his balance. Morgan tried shoving Gyro 2 again, this time with even more force, but Gyro 2 didn’t fall. I couldn’t help to smirk.

My smirk, however, didn’t go unnoticed. Morgan gave me a cold look this time and then the same predatory smile as when he was introduced to us the first time. But I just didn’t pay attention to him. I was in full self-confidence demonstrating how Gyro 2 could pick up objects and lift things.

But when Gyro 2 was showing how he could pick up a box with a flat screen TV, Morgan went straight to him and shoved him. With the added weight of the TV, Gyro lost his balance and fell backwards. He got up and picked up the TV, but Morgan simply said now we were liable for property damage.

So once again the operations officer sent me back to “fix” Gyro 2. Not without my co-workers protesting that in a real world environment whoever pushed Gyro 2 would be the actual culprit for the property damage, just as whoever shoved a real person with a TV in his arms would be liable not just for property damage, but also for any injuries to the person who fell as a result of the shoving. Again I didn’t say anything. And again the operations officer didn’t care for my co-worker’s reasons and sent us back to the drawing board.

Fine. Three more months of development. This time programming Gyro 2 to calculate his weight and balance point when carrying an object. I also had his legs reinforced by splitting them in half vertically. That way he could have four lower limbs to use as support in case he needed to regain his balance.

And again we did a demonstration. Morgan tried to shove Gyro 2 while picking up a TV, and this time Gyro 2 didn’t fall. And again I had my smirk, which probably pissed off Morgan, because right when he saw me smirking he pushed the TV box down, making it fall from Gyro’s hands straight into the floor.

Once again, Morgan said we were liable for property damage. And once again the operations officer sent me back to the drawing board to figure out a way to keep objects from falling off Gyro’s hands. Morgan, of course, got the last smirk. And my coworkers protested, pointing out to the fact that what Morgan did was clearly deliberate destruction of property, not the robot’s fault. And as always I said nothing.

That night I went home and trying to think about how to fix the problem. But all I could think about was how to deliver Morgan a well deserved kick in the balls. Asshole. He made my life miserable in high school and now he was doing it again. Just for his amusement.

The next day I came back to the office and I told the guys in the robotics division I figured out a solution to the problem. They agreed with my solution and we spent a month applying a final fix.

The day of the third and final demonstration for Gyroscopic 2.0, we began the presentation by telling everybody not to get too close to Gyro 2. We also let them know that if Gyro 2 detected them being too close to him, he would warn them to back away. Well, my co-workers told everybody that. I didn’t say anything. That seemed to piss off Morgan, because once again he gave me the predatory look, but without the smile.

So when Gyro 2 was lifting the TV box, Morgan got close to him. My co-workers warned him not to, but he kept getting closer anyway. I didn’t say anything.

When Morgan was face to face with Gyro 2, the robot turned on a red light in his head and gave him a warning.

“Please step away. Close proximity to this robotic unit may result in bodily injury,” warned Gyro 2. But Morgan didn’t move.

“Please step away. Close proximity to this robotic unit may result in bodily injury,” Gyro 2 repeated.

Morgan just turned his head to look at me and gave me the predatory smile. He asked if that audio warning from Gyro 2 was the best we could do. Then he claimed the warning didn’t solve the problem and that we were being lazy for wasting a month just adding an audio warning.

Then, Morgan raised his arms so he could push the TV box down. My co-workers warned him not to do it and Gyro 2 kept repeating his audio warning. It didn’t matter. Morgan pushed the TV box down. Gyro 2 reacted by immediately lifting his secondary legs and bringing together his secondary feet to form wedge so the legs could catch the TV box, allowing the robot to grab it back with his arms instead of letting it fall into the ground.

The thing is, by lifting his secondary legs and putting together his secondary feet at the same time with full force, se he could catch the falling TV, Gyroscopic 2.0 also gave Morgan a really monstrous kick in the balls.

Morgan’s face went not red, but purple, as he slowly fell to the floor with his hands on his balls,  ending up in a fetal position. He was hurting so bad he lost control of his sphincter and shat his pants.

I didn’t say anything. Well, I laughed. But nobody noticed because they scrambled to get an ambulance for Morgan, who lost both of his testicles and had erectile disfunction as a result of the kick to his balls. And by that I mean a broken penis, so no amount of Viagra would help him to get an erection anytime soon.

