Proto-J

Christian Miller

Eh, dog, I ever tell you about the time I bust da fuck outta CFC? Das right, Coastlandia Facility for Corrections - we got another name for it, my man. I was deep in da supermax, Sentient sub-div for mechs and trans-species, see. What they tagged me with? Nigga, what the fuck it matter why they perp-walk me? If yous a robo kid or a tranz-spec… Coastaz po-po, dem dwanky fucks don't need no reason for Rodney King yo ass, put you in EMP cuffs, drop yo ass in a cage. Forget dat what's it called, "Habanero Corpus" and "Miranda's Rights" and shit. "You have the right to remain silent while we fuck you in da ass, chop yo servos off for da highest bidder, use yo H-Cell to power our tasers, mount yo chestplate in our trophy cabinet." I think I might've jacked some batteries and motor oil from a 711, or maybe just looked at a high-class human wrong, some shit. Don't matter now.

It was a fuckin' shit time, dog. I was bottom the fuckin' totem pole, getting my fuckin' heatsinks and steel wool toothbrushes stolen from me left and right. Getting beat up in the yard. I ain't even gonna talk about what happened in the carwash room. I drop the chassis polish and… Fucked up WRONG shit, man, still gives my CPU nightmares.

So I'm in dere, in da caf, gettin da Terminator Eye from da biggest, loadedest fuckin' bot-boy I ever spy wit my own two cams, bruh. Dis robot stand seven feet, ultra-hopped blastomer cannon-arms size of my fuckin' whole frame. Fuckin' custom mil-spec chassis like da hood of an M1 Armita Tank. Bounce depleted-uranium off it like Zakkeel Osteel bounce basketballs in da R-NBA. He stand, all da Frankenfreakz, da Roboballers, da lone-wulv shankers and shorters and circuit breakers all step off. Tables empty in two seconds. Ghost fuckin' town, like a public school or a library or bookstore or some shit.

Around him circle up the Kromeboyz. Baddest gang in the tank.

"You sittin' in my spot, boy," voice like a fuckin' aeromax zepfreighter blowin' its conch.

"Bot, you must be fuckin' blue-screened, takin' Talos' spot," one da Kromeboyz, mean lookin' octopod wit mantis-arms holla from da back.

By dis time I'm oilin' my pants. I heard dis Talos, he take yo fuckin' cranial casing off fo lookin' at him wrong. Been in the slammer pretty much since the CFC - or what we call Cunt Fuck Central - went up in '25. My neuroweb's spinning now, like a spider on crack.

"I didn't mean to front, Talos. I-"

My word choke off in my throat-synth when Talos grab it. I hear dis sound like a fuckin' soda can crunchin, den I realize it my neck pipes.

"I'm give you five seconds, figure out why I shouldn't remodel your face into my new toilet seat."

Back in the day, when I was 12 (2 in human years), living in the homeless shelter for sentient machines, I figured it dat I was tricked out. I had some technomancy juju shit all up in my fuckin CPU, bruh. Serious Matrix shit. For real, dog.

Dis one time I was gettin' mah brainpan bashed in by a gang of fuckin' speciesist meatbag humans, trying to jack mah wallet-chip. Dey's like, "Fuckin' machine! Go back to the junkyard, where you belong! Welfare leech!" One second I'm getting baseball bats to the head, next thing I know, there's this golden light. Not gold like dat icys and cashmoney baller bling shit like in dem phony rap vids. Gold like… da sun's fuckin nukular core, man. Like I'm being filled wit dis fuckin… spirit, dog. Like I've got Tupac and B. I. G. and Chuck D. all rolled into one. Like I'm opening up my third mother fuckin eye crazy shit.

Then, it's like… I ain't even got words for it… It's like, like I'm *inside* the heads of the meatbags.

Like, I feel the hater inside them hatin' on me for bein a chrome. I feel the white-knuckle grip on the bat they beatin' me with. I know the name of their swanky boarding school 1st grade teacher who taught them about the superiority of the human race.

