Chapter 3| Henry, a hen

Alright so yeah things we're seeming hellish, the exosphere conduits were severing from their base plants and dangling from the sky like tentacles, oozing unprocessed soy milk, and sporadically crashing into the ground, and reverberating loud enough to induce deafness from kilometres away.

 Once in a while one would crash into a few houses and fleeing crowds of humans who were senseless enough to think they could out run a 36000 km tube made of malable cast iron.

 But what really seemed problematic was the fact that the conduits weren't receding into the Coves but were degenerating and emitting a searing heat, reforming into longer thinner tubes and sporadically lashing out like frenzied whips.

Some distance away running pretty casually, Mr Moonson cradled his left arm, which appeared to be partially severed and poorly maddled in some makeshift bandage. Mr Moonson wasn't the brightest of fellows but he was a pretty good pianist, and even though I hadn't seen him play, I could hear him for hours on end from my implant dorm at night, the few segments of fibreglass did little to actually separate us from his melodic fits of sorrow.

 Looking at his now quite mangled looking arm, I doubted I would be hearing those fits anytime soon. He saw myself and a fairly shooken up Mowgli and waved with his uninjured hand with a wince. As he began to run to us, in his triple layered sheer torso harness and tighter running shorts (the man had befallen to modern trends after his wife was summoned for sched-death(1) four years ago). 

As he leapt over a log of debris from our building he suddenly stopped an held very still, like freakishly still and his arms fell limp at his sides, and bone from his partially severed arm began to tear through his skin as he was elevated in mid-air . 

And faster than I could comprehend translucent glass-like semicircles erupted from each side of his neck, and stretched out fading into some kind of black ellipsoid around his head. A mixture of a black-ish navy sap and blood started to drench his clothes, that began sticking to him as steam began to rise from them. 

 Then his very still body began to seize violently, the black sap began to formulate into a thicker sludge and capsulated the blood as the two liquids came into contact. It looked like runny blobs of black tar and water globules. 

When the seizing stopped, his body rose higher up, not just suspended in midar but the ellipsoid was attached to the whip-like tubes and carried him away all frenzied like over us, like he was a piece of paper in the wind. And in the frenzy the whip glided though the smashed scifto- glass dome that had one covered out building and awkwardly impaled his body from his navel. The whip continued to glide, roughly tugging at his body, until the glass completely slashed him, and not even a clean slash at that, it was all jagged like he slid across a giant bread knife.

And just like that with a wet, plat, it fell behind us. I turned around first, I mean, Mowgli was going into shock here, hours in simulations not even beginning to compare to all that. I walked up to the body and Mowgli ran up to me and yanked at my arm, " Come on dude, we gotta get out of here"

"Yeah, yeah just give me a sec"

"Dude stop being such a white person right now, like I get that it's in your genes or whatever but we are not about to be the characters that die first in the movie because you want to investigate."

"Considering the circumstances right now Mo, we'd be the second and third people to die which still isn't a winner. So just shut up and give me a sec, alright"

I walked a little closer to Mr Moonsons, now half of a body so poorly cut in half that some of the skin from his lower half was completely torn off. It was twisted awkwardly and you could see some of his spine and spinal cord. 

His sheer torso covering tattered and twisted around and two medium sized holes in his back along his spinal cord, like they were drilled in, and from each one was plexi-cord, like these reedy electric cords that could transfer enormous amounts of any kind of data in nanoseconds and where only the width of a hair strand but stronger than any element on the f*****g eriodic table. Hundreds of them whisping out of those holes. And with a teeth shattering crack his body ripped in half down the middle and erupted with the black sludge and blood and formed into 2 solid glossy black spherical pipes

"Can we go now" he says.

"You know what that would probably be for the best"

So we turned and ran, covered in a bunch gross smelling black s**t and Mr Moonsons blood. Cue the Slow Motion feature and Simon and Garfunkel's America and we basically have cinematic excellence.

...

"So that was weird"

"Weird? No that was next f*****g level okay, that was some- I don't even have the f*****g words right now." Mowgli was not handling the turn of events well.

"Those cord things sticking out from his back, those were plexi-cords, like a while lot of them together." Neither was I.

"Yeah okay, I get that you've had your Nancy drew moment but do you suppose we could stop talking about this."

