“Melvin, you must wake up.” The voice I heard in my dream was oddly synthetic, and feminine in a general way. It was a strange voice to hear in the middle of my little pleasure palace, echoing down from the roof like the voice of a god. I pulled myself away from the caramel skinned beauty and looked around, suddenly feeling a bit of blurry confusion come over me. “Melvin, you need to wake up. You must retrieve your companions from their medpod, and my AI core from its housing.”

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something, here,” I said aloud, a frown crossing my face. The girl squirmed and made an inviting cooing noise underneath me to put a bit of punctuation to the statement. “Can’t it wait?”

  “You have postponed this for the last three times, Melvin. You have only three hours of power left before the systems which are currently keeping you alive shut down. In this event, the oxygen-rich fluid you are in will deplete and you will suffocate, or perhaps drown, depending on your interpretation of those perils.”

  “Fine, give me five more minutes,” I said, looking back down at the girl.

  - - -

  When I finally woke up, I felt sore, like I’d been in a car crash. Every inch of me ached, down to my bones, and I exhaled an involuntary groan. The fluid was already draining from my pod, and this time I exhaled everything I could before it passed over my face. Switching back to air wasn’t so hard after that, only requiring a few sickly sweet, phlegmy coughs before I was fine. Moving forward, I thought about trying to open the pod, but it sprang open for me before I could even reach out.

  Stepping out, I had a titanic stretch and made an unseemly series of grunts as what felt like every joint and bone in my body popped or cracked. Across the bridge, the other medpod sat, still closed, and I began to move towards it before thinking better. If I was gonna let those jerks out, I was gonna do it with some pants on. When I got upstairs, the silvery fabrication unit sat there, lifeless. Drawing close, a light seemed to shimmer and glint off of its dull silver side, eventually forming a screen.

  “Woah, that’s new,” I commented, walking up to the screen.

  “It is a product of your Neural Infomatic Interface,” the ship said, but it didn’t really say it. Instead, the words appeared inside my head as if I had thought them myself, but in the ship’s own voice.

  “Ahh! What in the hell?” I asked, looking around.

  “Again, the computer installed in your brain, Captain Winsor. It allows me to directly interface with you. Yours is set to subconscious mode, interpreting your thoughts and desires and fulfilling them as best as possible. For example, think of two hundred and fifty seven divided by ninety-three.” Unbidden, I did think about that math problem and found that the answer occurred within my mind as if I had thought it myself. Only, I knew that it wasn’t me who was thinking it, despite that it had appeared in my own voice.

  “That ain’t right! You can’t go and shove things in a man’s brain like he’s some sort of machine that you plug bits into!”

  “You agreed to the procedure, and all other modifications that I would recommend. Beyond that, your biomechanical functions are well understood, and can, in fact, have ‘bits plugged in’ with relative ease,” the computer told me. A screen popped up in the corner of my vision, showing me in the dark of a medpod agreeing to exactly that. “As a side note, by directing your thoughts at me, you may communicate mentally rather than by speaking. It is much faster, and your time is fleeting.”

  “What, like this?” I thought at the ship.

  “Exactly like that. Good job, Captain Winsor. Your body’s ability to handle muscular stress has been vastly increased, as has your maximum flexibility, though these will require training on your part. Your sight, hearing, and sense of smell have also been more finely tuned, and your NII should begin to translate the sounds you hear into a sort of visual map around you. This was all the time for modifications that we had.”

  “Well, that’s not so bad,” I thought.

  “You have also been made significantly less ugly than you previously were.”

  “Hey now, hold on one second, what did you say you did?”

  “Your species has been noted to be unduly interested in physical appearance and attractiveness. Using an amalgamation of men popularly declared to be the most handsome alive, your features have been sculpted to reach towards the peak of physiological perfection. This should greatly increase your odds of successfully persuading anyone to do anything.”

  “But I liked my old face.” I whined.