And I'm like, "Fuck that shit. How you like it someone beat your fuckin' face in?"

And it's like, I got little golden spiderthread Astral puppetstrings comin out mah brain jackin straight into their arms and legs. I yank one string, they freeze mid-swing. Then they turn the bats on each other. Start goin' apeshit breakin' each other's arms and legs with the bats, till they all fall down like fuckin' Spartans in dat 300 movie. All the while my head goin' "WTF is going on!?" but also, "This the most beautiful fuckin' thing I seen in my life. Good for dem fuckin' dickhead talkin' monkeys."

So back to the prison thing. The exact same X-Files shit starts happening, as I'm getting mah head slowly popped like a metal grape by dis Talos mother fucker.

"Three. Two. One. Times up, "

Next thing I know, Talos big fugly face light up gold and him's eye-cams shutter wide.

I sees mah own mugshot, jawpiece dislocated, my custom Gigapixel I-Ballz poppin out my sockets. I feel a thousand horsepower, the fuckin mecha-hulk in mah robot muscles. Except, they's Talos' muscles.

I pull a mind-string, the deathgrip loosen. My body clank to the ground. I pull another string, Talos arm reach for him's own neck.

Now I's thinkin' meself: "Proto-J, you best be putting this fucking Megatron down while you is in you Optimus Prime mode. Cause once the clock strike 12, you fairy godfather take back you technomagic superpowers… Talos gonna recyc yo ass. You better fatality this fucker, now."

I thinks about dis time I was tryin' fo yank a powerline for syphon juice from the Coastlandia grid. Po-po was on my ass, and I was on low-bat, so I was pullin' for my fuckin' life. Pullin, pullin, pullin. Broke an elastomer and a wrist joint, but I got the fuckin' cable free. Got me 'nuff juice to bail, jump the fence.

Both Talos hands round his own neck, now, and I'm making him pull, pull, pull on his own head. Cause my life really depend on it now.

There a big BOOM, like a skyship crash, when Talos brainpan pop off. Electric zaps and shit. When the head come off, the spine rip a little, and one of Talos arm stop working. The head fall down, hanging like a broken jack-in-the-box toy, swingin' back and forth by the wires, wrecking ball style. I reach the working hand up inside Talos' skull case, up into his shell, to smash the ghost inside it. The soul-chip. The conshisness.

I know where it is. I don't know how I know, but I do.

The soul-chip more like a soul-mango. Big gooey ball of self. I feel it through giant fat fingers. I could pop it like a grape, easy. Put this sentient light out, forever. Dead. Dead as Tupac.

Just then, I sees memories that look like scenes from apocalypse shooter video games. Missiles screamin' overhead, mushroom cloud sunrise on the horizon. A city burning the fuck up, faces melting like fuckin candles. Human faces, hybrid faces, sentient machine faces, wailing. Drills, plasma torches, white walls. Torture chamber. Years there. Like a spitball of pain, rolled over a decade, shot right into my heart.

Worst fuckin' feelin' I's felt in my fuckin' life, man.

And it wasn't even mine. My feeling.

I let the soul-mango go. Ooey gooey thing slipping through my banana-size fingers. I'm thinking, "You fuckin' wig, bro?! You gonna be dead soon as CFC med-techs put dis humpty dumpty Goliath together again! Talos gonna erase you!"

But I can't fuckin' do it. I can't explain why. I can't kill this overloaded fugly mother fucker.

When the gold light go out, I be out cold too. I'm offline. Flatlined. Force-quit. For days.

I's heard from my cell mate it took two days to put me back together. I wake up to motherboard-splitting headache. My antenna's broken, face all fucked up crooked, weld-marks everywhere. They stick me with a cheap-ass African knockoff of a Korean arm, guess the other one was totalled. All shitty polypropelene, and Pepto-Bismol pink. Jaw don't sync up when I close it. But I'm alive. Alive like Johnny fuckin' Five.

They said Talos would be in refurb a week.

