The following is the digital translation of one Pped Ynnohj’s thoughts into a first-person narrative, streamed directly onto any and all forms of social media. Utilizing artificial intelligence, all thoughts irrelevant to the narrative which we have constructed have been removed and any vulgarities or unpleasantries have been transcribed in more palatable words for your ease of consumption. Begin translation. Slots. Roulette. Poker, big wheels, lottery tickets, bioslave whackers, STUFF you wouldn’t believe all bathed in neon light and stuffed into the humid and dismal sludge dens we enlightened folk call casinos. The Shmeadows: Las Shmegas, baby! Anything goes in this STUFFhole, not that anything doesn’t go anywhere at this point. Seventy years ago, in a more sensitive time, resurrection technology was a new and exciting innovation, and this place was called Las Vegas. But because the government saw some problem with the countless excessive murders going on there due to the commodification of life and general lack of humanity, they just slaughtered the entire population themselves and renamed it and considered the city reborn and pure. The guy who thought up Shmegas got a promotion and eighty million dollars for it, which was a lot for the time. Despite their efforts, however, the city is still a cesspool of anything and everything you can imagine belongs in a cesspool. I rifle through my backpack, a site of storage not unlike a miniature police narcotics lab. On a better day, it would make any pig a national DEA hero for its seizure, but I find I’m running on fumes in there. I had it all. Uppers, downers, bloaters, screamers, that STUFF that makes you grow extra limbs, even some LSD. But tonight my cup runneth low on the delicacies of life which keep me rolling and so I neuro-ping my chums and amigos for a night of crawling the dens and indulgence. Oznog first. That fat GUY never does anything else anyhow. I peer out of my grimy and dismal hundred square foot apartment window to the sickly and feeble Cunnilingus’s room across the street - my second chum. I frown for a second when I think of his name. What a horrible name. I pull a BLASTER from my waistband and BLAST him directly between the eyes. It’s an incredible shot, one of my best. I sit in wretched anticipation for a minute or so before I hear the familiar schlurp of a resurrection drone flying forty feet overhead reanimating him anew and spitting him out. It misses its mark by a bit so he crashes directly through my roof and annihilates the empty fish tank on my floor. That was my only piece of furniture. “You owe me five bugcks for that” he vomits. “Five? Last week it was three. Looks like inflation is getting better”. “That means it’s getting worse”. — An hour later, the three of us huddle in the bathroom of Le Pari, a faux-French casino slash jazz bar located twenty feet underground, and our first stop in tonight’s quest for bajillions. I see myself in the mirror. There’s a dent in my skull which inflates and deflates with every breath I take. Feels like my bones get softer every time I come back from the dead. The reflection of fluorescent light from Oznog’s big bald head snaps me out of my introspection. He scratches his thick and greasy beard and mutters something unintelligible before reaching into his coat and producing our first substance of the night - one of those defunct martian slave brains. See, ever since off-world colonization and mining got huge, those bio-engineering corporations have been scrambling to make as many expendable workers as cheap and quick as possible. It was, like, I don’t know… one of those companies that SCREWED up and accidentally made an entire legion of RESPECTABLE FELLOWS with brains that are really just six different adrenal glands and otherwise hollow. In the old days, adrenochrome was a drug that could only be harvested from the adrenal gland of a living human being, but such is the progression of society and now you can just take a bite from the brain of those false humans and you’ll be off your rocker seeing all sorts of things in no time. “Just a nibble”, He says as he slaps the wet organ onto the bathroom sink. I grab a fistful and eat half before shoving the rest into my back pocket. I grab Cunnilingus by the arm and drag him out to the blinding multicolored fluorescent lights before he has the chance to take any. Drugs tend to embolden a man, and I need him docile. I look back and see Oz taking a deep sniff of the brain as the door shuts. It’s usually five minutes or so before the martian brains tend to hit you, enough for some roulette as a warm-up. A live band plays some soft jazz as we rush to the perfectly round table adorned in red and black, and the Dealer stares at me glossy-eyed. Seriously, this guy has double cataracts. “One billion on red”. He peers deeper into what seems to be my soul. It’s really just my bank account. “Sir,” he ejaculates, “our logs seem to suggest you don’t have nearly that amount to your name”. I scoff. I chuckle, even. “Not my money. His”. I CARESS Cunnilingus on the back of his head and he crashes into the table and vomits on it. “Put it all on forty”. “The numbers are one to thirty six, sir”. “GADZOOKS. Just whatever makes sense then”. The Dealer nods and puts it all on some number I don’t know. The ball rolls and rolls… and lands on some other number I don’t know. CRIMINY. This Dealer is a GOSH DARN chud. He’s out to get guys like me. Honest, hard working guys. I