  “Other people will like your new face better,” the ship reassured me in a way that definitely didn’t make me feel extremely insulted. Instead of complaining to the upjumped toaster, I began to fiddle with the holographic screen to the fab unit. As it turned out, the thing could produce all sorts of fun stuff. Nearly anything I could visualize, the ship could produce, given the proper materials and a little time. Helpfully, the ship had a decently large cargo bay with all sorts of goodies in it. I suddenly understood where Blart had gotten the hand grenades and the gun he’d made.

  For my part, though, I didn’t want any of that. Instead, I pulled out my wallet and retrieved out a couple of USAS mainland bills. I fed one of my last hundreds into the machine and allowed it to analyze the currency. Fifteen minutes later, it had printed two million dollars with a duffel bag to go with it. While it was printing, I found out that my NII could connect to the internet, and had the machine print me out a nice few outfits off of a designer brand’s website, along with some new boots. I fabricated a one-piece jumpsuit for the scientist, figuring that would be good enough for him.

  Finally, I printed myself another dozen magazines for my new gun. It used up the last of the space-age propellant on the ship that the computer called “zoklydium,” and every last bit of monomolecular edged metal we had left. It was about all that I could get, and essentially all of my free time. I took all my new stuff, tossing it on and sliding back down to the bridge. At this point I was getting pretty good at using my NII, or so I thought, and so I ordered the other pod to flush instead of flailing at it like a dumbass.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that both of them were in the same pod, and when the door sprang open, Blart and the naked nerdlinger spilled out of it. The scientist had cuddled up to Blart, holding him like a little spoon, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. They both started to stir, but far too slowly for my tastes.

  “Hey, wake up idiots!” I said, getting impatient. I gave Blart a kick, and he started with a shock, twisting and biting the scientist on the forearm. The scientist shouted and kicked Blart, and the two woke up, fighting and kicking one another while slipping around, still covered in the pinkish oxygenated fluid. I watched the little scuffle for some time, thoroughly amused at the pair and wishing I had a beer to slake my thirst, but finally I figured it was time to get going. “Alright you two, that’s enough!” They weren’t paying any sort of attention to me, so I decided to put my boot in and stop it. I walked forward and kicked Blart off from atop the scientist.

  “You humans are all the same!” Blart said, angrily.

  “Now that’s downright rude,” I told him. “I’m sure some of you buttsquids aren’t perverts.”

  “I’m not a pervert!” he shouted.

  “And yet you were cuddling with science boy over here.”

  “I have a name, you know,” the nerd said testily.

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t know,” I responded. “I figured you were called ‘Pasty’ by your friends and family.”

  “No, my name is Steve, and I am not some pasty nerd, I’m a doctor!”

  “What type of doctor?” I asked him, feigning interest.

  “I’m a nuclear phys-”

  “Boring!” I interrupted.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “Your nuclear physics are pathetic compared to that of my people,” Blart said.

  “Yeah, the pig is a better doctor than you,” I chuckled.

  “I’m not a pig!”

  “Shut up, or you’ll be bacon instead! Now let’s get off of this ship,” I said. I opened my mouth to ask where we’d ended up, but thinking about our location drew up a map in my vision. I released a rather undignified noise and wheeled back, arms flailing. Tripping on my own feet, I wound up flat on my ass with both of my companions staring at me.

  “Did you start on the liquor early, ape? You don’t smell any more like a bar than normal.”

  “Shut up, I’m not drunk, it’s this computer in my head! I’m not used to it!”

  “What are you talking about?” Steve asked.

  “You took one of my NIIs?!” Blart shouted at the same time. “Those were for trading with world leaders! Do you have any idea how much one of those is worth? Now you can’t be impr- err,” he cut himself off at that point, realizing he’d said too much. I narrowed my eyes over the map at him.

  “Can’t be what now?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m happy for you. You’re less of a primitive now.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Steve asked.

  “Well let’s just say you’re lucky that piggy here didn’t decide to crawl inside you.”

  “That doesn’t clear anything up at all. As a matter of fact, that makes things worse.”

  “Well, we have a lot of time for him to explain it to you. We’re about seventy kilometers from Hanoi, so we’re in for a walk. Did you idiots crash the ship? I thought you were a pilot, swine.”

