Born Hard Again: Book Three of the Future Remembered Chronicles (16 page)

The feeling of time running backward gripped me.  The carnage covering my face was uncannily sucked away and back into the head of Dr. Franz.  His face looked comically bloated as its ragged, torn flesh zipped itself back together.  Now his face was fully recovered and his expression was one of extreme confidence.  By the way his body was gyrating, it was obvious to me that he was hip hop dancing.  The hole that I had blown in his torso had been covered with gauze and bandages. 

We weren't alone.  Koochy was standing behind Dr. Franz, leveling a large-barreled plasma rifle at the back of the dancing doctor's skull.  Looking to the right and left, I saw several buxom, scantily-clad  nurses who were moving in perfect synchronization with Dr. Franz's rewinding syncopation.  I noticed they were using bags of blood and globulin as pom-poms.  The lights in the surgery room were flashing and spinning in ways most unbecoming of a medical facility. 

Dancing backward, out of the surgery center, our group moved backwards down the wide hospital hallway that I could see led directly to the landing pad where we had started.  The passageway was at first crowded with onlookers, but as we drew closer to them their faces disappeared into the many hospital rooms lining the corridor.  With only a few feet between us and the doorway, the backup dancing nurses also withdrew into rooms.  Their nominal nursing uniforms flew up from their crumpled places on the floor and slid back onto the lithe bodies they had been covering as they stepped backwards into their respective rooms and out of sight. 

We reversed our way out onto the landing pad, where the GMS-KJH86 was still idling.  Its turbo engines were sucking up jet thrust that they should have been expelling, had time been running forward.  Dr. Franz was un-bandaging himself, still popping and locking as he did so.  I could tell he was talking to us, but I couldn't understand what he was saying while trapped in my future memories. 

The atmosphere around me began to shine and reverberate in the way that signaled to me that my vision was coming to a close.  While this particular future had not been very terrible at all given the total scope of my life, I wasn't really in the mood to watch a re-run of Dr. Franz's performance.  Thanks to my power of prognostication, I already knew where the surgipods were, as well as the hot nurses.  And I needed to get to TK fast. 

The world was back to normal now, and time resumed its inevitable progression towards the events I had just witnessed.  Dr. Franz, still mortally wounded, was somehow regaining strength as his dance moves became more confident and pronounced.

"I have practiced...ughhnnn" his quiet words were almost inaudible due to the blaring bass still pumping out of the GMS-KJH86.  "I... knew my chance would... come...."

Running out of ideas, I fell back to what worked last night.  Desperately, I called upon my holy name.

"JESUS CLEVELAND!" I roared, excited to see what happened next. 

Instantly, the early morning light was choked out.  Ominous, Armageddon clouds billowed into existence from seemingly nowhere, filling the heavens.  A new sensation entered my mind.  I felt more powerful than ever.  As if all I needed to do was will an occurrence and it would come to pass.  Humorously, I imagined Dr. Franz transformed into a steaming pile of goo.  If only it were so easy. 

SHAZAAM!

Lightning streaked down from the dark heavens and incinerated Dr. Franz where he had just managed to reclaim his standing posture.

"Whoa!" I shouted in shock. 

Three more tree-trunk-sized bolts of lightning struck in the exact same spot in rapid succession.  Now, the disintegrated Dr. Franz was completely obliterated.  A smoky crater in the landing platform's steel-reinforced concrete was all that remained of his Hippocratic oath and musical intent. 

The menacing clouds rolled back into non-existence as quickly as they had appeared.  The morning sun now kissed the horizon with the promise of a new day.  Doves and blue birds flew up from the side of the building in great flocks as they spread out in the sky.  The harsh music beating out from our ship had suddenly gone silent, so the sound of the birds tweeting became all we could hear.

"Daaaamn, thon!" Koochy brandished some gang signs to show his approval.  "You mutha thuckin' tripple murdered dat docta dude!  Yo ath wath col' as ice when ya buthed a cap in hith ath.  But den yo ath call down da holy judgement on dat dude!  CRACK!  Kilt yo ath!"