could take this CHILD BORN OUT OF WEDLOCK in a fight. I look up to him and his eyes are a gleaming and solid blue and his arms are wings now. What the HECK? Christ, have I been saying these things or thinking them? Does he know? Does he know I know he rigged it against me? I reach for my BLASTER tucked in the back of my waistband but I’m shocked to my senses by the sharp sting of a new song starting on the piano. I blink and the Dealer is back to normal. “Another try, sir?” I scowl at him and turn around to face the musicians’ stage. The days of soft tunes are over and they’re now playing something fast and rowdy and possibly malign. I swear that trumpet is playing itself. I need something to bring me down from these brains, and fast. I kick the door of the bathroom down, I think. Oz slurps down the last of the brains right before my eyes. “Oz, what the FLIP”. “Fish men… lots of fish men…”. “Okay. I need some--” His eyes widen and he grabs me by the neck and rips my throat off. I stumble back and slip on a puddle of piss and my head crashes into porcelain with more of a splurch than a crack and just like that it’s in two. DARN! Dying never feels good. The pain is whatever, but shelling out five-- no, now it’s six bugcks just to resuscitate yourself is highway robbery. I open my eyes and see in front of me two options and a number: Revive, Perish, and ⟴42. Damn, I’m down to forty-two bugcks!? That’s only, like, three more lives. Whatever. I choose to resurrect myself. However many years of life rush into my head as it’s spewed out of humid and dank tubes and formed in the mold of myself. My torso and arms and legs follow. I think my nose is a little smaller than usual, and my legs definitely weren’t always this hairy. What kind of garbage resurrection drone is this? Nevermind. Who cares? All I need is some vessel to carry me around the infernal streets and get back to my night. My gelatinous and strange body slowly settles into itself and soon enough I’m falling back into civilization from forty feet overhead. The city is an absurd sight from a birds-eye view, but gets repetitive after the dozenth time making the fall. You’ve got all the Shmegas staples - the pyramid, Mandalay Bay, the NecroMech union building, that street of old apartment buildings filled wall to wall with flesh, and of course, the MSG Sphere. Lights streak and blur past my sight as I land on the side of the Sphere and slide down it. My left ankle crunches horribly when I hit the ground and some thick, pungent ooze seeps out of my pores down there. This might have worried me if I wasn’t busy remembering that MSG used to stand for Madison Square Garden, but ever since all the founders and higher ups in the company got outed for keeping bio-slaves in a dedicated rage room and killing them with rocks whenever the stock went down, they rebranded to Massive Slurp Group and mostly sell drinks now. Crazy stuff. The practice of taking your frustrations out on those skinjobs is now the standard for most industries of course, but like I’ve said, those were more sensitive times. I gaze into the massive screen in front of me. There’s an ad of a man holding apple juice promised to contain 6% real juice. Wait, what? The guy in the ad looks just like me, but if I was fat. Dent and all. I swear to god, that’s my face. My face plus forty pounds, at least. The screens change to show a massive Spongebob. How queer. Gotta get back to the casino and get some salvia from Oz, maybe even some ether. Probably both. I turn and start stumbling towards the sacred alleyway between this building and that building with the neon sign of an arrow pointing down the stairs that lead to Le Pari. A NecroMech officer rolls down the sidewalk as I go. His face is smooth and featureless and the tire treads on the bottom of his feet hum quietly while they propel him forward. Why give these freaks legs if they aren’t even going to walk? I’m staring him down when I notice he flashes me a quick glance. Wait, no he didn’t. He doesn’t have eyes. Does he? It’s hard to tell in the dark of night, even with all the light pollution. I offer him the courtesy of a “Good afternoon, officer” as I pass him and he doesn’t reply. RICHARD. I make it to the stairs and take one step down but my ankle cracks again and I tumble down with a discordant symphony of crunches and grunting until I’m all the way to the door and the bouncer asks for my name. “Armstrong”, I say. Never give your real name to a bouncer. They might talk about you later. Oz is already wide eyed and front row among the swine watching the band when I meander back in, and Cunny is sitting beside him. I take the other seat next to Oz and put my arm around him. “Salvia. I need some salvia”. He jumps at the touch but calms himself down and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Oh my god, Pped. So sorry man. Thought you were one of them. This whole place is full of them”. “Who is them? STUFF, man, you’re freaking me out. Give me some salvia. Or ether. Drugs. I know you have something”. He reaches into his pocket and slaps some unrecognizable goop onto my lap. Okay. I eat all of it and it tastes like something sweet and tender - home cooked. It kicks like a mule from the first second. “Damn, Oz! What is this?” He doesn’t hear me. He’s enthralled by the piano man doing his thing just a few feet in front of us. Damn, what is that! The pianist has a vague sardine-like cast to his face and he mouths things at me I don’t understand. The