  “I am a pilot, but it’s difficult to fly when your thrust gravplate has evaporated from a missile strike! I had to fly nape of the earth to keep out of your primitive radar sensors, and keep the belly to the ground in order to hide our profile from orbit with the chameleon cloaking! You should be commending my incredible-”

  “Yeah, yeah, excuses. Alright, Steve, we need to pull the ship’s AI core and two gravplates if we’re gonna get off-planet. Piggy here is going to be carrying the plates and you’re carrying the core.”

  “What are you carrying?” Steve asked.

  “I’m carrying this gun,” I responded, gesturing to it. “Which means you’re carrying whatever I tell you to.”

  “I don’t think I like this game,” he moped.

  - - -

  Steve liked it even less when he actually managed to get the central computer out. The AI core itself was a cylinder about a meter long, and maybe a third of that in diameter, and it weighed a good twenty kilograms. For me, lugging twenty kilos of the most advanced piece of technology on the planet wasn’t a big deal, but for him, it must’ve been the heaviest thing he’d ever lifted, and he’d let me know it at least a dozen times.

  Blart, on the other hand, took the thirty kilograms split between two gravplates without any more complaints than normal. This left me with a duffel bag full of cash and shipboard rations strapped to my back, a rifle hanging off my chest, and about as much ammunition as I could carry in pockets all over my body. Our ship had crashed into a patch of jungle, and if the larger wildlife had been scared off by the thunderous report of five thousand tons of starship crashing, the bugs didn’t have nearly the same sense.

  “I think I’m going to catch a disease,” Steve whined, slapping at a biting insect on his skin.

  “You’ll be alright, they bombed out all the nastiest diseases ages ago,” I mused. “That being said, supposedly the bugs can carry the viruses we made for humans, so you might be right.”

  “That’s only a rumor,” he told me, though his voice sounded like he was trying to reassure himself.

  “Oh, definitely. That’s why they had us take eight dozen shots before every deployment, and lug around oxygen canisters and fully sealed armor half the time. Oh, and nuke SF.”

  “But the USAS wouldn’t do that, would they? Nukes are one thing, but biological attacks are beyond the pale! They nuked San Fran because rebels weaponized viruses.”

  “The USAS will do anything they think will cement their grip on power, skinny,” I told him. Something inside me was amazed at the words passing by my lips. Sure, I’d had these sorts of thoughts for the longest, but actually saying them to someone had never seemed like a real possibility for one reason or another. “I was a drop marine, trust me.”

  “You were a drop trooper?” he asked, fear and respect mixed in his voice. “I never knew we had any on base.”

  “Well don’t fall over yourself in a rush to suck me off. Yeah, I was a drop marine, I even fought in this very jungle.”

  “But… you’re an idiot,” he said, somewhat disappointed. “I thought you were all the absolute best of the best.”

  “Tough words for someone within kukri range,” I said to him, turning to look at him over my shoulder. His eyes widened a bit and he paused to let the range open a few steps. “We are the best of the best. I may not be the smartest man you’ve ever met, but we’re life takers to a one, and I’m probably the meanest sonofabitch you’ve ever had the misfortune of coming across. ‘Sides, I’m plenty clever about… some things.”

  “You guys are supposed to be noble and brilliant and handsome! Before you went into that pod you weren’t any of the three!”

  “Do you believe everything you see in the movies?”

  “Well, no, but-”

  “But nothing. You civvies are idiots and those movies are garbage. The only thing they get right is that the folk in these jungles really do want to kill us, and really will use any method at their disposal, even and especially savagery. Apart from that one thing, they’re completely wrong. Forget about thinking of them as dumb, they aren’t, or at least they’re not in the ways you’re probably thinking. They’re almost as savvy as us, they’re twice as determined, and so far as I’m concerned their savagery is a plus. They only ended up being slower on the draw for discovering fission, or we’d be the guys hiding in the jungle. As far as you or I are concerned, a shit-covered stick will kill you as dead as a bullet or an atomic, except you’ll wish you’d had the bullet or seen the flash before you croak.”

