The one who controls the spice controls life itself.
Spice is what allows the techlords of the Empire to chart an impossible course through the logic of finance and so establish corporations valued in the billions that burn through trillions in catastrophic losses. In defiance of conventional laws, the more money these navigators of financial space are able to evaporate and the less useful the applications they produce, the greater their market capitalization. Spice alone allows the masters of tech to perform this feat, weaving defiantly through elemental logic and market fundamentals toward their goal of endless and impossible growth.
Only the shittings of the Grossdesert Serpent out by Truehome can produce spice, though there is an inferior synthetic-spice product that’s sold under the counter in every neighborhood in the Empire. It is rumored to cause male-pattern baldness in females and female pattern baldness in males. Its effects on its non-binary abusers are unknown as yet.
Though its continued abuse makes this generation of oligarchs odd-looking, off-human in the most squirm-inducing and indefinable way imaginable, it’s necessary to acquire and feed them their spice in order to keep the eerie miracle of infinite market expansion going indefintely. The priceless excretions of the Grossdesert Serpent must be obtained, whatever the cost.
At present all the spice in the Empire is controlled by Baron Nikkellodon, a grotesquely obese old man with a diaphanous halo of dead hair that floats five centimeters above a blotchy scalp pintoed in mildew-patch-orange and deadflesh-white. Bloated ankles peep out from overlayers of flesh, and his cankered skin glistens with an ill-smelling discharge, as his men hoist him through his Southern Palace this weekday noon.
He is habitually transported around his lair on the back of a detachment of elite marines of the Space Force, military thralls who willingly contract to a lifetime of hazardous serfdom and unthinking obedience. In return they are promised great benefits that never quite materialize, but in any case are kept apart from the agonies of daily hunger. Death for a Baronial Space Marine comes in other forms.
The particular detachment of marines designated to carry the mass of their blob-like lord on their sweating backs are known as the “Anti-Gravity Units”. They have broad shoulders and a deadening addiction to painkilling drugs. Now the Anti-Gravity grunts deposit their lord at the control panel set in the dead center of the Oval Chamber, an ornate space gilded all over with flaking gold leaf tarnished with difficult-to-remove bloodstains. Persian carpets made of real Persians decorate the floor.
The Baron snaffles a Kwik-Snak of Xheez and Baorger and rubs his greasy fingers on the curled locks of one of his enforced catamites, who stands by the control panel softly weeping for a long-dead mother.
There was a time when the Baron was careful to conceal his proclivities, but since he cornered the market on spice, nobody would dare criticize him, so it’s all unashamedly out in the open now. Better that way, says the Baron to himself. Better without the hypocrisy of the Old Empire, that ancient pretense that we were here to do good. And who’s to say he’s wrong?
Mentat Steven steps forward, his thin lips dripping with Thieljuice, the substance that allows its abuser superhuman feats of concentration at the cost of a certain... handle on sanity, shall we say.
The drool on his chin is partly spilled Thieljuice, partly the regular slobber which leaks out whenever he witnesses the Baron’s heroic debaucheries. Mentat Steven is a man who knows what he likes, and he very much likes the Baron’s instinctual cruelty - and even, in his depthful heart of hearts, would wish to have it visited upon himself.
“My lord,” he sighs, breathing strong so as to inhale the scent of cracking scab-edge, watery excrement and the tears of wailing orphans that hangs around the Baron like an aura of greatness. “My lord, the insurgents are starting to give us trouble again. The spice routes are in danger of disruption.”
“What’s it now,” burbles the Baron absently. He’s having his tiny manhood handled, and the dainty fingers give him pleasing palpitations that erode his already-flimsy attention. He begins to sweat broken pheromones and the rancid hormonal exudations of a worn body revived each day by injections of artisanal serums of exotic provenance.
“There are... disturbers,” wheezes the mentat, his eyelids beginning to flicker from the rich odor of his adored and despised master. Steven is danger of sinking into a paroxysm of arousal and disgust mixed. He surrenders now to a lust for his fantasized death in unimaginably excruciating ways that may well lead him to a seizure, find him collapsed on the floor: staring, blinking, grinding his jaw, puking and shooting his vile undesired jism into the rich carpetry of the Baron’s ancestral office. He cracks a trank-popper and breathes deep, evoking a serenity that he is far from achieving.
“Spare me details,” chokes out the Baron between orgasmic sighs, meat effluent and brown syrup drooling across his chins. “Terminate unpatriots and foreign dogs.”
Mentat Steven bows, closes his eyes, and processes backwards from his master’s presence. As far as he is concerned, he has received a mandate for his deepest desires to flourish.
For now he breathes an air untainted by the Baron’s debauched and failing body and begins to calm himself. Back in his mentat quarters, a certain number of captives will be made to suffer in baroque manners which he is even now envisioning. But first he must give orders so that the Baron’s wish and his, for the annihilation of their shared and intimate enemies — so formidably strong and yet so deliciously weak — may be expeditiously effected.