"I don't get that reference."

"Okay you're focusing on semantics right now which is fine, you're freaked out, I'm freaked out, everything about this situation is freaking me out but right now we need to stop talking about it and just think of what to do next." Insert a deep exhale and a hand to a forehead

I had no concept of time at that point and I was feeling pretty woozy at the stink of whatever this black stuff we were covered in was. All I knew was that it was it was somewhat midday we couldn't sit inside that sound vestibule for much longer because our smell was starting to waft about and I could see some of the Sipuds (Sonar Image Projection U-bot Drones) getting agitated. 

We should probably leave before they escorted us out, which would definitely trample over my declining mood. And strangely the only place I really want to be at the moment is in my living room on the blue-beetroot humus-stained �" Cheshire couch reading polygraphs on Ed Brubaker's best work or how much of a cultural icon Donald Glover was in the 21st century. 

"I think we should....we should probably go home."

"Dude you don't even know if your house is still standing much less if there's anyone in it. I mean look around," I do a quick review of our surroundings.

"...there's nobody here, everyone's running around all madmen or trying to cram as much artificial turkey they can into their metabolic suspension chambers. Everyone else who can't afford them, is probably headed to Edge, which, who knows, could also be under attack."

"Maybe we should just stay here, wait it out for a few?"

"WE CAN'T STAY IN A F*****G SOUND VESTIBULE, MARZ."

"Right." I probably sounded a bit deflated. I get that I wasn't exactly spitting out winners here but I was in shock, sue me.

"Look man, I didn't mean to yell or get mad or whatever but we can't stay here-"

"I didn't think you were mad, I thought you were projecting your frustration and/or fear on to me, which is totally cool, given the circumstances"

"Yeah well I'm sorry for all of it, let me try to check in with Ronnie and Gretal. Then we'll try Mav and your mum" Ronnie is Mowgli's sister, she was an intern at some tech-company that created regimented soy based meals and energy plants (though I suppose most companies were into that sort of thing now), Gretal was Mowgli's own personal Cybernetic Executive Marshal Intelloid (Cemi) , that he was clearly falling in love with but completely in denial about it. Despite that one time I heard him moaning her name in the bathroom at 3am when I slept over at his house.

"Gretal, hey hun?"

" 'Sup Mo, what's going on?" Cemi was a system that was strictly reserved for military personnel, and if one ever did hear her voice it was fairly authoritarian given her position. But Mo, hacked through the military interplanetary cyber satellites and gained unauthorised access to her when he was 13.

 In alignment with this resounding ingenuity, Mo had altered her voice and renamed her. Her voice was of some 22 year old woman with an accent that I could quite place, I was fine with it, but she also kept inflicting some peculiar early 2000s millennial dialect. That, I hate to say it, but got on m nerves.

"There's some craziness happening with the exosophere conduits, can you tell me what's up with that?"

"Gotcha....Looks like the plutocracy has cast down most of the civilian comm systems so there's fairly minimal info to get from those, but in accordance to the data I have gathered from Edge, it looks like there's been a breach in security, specifically to the military interplanetary cyber satellites, that I'm from. The Vervisia(2)  taken a few hits to their exoskeleton, the Meitnerium is messing with their conduit performance keepin' 'em from grade A function, and generating random upsurges of elemental reflux. Looks like the atmosphere is harbouring a lot of the excess Nitrogen cuz'a the all the unbalanced redox reactions happening."

"Oh F**k." Mowgli looks at me, I realise just as soon as he does that we need to leave the vestibule before we run out of oxygen. 

Fortunately with all the radiation from the wars the most of the global population can sustain higher levels of nitrogen, and quite recently, mercury, in the atmosphere. But sooner or later if there's a significant increase in those levels, brain operation won't be so good.

Mowgli double taps the back of his ear to speak again, to Gretal. "How long until Nitrogen levels are below optimum?"

"12 days, 17 hours, 37 minutes, 23 seconds and declining."

"Alright, thanks G"

"Sure Mo,"

I stand up first, and try to wipe some of the blood and gloop out of my eye. "Okay that's not bad, but we still gotta find somewhere to perch for a few." I say.

