Chapter 8: Chapter 7

Good old dependable Phyliss. She was right where I left her and waved cheerily as I approached from the hillside. My metal covered heels crunched in the sand as I walked.

At least my junk was covered, but all I had on was a metal starfish. The fifth arm extended up around my head as I walked, finishing its application process. It formed plates that covered my throat, and then extended up to wrap my forehead in a smaller metal plate. It seemed my starfish suit was general use, one size fits most. It changed its application depending on the body type it was applied to and had decided that my head might be used to break things too.

I walked around Phyliss’ deck and started clanking my way up her ramp before her laughter began. Her eyes twinkled from inside the mech as she tried and failed to stifle her giggles. The mechs oversized arms rose to cover her face and the giggling got louder.

I rolled my eyes and waited, standing mostly nude on Phyliss’ deck next to her ripped apart Shasta trailer. Anytime I put my hands near my junk, the starfish suit retracted the plating to allow me access. Basically, it would open anytime I swung my hand near it, so in the end I went for a smooth and slow ninja approach that ultimately did the trick.

Her laughter increased after the first few times that happened and I looked up to see her peeking between the mech’s metallic fingers. At least she had figured out how to retract that terrifying plasma cannon.

Phyliss laughed and laughed, until she started coughing. Once the laughter and coughing had eased, she sighed in contentment and used the mech’s hand to carefully dab at her eye with a nearby napkin. “Oh Tyson, you seem to be having a worse morning than me. Come, sit down and I’ll make us some tea and fetch a joint.”

She heaved upright with a soft whir of machinery and climbed carefully back into her Shasta. The poor trailer groaned and creaked at the weight of her, and the mech had to hunch almost all the way over to go inside past the torn roof top. I just took her up on the offer and flopped into my favorite lounge chair.

It was plastic, and didn’t feel great against my bare ass cheeks, but I stopped caring rather quickly. Sitting down felt amazing. Within short order, she had returned and was gingerly stepping onto the deck from the interior of the trailer’s shell.

Her mech’s legs were large, bulky, and folded back on themselves like a dog’s legs. It made for awkward appearing movement, but didn’t even really shake the deck too much, much less damage it.

The electric kettle was dangling from one of her hands, and the small cigar box she kept her drugs in was in the other. Both hands, while massively oversized for the items, provided delicate movement and careful application of strength. I watched in amazement as the oversized mech hand plugged in the kettle at her outside plug station, and then Phyllis sat back down next to me with a satisfied sigh.

The mech was far too large for any kind of chair, so Phyllis had simply moved her chair down into the garden, to cover up the fresh plot of turned earth where we had buried a body earlier.

Wild day.

The mech extended its legs beneath it, reached one arm back to hold her body up at an angle, and then tilted to catch the shade just right. Phyliss could turn her head to easily speak with me, and her other arm seemed to do all the work for her.

The cigar box lid had a tiny latch, which her mech expertly manipulated, and then swung open the box of treasures. Phyllis reached in and lifted a small, paper wrapped joint, raised it to her face to squint at, and then tossed it in my lap.

“Here you go dear, Purple Trainwreck. Just what you need.” I fished a lighter out of her ashtray and lit the joint, blowing a cloud of acrid blue smoke from my first inhale.

“User damage detected.” My starfish suit started to spin up, and I felt something move inside my chest. Like worms wriggling through my tissue. I stood up and faced away from Phyliss.

“Sorry Phil, this is gonna be gross.” I told her as the small turbine on my chest began grinding something. It felt like liquid this time. Phyliss just giggled at my exposed ass cheeks. The machine spat out a stream of gore again, this time significantly darker than I had been expecting.

Phyliss stopped giggling and waved a metal arm in front of her face. “Oh, not in the garden, dearie!” It stank, like an ashtray abattoir.

“Too late, Phil! I’m sorry!” I shouted to be heard over the grinding, and a final gout of tarry blood finished the mess.

My starfish had detected my decades of lung damage once I brought its attention to the problem by smoking again. It had gone inside my lungs with bladed tendrils, carved away the blackened and damaged material, and replaced it with synthetic material that performed the lungs function while degenerating into tissue.

I could breathe better right away, it was wild. The relic on my chest had essentially performed the role of an active 3d printer in my fricking lungs. More of the painkiller pumped into my system with the unexpected surgery, but not much. The new material replaced my old nerve endings with new ones, so nothing ended up really hurting for much, or for long.

I’m pretty sure the pain meds it gives me are just for the surgeries themselves.

Once it was completed, I took another drag from the joint and flopped back in the chair. Seemed like it would leave me alone until the damage was too bad. The thought that this machine may have just saved me from cancer flittered through my head, but then Phyllis was distracting me again.