About three months after that, Morgan was fired and a new warehouse manager was hired. Some other meat head who apparently was also the operations officer’s wife’s “friend.” I guess the wife didn’t find Morgan useful if he couldn’t fuck her and simply found another booty call boy.

As per Gyroscopic 2.0, we only made one final modification to him before he was released to the market; we padded the tip of his secondary feet with latex. We called the padding “the Morgan pad.” That was my co-workers’ idea. I didn’t say anything. Well, I laughed.

--

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The only thing I wanted to do with this story was to show a robot kicking somebody in the balls. That’s it. that’s the only thing I had in mind. Then it turned into this sort of Revenge of the Nerds kind of story. I came up with the idea for this story after watching videos of people pushing and kicking some robots that were supposed to stay balanced even if you kicked them and shoved them. I just thought it would be funny if one of the robots kicked somebody in the balls.

The End of the World

So much money wasted on Mars. Billions were spent sending probes to Mars way before the first humans set foot on that God forsaken rock and all for nothing. Within a few days, all of the human presence on Mars will be erased. It will be literally the end of the world as we know it. On Mars.

NASA is playing the “well, these things happen but we had no way of knowing about it” card so public outcry will be minimal, but they knew. They knew it was a big fucking waste of resources just so a few nerds in Florida could geek out. They knew it.

Why the fascination with Mars? Because people thought there was water there and therefore life. Martians could invade Earth, wrote H.G. Wells. Which is false, of course. There’s relatively little water on the surface of Mars for a sustainable civilization and no life whatsoever because of the low temperatures and because there’s no atmosphere keeping space radiation from killing anything that stays on the surface.

“But we can terraform it!” the nerds said. Bullshit. There’s no atmospheric pressure to keep breathable air on Mars. For the same reason there’s no way to keep heat or liquid water on the surface, so the planet is always freezing and there’s no way to irrigate it. And even if for some miracle you could actually terraform it, you can’t grow food on Mars because the soil is full of perchlorates, which are toxic salts that cause thyroid disease. Oh, what about that movie about a guy growing potatoes on Mars from three hundred years ago? Well, that guy would’ve died from thyroid disease or any of the internal organ diseases derived from thyroid disease. Because, guess what? Martian soil is toxic to humans just by being in contact with it.

Not only that; the dust on Mars is so fine it’s actually impossible to avoid. The problem is it doesn’t just contain perchlorates. It also contains silicates, which are hazardous to humans if breathed. And it also contains gypsum, which can clog your lungs like coal.

And that, believe it or not, was actually the good news. The bad news was Mars’s moon Phobos would eventually collide with the planet, either hitting it hard and destroying some random settlement, or, most likely, disintegrating into smaller meteorites, meaning all of the Martian settlements would be in danger of being hit by rocks falling from the sky.

Phobos isn’t really a moon. It’s a big-ass pile of rubble that got stuck together into an asteroid shaped object and now orbits Mars too fast. Meaning it will eventually collide with the planet.

But it didn’t matter. Because of pop culture the governments of Earth kept on spending billions on sending missions to Mars and to build settlements. “Meh. Big deal if Phobos collides with Mars. It won’t happen for at least 10 million years,” NASA said.

But they were wrong. Phobos is on an imminent collision course with Mars right now and it will impact the planet, possibly destroying all of its settlements in less than an Earth week.

Obviously NASA shat its pants when they found out about this. There are currently thousands of people on the Mars settlements but only a handful of ships to get a handful of people off the surface. Mostly tourists. Even if they could send every single rescue ship on Earth to evacuate the planet, they wouldn’t be able to get there on time.

Why is Phobos on a collision course to Mars, you ask? Well, because of poop.

You see, at some point somebody figured a lot of people, counting long term settlers and tourists, would have to shit and piss while on Mars. But what do you do with the shit and the piss? You could technically dehydrate them and reuse the water, but that leaves the solid waste intact. An average human produces 123.6 kilograms of feces per day. 75 percent of the average human turd is water, so that means you still have to deal with 30.9 grams of solid waste after dehydrating excrement on Mars. Which may not seem like a lot, but when you multiply it by the 25 thousand people currently on the planet, that adds up to 7,725 kilograms of shit per day. Multiplied by 365 Earth days, that’s 2.8 million kilograms of human shit every Earth year. That’s more than 3,086 tons of shit, in case you’re wondering, which is more than the weight of a 389-foot long US Navy combat ship. Now multiply it by the two hundred years it has been accumulating on Phobos and you have more than half a billion tons of shit. Literally a shitload.