"Yeah, um....ring your mum." I tap the back of my ear, and a some holographic imaging opens up with a low hum, to my last opened folio, I select "contact" and ring mum. The autobot immediately chimes for messaging, so I try to send a telepathic message but,

"Something's suspending my transmission, everything's fudging."

Mowgli accesses my imprinted account, and starts to mess around with my settings then starts to shovel deeper into my home board. 

"Looks like the plutocracy has also cut off a lot of private transmission even telepathic. You can try using Gretal to decrypt for admittance C.a.t. but she'll have to waft through a lot of surface data to reach your mum's imprint." his fingers start reopening a new holographic script that I can't really make much sense of. "Cause your mum is always popping in and out of IC 1105, which is about a nearly a billion light years away it makes her firewall all blotched with a bunch of indistinct galactic data. I mean I'm sure G could hack it but it'll take a few hours, maybe an hour and a half, if I give it priority classification but then I'd have to cease my own neural corpus echo activity that helps with recalibrating the mush that is information entering my brain every nanosecond." 

With a huff he shakes his head, oblivious to the fact that a chunk of what he said just wafted over me.

"We can try Ingrid, though that will spring up some red flags at the base. So maybe the stepbrother..." he finally looks up at me, expectantly. Waiting for my say on his next move.

Felix and I had an "okay", relationship it's not that we didn't speak it's that we were in different phases of our lives and respected that just because our parents were cohabitating it didn't automatically necessitate for us to act all brotherly. I was alright with him and he was alright with me, we didn't cross each other's boundaries and that was that.

"Yeah, lets just sync up(3), so Gretal do what she does." I let Gretal take full control of my holographic screen and account while she tries to bypass the lockdown on private transmission. It takes less than 30 seconds and G, speaks up.

 "Felix for some reason is in the back of a Sleeper, but he's pretty lit on TempLite and half on an ophthalmic dampener, his vitals are showing a decline in residue deposit into his bloodstream. So it shouldn't be to much of hassle to talk to him."

Felix treated himself, to the niceties of inebriation every so often. So it's not like I was all surprised that he was all tanked up but the timing was not ideal. His face pops up, all gooey and the back of his head is uncontrollably but calmly diffusing into the port screen behind him.

"Salutations, Marzipan" he says with a lazy smile. "Everyone's headed to Edge shield plants, Ingrid has a private cabin for us at the base, I'm headed there now before the huge evacuation." His speech though sluggish was unusually courteous. 

Mo chimes in, "Hey Felix, it's Mo. Dude, are they telling you what's going on?"

"Not really but at Trump(4) people are losing their shiiit." Spoke too son about Felix's speech

"The undergrads at Trump are being escorted by three thousand-five hundred-and-sixty-one AISA from the base. Things aren't looking too good. Most of the BioSimulator Capsules are being deployed into exospace, a course has been set for Nova Domum. General Schaal, has activated 613 000 Auto Armada G-droids, below Edge and 36 050 assigned lieutenants for regulated function. Civilian safety has been classified second priority-

"Second to what?" I interject.

"This sounds like something kinda extremely problematic." A zonked out Felix adds.

"Colonist galactic life forms and CRF rotation." Gretal responds. "New data has been uploaded to my system, looks like priority itinerary is the transmission of Lebertex(5) outside of the Ericular galaxy. Someone's sending a message out of Edge jurisdiction, someone way higher up."

"How far up?" Mowgli asks.

"Someone whose entrance key, is pretty much invisible to Cemi, AKA, others like myself. Which probably means they've got a skeleton signature."

Mo has on his imma-bout-to-smash-some-keyboard face and spins in his seat while addressing Felix.

"Yo, Felix I'm going to send Gretal with you, so she can access this thing manually, to figure out who the f**k is bypassing regulation protocol over at Edge, it would probably get us some answers faster.

Some chill Lofi floods into Felix's Sleeper and he looks like he's melting into the whole thing. Gretal notifies Mo and concurrently myself that she's successfully interfaced with Felix's Halo account.

"Alright Felix catch up in a few, yeah?" Mo says. Felix being half dazed and somewhat diffused into his Sleeper, responds with an offhand "Cheerio gentlemen" and flicks his hand up with his thumb tucked between his ring and pinkie finger as his middle and index finger cross. A symbol of Godspeed. And with a twirl of that same hand and formal salute his image poofs away but not before he puts both his hands on either side of his head and flicks out both middle fingers as he sticks out his tongue. The more common symbol of douchebaggery.

