A Mortality Event

“Crumski!”

Shit. Incoming. I do not respond.

“Crumski!” Jensen calls again. He glides toward my workstation, footfalls silent in the visibly effortless locomotion his kind possess. His body moves as if propelled on a conveyor of celestial bodies, and it carries a face that is so aesthetically and mathematically perfect that it is practically featureless. All his impeccable proportions and physical traits, however, belie his repugnant personality.

He eases to a stop in front of me. “Are you not hearing me, Ted?”

“Sorry, I’m really concentrating on finishing this piece of the project,” I say, not really sorry. Not really concentrating, either.

“That’s the problem.” He stiffens and upsets the symmetry of his face with the faintest hint of a glower. “You’re still behind. On top of that, your last build was riddled with errors. You are becoming increasingly without purpose to me.”

“I don’t know what to say.” I really don’t know what to say.

“I’m not surprised. It’s a marvel that you manage to dress yourself… in the same clothes again, I see.”

I glance down at my shabby sweater and threadbare slacks. I don’t care, and my outward appearance doesn’t disguise it. I am trapped, as I often am, between focusing on something other than the conversation in front of me and simply not giving even a tepid fuck. Thus, I continue to sit in silence, stewing over “riddled with errors,” which is a goddamn lie.

“Do you understand me?” Jensen says. The rise in his voice gives it an odd, chordal quality.

“Yes,” I mutter, not lifting my head to gaze into his stupid, mesmerizingly splendid eyeballs.

“No…” He shakes his head. “I mean, can you understand what I’m saying? I rarely vocalize anymore, and when I do it’s to one of you people. I want to make sure I’m dumbing it down enough to sound like one of your blithering type.”

“Yes.” I sigh, peek at his face—but not at those glimmering, ice-blue eyes—and say, “You’re coming across perfectly clear.”

“Good. Back to it. This must be finished today. And more attention to detail. Don’t make me come back over here.”

I nod and turn to my terminal. Fuck you, Jensen, you beautiful bastard.

I try not to think about how much and how vociferously I used to carp about my previous employment. The job was much the same: working too much for too little compensation, suffering an overbearing horse’s anus for a supervisor. I don’t look back sentimentally on a time that wasn’t without its own harsh interpersonal issues and politics. Back then, before the boom of the Beaker Babies, there were elitists and prejudiced jerkwads aplenty. In a distinct way, though, it was harder to tell them apart from the just-well-adjusted-enough-to-coexist. Then we developed perfection one nucleotide at a time, and while it made a great many things better for those who could afford it, it also made the translucent corrals of socio-genomic segregation more robust. The “us” and “them” sticky name tags were slapped plainly on the chests of every humanoid walking the streets.

If nothing else, this made fast friends and strange bedfellows among groups that previously found themselves at odds over everything from skin pigmentation to pizza eating style. That said, alliance against the Synths (or, more colloquially, “SYNTs”) was not as universal as early rhetoric postulated. On one end of the dissent spectrum were violence-obsessed lunatics frothing at the mouth for all manner of heinous “solutions.” On the other were those who didn’t really care in an active way, but had a slightly more than vague distrust of and dislike for our better-looking, better-performing counterparts. This left the rest of natural-born society in two camps: sycophants stumbling over themselves in fawning adoration of their new masters, and nincompoops so oblivious to goings-on outside their self-obsessed social media cocoons that the glowing screens of the digital devices implanted in their palms were the only light sources to illuminate their own cavernous rectums enshrouding their heads. I felt alone as a part of none of these factions. I didn’t much care for people in general, regardless of genetics or birth method; I just wanted to be left the hell alone by everyone.