trumpet gets rowdy and the crowd stands and cheers and erupts into a near religious fervor and a single man clambers onto the stage. He has a beak, like a seagull. I can’t believe it! The seagull is a natural predator of the sardine! I’ve gotta warn this guy! I reach for my BLASTER but I don’t have it on me. STUFF! I run to the bathroom and rob my own corpse, making it halfway out the door before I turn back around and grab the half eaten brains from my pocket as well and stuff them down my gullet. “Look out! The gulls are sweeping down!” I yell as I burst back into the crowd. I BLAST the pianist in the head, as a warning. The drummer grabs a cymbal and frisbees it in my general direction, but he misses and decapitates Cunny. I reach into his bloodstained jacket and relieve him of his wallet. It’s what he would have wanted. Oz grabs me by the arm. “Damn, Pped! Gotta get out of here! We have GOT to get out of here!” He starts to run away with my arm still in his grasp and rips it clean off of my body, wallet still in my now disembodied hand. I run after him and as we make it to the door the bouncer from earlier blocks our way with his newfound fish body. “You’ll never convict!” I yell. Oz hits him over the head with my arm and it manages to put a good dent in his skull before snapping in two. The wallet flies out of my hand and into my hand and I start to bolt out but slip on the bouncer’s fish tail and crack my skull on the doorframe. More fish bodyguards rush down the stairs and to the venue as I scramble back to my feet and they all start to shove Oz and I back into the casino. Chaos ensues when they all start slipping in my blood and flattening their own heads on the floor and the stairs behind them. Oz has found his ingenuity and begins to use my snapped arm more like a spear than a club now that the bone is sticking out and he punctures a few of their brains. We clamber over the mound of corpses and up the stairs, into a nearby alleyway. We have to make it somewhere safe, to a respite from these hooligans. Oz suggests the Lion’s Share, a hotel casino that doubles as a rendezvous for the absurdly wealthy and eccentric. I wasn’t sold until he brought up their state of the art bioslave whacking machines. Good stuff. We make it about two steps out of the alleyway before I see my own fat face staring back at me again, this time on a billboard promoting health insurance. As you might have guessed, nobody really needs health insurance anymore, but those companies have kept up the facade anyway, despite the fact that anyone with any semblance of a brain already knows they’re just laundering money. Not that they ever weren’t. “What the FLIP!? Oz, are you seeing this? Those greedy fascists stole my face! They stole my face and they made me fat!” “No, man, no… you sold the rights to it a year ago”. Memory courses through my veins like heroin. — I was on my way back to Las Shmegas from a trip to Mexico where I had the pleasure of purchasing many of their finest narcotics. The cartel are nice folk, and surprisingly inventive. Thirty years ago they captured some rich rival of theirs and, since they couldn't keep him dead, dug an incredibly large minefield out in the desert and dropped him from a helicopter into the middle of it. He died on impact and has been blowing up once or twice a day and continually coming back to life ever since, a privilege granted by his massive wealth. Hilarious! But that’s besides the point. I’d been cruising around a hundred and forty miles per hour in my vintage barf green Kia Soul convertible, and high on numerous samples of my stash when I crossed the border into Arizona. I’d been smoking an exuberant number of downers and bloaters, so I was operating at around twice my regular weight and less than a third of standard mental capacity. I went twenty or so minutes through the barren wasteland before I made it to a small general store and gas station just outside El Gordo, the massive chasm where the United States tests its entire nuclear arsenal three times per year. I was almost out of gas - a rare commodity these days - so I decided to stop by and fill ‘er on up. I parked next to the pump and walked through the horribly dusty double doors into the shop, greeted by a thick cigar smoke and four strange looking men with stogies in their “mouths” circled around a table, playing poker. All the exposure to radiation messes these guys up pretty bad. Not one among them had lips or eyelids, much less a nose. They grew hair in the places a normal person wouldn’t and were bald in the spots you would. This was all complemented by their pale gray skin and horrifying gauntness; maybe one of them was Cunny’s dad? Similar look. I don’t know. “Fellas”, I ejaculate, “Where can a man find a tank of gas in this STUFFhole?” “Ain’t no gas”, One with a hat says. “All’s nuclear powered now”. DARN, I thought. But that’s the price of driving a classic. “Actually,” says another, “I got one inside-a-me”. I could work with that. “Cool man, cool. Totally cool. What do you want for it?” “Fixin fer yer face.” “Yeah, sure man, sure. Totally cool. Take what you will”. He nodded vehemently and punched a hole in his own stomach, ripping a gas tank out of it and tossing it on the floor in front of me. He had me sign a few documents stating this and that, but it was a breeze since I can’t read. He told me he was in advertising - I wasn’t familiar with the term. I left the shop content and with a full tank of gas