Mowgli smirks and rakes his hand through his hair then grimmer looking expression settles on his face. I try to think of an actual plan so he can just calm down because despite how composed he's coming off, Mo was on the verge of neural implosion from overthinking. "Alright, I think we can just take a Port Pod(6). It's just us two, one could convey us both at the same time." Mo smiles at me and I think Yeah! There we go brain, talk about effective. Until he says "We gotta see find Luther."

I raise my eyebrows, and squint my eyes at him looking all dubious. A face that says, "You sure about that idea?" But he just smiles at me and says "Hey G?"

"What can I do you for, Chakrabarti?"(7)"Locate Lutherson Ludwig Ungar III for me?"

"Coolio."

"Why would you want to find Luther right now? He's the least functional living creature, we know."

"That's a bit harsh, no?" It's not that Luther was totally mentally incapacitated, he just was so often caught up weirdest of exploits, that the act of actively hunting to have him around was equivalentl to hiring a giraffe to follow us around all day. Like one time, he dedicated 3 months in the revival of jazzercize because he felt that both jazz and natural exercise had been lost to (and I'm paraphrasing here) "a hoarde of mouth-breathing vape-addicted scientists, wrecking the world with their musical gentrification and biosynthetic modification." I swear, it's not like I hated the guy, matter of fact after Mowgli he was the only other person that I felt like genuinely gelled with. But as for right now, an I mean this with the sincerest of hearts.....dead weight.

"Okay.. but, he wouldn't be particularly useful person to have about in this situation. In fact there are few situations where I think his.....eccentric sort of skill set would be useful, in fact I think, the probability of his "skills" (the word skill being a generous here) proving valuable is so puny that even bare concept of it could be obliterated by a falling eyelash. I jus-"

"Lutherson has been located." Gretal interrupts

"Splendid!" Mo says with a clap and stands from his spinning chair. He starts to walk over to one of the relaxation cooling pools with his back turned to me.

"I am I really the one of us who's going to point out illogical this move seems?" I try my very best to sound calm so as to emphasize how logical I'm being, "Come on man." I try to emphasise how this idea needs some serious thinking through. Mo turns to face me, "Oh you Come on, man. Luther does actually have skills in stuff other than splurging on non-sensical bullcrap, don't get me started on his whole, Jazzercise idea. But a guy with his expertise would come in handy right about now."

"I trust you Mo, despite the fact that you have proved to be an uncultured and CPU obsessed idiot sometimes, you're also kind of a genius so I trust you. I just don't trust this exact idea is gonna pan out the way you want." He shakes his head at me, "I know that's not what you wanna hear right now, but that's my 2 cents on the matter."

He tilts his head at me "I always knew you thought I was a genius and can't fault you on that. Most of the times I can't fault you on a lot of stuff, but this isn't one of those times. Now, yes we watched a lot of our town get gorilla style ravaged by some metal alien tentacles and we freaked out and yes that sucked but I'm chill right now because I really can't change all that, I really suggest you get to my level, it will do you and your skin some good."

"Sonuvabitch." I toss my head back out of exasperation then look right back at him, "You know, you're going to be the one that makes us the first characters in the movie to get killed."

"Aw Marzipan, why so negative, huh? Lighten up?"

"Just spitting facts, man. You don't have to like it"

"I can assure you nobody likes it when you spit." And then the he flops backwards into the cooling pool.

...

Ahhh Lutherson. I think after Mowgli seemed so confident in his plan to go see Luther, I kinda felt like maybe I was being a little unfair on the guy, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge. He was a person, well, partially considering he'd had his fair amount of bionic upgrades, but still human, he had good and bad attributes. Maybe I just hadn't personally witnessed the display of the positive ones in all the 18 months I've known the guy. On the other hand, when we showed up to his subterranean museum-like hospice, Luther was grooming Henry in his lap, shirtless and bare foot revealing his bionic leg, and apparently assessing two very similar looking slates of some kind. The place was littered with random relics like, actual paper, some of which had been bound into what I believe where hardcover books and manuscripts. And something that looked like a holograph projector but bigger.(8)

I am certain Luther was notified when we arrived yet he doesn't either Mowgli nor I's presence. Instead he scratches his lower stomach, something I've learnt helps him think, then double taps the inside of his palm with his middle and index finger and reaches over to the hand holding Henry and taps the knuckle of it's index finger. One of the slates rises and rotates and he just sits there stroking Henry.

