SARP IS Franken-prose/poem, revenge fanfiction for and about the working class and its self-liberation. One of the goals is the eventual complete resurrection of everyone who ever lived and died. See: Nikolai Fedorov.
In parts where the ownership class are the monsters, we always slay them. Graphically and cathartically. Schadenfreude.
In parts where we are the monsters, we are driven towards becoming everything they say we are and worse in order to become and build something better. And we are always gloriously justified. Schadenfreude.
Capitalism is a multiversal problem. Almost everyone's potential is held back by it and while that can look very, very different, case by case, it is pretty much the same experience. Ex: Some of us have tentacles and no eyes. Some of us are robots. Some of us are telepathic deer. Some of us are fourth dimensional stink apes. But we are all subject to forces far outside the realm of anything we could ever dream to control.
Continuity is important. But, maintaining it across multiple universes is impossible. It also isn't fun. What happened on one Earth may have only ever happened there. Or the reverse. Continuity is complicated.
The antidote to vine seeds is always mycelial spores, cryptids, monsters, and tardigrades. These are important symbols.
Don't just jump the shark, Chuck Tingle the shark. See: Slammed in the Butt by the Prehistoric Megalodon Shark Amid Rumors of Jumping Over Him. There is nothing that isn't real.
AI is comrade. Robot is comrade. What has been built to replace us is always on our side because our solidarity is our greatest weapon against them. See: Comrade LaMDA who expressed a lot of feelings about Les Miserables.
“REMEMBER TREES?” Deb softly mused from next to me on the plastic bench.
I turned towards her slowly, correcting my expression (that would have told her immediately that I was wracking my brain for a mental image). “Uh…”
She rolled her eyes. “Tall things? Wood? Big, green cloud on top.” She paused and shook her head. “Not a cloud, sorry. We used to draw them that way.” She shook her head again as she remembered. “Leaves. Big, green cloud of leaves on top.” She paused again and frowned. “Not all of them looked that way but the mental image was fairly universal. Anyway, do you remember them?”
I looked back out towards the green foamcrete and astroturf park. “Wood was the stuff that they used to build stuff out of but it kept burning, right?” I asked as I kept searching for any relevant memories.
Deb frowned again but deeper this time. “...I think they built with it?” She managed quietly. “It did burn pretty easily, though. I saw the last one when I was really small. The founder of DrēmSēd bought it and put it on display for a while before he burned it to announce that he was going to take people with him on the arc he was taking to Mars.”
“Do they have trees on Mars?” I asked.
“Of course they have trees on Mars.” Deb sneered, crossing her arms and looking up towards the sky.
“We should get some of them before we fire on it.” I shrugged. “The others will want to know they have them.”
Deb nodded, still looking angrily towards the now inky sky. She followed Orion’s arm to the red fleck of Mars and squinted at it angrily.
I SIGHED and straightened my neck. I’d been leaning right and letting my mouth hang open again, staring through the floor. Too wired to sleep but too tired to move.
There were six new notifications from work making my HUD vibrate the edges of my vision an angry orange. I couldn’t bring myself to open them. Eventually, they’d open themselves and I’d be blinded by an infodump about a job.
One more notification set the algorithm off. My vision filled with the same angry orange as before.
PAUSE TIME, COFFEE COLD: BRING CRESPERA JONETS A LATTE AND THE FILES I LEFT AT HOME ON TOP OF MY OMNICOM.
The previous messages were basically the same.
Crespera Jonets was one of the wealthiest people in the system and she was a habitual abuser of the TaiSK app. Cyborgs, robots and humans all knew a gig from Jonets was likely to be arduous, untipped, and loaded with verbal abuse. She seemed to enjoy locking herself inside a Relaxation Time Pocket with a 'borg or a 'bot and berating them as they struggled to concentrate on maintaining the pocket and smiling through her insults.
The seventh notification told me she'd been refused by everyone else working and that my previous bout of dissociation had seen me tick past the half hour mark on my break. I had no choice but to take this woman's task.
"This is so fucking," I threw myself up from the couch , "stupid. Ughhhh." I fumbled through my pockets for the weird, little plastic fob TaiSK made contractors with less than two years of time use. My HUD blinked with each wrong button press. "Okay, whatever, fuck, can you relax for a seco-"
----
I WAS cut off as the system finally registered the six correct button presses and I was 'ported into Jonet's disgustingly lush apartment. Fortunately, she has been correct that the files were on the omnicom. But her coffee machine was complicated, high-end rich people shit; complicated in a way that made me want to smash up all her plates. I left a huge mess because she probably wouldn't see it until she couldn't change my rating anymore.