The “better-looking and better-performing” happened instantly with the first generation of Synths created after all three branches of the US government caved under the giant shit-pile of money dumped on them by the consolidated interests of the world’s biggest biotech firms. When the US shirked any and all international oversight, other nations followed suit. China had gone rogue years earlier and was leaps and bounds ahead. Well, they were until the tragic and unexplained series of nuclear reactor meltdowns unceremoniously flushed their civilization into the radioactive East China Sea…

We stopped long ago the race against disease, toward enlightenment, for the betterment of humankind. Once we discovered the shortcuts, it was a full-tilt power march to emboldening the children of the instant-gratification generation. Right from the womb (yes, the inaugural batch were birthed that way), the first Synths enjoyed every unfair advantage. It all began as many suspected: ordering a to-spec, blond-haired, blue-eyed baby with all the genetic benefits a living status symbol could be bestowed. They were more adept at learning, stronger, faster, with better decision-making skills, and they were, by any human standard, timelessly and objectively gorgeous. Add to this being born into the richest and most powerful families on Earth.

Personality was never something anyone invested much in. I don’t know, maybe there’s limited space in the genetic code. Why waste any picks off the menu on altruism when you could use that slot for bulging pectorals and a knockout set of chompers instead? The capacity for empathy, generosity, and basic politeness was diluted until we found ourselves with these rude egomaniacs. It seems an obvious conclusion now, when you consider this started with the chromosomes from a class of people with the means, motive, and genetic predisposition to smack down and trample anyone in their path on the way to the top of the heap.

But a rich family does not necessarily a success make. The twisted sons-of-bitches yanking at the levers behind the curtains figured out at some point how to basically inoculate nature from nurture. Designer bundles of joy weren’t susceptible to the havoc of unpredictable, shit parenting like the rest of us weathered for however many hundreds of thousands of years. This wasn’t as necessary in the subsequent generation, of course, as the near-perfect banged the near-perfect (so to speak; it was done for them in a petri dish) to produce the even-more perfect. And then came the real-time gene editing. It no longer mattered that you weren’t born sublime; you bought better genetics and permanently fixed those shortcomings at the source. That was when shit got really weird. Ethereally handsome Jensen is, no doubt, the result of Synth-on-Synth mating and DNA tinkering.

By advantage of genetics and nepotism, they fell effortlessly into the best careers. Initially, their kind only occupied the highest of positions. Executives, presidents, the world’s movers and shakers. There are enough of them now, though, that many are relegated to middle management. Regional VPs, general managers, or, like this bleached asshole Jensen, middling and meddlesome Overseers of Menial Tasks. Still, there are none working alongside me. The time will come, I suppose, when they will be such a majority that some will have to start getting their hands dirty. Although, the day one gets elbow-deep in a clogged rest stop crapper is the day they redouble their efforts developing service robots to do all such reprehensible duties. Then we inferiors will be truly fucked.

On being “truly fucked”… I can go to some wild and dark places if left to sit and imagine, which I do often because I can hardly bear the monotony and futility of what I do. For instance, how long before those who share Jensen’s disdain for us simpletons (but have actual authority) round us up, throw us in camps to quarantine the bland and unsightly? How long after that are we of no use and banished to some slow-melting ice floe in one toxic, formerly arctic ocean or another? Or, knowing these perverted, conceited sadists as I presume to, I would bet their extermination of us would be made of far greater entertainment value. They’d make the loyal ones their sonderkommando when they had finally used us up and were, despite their repugnance, unwilling to handle the mess left in their loathsome wake. We wouldn’t be allowed weapons, so the traitorous goons would employ a high-tech coercion device that could not be turned against their commanders. Like zombified cattle, we’d be collected and ushered into the yawning maw of a hellpit dug into the earth that served as an entry into a vast, infernal machine that would puree us—alive—into an unidentifiable slurry channeled to a central processing station to be further filtered, separated, homogenized, and pasteurized into the liquified treat served to the remaining stock of imprisoned humans to keep them strong and motivated enough to fulfill whatever mundane tasks or eradication operations our glorious overlords deemed worthy to watch in their leisure time. There’s a history of this sort of sick shit. Precedent. They would draw from it, evolve it like they’ve done with everything else. Then again, with their extraordinary intelligence, I probably can’t even fathom the imaginings of what they have in store for us…

Cripes. What the holy hell is wrong with you?