You could argue that the shit could be used as fertilizer, sure. But since the food we eat here is either hydroponically grown or sent from Earth (can’t grow it on Martian soil because of perchlorates, remember?) then the question is, what do you do with 2.8 million kilograms of shit per Earth year?

It could be just thrown out and fill some Martian crater with it, sure. But since environmentalists decided that would be polluting Mars, and risking contamination of underground water deposits if they were to actually exist, though none had been found so far, then something else would have to be done with the crap.

So the corporations that run the settlements on Mars conned NASA into agreeing to take all of the shit produced on Mars to Phobos and just dump it in its huge Stickney crater. Why Phobos? Because it’s the closest celestial body from the surface of Mars and it circles the planet once every eight hours. That is, it’s available anywhere along Mars’s equator about a little more than three times per Martian day at a distance of almost six thousand kilometers. Pretty convenient in terms of waste disposal. That meant less fuel needed to get rid of the shit as opposed to, say, sending the excrement to the Asteroid Belt or to crash on Jupiter. I mean, it’s shit after all. No corporation wants to spend too much money on getting rid of shit.

The funny thing about Phobos is when it passes in front of the sun and you see that “eclipse” from Mars’s surface, you can actually make out Phobos’s shape. I kid you not; because of its irregular shape, Phobots looks like a small, potato-sized turd orbiting the planet.

Which I guess is pretty fitting considering what’s about to happen to Mars.

I know what you’re thinking. How can a bunch of shit on Phobos cause the destruction of all settlements on Mars? Quite simple, really.

You see, the corporations that run the settlements failed to inform NASA that the dehydration process for the poop didn’t remove 100 percent of the water in it. Some moisture still remained. They also failed to mention that the containers used for storing the crap and then send it to Phobos were not 100 percent in a vacuum. A small amount of oxygen actually remains inside. That is the real reason why they wanted to send the shit to Phobos. So nobody would dig it up and sue the corporations for poor sanitation procedures. After all, who’s going to be looking around on Phobos to see if some containers of shit are dry and vacuum sealed, right?

That’s right; nobody. Only us, the employees who work at the waste disposal units of the corporations running Mars, know about it.

That’s the same reason why the corporations also dumped on Phobos all of the malfunctioning nuclear generators that have been used on Mars since the Viking probe. The nuclear generators, of course, produce heat. The heat kept a lot of the shit containers warm on surface of Phobos. The warm temperature of the containers allowed the bacteria and the moisture from the shit to produce methane. Mixed with the oxygen, the methane produced by hundreds of thousands of tons of shit became a big fucking bomb. When that bomb exploded it pushed Phobos closer to Mars and made it unstable. So now pieces of Phobos are going to become Mars’s rings, like the rings of Saturn. But the rest of Phobos is going to impact on the surface. Some of it in the form of meteorites the size of a bowling ball, some of it as meteorites the size of a boulder, and some of it as a really big meteorite. And because the feces containers ruptured during the explosion, a lot of the meteorites that will hit Mars and the settlements will also be covered in poop.

So you can say that a shitstorm is about to hit Mars. Literally.

But wait. You must be thinking that’s not possible because even poop bombs don’t just detonate spontaneously. That’s right. They don’t. The shit containers were detonated when Kevin, one of my fellow pilots at the waste disposal ships, got too close to the surface of Phobos when he was dumping the week’s fecal load for his quadrant. Why? Because I told him that if he wanted to get high on Mars the only way to do it was using poop.

I was just teasing him. The guy had been counting the days till he could return to Earth and get high. So I told him about this urban legend from three hundred years ago about some kids in Africa who supposedly got high by inhaling the gases that were produced by urine and feces in a jar. Supposedly, if you put shit and piss in a jar and you covered it with a plastic balloon, the balloon would fill up with methane and other gases. Once the balloon was inflated, you could inhale the contents and hallucinate. The kids in Africa supposedly called the gases “Jenkem,” a word that was supposed to be derived from the name of some generic brand of glue used by street kids to sniff and get high.