Dust rises in the dawn of the Grossdesert, that first false dawn when butterflies take to the air in their multihued surprise and startle the drowsy lizards on the desert floor.
On the outskirts of Truehome, the city which until last summer was the capital of the resistance, and which has since been rendered down to rubble and powdery oblivion by an incessant rain of suicide missiles, a pair of Imperial soldiers carries out a boots-on-the-ground sacrificial sweep. They are not expected to return, and they know it. Where stoic fortitude in the face of imminent death is called for, they show only despondency and the kind of fuck-it fatalism bred into the trash-monkeys of the Imperial core from birth.
“Waaall, I dunno,” says Jurube Bloot, and spits a warm gob of tobacco onto these warming sands. He’s not allowed chaw on duty but the fuck-it imperative has taken over. He figures that since today is his last day, Imperial service regs are there to be merely scorned.
In olden days, samurai warriors on a suicide mission would compose their death poems. Now Empire’s grunts chew twist and express their individual transcendence through acts of minor insubordination which nobody ever notices. “I dunno”, he repeats. “Mebbe th’ toweltops’ve bounced, Simon.”
His companion gazes straight at him through impenetrable combat shades. It may be surmised from the accompanying grimace playing around his unshaven jaw that he feels nothing but contempt for his hillbilly squadmate.
Simon Gettson grew up in the slums of the Imperial capital District City, just blocks from the White Palace where the Old Emperor had lived in seclusion. Once, skimming for change on the sidewalks, he saw the old man doddering about the palace gardens addressing a rosebush, before being led away by concerned aides. Like many others, he’d been swept up by Imperial Lawforcers and offered the choice of profitprison or military service. Death or death.
“Fuck no,” he states simply. “The toweltops have not bounced.”
“Ve’y ve’y quiet round here, tho.”
“You shitferbrains muffuck, you never seen a viddiklip? When it’s quiet, that’s when it’s most dangerous, that’s when they strike. So keep yo peckerhead on a swivel and watch for telltales, mamón piss-stain-ass baccy-chewin’ waste o’ space!”
Jurube Bloot was one of the voluntaries. He joined up willingly to improve his life prospects, swayed by the medical care and the educational opportunities. All of which are looking fairly remote on this, his last ever sunrise. You’d think that in the Imperial Stormforce the volunteers would be valued higher than the draftees, the ones compelled by the penal system to join up or channeled out of psychiatric institutions to serve. But the reverse is true. The ones who were dumb enough to sign up of their own accord are the most expendable.
They pause in their shuffle through the mangled glassy outskirts of Truehome and push their backs into each other in accordance with standard vigilance procedures, their gauss flailers at port arms. The sun is now clearing the jagged wreckage of the city’s downtown and glares directly into Jurube Bloot’s face.
“Caint see shit,” burbles Bloot as he makes to hawk out another wad of chaw.
But before the clump of tobacco hits the ground, Jurube Bloot has lost his head. Face and neck turn to crimson haze and his helmet makes a short hop up into the golden sky. Bone chunks and brainslime coat the backpack of his squadmate Simon, who makes to turn as Bloot’s headless body slumps to the sand.
Too slow. Already a blade is at his throat. Simon freezes, the panicked whites of his eyes showing as the dark combat shades slip off. He lets his gauss flailer drop and slowly raises his hands.
From small heaps of rubble and little mounds of sand around, a half-dozen warriors emerge, wielding short scimitars just like the one which the turbanned figure in a black skintight suit holds against the Imperial Stormsoldier’s neck. Wordless, they set to work, stripping Simon of his helmet, body armor and devices, leaving him in undershirt and shorts, and they lead him away, holding him underarm and urging his reluctance with swift steps. The group moves off into the ruins of a house and files through a cellar door, pushing their captive head-down into the dark.
As trooper Simon disappears into the underground, his comms headset, lying amid the bloodied wreckage of his late comrade’s body, comes alive and squawks.
“Patrol Hyena-Two, patrol Hyena-Two, stand by for drone support. Repeat, drone flight Ripper-Six on its way to your location. Report status, over...”
The crackle of static awaiting answer sounds faintly in the ruined place. A breeze stirs up the dust of legions of lost lives, acres of crumpled streets, to begin the patient process of coating this small scene with war’s forgetfulness.
END OF EPISODE ONE: “THIS SHIT MUST BE GATHERED”
NEXT EPISODE:
If you enjoyed this, consider dropping a tip in the author’s tip jar
And if you’d like to read more parodic comedy pieces, try…
The Great Bang-Pow-Bang of Murgatroyd County
Ni Hai the Grasshopper was a kung fu monk wandering the West in the olden times when no law existed but a man's own two fists. One punishing day he came to the town of Murgatroyd, New Mexico, a settlement which until now had been victimizing natives in the vicinity and which had but recently switched to terrorizing itself.
Another gem of a series to keep looking forward to...