I blink heavily a couple times and welcome myself back to a less horrendous but still-miserable present state. I stare at the blinking cursor on my terminal. It prods me to enter some gibberish that may or may not be aiding in the development of that human smoothie blender.

Hmm… my heart rate is slow, considering. I wonder if I could get it to sync with the cursor…

STOP IT, YOU FUCKWIT!

A quick waggle of my head, then I type, and I type. I type and type some more until I’ve churned out sizable chunks of instructions littered with indentations and punctuations. How did I ever come to understand this stuff? Sometimes I still marvel at the miracles of learning and adaptation of which we garden-variety humans are capable.
“How’s that latest module coming, Ted?” a basic-model coworker calls out pointedly but not impolitely.

“Just about there. A few more minutes, I think.” I think it’ll be a few more minutes, but who the fuck knows? Does anyone actually know what the hell we’re working on? I feel a rare surge of concentration, and I buckle down and mash my fingers into the keyboard with an arrhythmic fury that somehow spews forth precisely what it should. I try not to make conscious note of it, because it will surely disintegrate by virtue of the observer effect.

From the corner of my eye, I spot Jensen slithering through the office space. How the hell does he move like that? His posture is ramrod straight, and he looms over all the seated workers, peering at the rowed workstations only with his downcast eyes. This is fucking nuts, I know, but I swear I see nictitating membranes flash across the wide-open, unblinking azure orbs seated entrancingly in his golden head. I momentarily hamper the urge to let it send me skittering off the rails, but by the time I snap my gaze back to my monitor it’s too late, and I’m off and running again…

What the shit are these gilded lunatics up to? Where will the experimentation stop? What if this self-guided evolution eventually takes them to a bodily design that’s barely anthropomorphic? Remove all physical weakness and redundancy of the human form, and the dominant race emerges as an armored slug of some sort, protected from external threat but needing to take no more useful a configuration than can be used to concoct inane thoughts, post meaningless internet drivel, and pleasure itself. Or maybe, with all humdrum and custodial functions then performed by artificial intelligence, what if we humans left on this decimated Earth are enslaved to service these new Supremes… you know… eh hem…? Like, inserted like a living, screaming marital aid, and the writhing of our suffocating death throes brings a gratification to our viscous oligarchs like no sexy slug slut ever could—if it wasn’t so much effort to meet one and show the minimal interest necessary to shed scaly exoskeletons and get freaky. Or, you know, however the fuck their anatomy works.

But, whatever. I don’t weep for the future. There isn’t much left as I see it. Taking this progression out a few more generations, these things will have hopefully fucked each other into an incestuous oblivion. Then the rest of us can pick up where we left off, inciting wars over fables written by charlatans, dumping our noxious feculence into our own waterways, and expelling vapored putrescence into the very air we breathe.

“Ted?”

Goddammit, leave me ALONE!

Jensen again. “Ted, could you please verify the last bit you sent to the compiler?”

When you think of supreme beings, you may picture a very stoic entity who has developed past the need for petty emotions. Some uptight Spock type; the smartest motherfucker in the room, but incapable of understanding the nuance in a white lie to spare someone’s feelings or the simple joys of a perfectly plotless fart joke. Maybe this is what waits down the evolutionary pike, but Jensen proves there is so much road left to traverse. These monstrosities excel at a great many things, but perhaps none more so than being condescending douchebag asshats. Imagine a higher-order species that, without exception, acts like rich dicks, college jocks, beauty queens, and insufferable blowhards. Now imagine the superiority complex of a being that craps all over those twats. I am, however, surprised he said “please.”

“Yes, I will do that right away.” I will not. But I should… Okay, let’s rally and get this done. If I could just focus for a while longer and finish this shitfuckwork I could go home and not have to see this plastic dickhead any more today.

