Splatty

My grandpa told me the sky was silent back when he was a boy. I wouldn’t take his word at face value though. More shit came out the old geezer’s mouth than his ass.

I toss my bag over to the kitchen table and shut the door behind me with my foot. I take my company-mandated vest off and hang it on the coat rack next to my shoes. I go lay down on my bed and sigh.

Work today was dull as usual, just overseeing the sorting automatons back at the LGF warehouse. They're getting better every day, and I’m sure the corpos back at headquarters know it. They’re going to downsize the team again any day now. Only four of us left. I was good enough to survive the last three firings, but I’m the worst on the team– besides Argie Hammersmith of course.

“Mom tried calling today,” I mutter to myself. I'm looking at the missed calls on my phone while dinner cooks itself in the microwave. The whirr of the oven almost drowns out the rain– almost.

I don’t really want to call her back. I don’t hate her, she’s a kind woman and all, but she never really understood me. “Well, at least I tried!” That’s what she said to me at dad’s funeral last month. We got into an argument about how they treated me growing up. I blew up at her and we haven’t talked since. I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with this after moving away.

“Ding!” Dinner’s done. I roll out of bed and walk five feet to the kitchen. It’s a small apartment, but at least it comes free with working for LGF. I’ll need to find a new place soon. Hey, maybe MP&M is hiring. I’ve got experience watching robots do an actual job while I stand for ten hours a day.

I stop thinking about the exciting new opportunities that come with being canned and peel the plastic wrap off my meal. LGF-branded meat slab with a side of almost carrots. “Delicious.” Mom cooked me real food once. It was a special occasion. The anniversary of some old harvest festival. This was back before chickens had gone extinct. Mom said they used to eat a different kind of bird originally, but that one is even more dead than the chicken.

I pick at the “carrots” with an LGF housewarming spork. They gave it to me when I first moved in. I remember mom and dad helping me move my stuff in. My room was smaller than expected so we had to throw out a lot of my stuff. Just junk from when I was a kid, nothing of value– besides a couch I guess. 

Mom didn’t want me to go. “Honey, we have everything you want here back in Egret City, why do you have to leave?” She knew why, even if she didn’t want to admit it. I wasn’t moving to New Veska because it had something Egret didn’t. Quite the opposite really, New Veska didn’t have dad.

I force the fake meat down my throat, nearly choking. It’s too chewy. If I was higher up the corpo ladder I’d tell someone to fix that. 

Dad hated me. He hated me because of his mistake. I mean it was probably his mistake. He was the one who signed up for the super-soldier program back in college, not mom. It never worked out for him. The fat bastard died by choking his heart in his own lard. No, the reason he hated me was because some weapons manufacturer shot him up with drugs in his twenties and fucked up his balls. He may not have experienced any change in his lifetime but my mom, and many other mothers like her, gave birth to the first generation of neo-humans. 

We were all pretty unique. Each needle had a different poison I guess. I didn’t get any of the cool ones. All I’ve got is an extra eye right below the left one. It doesn’t do too much. Maybe it makes employers think I have an advantage in observation work, but truth be told I can hardly see out of it. 

Dad hated me for it. He was a big believer in racial purity and having a kid that wasn’t even the same species really set him off. He beat me, shouted at me, all the usual things one would do to an undesired child.

I finish my sad excuse for a dinner and throw the leftover plastic in the can at the far edge of the kitchen. Before I head back to bed I stop and stare at the view out my window. The neon lights of the city make it impossible to see anything besides the mining moons up in the sky. Scientists say it used to be filled with things called stars before the eco-death. Little white pin points just floating up there. Can you imagine? Apparently they’re actually far away light-suns. They’re supossedly so bright that the planets orbiting them are brighter than a corpo’s office half the time.