Cyberpunk Trashcan

money. The whole thing gets even worse if you put any thought into the whole deal. Most people held meaningless jobs, like being a smiley asshole pizza waiter. Even then, that was mostly something for slummy areas. Or half-slummy areas, like I was used to. The whole thing was a real bother, to be honest. Most of the chain places use touch screens or voice ordering and automated assembly. The recent trend was to just replace a storefront with a kiosk that sat on the sidewalk with a few benches attached for people to eat at. Delivery bots would load up the food cube whenever they needed it. More economic and there were a dozen districts around the city where there was technically no law against putting a giant burger cube in the middle of a sidewalk. The only thing that’d kept some streets from becoming a giant line of the things was this weird old law no one ever remembered to pay to have removed where standalone businesses had to have a certain distance between them. This got coupled with some technicality where two distinct programs— the voice recognition one and the one that made the actual burgers— counted as multiple employees and made it so they couldn’t count the cubes as a kiosk.

The one asshole on the bus was staring at my stump. A really gooby piece of work. The sort of guy with no chin who looks like his neck got circumcised when he was a kid but now it was coming back with a vengeance. I tried to find exactly where the skin flap was that was going to eventually cover up his mouth and drown him in neck smegma while he slept, but I couldn’t manage it. At least my disgusting body horror was the result of a conscious decision.

“Hey.”

He looked away like I wouldn’t fucking notice. I had a lot of frustration I was working through and I was really excited to dump it out on ol’ dickneck over here, but Marine touched my arm. That shut me up, but it didn’t really do anything for my frustration. I lost my fucking hand. Don’t I get to be a little bit annoyed? Don’t I get to take it out on somebody? Okay, I’m grateful she’s got some mysterious guy who has spare robot hands lying around. That’s great. Super. But fuck, my arm hurts all the way up to the shoulder and this stabilizer is pulling at my meats in weird ways that I’m just really not enjoying. But how do I complain about it, you know?

The staring problem lessened as the buses we switched to took us into the less opulent parts of the city. Somehow that sort of annoyed me just as much. Oh, that’s fine. Just another guy with a missing hand on the ol’ hoverbus. Nothing weird about that. Hands get lopped off all the time. Stare at my stump, you gormless shits! It’s not even healed over! What, do you see this sort of shit every single day?

“Can you believe these people?”

Marine looked at me. “What people?”

“These bus people. It’s not even noon and they’re refusing to stare at my stump.”

She furrowed. “You… want them to stare at your stump? I mean… arm. Wound.”

“Stump. It’s a stump, Marine. Don’t be weird about it. And no. I hate them. They shouldn’t even be allowed to be in the same room as my stump.”

“I don’t…”

“Of course you don’t. How could you know what it’s like to have a stump?”

“I’m sorry, I just—”

“I’m fucking with you, Marine. Jesus. Seriously though, who is above staring at a stump? I even have fucking glowing mesh shit on it. It might as well be a gimpy flashlight.”

“I’ll stare at yer stump.”

I looked across the aisle to see what mouth those distinctively dim sounding words had come out of. A middle-aged man whose dick was guaranteed to be hidden by the massive, taut balloon of poor eating decisions that poked out from under a stained white t-shirt. If that part got your mouth watering for a glass full of fat-flap sweat water, then boy howdy are you going to love the rest. He had on sweatpants. A fashion item ostensibly created for people who intended to seek fitness which had never known the lofty heights which its creator had dreamed it would reach. And they were held perilously deep in the cracks between his thighs and what no human would call a crotch by rainbow colored suspenders. He was smiling, missing at least one tooth, and he had pinkeye. Oozing, disgusting pinkeye.

I narrowed my eyes involuntarily from the disgust I felt in the most pure, honest part of my being. “What. The fuck. Is wrong with you?”

He frowned and the pinker of the orbs in his head rolled inward toward his nose. He looked down at the floor and, mercifully, said nothing else.

I turned back to Marine. “Have you ever seen one of these bus people out in the world? Seriously, where the fuck do they come from? Where do they go?”

She shook her head, covering up a wide smile and turning her head past mine to look out the window and hide her laughter. That was probably enough to make her a more decent person than me and I liked it. Still, it only encouraged me. She’d have to accept responsibility for that one day. Probably when one of the bus people dragged us into their lair and used us for weird sex games.

It was our stop and we got off and I resisted the urge to scream at another bus troll who was clearly going to be patient zero. Just fluids coming from every hole and he was coughing straight onto a newspaper like it was the most normal thing in the world. He fucking sneezed and didn’t wipe any of it. It was all over his lips and he kept licking them. Fuck me, how do these people even come into being? What