The alpha despot stands in clear view, observing my disgruntled rappity-rappity on the keyboard. I may be easily distracted and altogether apathetic, but I am, for better or worse, good at this (for an imperfect ape). Whatever inkling of pride I feel, though, is offset by a creeping shame. I do my best (which is, as with many things, woefully inadequate) to avoid contemplating my role—however inconsequential it seemed at the time—in contributing to the first successful tests that cleared the way for the proliferation of these goddamned abominations. I just wrote code, for chrissake. Piles and piles of mind-numbing gobbledygook understood exclusively by a self-selected group of socially stunted, dweebish elites. I guess in that regard I have a little something in common with our new taskmasters. Well, until recently, anyway, when they worked out a way to communicate with each other through a form of goatfuck telepathy hoodoo. Point being, it may have just been code, but I’m sure all of history’s hapless collaborators made similar rationalizations.

Not unlike genetic code, one syntax error in a programming language and an entire system can be brought to its damn knees. Maybe the power grid goes down, maybe you’re rotting from the inside out with cankerous tumors. This I do often get stuck thinking about. What if, by accident or not, I had written my portion of the system “riddled with errors,” and the whole enterprise slammed into a brick wall and exploded into trillions of useless A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s? I wasn’t indispensable; they would have gotten some other schlub to unfuck what I had done. The more I torture myself, the more I’m convinced that there had to have been something I could have carried out to cram a mushy banana in the gaping tailpipe of that accursed apparatus.

But that was then. These bastards are at least a dozen moves ahead of me on the gameboard of the age-old family favorite Fuck My Life. They keep us all in the dark as to what we work on, project to project, assembling and compiling our collective efforts into grander works. It’s incredible, really, how we can never envision the full application for the piecemeal blocks of code until it’s completed and unveiled. So, best to keep my head down, finish the work at hand, and go home to my beloved Scotch while it’s still legal for us Human 1.0 models to get royally plastered.

Lo, the dreadful places to which my mind wanders while I sit sedentary for hours, typing lines by the bushel in an effort to generate 1’s and 0’s, the combination of which may or may not have ramifications as dire as the eradication of the most [edit: second-most] advanced species this planet will likely ever suffer… Lately, when I find myself stumbling around these dark, debased recesses, I don’t get nearly as upset as I used to. I make a halfhearted effort to slap myself back to this horrid reality. Or… I double down and in the warm, fuzzy embrace of inebriation fantasize about a fetid pestilence that attacks only those with a manually manipulated genome. I have no doubt that there’s a frigging trademark identifier spliced into the biological gunk of every one of these superpeople by one of the competing corporations driving this scientific merry-go-round-broke-down. Just as I can instantly spot one of the electric-blue bloods with my poo-brown, nearsighted eyes, I have no doubt that our juxtaposition at a molecular level is just as unmitigated, and whatever superbug evolves in parallel with these lab-grown grotesques can glom onto them and wipe them off this forsaken planet in the most savage and grisly way possible, sending us back to the dark ages of conception by sheer hope and personal development by hard fucking work.

Pull it the fuck together, Ted.

Visualizing the corporeal corruption of their exquisiteness, I suddenly realize my congruence with their speculated sport-killing of us that haunts my dreams. I’m disgusted with myself. Despite my misanthropic tendencies, I believe in equal rights, in not begrudging people for how they look or where they come from. I hold true the tenet of not saying anything if I have nothing nice to say, suppressing festering enmity and letting it boil my innards into a playground for inflammatory disease. Perhaps the Synths—what an awful epithet… Perhaps these people, born different, aren’t the agents of evil they’ve been caricatured to be. I’m in a shit mood this week; surely I’m projecting. Nothing truly terrible has happened yet, and it probably never will. I can count on two gnarled, hairy-knuckled hands the number of enhanced persons with whom I’ve had a meaningful conversation. If I’m being honest, not all were atrocious windbags. I should not judge their kind based on my dislike for my pompous boss, who just happens to be an enhanced person. I resent most authority figures, so it’s not his fault I’m in the position of underling. I should have tried harder, applied myself more. I could be running this unit, but instead my lackluster attitude has me working with the slobs. Maybe instead of my usual tacit sabotage I could make myself a part of something great, something bigger than what I see as my lowly station. Why not control my own hypothetical destiny for once?