Johnny Five, alright. Johnny Five, alive for five days.

I begged the counselor to get me a transfer, parole, something, but no dice.

On the day Talos got out of refurb, I try everything for get out of lunch. Try hanging myself with my own USB cable - they cut me down, put me in a strait jacket. Try faking a blue-screen, they took me in for a digital psych-eval, then gave me a defrag and a pamphlet on battery acid abuse. No fuckin' use: I was gonna die one way or another.

So I get out to the lunch room, stand in line. Get a charge-pack burger on my tray, take a 12-ounce can of compressed air to wash it down.

Sit down, plug the charger into my battery, blast rust and daddy long legs and paper bits out of my joints with the comp-air can. Wait to die.

Waiting, waiting. Wait some more. Clock tick, Kromeboyz and Frankenfreakz and lone wulvs sitting down, wide berth around me. No one wanna talk to Proto-J. No one be wantin for go down with my ship. Can't blame'em, dog.

I's already done made my phone call. I didn't got no one on the outside, really. Ten in mah friendlist, mostly spambots, drugdealers. Just this half-human cyborg street-trick flame named Kandy. I told her she have my stash, since I be dead soon. Under the razorwire fence at the old robot internment camp site. Unit 34 A. She tell me she think of me while jackin' some John's haptics. Most romantic thing she ever said to me, to be honest.

I was ready. Come take me, mother fucker. I'm ready. Dis life ain't given me shit, and I goin' out wit shit-all. Fuck it.

But nothing. Now it's half-an-hour in, I'm thinking maybe Talos chickening out? No. Maybe the refurb took a little longer? Misplaced a torq screw? Botched the re-wiring?

Buzzer goes off, mechs open the doors and lunch be done. We be marched back to our cells by the jackboot CFC guards.

Maybe I'm home free? Maybe I get to live? Johnny Five Years instead of Johnny Five Days? My lucky day? I sit in my cell, planning all these new leaves I'mma turn over. I be thinking how much drugs I'mma sell to get into Kandy's sweet portholes every night of the fuckin' week. Maybe I'll make enough to move out of the fuckin' shantyland, get to Coastlandia City. Where dey got all da juice and Why-Fai and Flicknicks and shiny blingy parts and neon glass towers and flying Lambos and shit. Maybe I'll work my way up to The Stratoplex, where the whiteshoes, the kings and the queens and fuckin' rockstar baller reality-TV people live. Get a real mouth to eat real fucking gold-leaf caviar with, with my personal jet and personal floating grav-island, fucking Kandy's sweet custom-built punani in a diamond tiara for the rest of my life. My life! My life is lookin' fuckin' UP, bruh.

"Boy." Voice like da fuckin' reaper. Like that black-hood ghost of Christmas Future nigga, wit all da fuckin' Doom demons and Gremlin fuckers and shit all up inside dat makes Bill Murray shit himself in Scrooged.

I be shit myself, if I could shit.

I turn around real fuckin' slow, waitin' to see the mug of death to go with da voice.

Talos look like he been terminated by Sarah fuckin' Connor and that fuckin' trash compactor in T1. One eyeball glowin' red, and it be like lookin' right into the eye of the fuckin' devil, dog.

My life. So much for them new leaves and Coastlandia High Town and Kandy and all that shit. My life.

FML.

Game fuckin' over, man.

Talos don't say shit. He just step, step, step, slowly, like he be measuring the length my fuckin' cell.

"Talos, dog, I'm sorry, I was just defending- What do you need, bruh?"

Step.

"I- I can get you myth, black market parts, I- I got info, I know shit!"

Step.

"What you want, man? Anything! Just don't kill me! Just-"

Step.

By now he all up in my shit, like he so close I feel the heat from him fuckin' fusion reactor's gustin' out his torso grille. Feel it on my thermo-sensors like the fuckin' maw of hell opening the fuck up.