"Lutherson, what's up?" Mowgli asks

Luther ignores us, and continues grooming Henry now with a brush that I can't be certain came from where. I look at Mo, with an eyebrow raised. Mo just sits down on the leather couch, and picks up one of the books and starts reading, though it's in a language I can't understand. I see so too for Mo but he just presses behind his ear and after a few seconds starts to read. Luther stands up and turns in the direction of his scullery. When steps back, and looks mildly startled like he was not particularly scared just caught off guard or troubled by our presence. "Oh, Mowgli, Evil Knievel and didn't hear you come in."

"You didn't hear us come in?" I ask just as Mowgli asks "Evil Knievel?"

Luther looks between us, "This is some highly intensive businesses I'm doing here. I may be an omnipotent human non-entity but I still get hyper focused and your unsuspecting presence whilst welcomed is still a startling distraction. And Evil Knievel is a name I gave to my dear Marz here." He gently taps my shoulder as he walks past me into the scullery, where he starts to fuss about. The ruffling of Henry's grey and white feathers fading a little as he walks farther away.

Mowgli, looking equal parts confused and humoured turns his whole body on the couch to face me, "Evil Knievel?" he asks more emphasised.

"Yeah," I walk over to the couch and flop down "The guy who's famous for breaking the most of his own personal bones known to man?" I say with a huff as I pick up one of the books and begin to asses it.

"I'm aware but....I don't see the correlation there."

"Remember when I went on that tour for Tesler," he nods "One of the simulators jammed and my leg jammed in the metal arm-things, totally obliterated my left patella and some of my leg. Luther was my nurse, thought it was cool, said the simulator was basically a death trap and that I was like stunt man or something like it."

"Definitely "something like it" ." he scoffs

"Har. Har. Anyway the name stuck."

He frowns briefly, "What?" I ask.

"It's just that I always knew that Luther was your nurse up there, but I just thought you were unpopular, I didn't know you broke your leg."

"Huh. Weird. Well I was there all of eight months... so," I shrug. Luther exits from the scullery and puts Henry in Mowgli's lap. Mowgli starts to pet her.

"I think we need to rename her." He says

"Why I think Henry, is a perfectly fitting name." Luther tuts, clearly roused that Mo would even suggest it.

"Well she's a hen named Henry, and there aren't too many of those around anymore. It should be something grand."

"Henry is grand." Luther shakes it off, "What I can I help you gentlemen with?"

"We are not gentlemen, Luther ,we are warriors of truth. Omnipotent beings." I lean further into the couch, "It's a totally different thing." I correct. He half-smiles and blinks slowly, waiting for an answer to his question.

Mo moves Henry over to my lap and dusts the dirt from her feet off his slacks. "We need a favour, a small one."

Footnotes:

1. Sched-death is the summoning of government personnel for death on account of someone qualifying for an age extension to keep the surplus population in check. So basically for people to live longer someone who works for the government has to die. It's all pretty humane, one's successors get a huge lump pay-out.

2. The actual names of the aliens

3. When two or more accounts engage in a single extrasensory perception system (people reading each other's minds) and can see each others private Budapest (the company not the place) Holograph accounts. This process releases gratifying hormones (basically sex but not sex so like.... sex-light?) a lot of couples are really into it as foreplay. Just to be clear Mowgli and Marz are not a couple. But they are basically mind-f*****g each other. Or to be more specific Mowgli is mind-raping Marz

4. Trump is a university named after a war hero who sacrificed his life to build a shield around the Bureau jurisdiction to prevent alien immigrants from raiding planets that had been colonised by humans.

5. A programming language.

6. Despite the name this piece of machinery is not a portable chamber pot but a teleportation pod.

7. Mowgli's surname

8. This thin slap of black metal, my Halo assistant, informed me was something called a cellular iphone. The scope read that it was used for communities to convey and publicize information on a rudimentary interconnected network. More commonly used to photograph underdeveloped human life forms, male genitals and dogs

Author's Note

Critique if you please