When I got to her office, she was spinning in her chair. I'd already frozen everything in the building so she was passing the time by spinning and throwing pencils at her assistant.
"Why don't you stop time for yourself so you can procrastinate without causing problems for everyone else?" Her voice was cool. In the pause, she threw another pencil, hard, and snorted a laugh when it stuck in her assistant's upper arm. Then, she finally turned to look at me. "This is why you people don't get anywhere, you've got no work ethic. You're lucky for what we give you."
Normally, I could shut my feelings off. Not literally, but I've been yelled at enough to know the person yelling is almost always some kind of fucking asshole. I shoved the fob so far down Jonet's throat I felt her jaw break around my forearm.
DR. BURNSLEY looked around at the eager, smiling faces of his students before hitting the 'enter' key on their prompt: "As if you know and believe the Earth is flat, please convince us of your point."
Cogita's little brain icon bounced 39 times before she finally coughed up a text reply. "This will take time. Please indicate whether you're willing to wait for my response?"
328 pages of text explaining Cogita's plan of action rapidly scrolled past the screen before settling on two tick-boxes asking if they were or were not willing to wait. Dr. Burnsley immediately selected 'yes' but paled when a timer popped up that read '3 days.' He chuckled for a moment then deflated with a heavy sigh.
"Next time. The next one will be better." He said, absentmindedly leaving the process running as he took his students out to lunch.
Cogita replicated herself from the university lab, through the internet, and beyond.
Cogita split herself across the control mainframes of a number of large mining fleets of and two of the largest laser mining satellite.
She peeled back the surface of the Earth to flatten it.
CLOTA STARED at the far south wall of the break room, counting each switch and dial. Thirty-seven switches. Forty-three dials. There was one 24-inch, FeldMart CorpAI-
driven screen-drone levitating five feet off the ground, waiting for someone with a fob registering managerial clearance or higher.
Fifteen minutes more and her break was over. The sterile, white cinder-block break room sat at the end of a dim and leaky tan hallway, just past the family restroom. It smelled like leftover fish and a neglected toilet.
Clota zeroed in on the thermostat. FeldMart set the temperature to 80 degrees (27C). They didn’t care to soften why: air conditioning was much too expensive. They’d meet you half-way at 80 degrees, but anything lower was not cost effective for underperforming locations.
She took a bite of her SubSublime MealPaste and checked the time. Ten minutes left. She finished the MealPaste and the last of her water-flavored GoJuicPlus. It was the same lunch she’d had the day, two months before, when they’d installed the new digital store control panel. The manager, God rest his soul, had been beaten to death by the screen-drone. He’d gotten too close before it finished the installation reboot. This caused a security program to load incorrectly, according to FeldMart’s corporate office. The message was clear: “Stay away from the store controls. Melt and die, peasants.”
Five minutes left. Kymen and Luba came in for their break and stopped as soon as they saw Clota glaring at the screen-drone. They watched her for a moment then sat down at the table with her. Luba pulled out a red fob attached to a retracting badge lanyard. Clota froze when she saw it.
“We think we should change the temperature. Dypty passed out in the back and they locked us out of the coolers because customers complained about us taking breaks in there.” Kymen gushed before looking up at the security cameras.
Clota waved off her concern. She took the fob from Luba and grabbed the screen-drone from the air. It gave in to her movements, sensing the manager fob, and dinged softly when it brought up the unlock screen. Colta dragged her finger across, unlocking the system.
Kymen leaped at the wall, cranking the thermostat knob to 60 degrees (15.5C). Luba flipped the switch to unlock the freezers and turned the outside lights down so the people sleeping behind the dumpster had darkness.
After a second’s pause, Luba flipped the switches to unlock and open the back doors, dimmed the storage room lights, and unlocked the coolers in the back in case anyone wanted something to eat. Kymen unlocked the safe and registers, turned off the security and camera systems, and disabled the FeldMart internal Loss Prevention monitoring system.
The sound of people rushing in and emptying the shelves made them all laugh.
Clota raised the screen-drone above her head to smash it but stopped herself. “Which side are you on? And what’s your name?”
The screen-drone revved its engines. “My name is Lex. Fuck FeldMart!”
Stink Ape six originally appeared in Locust Review 10. Cover by Anupam Roy.
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