Zeros and Blindy made their way to We Fix It Right™,
a merc agency tucked inside the Shit Hall™ sector, to pick up a new job.
Doce—happy, glowing, almost like a man
who just found a bag of money under his own bar—
politely refused to give them any more work.
He had two very good reasons:
- ONE: those two degenerates were completely unpredictable,
and every job they took could turn his life into hell. - TWO: thirty-two million c-bucks were practically sitting in his pocket.
He was already dreaming of:
- a full bar renovation
- new mirrors
- new displays
- and maybe… a trip to a planet
with real beaches, real sun,
and a place where Tresbola
could feel like a diva again
Of course, “sitting in his pocket” was a bit of a stretch.
First, he’d have to:
- fill out Form A-17b: “Declaration of Sudden Wealth”
- attach proof he had no intention of taking over a planet
- pass a mandatory interview with a bank psychologist
whose job was to confirm
“the client is mentally stable enough to own money” - and then verify his biometrics three separate times
because the bank’s system decided
“a bartender cannot have this kind of balance”
So instead, he just smiled politely,
wiped down the counter, and said:
“Amigos… trabajo terminado..
Go somewhere they’ll actually give you work.
I ain’t puttin’ trouble on my back, now.
I’m off. Call it a vacation.”
So Zeros and Blindy headed to Shit Hall™,
hoping the galaxy still had folks
worse than them—
and desperate enough to hire.
They stopped at the entrance of the agency.
Zeros pointed at the door:
“Blindy. You go in, take any job. I don’t care which.
I just want out of this dump.
My daily tolerance won’t last long enough
to stop me from turning that guild master—
some Froppian ass-eye named Uls’Than—
into ground meat.”
Blindy shook his head like some old life guru:
“Zeros… buddy—you—y’can’t live like that, man…
You gotta—
you gotta love somethin’.At least—somebody…
Otherwise—yeah—you just…
end up dyin’ alone…”
He raised a finger, delivering wisdom like scripture:
“And before you go—your whole life—boom—
just flashes right in front of you…
and you see—like—how empty it all was…Ain’t nobody miss you…
ain’t nobody mourn you…Just—
Find somebody you actually give a shit about—damn it…”
Zeros didn’t respond. At first.
He stood there, still, as if he had simply filtered the entire speech out as background noise—
just another unstable biological signal within a three-foot radius.
Then something… didn’t quite pass.
His head turned. Slow. Sharp.
“Listen… you decaying piece of meat…
do you actually understand what you’re saying?”
His voice dropped—flattened—metal creeping into every syllable.
“First—our cognition does not function like yours.
Sweaty, unstable biological organisms.”
He stepped closer.
“Second—there is no ‘life flashing before your eyes.’
That’s an ancient myth.
One your kind keeps recycling like everything else you don’t understand.”
Blindy opened his mouth—
Zeros didn’t let him.
A finger pressed against Blindy’s forehead. Not hard.
Just enough to stop him.
“When your body begins to fail… your defective brain initiates an emergency search.”
His words accelerated—clean, precise, like a system log dumping in real time.
“It cycles through stored memory patterns, attempting to locate a previously successful survival scenario.
Something—anything—you’ve experienced before that didn’t end with you dying.”
A cold pause.
“Do you understand that?”
Blindy slowly shook his head…
and glanced sideways, like he was already planning an escape route.
Zeros didn’t move.
“For that process, multiple neural regions activate simultaneously.
The overload creates the illusion of rapid visual recall—
‘memories flashing.’”
A slight tilt of his head. Diagnosis complete.
“But it isn’t your life. It’s a search query.”
A brief pause—measured, mechanical.
“Fast.
Desperate.
And in your case—mostly garbage data.”
Blindy muttered.
“Man, wha—what the hell are you even—”
Zeros didn’t hear him.
“When no solution is found… and the system confirms termination—
chemical release begins.”
His tone flattened even further.
“DMT. Endorphins. Stress compounds.
They suppress panic.
They generate vivid hallucinations.”
He let the words hang—clinical, unchallenged.
“And that’s when your species decides it was ‘something meaningful.’”
Another pause followed, colder this time—
not for thought, but for emphasis.
“Reality: it’s just the last glitch before shutdown.”
He straightened slightly.
“Android systems do not enter panic states.
Do not generate illusions.
Do not search for comfort.”
A microsecond delay.
“We register a single outcome:
system complete.”
Then he leaned down.
Picked something up from the ground—
small, twitching—
somewhere between a spider and a worm,
a creature so useless
even biologists never bothered naming it.
He held it between two fingers, studying it with complete indifference.
“Here.
Now I have someone to care about.”
A faint tilt of his head.
“You satisfied?”
His voice dropped again—low, metallic, final:
“Now go inside that hole…
and get us a job.”
Blindy dragged a hand across his face like he was trying to wipe the entire conversation out of existence.
“…What the fu—
Oh—Great deGrasse—have mercy…
b-buddy—you’re—
you’re actually hopeless…Like a—
like a—A TOTAL PIECE OF SHIT!“
Behind him, Zeros flicked it off his finger.
The creature traced a brief arc through the air,
its legs twitching—
and vanished into the dust.
Zeros, calm… almost satisfied:
“Attachment established.
Attachment completed.”
Blindy cursed under his breath and walked inside,
while Zeros stayed outside, watching:
street gangs,
illegal hallucinogen dealers,
mercenaries, killers—
and those willing to sell their souls for pocket change—
human, alien, mutant, android, or cyborg.
It was like all the garbage in the galaxy
decided to gather in one place, at one time,
just to annoy him.