wildcat

Mostly the future was big, dumb super-men who watched too many gladiator movies and smacked each other around. Or smacked robots around. Or strapped each other to rocket ships and launched them in the direction of Mars. There was a lot of concrete and firm plastics but it was all just big set-pieces for the dumb men with wedgies to rip apart with their bare hands, juiced up by mystery satellites and designed genes. Stupid. Eni hated it, more or less, on sight—things were too easy to fix, the recriminations boiled down to shouting prearranged catchphrases at the top of their lungs before smacking major monuments on each other's heads. The Sphinx had been rebuilt twenty-seven times in the last six months alone, according to the news feed, because destroying it was such a great visual.

Surprisingly easy to meet people, even if you didn't know who the hell they were because they walked around in chemically-treated masks that stripped them of all facial features. In the name of global peace, which was a bit of a fallacy as far as Eni was concerned. World peace was for beauty pagaent queens back home. She had, surely, a right to be bitter; seeing as how she had to move every other week because of spaceship crashes and robot dogs accidentally blowing up into a million little fucking pieces all the fucking time. The fireworks were almost constant, so at least she had something to listen to while she chopped vegetables carefully by hand on a little plastic chopping board in her little plastic kitchen, waiting for her date to show up. This was a third date, practically unheard of when most people got married after the first and divorced after the second. Whole clone baby colonies could be spawned over the course of a week if you felt like it, and it happened often, even Eni had bothered with it once, just to try it out, just to see the little Eni-doubles scrabbling over each other for a shot at the feeding nozzle. Burping a lot, clones burped a lot during the early stages. Most of them would be irradiated and working pointless IT jobs by Friday.

She wasn't sure, to be honest, as she slid the knife through the cucumber to leave thin round leaves of it in gathering piles on the cutting board, she wasn't sure if she wanted to bother having babies with this one, this lover, though she wouldn't mind some mindless sexual gratification. It was difficult to have anything else, really, though they were attempting it. Relationships had to be extremely acrobatic. He'd pulled some line about working for a great metropolitan newspaper, but people were always using lines like that, and half the time they'd peel their faces off at the end of the night and HEY! YO! Turns out she'd got stuck with a Dalek fetishist from Britain or something. She preferred her weird metal prongs to be lower down.

But at least this one seemed to be something not unlike genuine, and he hadn't bashed any robot hordes with her furniture, yet, at least as far as she knew. He might have done so while she was in the bathroom applying amphibian-derived moisturizer to her cheeks, Tadpoultice, ruddy as they were from the drink. Eni chose to give him the benefit of the doubt. He took the train to work and had boring taste in fetish underpants. He showed up on her doorstep for their second date with a full box kit of vibrators. Nice variety, too. Tasteful implants.

"So, like, tell me, like, how did you end up in the future." Jack—his name was Jack this week, and hers was still Eni, because Eni liked to be consistent, even if she did enjoy the future's free name changes once in a while—Jack never bothered asking question so much as stating questions like they were ordinary comments. Jack had a learning disability relating to verbal punctuation.

They were sitting on top of kitchen counters facing each other across the gap of the floor, eating sunomono salad out of reusable enchilada containers. He had on gold lame short-shorts and eyelashes longer than hers. It always had to be about size, didn't it? She chewed a piece of imitation-imitation crab and stared up at the ceiling. Future people maintained eye contact until it was disturbing, but she'd never really acquired the knack of it. "Oh, you know, the old story. Bored after university, they were recruiting, I get copiously wet between my legs at the thought of a career as a corporate drone. Plus the dental plan they were offering was ridiculous." She could have pretty much said anything, she didn't have to stick to any established script of acceptable dinner conversation because everyone else would, regardless. They didn't really get irony in the future, it being post-ironic whatever that meant, life on Deadpan Earth where most people could only really produce maybe three or four facial expressions and had the option to buy a couple disturbing anime ones. Imagine paying for the experience of looking nosebleedingly horny! That certainly didn't leave her wet between her legs. She could say anything and it still made her marvel sometimes. She didn't bother to ask if he liked the salad because he operated on strictly texture-based tastebuds. None of his compliments or complaints would really equal anything. Instead: "What about you? You never really specified in your profile if you were native or just passing through." It was difficult to tell, even future people called it the future now. Time rendered as geography.

Jack burped like a squiffy afterthought. "Born and bred, post-singularity. Take me to your leader. I come in peace." And he'd be coming in pieces after dinner, she bet, with the jigsaw implant and her living room carpet. Take me to your leader, I come in peace: Holy Catchphrases, blessed be and well met. Bless this meal. She'd never liked saying grace, but mostly future people forgot to say them until they'd had a bit to drink and were starting to get sentimental. In the future, the Creationist Point of View mostly had to do with the Marketing Executives birthing themselves from the primordial pile of shit. The Bible read like an advertisement for a timeshare in an 1950s B-movie. It had pop-ups.

They had sex after dinner, because what else are they going to do? What's the point of watching a stupid movie on the screens if he won't get any of her witty little commentary delivered out of the corner of the mouth? He's probably like her last boyfriend, who thought Madonna was some sort of alien that burst out of Marilyn Monroe's lower abdomen except he didn't know who Marilyn Monroe was. First female astronaut president? Or was that Jackie Collins? Better that they just have sex and then she could send him home, lock the door, put on a pot of green tea, stare listlessly at the ceiling, and then fall asleep to the strange rhythm of cruise missiles and men with giant mohawks crashing into the pavement outside her building.

Eni pulled off her lime-green tank-top while Jack lay back on the carpet picking maladaptive emotions out of his ears—long strands of green-glow spaghetti. Talking too much, which was probably what she liked about sex with him, because Eni could never really get into sex that didn't at least have a monologue going on all the while, rather than thrusty-thrusty silent O-faces grinding into each other like they were making an instructional video or this was a proficiency exam. People in the future did it like that, too, not just the boys back home. Jack pried worms out and flicked them under her couch like she wasn't watching, but they'd dissolve by morning anyway. "I think I caught this off the boyfriend I had last week, Svetlana, he was hot but he had this thing about sex with robots. You know." She couldn't always handle this, giving full disclosure of random sex partners from whenever. It wasn't like they'd done away with jealousy in the future, but its borders changed and its tectonic plates shifted. Everybody else had Australias of jealous rage in their heads but she was stuck with Pangaea. "All these creepy thought eggs opened the other night and—"

She kissed him then, which actually surprised him, and it felt a bit like home.

© 2008 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved