Growing Hope - Installment 2

Kenchi was still going when Telson and I came to. They must have had some pretty good shit over in the Freelands. “Bill Hicks is a national hero over here, and what do you guys have,” he railed, for it was he at the moment, “you've got Thomas Jefferson. What in the fuck did he do for you? Own slaves whiel he preached against, then knock one of them up, that's what!”

By the time I rolled out of bed she was signing off. Time to get some sleep, she said. Recharge, check in with her security staff to see how many “blatantly illegal... HA! Kenchi lives by now laws!” intrusion they'd fended off this time. That's how Kenchi judged its popularity. By how much the Amerikan/EU/Chinese/Russian government wanted it shut down, or permanently defunct at least.

There'd been impersonators, sure, people who claimed to be Kenchi. But none of them really measured up to the test. You couldn't feel the heat waves of the fire in their balls/ovaries/processor(?) like you could with him. They were just laughed off the net.

They were probably narcs anyway.

“Telson, Telson, Telson,” I chanted quietly as I knelt down with my face close to his. Finally he opened his eyes, one hair spike flopped unendearingly to the side, “You know you're ugly when you sleep? And you smell funny?” He only nodded, obviously disoriented by the setup around him. It was his pad. It was very disconcerting.

“Did I,” he paused to lick his lip and begin again, his voice anguish filled, “not get laid last night?”

“No,” I replied, grin plastered across my face, “I kept you here. We're leaving today, remember?” He weakly shook his head. Aw. Telson was hung over. “You tried to leave, if it makes you feel any better,” I offered.

“It doesn't, Dorse. It doesn't.”

Breakfast was a simple affair. Warm beer from the night before along with eggs I'd managed to trade for a couple days before. Actually organic, not from one of the many factories that sprawled across the rural, outlying areas. The guy had needed antibiotics. I gave him some carrots that ran thick with omoxycillin instead of beta carotene. “Might not help your eyesight”, I pitched to him, “but it'll help with that infection that's quickly crawling to your heart”. So what if I was a good salesman like Telson accused me of?

Telson leaned back in his chair, rubbing his belly like a bloated giant who'd eaten too many villagers. “Vegans suck,” he commended, then belched, “they don't know what in the fuck they're missing.”

I laughed as I scrubbed out the cast iron pan in the sink. It had been my mother's, something that was left over from the days before cancerous teflon non-stick ones were born. They'd recalled those in 2007 due to birth defects becoming prominent in their research and assembly centers. That was back when the corporatocracy had “morals”. If you could call them that, even back then. I didn't trust the pan in the dry dish cleaner. I figured the nanobots would recognize history and try to destroy it, erase that part of my past out of spite for me or just their human captors in general.

“Hey,” I said over my shoulder as I finished up, “what do you think we should do with the hydroponic gear? I mean, shit, we've got a whole acre of it.”

“Well,” Telson replied, obviously turning the thought over in his poor alcohol soaked brain, “we could... ummm... give it away. To one of the collectives, you know? There's that one with that real cute piece of ass, that red head Cheryl.”

“You mean Carol?” I asked, setting the pan down in the sink to dry.

“Yeah, that's the one. We could give it to them. Not sure if they know how to use it, though. Not correctly at least.”

I dried off my hands, thought for a moment. Then it hit me, “What about the seed?”

“The seed? Just give it to 'em, I guess.”

“Well,” I grabbed my beer, “why don't we take it with us, you know? Spread it or something?”

“Like Johnny Apple Seed?”

“Like Johnny Pharma Seed. Shit. I don't know.”

“Well,” Telson looked up at the ceiling and considered it, “it would fuck with people... like actually giving production back to the people, wrenching it away from the corporations and such. It's not a bad idea. It's just...” he trailed off.

“Yeah,” I filled in the silence, moved and pulled out the chair at the table across him, looked around at the weathered walls that surrounded us both. “Yeah,” I repeated, “I know what you mean. People wouldn't know how to use the shit. Half the stuff wouldn't even grow.”

“Well,” Telson stroked a wilted green hair spike absentmindedly, “it might. Maybe not to its full potential. But it'd flower at least. We'd leave behind more seeds, at least.”

“Yeah,” I reached in my pocket and pulled out an herbal smoke, “it might.” I paused, lit it, “Yeah. You're right. It might. We could even bring jumps along with us that have all the assembly instructions.”

Then Telson perked up. “So we're going to go see Cheryl?”

“Carol?”

“Carol.”

“Yes.”

“Juice!”

“Juice?”

“Yes. Juice. Join Us In Creating Entropy.”

“You know,” I lit my smoke, exhaled, “you sound like you don't like women when you say that?”

“Fuck you. I picked it up from one of the dancers at Mad Hatter, that strip club downtown.”

“That's a y-to-x chrome club. You know, the freaky transgenders you can only read with a bio scan? Now I see why you didn't want one on the apartment.”

Telson went to say something, mouth half-open, but he must have had a change of heart. Instead, just hung his head. In his defense, though, there really was nothing physiologically wrong with them. And you could really tell when they were wearing vinyl.

Cross posted at Frequency23 many moons ago.