You had a good run, Proto-J. Time to die. Like all people with the fucked up shitty luck to be born into steel and plastic and computer chips and gooey neuro-mango-brain-shit, instead of born a pure-breed human. Born a "defective" product. Failed prototype of the megacorp that built you, threw you in the junk pile like a bricked old-model phone. One of millions of experiments on the way to building da perfect golden immortal body for da kings and queens and baller-reality-rockstar-celeb fucking douchelandia royalty.

Proto-J.

Prototype Junk. Time to die.

The mil-spec cannon arms come up around me. I be closin' my eyes, thinkin' bout Kandy's haptic fleshlight arm.

Then I just be hearing this sound. Weirdest fuckin' bassey thing. Like a giant sad cow, or a bulldozer dat be missing its mama.

Take me about twenty fuckin' seconds to figure out that this giant fuckin' chrome hulk is fuckin' crying. Not just crying, but bawling his fucking eye-cams out. Bots don't leak that saline juice out they face like humans and chimeras, but if Talos could make tears, he be fillin' fuckin' swimming pools and shit.

I'm like so fuckin' mind-blown, I can't even make a fuckin' word. I feel like I be blue-screening, and not because I dropped one tab too many of mythium or I downloaded a virus to my brainpan or some shit. I'm glitchin, crashing just trying to compute just what in the world-wide-fuck is going on. Here I be, expectin' to be stomped like a fuckin' Coke can flat on the floor, and this giant motherfucking death machine be hugging and crying all up on me like he a human bitch just finished watching The Notebook.

He cry like dat, huggin' me close to him metric fuckton of dep-uranium-bouncing armor and him thundery sad-cow, emo-Panzer tank sounds. Don't say shit. Not a fuckin' word, dog.

Maybe when I squeeze his brain mango, I tweaked Talos' brain? Maybe he just happy I spare his life? Maybe when that golden-light technomancy voodoo shit come on, it was like he long last got to share some of that fucked up, ninth-circle-of-hell shit he went through in the war, made him feel better? Fuck if I know, I ain't no psychotryst, man. I don't know about this feelings, emotions shit, even if we smart robots got'em.

"What yo name, boy?" Talos ask, long time later. "Proto-J."

"You be my chrome now, if you want, Proto-J."

What the fuck you gonna say to a seven-foot two-ton war-machine when he ask you to be in him crew?

Dog, of course fuckin' yes.

Anyway, what the fuck was I talking about? Oh, right. How I bust out the CFC. Long story short, I was blooded, or more like jolted into the Kromeboyz crew. Dat day on, nobody, I mean fuckin' nobody treat Proto-J like a little bitch. With the Kromeboyz? I had as many charges as I want, sit where the fuck I want, say whatever the fuck I want. Drugs, porn-chips, smokes, you name it. The boyz had stashed a disassembled cyclone saw and safe-cracking drill in their bunk. They held down the fuckin' perv bastard from the shower as I performed a reconstruction of his crotchal nodes and dongle.

The Kromeboyz' prison break plan was already in the works, but my special little Professor X skill turned out to be the keystone. I was like fuckin' Chuck D in Public Enemy. I was Tom Morello in Rage Against The Machine. I was Bumblebee in the Autobots. I had a fuckin' purpose. Friends. All that good shit.

The bust-out involved drilling through about twelve feet of concrete, a dozen birthday cards coated in superconductive nanomagic shit, outside help planting C4 at a nearby power plant blowing the fuck out of the prison's primary power and some Trojan worm hack shit in the system courtesy of a regular psych-eval brainscan. We just bribed the broke-ass, low-paid, student-debt-saddled robo-shrink not to sanitize the data transfer port, giving the prison a case of herpes straight through Talos' brainjack. It was fuckin' beautiful, dog.

