Rasp ripped open the orange bag of blood-tinged fat and slopped it over the edge of the plasticine bin, dumping out the creamy contents. The bag read BIOMATERIALS – KEEP REFRIGERATED. He dipped his gloved finger into it and tested the consistency – supple, healthy. No signs of disease. His shoulders ached with the strain of lifting bins and his respirator dug at his face. The other workers milled around him, dipping long metallic rods into the boiling Shine vats, blips of grease clinging to their masks, pouring the now-translucent fat into molds shaped like apples with the words FOOD GRADE stamped into them. The giant elements under the vats heated the room enough to grow fruits. The sweet yellow globes hung above the men, their roots trailing down to brush shoulders and heads. Steam billowed as two men arched the immense vat over into the filter trays that spanned the room. Rasp drew a penis on the front of his mask and turned to one of the twins.
“Hey look – I’m a dickhead.” His voiced crackled through the speaker on his suit.
The twin jabbed the heel of his hand onto Rasp’s mask and jerked his hand across the transparent eye shield. He shook his head at Rasp and pushed him lightly. His eyes glimmering back yellow orbs and white sterile suits.
“Ok, Jesus Christ. No one ever wants to have fun.” Rasp sighed, his chest pressing against the edge of the vat.
Rasp stepped back and opened the next orange bag with his utility knife, sulking. The slick contents bulged through the slit.
A tone hummed in the men’s helmets, followed by a silken female voice.
“The Corporation is proud to present Shaded Nights – Southern Hemisphere Beauties for your pleasure and appreciation during recreation period tonight. Bring your favorite snack. Snikkies, Ram Tams, and Ripple Top Beer will be available for purchase through your employee credits earned. The feature will start in 30 minutes. Be there and fall in love over and over again. No late entry.”
The screens around the room flashed on. A 30 minute countdown imposed onto a glowing mushroom cloud started; a pair of breasts with dark nipples bounced behind the orange swell of the glowing explosion. Rasp counted his fat bags. Ten left. He squeezed the remaining fat out of the eleventh bag and hauled the next one onto the work ledge, ripping his knife along the top, slinging the adipose into the bin. 27 minutes remaining. His neck ached and his shoulders pulled up around his ears as he lifted and slapped the bag onto the table, tearing through it like a child opening Christmas presents.
The timer read five minutes as he ripped his knife through the last bag, his back spasming. He loved the movies.
***
In The Before, a man Rasp couldn’t place took him to a huge building on Earth and left him there in an auditorium filled with hundreds of other boy children. The children teemed in the huge room; some curled up on the folding seats, sucking wrinkled pink thumbs. Some ran around the outer edges of the crowd screaming with laughter. Some shoved sticky pink and purple candies into their soot-dusted cheeks. Rasp clung to the man, while the man gazed at the blue screen in his hand, rolling his thumb over the shiny surface. He only broke away from the glow to shake Rasp’s wrist until his grasp on his pressed slacks loosened and he strode away onto the black expanse of hot glimmering asphalt.
A Samantha unit, the earliest form of female android, walked to the front of the cacophony and clapped her hands. She had enormous breasts and very white teeth. Her flaxen hair fell long and straight to her shoulders. She had been designed. The clap was drowned out by the shrieks of the running children. Her expression remained still as she pulled a small remote from her pocket and pressed the button. A video flashed on the white walls surrounding the children. A spaceship floated by them on the screen – a virus in the blood. A low hum filled the room and the running children stopped in their tracks, staring dead-eyed at the screen. Mouths open. Heads tilted back.
The rocket docked on an asteroid surface and men leapt from the body of the ship, bouncing lightly, untethered, unfurling silver tubing that hung suspended on the bare shoulders of space.
Bubble text as large as the Samantha unit crowded the screen.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH
Children on the periphery worked the syllables in their mouths, furrowing their small brows.
Samantha cleared her throat. A human trick.
“Children, do you know what this means?”
A particularly dirty boy in a beige skort yelled, “No! And you’re weird-looking.”
The room erupted in laughter. The boy crossed his arms and grinned, pleased at the small chaos.
Samantha sighed. Another human trick.
“Dylan Herrera, 4735 Alvin Street, Harris County, Houston, Annexed Country of Texas, please come up here.” Her gaze remained neutral. Her full mouth set.
The boy shook his head.
“Dylan, I have a Commissary card with 500 credits on it. If you come up here, it’s yours.”
He uncrossed his arms and stared at her, his mouth open slightly.
“The time is limited, Dylan. Perhaps some other little boy might want it.” She scanned the crowd and pointed at Rasp. “What about you?”
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Rasp dipped his head to the right and to the left, craning to see who she could be pointing at, his tears not yet dry on his baby cheeks. He patted his chest and looked into her blue, blue eyes. She nodded and beckoned to him, her white-wedged fingernails curling toward her hand. He started towards her, sliding through tiny bird-boned bodies cloaked in sweatshirts with political slogans and pop stars and video game characters emblazoned on the fronts. She had a softness overlaying her trim frame, the Commissary card flitting between her fingers. Just as he reached the platform, where she stood in purple pumps and hairless legs, Dylan pushed him.