But it was just an urban legend, jeez! I told Kevin that just to fuck with his head. How was I supposed to know he was stupid enough to believe it and try to land on Phobos to try to inject some methane from the fermented shit containers into his space suit to see if he could at least get a buzz? I suppose he did it because you’re not allowed to store your own shit and piss in the settlements because you could cause a severe health risk. But if he injected methane into his suit while on Phobos, who was going to notice, right?

So I suppose Kevin was successful in getting high with the methane (or at least seriously pissed because of the smell) because when he started his engines to leave Phobos he used too much fuel. I guess he stepped on the gas pedal too much and the exhaust reached the surface. That definitely ruptured the shit containers and it must have ruptured at least one of the nuclear reactors, which probably ignited the methane and the oxygen and detonated the chain reaction from the poop bomb, which in turn made Kevin’s ship explode, which added to the propellant that pushed Phobos towards Mars.

The explosion was so massive it could be seen from the surface of Mars. When the shit on Phobos exploded I was in the middle of loading my waste disposal ship with the shit from my quadrant. But after a few minutes headquarters told us get ready for evacuation. “That asshole Kevin just fucking blew up Phobos,” one of the managers said clearly pissed.

Fantastic. So now I can’t stay on the surface of Mars because who knows how long it will take for the shit meteorites to stop raining on the planet. And I don’t have a job anymore because there’s no more Phobos to dump the shit on and, oh I almost forgot, no more people shitting on Mars because everybody is going to die with the shit meteorites. All of this just when my period is starting and I’m in a really bad mood.

But you know what? Fuck that. I took out the shit containers and I loaded my ship with food and water for the week long trip to Earth because I’m getting the hell out of here. I’m not going to wait for the official evacuation and take a bunch of rich tourists with me. If they want to prosecute me, I will exchange immunity for becoming a whistleblower and trade what I know about the shit containers for a vacation in Cancun.

Because I’m not going to risk my life for a bunch of rich people and nerds living on Mars. If they die is their fault. Who the fuck colonizes a planet where on top of all the things that put your life at risk every day just by being there, now you can also be killed because, literally, somebody lighted up a fart? So long, suckers!

--

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The more research I did on Mars for the stories I’ve been writing, the more I realized it’s the worst possible planet to go to. But what got me to write this story was the fact that Phobos is indeed getting closer to Mars every year, and in the distant future it will collide with the planet. So I thought, “wait a minute; but supposedly humans will be living on Mars in the future!” And thus I came up with the idea for an end of the world story for Mars with Phobos colliding with Mars. However, that in itself wasn’t appealing enough to me. I wanted the story to be funny. So I came up with the idea of a mega poop bomb on Phobos just to make it funny. I mean, wouldn’t be funny if Phobos crashed on Mars because of half a billion tons of shit?

More Sci-Fi from Victor Hernandez

Liked the short stories? Then you’re going to love Victor Hernandez's Sci-Fi novel Love Robots. Funny, real, and eye opening! The most subversive sci-fi in a long time.

Available on eBook at http://amzn.to/1Uls8f2

And on paperback at http://amzn.to/1pQdqAc

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VICTOR HERNANDEZ is a Mexican-American writer, artist, photographer, graphic designer, animator and filmmaker born in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, and raised in Mexicali and in San Diego, California. He has a B.A. in Art from San Diego State University and he was an M.F.A. Candidate in Graphic Design with emphasis in digital multimedia also at SDSU. He has published four art photography books including the three-part series Releasing the Nudes and The Virgin of the Path. He is also the author of the sci-fi novel Love Robots, two humor books in Spanish, and several digital books in Spanish with a focus on journalism based in the political scene in Mexico. He has directed a feature length documentary film called Presidente Legítimo, as well as several animated clips and short videos. His work can be found in his website toliro.com and in his political news blog called blogdeizquierda.com (in Spanish.) He currently lives in Mexico City but still visits San Diego, California. He also tweets through his account @toliro every day and can be contacted at blogdeizquierda@gmail.com

Table of Contents

Cover

Copyright and Credits

Other books by Victor Hernandez

Index

Fair Warning

Moon Diving

The Cyborg

Alien Invasion

The Movie

Nanobots

Hydrazine Outpost

@TheRealYearbook

PainStation

Gyroscopic

The End of the World

More Sci-Fi from Victor Hernandez

About the Author