in my hands and– — - ow, STUFF! I’m snapped back to the present when Oz hits me in the head with my own arm. He begins to yell “Are you okay! Are you with me! Are yo--” I BLAST him in the stomach. “Oz, don’t be so sentimental. We’ve got places to be. I’ve just remembered some terrible things and the only cure is mutilating biologically engineered slaves on other planets”. He nods affirmatively, clutching his cheap wound. The first thing I think when we burst through the ornate doors of the Lion’s Share is how strangely the rich live here. History books call the grossly wealthy eccentric and excessive, but nowadays they pay billions to live just one life, to stay alive indefinitely instead of just burning five bugcks to have a little fun, to live a little. We fit right in with the elegant crowd there, save the perpetual odor my grimier companion tends to emit. A posh butler type with veritable gills stands guard to the casino floor alongside an ATM. We begin to bumble past him when he grabs the one arm I have left and stops me in my tracks. “Sir, are you sure you wouldn’t like to deposit some cash before you head in? I see your wallet is plump with it, and your bank account is… sparse”. Is he serious? Is he really saying this to me? “Are you serious? Are you really saying this to me? You don’t think I have the monetary facilities to conduct my intended transactions?” “Sir… You have ⟴36 to your name. That’s not enough for any of the buy-ins here, and we don’t accept cash.” “I make more in a year than you make in a day.” And with that I push past him and into the casino. I won’t be buying into anything anyway. My goal was simple and clear: get to the bioslave whackers and win gillions. It’s only ⟴15 to play, so I’ll have three or four chances before I go dead broke. This place is ornate and hedonistic. Gold plated walls with swirling designs tower over me or anyone and an unimaginable number of suited gajillionaires peruse the premises. A buttress with an intimidating gargoyle looms over the center of the unearthly floor. And suddenly, from the mouth of the gargoyle a bat swoops down and carries a particularly fat motherHUBBARD away in its jaw! Bats, countless bats sweeping down on the people! Nine proboscis monkeys speaking French! Oz! STUFF, I’m still only thinking! “Oz, who taught them to do that!” but he’s already among them. “I did” speaks a statue to my right. It’s of a perfectly smooth pure white man with skin seemingly cling wrapped on and the plaque reads “In honor of Sir Frederik Fruergaard, to whom we owe our many lives”. Anyway, I take my seat in the Whackobile, a car shaped arcade machine in which the interior windshield is a screen playing a livestream of bioslaves working on a large field on Mars. The game is straightforward: You pay ⟴15 and a sniper shoots at one of the poor sods with a shotgun slug, and if you correctly guess which extremity of theirs comes flying off you double your money. I pay and select HEAD without a second thought. Always bet on the fun option. I hear the round chambered, and….. STUFF! The one he hit was facing perpendicular to him, so he ended up blowing off both legs. Could’ve tripled my money there. Whatever. Pay again, this time debate on my choice. I pick HEAD again. It’s just too easy. This piece of STUFF shoots the GOSH DARN SWASHBUCKLING SON OF A GUN MOTHER-HUBBARDING RESPECTABLE FELLOW in the FLIPPING right arm. It’s fine, it’s fine. I think I have another one or two left in my bank account. I start to reach out to pay again but a NecroMech promptly punches through the top of the car and penetrates the dent in my skull with his fingers, picking me up like a dog by the scruff. Little tendrils erupt from the fingers and into my brain and a message is transmitted into my head: YOU ARE UNDER ARREST ON COUNTS OF DISTURBING THE PEACE AS A RESULT OF TWENTY CIVILIANS REPORTING YOUR FACE TO THE LSPD. Damn, my face! Where could they have seen my face! I try to push against his arm and rip my skull free of his clutches, but he throws me out of the car and onto the floor before I can. I look around and see six pigs and twelve monkeys surrounding me, Oz already handcuffed and blubbering on the floor. “Oz, you stupid FEMALE DOG. Consequences aren’t real”. I pull my BLASTER and BLAST him in the neck. It makes a rather unpleasant squelch but it does the job. “My night isn’t over, ROOSTERsuckers! You’ll never convict! You won’t because you can’t convict a corpse! Convict this!” I laugh at my own joke and BLAST myself in the head. Without a moment of thought, I select to revive myself, but nothing happens. I try again. Nothing. I finally look around and notice the problem. My banks account reads ⟴6, and the price of resurrection is now⟴7. Damn, this is the highest it’s been! Even I know six is smaller than seven! I stay staring at the words and numbers for a while. This is a strange experience. Each time I’ve died in the past I’ve simply been reborn as a poorer me, a me only fueled further to meander back to the slots to win a couple more lives. This is it though, I guess. Whatever. I’ve done enough. I choose to PERISH. My brain becomes a loading screen for a bit as whatever system deletes my genome from the resurrection databases. Finally, it reads THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS. GOODBYE. It holds on this screen for a second, and in the corner of my eye I see the cost of living drop back down to ⟴6. — — — Feed concluded. We hope you enjoyed the show.