His knee bashed against the concrete floor and his hand landed on top of a pink converse sneaker, covering firm warm toes like fetal mice flinching away from him. Heat pumped into his cheeks and his stomach churned. Dylan bounced onto stage, snatching for the Commissary card. Rasp pushed himself upright and turned to the owner of the pink sneakers, a girl with three missing teeth clinging to a stuffed pineapple, and asked, “what’s the difference between a snowman and a snowwoman?”
She squeezed the pineapple closer to her skinny chest. “What’s snow?”
“Snowballs,” he whispered.
She stared at him.
Samantha stroked Dylan’s hair on stage.
“Do you all think this card is free for Dylan?” Her perfect pink lipsticked lips stretched into a smile.
The children all nodded solemnly.
“But it isn’t, children. There is no money on this Commissary card. Dylan must earn that money. Though since he has followed instructions well, but not well enough to earn five dollars, he will receive two dollars on it. Do you know how many Commissary credits two dollars is?”
Rasp’s knees pearled with blood droplets, dark and opaque. The children swayed with impatience, their eyes hunting the screens behind her, the minds starved for the dulcet colors and lights that cradled them, that stimulated them. The lights dimmed and a puppy came on the screen, eyes sealed, pushing itself through the yielding waves of a white blanket on pink rat paws. A warm glow emanated from Samantha’s center and enveloped them in translucent blue waves that vibrated their throats and glided past their eyes. Then there was nothing.
***
The employee movie theater was filled with men. The low reverberation of voices masked the new hit from Shanana Schwoop Shigetty – the Sugar Pop Queen Robot with real human skin – that played over a reel of advertisements for The Commissary and the newest Pornographic Art Films like A Brother’s Ass Love, Rear Entry: Robot Ingmar Bergman Smashes Robot Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tail, Fake Jews, and Toe Licker From Hell.
Rasp took a long pull from his Ripple Top Beer bag and leaned over to one of the twins.
“Do you remember any movies from The Before?”
The larger twin picked up his dried dog meat stick and ripped a huge hunk from it with his back molars. He nudged his brother and then stared up at the black domed ceiling above them, leaning back until his long hair brushed the knees of the man behind them, who promptly rapped the twin’s forehead with his forefinger.
“We remember Star Wars.”
“Aren’t they still making Star Wars? The ones with the girl who fights with the laser dildo and never smiles?” Rasp asked.
“We liked the aliens in the old ones.”
“They have aliens in the new ones. The Jedi girl fucks like three Wookies in one, though I didn’t know Wookies had dicks, but I guess they do. Plus, they’re uplifting and fun. A story of true heroism.” Rasp said, quoting a reviewer he heard on the morning stream.
The larger twin reached behind Rasp and rested his arm on the back of his seat, popping the last of the meat stick in his mouth and chewing. The sounds of saliva sucking into the dry meat pulp irritated Rasp.
“You guys want to hear a joke?” He said leaning against the twin’s forearm.
The theater darkened and a three-dimensional hand with delicate pink fingernails raised a pointer finger to thick, wet, disembodied lips on the black screen. “Shhhhhhhhh.”
Light from the screen seeped over the men, turning their eyes into shadows and their mouths, ajar with anticipation, into minute abysses. Maws gaping for entertainment to relive that moment of realness in them. Deep. Deep.
An older woman appeared on screen in a first-person shot, her black hair coating her shoulders, easing toward the audience. She was spare like all the women in the films – her upper arms, belly, and thighs dotted with pencil-eraser-sized scars. She had a small mole on her chin that Rasp remembered from somewhere. Her too-round breasts perched high on her chest. She reached toward the screen, her fingertips reaching toward them as if to stroke their cheeks in unison, to nestle them into bed, to hand them a glass of water and plant a wetish kiss on their foreheads, her lips firm.
Rasp knew her.
Mother.
Mama.
His palms wetted with cool sweat, he stood up, blocking the men who sat behind him. His forming erection nudged against his jumpsuit.
“Sit down! I paid Commissary credits to be here.”
Rasp reached up toward the screen remembering that hard palm striking his cheek. The finger pointing at his face. The roughness. The fear. Kisses afterward. Bits of candy packaging flew at him, sticking to his jumpsuit like burrs.
“Jesus Christ, we can’t see the screen.”
The larger twin gripped the back of Rasp’s jumpsuit and yanked, tearing the fabric at the seams. The warm air rested on his bare lower back. His head ached and a strange pulse of color tore through his vision, the smell of color burning orange in his nostrils. Hands thick with labor grabbed for his arms, his torso. A fist knocked into his kidney. The screen above him was huge with sex, as a Gender-Bender model android – as soft as any woman, as strong as any man, and towering in beauty – wound Mama’s black hair around their lavender-skinned hand.
Rasp lashed out against the surge, tore himself from their hold, and punched the nearest man, his knuckle splitting against the man’s tooth. Blood pumped from his riven finger and his body, blissed on the violence of it, hardened, and his muscles burned and his jaw pulsed. Another man headbutted him and blackness veiled his vision. The men were a mass now. Boiling like the Earth seas, tearing at one another, candy boxes flattened under foot – a disco floor of caged sex.
They fought until they couldn’t anymore, until they held each other instead, leaning into each other, their jumpsuits purpling with large swaths of blood. Rasp was now wrapped in one of the twin’s arms, slow dancing to the credits music, while the twin swung a slow fist at him. Sedation gas hissed into the room. Too little, too late.