Now that my miracle had passed, I felt guilty as shit.  It reminded me of masturbating in the porta-potties at school when I had been a teenager. 

"Uh, you don’t understand... I was just trying to put us, I mean him, out of our misery.  I mean, his misery!" I justified my actions poorly.

"Well, hith ath ain't mitherable now!  Hith ath ain't thit now, thon!" Koochy clapped me on the shoulder.

I couldn't disagree with him.

"Come on," I led him towards the surgery room I had seen in my vision of the future.

We kicked open the double doors that blocked our entrance to the hospital and triumphantly strode through.  The hallway was empty, but with many telltale signs that it had been made recently and hurriedly so.  Papers were still in mid-descent to the floor, having been brushed off of their shelves and tables moments ago as people must have hastily sought the flimsy safety of the hospital rooms.

"This way," I motioned with my third arm as I took the lead of our small group.

"Thit, P!  How you know dith da way?"  Koochy shoved me hard, in a hood-love kind of way.

"Let's just say I have a feeling this is where we want to go," I told him, over my shoulder, as I continued to lead us.  Of course, this was enough of a clue for Marcus.

"Ohhh thit, P!  Yo thit back, muh nigga?!  Yo ath 'membahin da futha an' thit?" Koochy caught up and walked beside me, his gait ripe with the eagerness of curiosity.

Nodding deeply, I grinned.  It felt good to be powerful again.  To be special. 

I caught a glimpse of myself in a reflective pane of glass as we drew nearer to the surgical unit where I had foreseen our murderous dance battle. 

"'Special' doesn't even begin to cover it," I thought as I saw myself.  I wiped my sweaty brow with my dick arm.

We reached the doors to the surgery center and entered, unopposed. 

"Awwwww yeah, thon!" Koochy exclaimed, happily.  He ran over to one of the industrial sized humanoid chambers, plugged full of corrugated hoses and wires.  "Dith bitch'll hea' yo ath!  Ay, P.  Dith goan thix me up right, tho rea'!"

He fiddled with the control pad attached to the front of the surgipod.  It made a sleek mechanical noise and, smoothly, the entire top of the unit separated from the base.  Koochy shed his suit and helmet.  His naked body was hideously ugly and badly deformed.  In a few places it appeared it was still dead and rotting.

"Jesus," I muttered louder than I had intended.

"You retherin' ta yathe'th in third perthon now, playa?" Koochy asked me as he settled himself in the medical machine.

"What?  No," I didn't get it.  "Hey, how long is that going to take?"

"You killed tha thuckin' docta, thucka.  How you thank I know?  Theit!" Koochy seemed to be
thhbbbttt
ing his tongue at me, but I was pretty sure that was only because it was so swollen and busted.

I laughed.

"Hey, Preston, can you keep watch by yourself?  I want to get in on some surgipod action too!" Alphonso pointed at his blistered face.

"Uh, sure," I told him.  Honestly, I didn't think that either Alphonso's presence, or absence, would be that significant in any kind of situation of gravity.

"Thanks, Preston!" he put his thumb and index finger together as if to signal
okay! 
Then, he too disappeared into an oversized surgipod unit.

"Should I chop off this dick arm?" I asked the obvious question to the empty room.  I willed the third limb to act like a frightened pet, trembling at the mere hint of its master's desire to dispose of it.  "It's okay, Bronson.  It's okay, boy," I comforted it.

Bronson?
I thought. 
Where did that come from?
  Wherever it came from, it definitely felt right.  At that moment, I knew the grafted appendage had taken root and I would not voluntarily part with it.

I poked around the room, searching for anything I could scavenge that may be of use.  Surprisingly, there was lots of medical equipment.  I swiped a few bottles of pills indiscriminately; this approach had served me well in the past.

  "Yes!" I exclaimed as I found a modern, high-end compute-pad.  I assumed it belonged to one of the doctors who had no doubt planned to do important, life-saving work in this room before I had blessed this building with my presence. 