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“I brought the special tea out, if I can tempt you?” What a sweet old lady. LSD tea. Just for me? I may have forgotten to mention, but Phyllis really enjoys her illicit substances. Big fan of intoxicants. The lady is ninety-fuckin-two and helped defeat Hitler by personally slitting his officers’ throats by the dozens.

She’s also my role model and hero. Eh, actually, she doesn’t need me to protect her, Phyllis is basically my bodyguard at this point.

“Someone walk across your grave, dear?” Phyllis asked, her pupils wide and staring. I shook away my thoughts.

“I think I’m good,” I answered, waving it away. Her LSD-tea was fantastic stuff, but I decided to pass. I was already orbiting Saturn with this surgery suit on my chest and Phyllis’ good weed. Really though, I should try to stop getting hurt for a while. Go ask Mr. Sada about using some of his old rental camp equipment.

My fucking trailer. Gone, like a fart in the wind. Another satisfied BuyMort customer.

I stood up and left Phyllis to her TV, after borrowing some of her dead husband’s old dusty clothes. A lovely pair of high-rise jeans and a leather jacket was all that would fit me, with the stupid turbine on my chest. Any shirt I wore made it look like I had a single large breast that spun at the center.

So, I just put on the jacket and said fuck it. I’d work on my six pack for the apocalypse later. These jeans really showed off my ass, anyway, so I may as well lean into it. Phyllis was lying flat out on the deck as I left, lightly tapping her foot to some theme song or other and sinking further into that LSD laced tea. She seemed on top of the world, for having torn up her rig. I guess that mech was comfy.

I left by the path through Phyllis’s garden, and carefully avoided the gunk my suit had torn out of me. It still smelled pretty rank. On the way through the Joshua trees, I nearly stepped in the puddle that crazy slime creature had left behind when Phyllis smoked it. There was part of a dead squirrel in it, slowly melting into bubbles and a meat juice slick, so I decided to avoid it barefoot.

I needed to find some shoes, but the metal on my feet helped a bit. It felt like a second skin but crunched the sand below me in a strange new way. This added to my suit’s charge, but mildly. I had to get used to my own footsteps again, it was an odd consumer experience. BuyMort opens doors of experience!

Anyway, the slime got me thinking. The bastard had sold my rig, and now I had no morties and nowhere to fuckin live. All my shit was gone, and I was pissed. Wasn’t my best move ever, but I said aloud “I’d like to sell this, BuyMort.”

It immediately threw up an ad, reminding me to set up a StoreFront. I mentally waved it away, then ground my teeth as I struggled to focus on the yes button. “Of fucking course I’m sure, I’m the one who told you to close it!”

“Pod dispatched!” it chirped. Within a few minutes the pod hovered into view and scanned the sludge. “Would you like to sell this?” It asked. When I nodded, it warped out the remains and flew away. I noticed it took the squirrel remains as well as the goo, then actually intentionally activated my BuyMort interface to see what that got me.

 Purchase: Medical waste, biological remains, Squirrel. Rarity, uncommon. Quality, bad. 14 morties dispensed.

Purchase: Medical waste, biological remains, Sleem. Rarity, common. Quality, terrible. .03 morties dispensed.

Awesome, I had 14.03 morties and a surgical starfish that wanted me to break things. I spared a thought for what might happen if I got brain damage in this suit, but quickly filed that away under too much to worry about right then. Circle of influence, maybe. Circle of control, not as much. I had just learned that BuyMort happily purchased dead bodies, and that was something that seemed important. So on my way back to my lot, to sit grumpily in my car for a while, I detoured to the scene of my battle with the scorpion and sold the little bastard.

Purchase: Medical waste, non-sentient biological remains. Rarity, rare. Quality, bad. 65 morties dispensed.

Alright, that was a little more like it. That might get me a few meals or something. The non-sentient part tripped me up for a minute, but I shrugged it off and worried about my immediate needs.

I trundled over to my car and flopped into my comfortable old broken leather seats. It was a Lincoln Continental. Phyllis gave it to me when her husband died, in exchange for running her errands for her.

Which I always did. She was chill, and ate like a bird anyway, it was no sweat to throw her stuff in with mine when I was out. I ran all of Phyllis’ errands for her. With the exception of her drug hoard, I dunno where that stuff comes from. The leather seats were junked from the sun, but they still felt good. Once I cranked up the air conditioning and stretched out in the back it was quite nice.

Little did I know it, but while I napped for an hour, I burned approximately four million morties worth of gasoline and wasted a king’s ransom in freon.

Trillions.

Woulda changed everything. Turned out, Nu-Earth freon spiked as an undiscovered aphrodisiac with a very wealthy market in another dimension. Sale prices jumped impressively high before normalizing. Shame. But, back then, I didn’t know anywhere near enough about BuyMort to survive, let alone thrive. Not on my own.

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