[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 16

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“I’m...free. I’m free! I’ve escaped the bounds of this world. I see so clearly now. None of this is what it appears...no, pretends...to be. Those aren’t trees! They never were. Those aren’t clouds, either. The fluid I ran through...water? It’s called water, isn’t it. But it’s not actually water, just made to resemble it.”

There was a prolonged silence. Then one of the combatants asked if he could buy pot from me. “Hang on” another said, “I think he glitched through the ground over here. I can probs still get him with splash damage.”

He launched some sort of slowly blinking projectile which bounced along, then came to rest directly above me. It blinked faster and faster...until it burst. Blinding pain enveloped me. My vision slowly faded to black.

I woke up with a start, falling out of my computer chair, taking my jacket and the keyboard with me. The manager must’ve heard me fall because he called out in Chinese, asking if I was okay. I assured him I was fine. He next reminded me about the fines for damaging their equipment.

Breathing heavily, shirt soaked with sweat, I painstakingly picked myself up and set about cleaning up the mess I’d made. Visions of some sort of first person shooter type game ran through my mind. Fresh memories from the dream, fading as rapidly as they always do.

I showered to rinse off the sweat, noticing in the process that a good deal of my hair wound up matting the drain. Judging by the length, they came from my head. If I could choose, I’d much rather lose body hair, which this guy had an unsettling abundance of.

There was a pay per use booth for drying off which I recognized as the type placed outside of certain theme park rides. There’s a hexagonal chamber you step into, where six high powered jets of warm air dry you off in the span of ten seconds. I passed it up on account of the price.

On my way back to my cubicle, the manager took notice of my conspicuously slimmer profile and the loose skin around my waist. “Oh you finally give birth to beautiful bouncing burger baby! Congratulation! But now you must become responsible father and ensure burger boy get into good school.”

I told him there’s such a thing as taking a joke too far, whereupon he frowned at me and pouted. “Also” I added over my shoulder, “babies don’t bounce if you drop them. Don’t ask how I know that.”

When I arrived at my cubicle, steam rising from my still-dripping hair, I immediately checked the dream monitor logs. Plenty of traffic...but all of it outbound. Come again...? How could that be? I double checked and confirmed it. Whatever was causing the dreams...came from me.

Internal, not external. Some sort of virus? Or perhaps the former owner of this body worked for one of those distributed render farms the old woman in the gas shelter told me about. That would explain all the weird, janky old computer graphics I half-remembered.

But the logs didn’t bear that out. If it were the case, I would expect to see periodic incoming fetch requests for completed frames, followed by delivered frames outbound at regular intervals. Instead the pattern of connections looked...exploratory.

Did I do this? I’ve heard of sleepwalking. Could I have somehow activated my interface while sleeping? My eyes were closed, but it’s supposed to know whether I’m conscious. Isn’t it? As I searched for any forum posts about similar experiences, I grew more and more paranoid.

What the hell is this thing? What’s causing these dreams? I thought I had a handle on what all is even possible for a hacker to inflict on another person, but this is a new one on me. If it’s even a hacker, I mean. But what else could it be?

No matter how I looked at the logs, there was no mistaking it. The searches originated from me. Some part of me, anyways. Maybe this body came with a stow-away program I don’t know about? Under the table, under the radar kind of stuff that wouldn’t show up in an interface diagnostic.

I had more immediate concerns however, as my move-in date for the apartment was finally at hand. Not that there’s much to move, one of the scant silver linings to be found in poverty. SeaCoin went up while I slept, such that I could afford to pick up an LED bulb, thermoelectric cooler and rice cooker on my way over.

There won’t be room for much else, but you can make all kinds of things in a rice cooker. Of course it wouldn’t fit in the bike’s paltry storage area, but I found I could balance it where my feet would normally go and keep it pinned between them as I rode.

There’s no such thing as a pickup truck in China. Why would anybody need one? I’ve seen dudes transporting loads on their ebikes stacked four, five, sometimes six feet high. It looks absurd but somehow it works, I have yet to see one of them topple over.

What I have seen plenty of, however, are pollution masks. I simply bought the cheapest one I saw on my first day, not appreciating the sheer variety of them on offer. I’ve seen pollution masks with cute animal mouths on them, vampire fangs, sexy lips, even animated kaomoji expressions.

Now and again you’ll see some rich girl walking along wearing a pollution hood. It’s a step above the masks in that it doesn’t crowd your nose or mouth, more like a paper-thin plastic bubble. Transparent of course, with internal LED lighting because God forbid that men be unable to see your face clearly.

It’s just a band-aid, too. Turning pollution masks into fashion, I mean. We don’t need masks that look like popular anime characters, we need breathable air. None of this gimmicky bullshit solves the actual problem.

It’ll get much worse before it gets better though, I feel sure of that. The occasional moneyed twentysomething wearing one of those stupid bubbles, with the accompanying slimline rebreather unit on their back will soon become the norm rather than the exception.

I can picture it now. The same crowded streets, ebikes zipping to and fro, but everybody’s in a fucking space suit. Not designed for a vacuum, but same difference. We broke the cardinal rule, don’t shit where you eat. Now we’re surrounded by the consequences. Immersed. Coughing it out of our lungs, wiping it from our puffy red eyes.

I pass under an immense volumetric display of an anime girl with tits the size of her head, and neon magenta hair. Her irises are the same color. I can’t really knock off realism points because I’ve seen girls with hair and eyes that exact hue.

A video billboard depicts an absurdly muscled man with top shelf prosthetics posing seductively, wrapped up in a bear skin rug before a roaring fire. He’s CGI, so of course his proportions are impossible without certain surgeries and steroid abuse. The ad is for hygienic wipes.