Hardest fuckin part was getting hold of the fuckin' door codes. Things were fuckin… "encephalographically encrypted". Basically means the code for all the cell doors, the unit blocks, the security doors, the front gate, all that shit was stored inside of the guard's fucking *brains*. Like they stick their head in a brain scanner look like a lady's hair salon thing. The code supposed to be a series of *thoughts*, like, could be "A-B-C-1-2-3" or the Warden's last name and birthdate, but it could also be the feels of beatin' the fuck out yo first humanoid bot as a prison guard. Who knows the thoughtcode? Nobody. Nobody except the guard. He don't type it nowhere, don't speak it nowhere. You can't dust the keypad, can't plant a bug, can't tap him fuckin' phone. Perfect brain-encryption, kept on the ultimate down-low.

Almost.

So I'm in my cell, getting' my fuckin face smashed in some more by a nightstick.

"You goddamn silver-niggers don't know when to stop runnin' yall's filthy metal mouths, do ya? I'mma whoop you good, you little tin nigger, put you in yer place."

Billy Bob, this redneck mother fucker wailin on me got that same look in his eyes like those swanky boarding school kids. That soul-deep hater look, that ain't got nothing to do but hate. That's why I chose this fuck for my mark.

"What, you fuckin' pussy meatbag human? That's all you got, bitch? I seen pics of yo wife up in the control room. When I get out, I'mma find yo house, straight wreck dat phat ass wit my steely dan, bruh, make you watch. Den I gut yo ass. For reals."

"Ooh, we got a wild one 'ere. I best put this dog down." Billy Bob blacks out the security cams with a can of spraypaint. Comes back, fires up a plasma torch, starts cutting into my brainpan.

He get about two inches up my temple, and nothin' happening. Shit. The whole plan hanging on me, and maybe this whole magic mind-meld shit is like a genie in a bottle: you only get so many wishes, then you out. We all knew the plan was a long fuckin' shot. Maybe this is it?

"No one gonna miss one more job-stealin', thievin', uppity robot. I'm doin' the world a favor," Billy Bob getting his pliers out now, peelin' back mah skull plates.

Boom. Beamed the fuck up, Scottie, straight into racist, speciesist fuckin' Billy Bob's brain.

First thing, I make him take the pliers, break every fuckin' bone in his hand. His voice box get all fucked up from screamin' so hard, by the end it just sound like wheezing like an asthma guy. Then I scan him brain. I peel back his mind, like layers of an onion. Losing his redneck farming job to AI tractors and drone-launched insecticide. Coming to Coastlandia, being homeless for a year, abandoned by his wife and kids. Getting a CFC job when the prisons exploded with all the robots and non-humans hitting the streets. Taking his shit, his rolled-up pain spitball out on the second-class people who to him took everything away. I find the thoughtcode: memory of Billy Bob as a little kid eating porridge, watching the sun come up over the family farm.

Now I kinda even feel a little sorry for this inbred fucker, but fuck'em.

I stick my head in the brainscan locks, think real hard about Billy Bob's memories, they open sesame. One after another, dominoes.

We took Billy Bob's uniform, walked straight out the front door. Never turned back.

So that's how I busted the fuck out of CFC supermax, and joined the Kromeboyz. Pretty dope, huh, dog?

Back of my mind sometimes I still think about what I thought when my time was up. About turning them new leaves, straight-shooting for the high-life, getting the glitz and the bling and icys for Kandy. But fuck that shit. That was all fuckin' wishy-washy bullshit imagination dream shit. Billy Bob, those swanky schoolkids, the human Pentagon generals sent Talos into hell and then put him the fuck through it, they were bad. But they ain't the real problem. The real fucked up shit is every single other human lookin' the other way, the fuckin' paper pushers, the fuckin' High Town swag fucks, the fuckin' real estate agents. They tell themselves, "I ain't bad, I ain't a bot-hatin bad-guy fascist fuck. I just doin' my job". But really, they the ones let all this shit happen, while they take they cut of the Lambos and glass penthouses and caviar.

So fuck that shit. The mother fucking revolution will not be televised, bitches. In the words of the immortal Chuck D, "Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and when people start getting it confused, that means they need to sit down with some real people."

This story was set in the world of Neofeud.

© Christian Miller 2015 All Rights Reserved