"Doctor Franz, oh!" a young nurse, whom I did not recognize from my vision, came walking into the room.  Upon seeing me, she stopped abruptly and dropped the device she was holding. 

"Hi," I greeted her, defiantly.

"Uh, you're not Doctor Franz," she astutely observed.  "Where is the doctor?  Who are you?"

I decided to play the messiah card.

"Come to me, my child," I said, creepily.  "For I am... Cleveland Jesus."

"What, like some kind of local Goodmas guy?  Isn't Jesus illegal?  Who - aaahhhEEEEEEEEE!"  She began to shriek hysterically.

I moved to calm her down, raising my arms to caution her.  All of my arms.

Her frightened screams intensified.

"Whaaat the fuck is that... thing?!  Get it away from me!  Eww!  Ewwwwww!" she held up her own arms, in protest.  "Ohmygod, is that a fucking penis?  Are you kidding me right now?!"

"
Brrrooonnnsssooonnnn...
" my dick arm hissed, most unexpectedly.

The nurse fainted.  I almost fainted as well.

"Get, get back over here," I yanked my newly vocal member back to me with my both of my real arms.

Bright lights, flashing behind me, caught my attention.  It was Koochy's chamber!  There was an audible rushing of air as the surgipod depressurized and the top separated itself from the floor-mounted main chassis.

"Awwwww yeaaaahh, boy!" a much healthier sounding voice emanated from inside the medical contraption.  "You know what time it is!"

I smiled. 

"Marcus!" I offered him my hand to help him climb out of the bed in which he lay.

With surprising speed and grace, he nimbly leaped to his feet and stood beside me, butt-naked.  His body and face were fully healed now.  He looked exactly as I remembered him, although I couldn't precisely remember the last time I had seen him this nude.

"Unnnnghhh, son!" he thumped his chest, bullishly.  "Cain't fuck wit' dis!  Cain't
no body
fuck wit' dis!  Fo' rea'!  I'm back, boy!  Don't call it a comeback!"

I tossed the gilded compute-pad to him and he plucked it deftly out of the air.  I figured he needed it more than he needed pants.

"Koochy, now that you've got all your hardware back, you gotta update your software!" I suggested, guessing at the technical terms.  "Remember all your hacking skills that you left backed up in the clud?"

"Fuck yeah, P!  I'mma get on dat wit' da quickness!"  His newly-restored fingers were a blur over the compute-pad's screen.  "Mu'fuckin' hospitals got dat premium internets!  Dem tubes be like, six, se'en feet across, son!"

It was true.  Originally conceived by the Good Man's government as a way to move robotic doctors offshore, the high-bandwidth facilities embedded into every hospital were now used for ensuring that the medical facility's permanent residents, other couch-beasts like Yvonne, had the latest Virtual Augmentation Gogglerz tweeting and poking abilities.  It was declared a human right to poke others with one's VAG, and the robotic doctors were cast aside.

"GOT-dammit!"  Koochy spat, vehemently.  "How da fuck you goan have sixty nine thousand updates, son?  Yo ass muh be bad at doin stuff they first damn time if you still ain't got dat shit right sixty nine thousand times lata!"

I laughed. 

Updates had become heavily regulated and even mandated after the security servicing nightmares of the twenty first century.  After most of Earth's middle east had been inadvertently bombed into non-existence due to a bad software update to the then-rarely-updated MISSLR app, the world governments had come together and treatied that every piece of creation wrought by man's hand must be updateable and updated regularly.

For compute-pads, economy models were required to update themselves once a day, regardless of whether an update was required.  For luxury models, more frequent updates were seen as a feature and thus depending on the cost, they might update as frequently as every ten minutes.  In fact, some devices were so up to date, that they had to interrupt their update process in order to update.  Despite all of this investment, software updates were still terrible; slow and unreliable, they always seemed to fail when you needed the device most.

Now was no exception.

"Motha fuck you, son!" Koochy was yelling angrily at the compute-pad.  "
Somethin' happened
my motha fuckin ass!  I'll show ya somthin' happen, sucka!"  He began slamming the device into the metal frame of the surgipod which had just restored him.