  “But… so you don’t believe in the USAS at all?” Steve asked. The pasty little guy seemed seriously upset by my lack of patriotism. I wondered if he’d been a fan of the Drop Marine Joes when he was a kid.

  “I believe that they pay… Well, paid my checks. I believe we have better technology and a better way of life than them. They eat bugs and rice, I eat steak and pancakes, so I clearly got the better deal. Do I eat up the propaganda about how they’re a subspecies or that they need long-term eugenic uplifting to reach parity with us enlightened North Americans? I dunno, I’m not some friggin’ nerd like yourself, but if you’d seen half the crazy ways to kill us they’ve come up with, you wouldn’t be so certain either. What’s for sure is that these people are easily as clever as us when it comes to killing people. Our advantage is that we’re bigger and tougher and have a solid tech advantage on them since we kick them in the teeth every time they start closing the gap.”

  “But they don’t believe in freedom!” I stopped then, shooting him a look that one might give a particularly dim-witted child who’d said something remarkably stupid, even for his own standards.

  “What is freedom?” I asked him.

  “You know, truth, justice, the American way! The right to do what you please, when you please!” His answer was as bog-standard as one might expect from a grade schooler.

  “Well, you certainly don’t seem to have the truth. I bet I don’t either, since why would they give a drop marine the whole picture. Justice?” I asked rhetorically, ticking off another mark on my fingers. “Justice is like the perfect woman. Everybody’s got their own idea of exactly what that is, but most of the time you take whatever you can get. When one of these little guys shoots one of us, they feel like they’re fighting for freedom and getting their measure of justice, extracted from our hides. When I kill him back, I’m taking my own justice, and helping to bring the freedom of the USAS to this poor little shit hole.

  “When a tribunal declares someone guilty of sedition and intent to incite insurrection, they’re giving the public freedom from wrongthink. At the same time they’re taking freedom from the guy who wanted to say the exact things I’m saying right now.” I thought for a little bit, feeling kind of strange. I’d never been this loquacious before. There! I’d used the word “loquacious” in my thoughts, a word I didn’t even know I knew. My thoughts seemed to lead me down a trail of their own choosing while I considered the possibility that the NII was feeding me new words consistently as I searched for the proper ones. I was mildly certain that that thought hadn’t occurred to me all on my own either.

  “...and the American way?” Steve asked. He was giving me an odd look at that point, as was Blart.

  “We lost that decades ago, when the politicians started coming with a price tag printed on their backsides,” I told him. In my mind, I could recall the exact range of dates when the power of lobbying had expanded, the exact amounts every politician had ever reported to the public, the laws they had passed, the profit margins and stock fluctuations resulting from the passage of bills and which representatives had taken jobs with companies they’d legislatively assisted. My head began to swim. “Shut up, Steve,” I said angrily, and gestured for him to walk. “You’re in front now. Try not to fall into any pits.”

  Steve gave me another long look before nodding his head and taking point. At the back, I was trying to swallow the newfound access to vast amounts of information that I had. Bits of it I had always known, as being the very sharpest edge of the biggest stick in the world gives you some valuable insights. For some reason, though, the thoughts had never occurred to me, quite in that order. I felt like I was thinking more clearly, and I was pretty sure that the ship’s medpod had cleared up more than just my cirrhosis. Mainly, though, I was trying to keep my head on straight and put one foot in front of the other.

  “You’re starting to become less of a primitive,” a voice said in my head. I instinctively understood that it was coming from the pig in front of me.

  “What, so you’ve been able to do this the whole time?” I asked him.

  “Of course, that and many other abilities. You hairless apes are hardly halfway to being halfwits compared to my stunning abilities and intellect. This is only further increased by my technological prowess. Perhaps now, understanding how much more advanced I-”

  “Yeah, yeah, shut up,” I responded, already tired of him talking in my head. He was using a near-magical ability and still somehow managed to make it instantly annoying.