Wow… I’m actually feeling calmed. Good on me for talking myself through another tough day, down off the ledge. I crack a few knuckles and head back into the trenches. A function here, a recursive loop there, and it’s going smoothly. Better than it has in a long time. Amazing what a cleared head can accomplish.

An hour passes. And another. Three fly by without another intrusive figment. And then I finish. I’m done! I send off my last assignment to the compiler. I watch the progress bar smoothly inflate without a hitch from zero to one hundred percent. No entries in the error log. Fuckin’ A.

“Awesome, Ted!” a fellow coder calls out. “All finished?”

“That I am, Steve.” I lean back and cross my arms. I complete projects big and small on a regular basis, but something about this finale is curiously sweet. A few deep, contented breaths. I look at my watch. To top off this feeling of satisfaction, it’s only twenty minutes until I embark on my quest home for a lascivious evening with my darling Scotch.

A stirring begins at the front of the office. It whirls and builds and expands until there’s a flurry of activity around me. Whispers, giggles, muffled asides. My coworkers are abuzz with a giddy energy that has them darting back and forth between stations. Furtive and not-so-furtive glances at… me? I see a few of them gawking at the big screen above us at the front of the office. There, in superb ultra-high-definition, is a perfectly rendered likeness of me. It’s me, but not me, I don’t think, but who can know with the technology what it is? I can’t remember being in that place, but was I? What the hell is that me-not-me doing?

Another enhanced human manager walks in. He looks almost identical to Jensen. (I wonder if we all look the same—equally ugly—to them as they do to us.) They say nothing, but there’s clearly an exchange happening between them. Glaring at each other, their eyes widen and narrow in a pulsating rhythm. They raise their right hands to head level and give each other a forceful high-five that reverberates like a thunderclap.

I swivel back to the monitor. I see the end of the video. Then back to the beginning. It’s on a loop. I dare not describe it in detail, so let it suffice to say that it depicts an uncanny rendering of me entering a room, followed shortly thereafter by another likeness of me. We—I mean, my digital doppelgängers—proceed to do unspeakably profane things to each other. German things. Japanese things. Very, very dark web things. Toward the end is huge, boldface text flashing as if to induce a seizure (if the preceding sights hadn’t yet done so). It reads GO FUCK YOURSELF, TED.

The look on my face must be one of utter shock and disgust, not unlike the expression one of my programmed clones has when the other plucks a used plunger from a filled-to-the-brim toilet and—Jesus H., never mind… At my most stupefied, Jensen picks up a glass of water and dumps it in my lap. I reflexively jump to my feet and swat the water off my soaked crotch. “Hey, everybody, check it!” he chortles. “Ted pissed himself!”

I hadn’t noticed that the other manager had positioned himself behind me. In a quick, jerking motion, he yanks my pants to my ankles, then drops to all fours. Jensen shoves me in the chest. I OOMPH! and fall ass-over-tea-kettle over the crouched manager.

Crumpled on the floor, pants drenched, saggy drawers exposed, scuffed and bruised, I survey the room. Some of my coworkers are obviously horrified, but have the uneasy, fake grins of those placating the cool kids, in fear of being the next target. Others are doubled over in legitimate, side-splitting guffaws.

Jensen places both hands on his face, as if to steady it and prevent the chuckling from forming any unsightly creases in his unblemished visage. “Congrats, Ted. You’re the Shitbird Subhuman Flunky of the Month,” he says. He flicks something off his resplendent suit. “Now get the fuck back to work, loser.”

Goddammit. Fuck these SYNTs straight to hell.

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Ted Crumski is a contributor of ranting prose to the website Curmudgeon in a Jar. Despite his diction, Ted actually has a much deeper distrust of and loathing for humankind than he lets on.

More of their… pieces… can be found at curmudgeoninajar.com.