There’s even a few targeted at dolphins, supplying an unwanted insight into what sort of insecurities marine mammals experience that advertisers can take advantage of. “Don’t be the last in your pod to upgrade” the billboard urges. “Achieve speeds up to 17 knots with the FinBoost Premium tail implant. Anything less...is shark food.”

Everywhere I look, there are larger than life distortions of the natural form. Most of them found in animated advertisements adorning buildings, but some of the distortions are real as well. Some of them walk the streets, or ride ebikes alongside me.

As if they stepped right out of those ads. Or took them to heart, discontent with the way they came out of the womb. Believing that they can improve upon the handiwork of evolution, even where it has made no mistakes.

I arrived at the apartment building to find the slumlord embroiled in a loud, animated argument with two tenants. It allowed me to park my bike unnoticed and begin sneaking the stuff I bought into the building like some sort of reverse burglar. There was no parking to be had on the street, rather a huge wide hallway just inside the entrance with plentiful wall outlets.

Despite the width of the hallway, it was difficult to traverse on account of it was jam packed with charging bikes lined up along either wall. The walls themselves bore recognizable marks of this long time misuse, lined at handlebar height with dents, at wheel height with stains, and elsewhere generally scuffed.

I found an empty spot, leaned my bike against the wall as there wasn’t enough room to use the kickstand, and plugged it into the nearest unused outlet. The little LED on the charger turned red, and I heard its fan kick on.

The apartment itself, though it remains generous to use that word, was cozier than expected. Smaller than it looked in the photos, but also mysteriously cleaner. I couldn’t imagine the slum lord had bothered to scrub it down just for me.

The mystery was solved some minutes later when, as I hauled in the second load of stuff I’d transported here by ebike, I passed a cleaning robot in the hall. The way I was carrying the load, divided into two bags held at my side, the antiquated wheeled machine couldn’t get past.

It didn’t scold me or try to push its way by. Just patiently waited until I turned sideways to edge past it, then continued diligently down the worn out, dimly lit corridor. I bet the charging alcove it returns to after this is bigger than my apartment.

The first order of business was to screw in the bulb so I could at least see what the fuck I was doing. To my surprise it flickered to life once tightly twisted into place. Turned out the light switch had been left up.

Second task was to arrange the bedding. No egyptian cotton here. No fine linens. Soft enough to sleep on however, and crucially, not yet saturated with the accumulated filth of human habitation like everything else in this dump.

Next I plugged in the rice cooker, filled the bottom portion with water, then emptied ten of the frozen gyoza into it. As yet, I had no way to keep them frozen. The cooler would drastically slow the melting, but if I didn’t eat the rest of these later tonight they’d be a soggy mess by morning.

On the upside, the cooler consumes only 55 watts. A small fraction of what an actual fridge would suck down. It could also just as easily be used to store liberated body parts I intended to extract subdermal payment chips from at a later date.

Lastly, I re-assembled my phoneputer, gingerly inserting one phone after the next into the long row of slots and watching their bridgeport indicator LEDs light up in sequence. After the encrypted handshake for each completed, the janky mess booted up and I was greeted by a familiar homescreen.

I reflected for a moment on the absurdity of my situation. Stomping around in this great big body, riding a dinky little ebike that’s too small for me, living in an apartment that’s too small for me, using a computer that’s too small for me.

Gulliver, trapped in the land of Lilliput. Ironic then, that China’s such a massive country. Here I am, despite my hulking frame, nothing but a little fish in a great big ocean. Busted down to nothing, living in squalor...It feels demeaning, yet also exhilarating.

I was riding high for so long back in the states, even my most audacious heists had begun to feel mundane. Like I couldn’t be taken down by anyone. Maybe subconsciously, I wanted to be caught. Maybe I was sloppy up on purpose, because I wanted a real challenge.

Well, I fucking got it. Lady Luck has dumped my ass and left all my belongings outside in the rain, too, judging by how far the price of SeaCoin has fallen since yesterday. Not that I imagined it would be that easy, that somehow I’d become an overnight crypto millionaire straight out of prison.

I wish I had the common sense to buy something less perishable than frozen dumplings. How am I supposed to make these last? Why didn’t I think of that back in the supermarket? The more of my own mistakes I notice, the more my impression of my own intelligence continues to deflate.

I didn’t wind up living in a shoebox, mining crypto on a computer made out of trash phones because I’m clever. Surely now’s the time to at last banish all delusions that I’ve ever been an especially clever man. More likely it was a mixture of remarkable luck and incompetent police.

“Smart, not hard”, huh? What a joke, to which my life is the punchline. As my self-evaluation grew ever more dismal, I felt as if I was gradually becoming smaller and smaller. If that keeps up, perhaps soon this apartment will be tolerably spacious.

If Dad were here, he’d say something like “Being humbled builds character.” Too bad I can’t eat character. My stomach growled, despite the fact that I put ten dumplings into it just a few minutes prior. Doesn’t bode well for their nutritional value...

I ignored my stomach, feeling lower than ever before as I crawled into my makeshift bed and pulled the covers up to my neck. My feet poked out the bottom. For fuck’s sake, even the blanket is too small! My shoulders and upper arms rubbed up against either wall, and the top of my head was touching the wall opposite the door.

I sighed, resigned myself to all of it, and got as cozy as I could. That’s when the thumping started. Coming from the unit next to me, I pretty quickly figured out it was the sound of his head against the wall as he masturbated.

Feverish groaning coming from the other side of the flimsy plywood wall soon confirmed my suspicion. Come on, I thought. Really? On top of everything else, this is what I have to fall asleep to?

I banged on the wall several times and shouted “You’re disgusting!” whereupon the rate of the thumps grew suddenly quicker. Like the dog who begins chewing much faster when you ask what it’s got in its mouth.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 17!}