The Future is Funny

The Future is Funny

I.

“Call me Wolfgang, screaming across the sky, cartel boss gloss visor with a smile, make it loud, give ‘em hell, what are these noxious vapors that I smell?” Eminem’s voice dubbed over Skrillex and et. al. Supersonic: My existence (2021), piercing my headphones while I ride. The song has been out for a long time, but it still makes my bones rattle when I hear it, you could say, it’s a part of me. Who am I? You already know.

My headphones are bone conducting because when riding through 2 rivel Cartel territories, you’d better have every life preserving sense available to you, you also need to do whatever necessary to keep from losing your nerve.

My tribe calls me a runner. I can bike through 3 counties in under 2 hours, I need only my legs, a gat and a bag on my back. A bike is quiet like paws creep up and down a snowy mountain.

In my old life I was a lot of good things, I worked in finance. The night my wife and kid died, something broke in me. I wear a 2 pieced gold locket they shared together as a reminder: to think of them, to remember to keep my legs fast and my aim true, a reminder I don’t wish to die, not yet. Only after I get back at the motherfuckers that took their lives will I be ready to leave this world. This is a revenge tale.

Tonight’s run is a little differential. A mathematical equation on three sides, a triangle teetering on the edge of war. The Struggle for power is what it is always has been, a devolution of mind, light bending towards a pig’s eye. I am carrying proof of life. Evidence that the other Cartel leader’s kids are alive. Kidnapping in post-apocalyptic America is a given.

The night is hot, there is no wind, but the air is heavy with guilty sin. I glide down lightless streets. Listening for anything, anyone, something, like a werewolf looking for a kill, my senses are peaked. I peddle on, my destination, a warehouse covered in an overgrown amazon. Huddled thugs, eye’s glassed and stationary but always following me like the Mona Lisa, clocking my every move as I enter the mouth of the building. Concubines moan high in the rafters of the megastructure above billowing smoke and red steel grating.

A man who I estimate to be the 100th I have met, feigning to be the second coming of Christ, clothed in over worn off-white sheets begs for food. His eyes have been burned out with either a hot poker or acid, a joke no doubt. “Be wary….be aware… be Ahwarey all ye who enter!” he mumbles through anxious and chewed lips.

II.

If you have been paying attention, you already know everything that happened. Mass flooding in coastal cities, but the floods were only a red herring, the things we had not anticipated…. black oil slicked swans musing over water on a great and endless sea. Cryptic rippling of particulate waters under a crescent, deadening yellow, regular people howling purple at the moon between peak and troughs, gargling salt water. Flash heat in the day. Most auto companies had elected to rid themselves of a simple piece of plastic of what was previously called a gas cap, maybe as a cost saving feature, or maybe in anticipation of a better future when cars ran on batteries. Across the world, Ethyl-Octane from millions of vehicles was lifted from tanks under the laws of fluid motion, Archimedes principal, baking in the exponentiated heat and humidity creating a noxious gas that hung like a noose. Living under an accelerating rocket bomb that never moved but only grew larger, causing mass delusion and hysteria. Many died in their sleep, those who were awake experienced popcorn lung breathing and mental disfunction, and coughing, hacking, laughing fits that broke ribs

The masses with nothing better to do than watch basic cable all day with no clue how to do anything more than their 9 to 5 sought comfort and refuge with fear mongering bureaucrats who had been pining for an extinction event for 50 years and when those same bureaucrats who’d been pushing us off the cliff had their ultimate rule, they were met with military coups and rioting, anarchy, drought and famine. Eventually, their makeshift States broke apart into smaller cells. Becoming more erratic and disorganized daily until the seasoned underbelly reared its head and usurped anything remotely recognizable of the Western destiny, shattering all the mirrors.

The people who had benefited the most from science had elected to ignore and outright proselytize against it. Using highly technical machinery that the average person could at best explain in terms of magic, to spout disinformation and paranoid conspiracy.

I’d studied Bioengineering and Chemical constructs. At the time I was working as a chemist for the Sinaloa Cartel, creating new designer drugs that corrupted young minds into thinking they were on the yellow brick road, that they could do no wrong. Only, there would be no big reveal at the end, no wizard behind the curtain. They call me Oz.

Most would probably assume a scientist would not do well in a world of scoundrels and harlots, violence, and post-modern gulags. I find this hypothesis to be… unobserved. When my old boss tried taking me as a slave, I gassed him and his oligarchs with a similar cocktail the world had suffocated on. Men are quick to realize their place in the new world, dying from apathy. We migrated our operation to Michigan. Surrounded by fresh water on all sides. Excluding the once lush and endemic west coast, where an unmaintained nuclear reactor is presently leaking into Lake Michigan vis a vis Gary, Fucking, Indiana. Whoever thought to put a nuclear power plant next to one of the largest freshwater reserves on Earth is truly a genius and whoever said a fool is born every minute has never been more right. The world is full of sheep, and I their shepherd. There is no precedent, only creation.

So, when two rival cartels threaten your position in the new world, what is one to do? You kidnap their kids and send your best man to chop off their heads, only we all know the tail of the Hydra, chop one head off and everyone is a laughing hyena, chop 2 heads off and it’s Tsushima. Muhahaha.

III.

I end my ride in front of the galley, step off my bike like Long Tall Sally. Seated on a large couch, the other Cartel leaders stand by. They look as if they could cry, demanding to see proof of life, evidence of their child. I reach into my bag and show them a tub of baby formula, a bloody nail and a tooth. They say, “What the fuck is this?”, and I say “it’s you and your kids laughing together for eternity because this shit right here is the truth” POOF