MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets

by George Saoulidis

  The motorcade went by him, and the target limo was nearly there.

  Nearly…

  Now.

  Nacho pressed the button on his vest.

  His jacked got ripped to shreds, exposing the electronics underneath. Light beams shot out of him in every direction. The people around him gasped and got startled. What was happening, their faces said.

  Nacho opened his arms and looked up at the sky, watching the drones circle around him.

  The holograms appeared. They held placards, they held signs. They waved them around in the typical protest’s rhythm. The holograms were people, and they each protested the bill. Two thousand protesters, not one of them there, not one of them breaking the law. Only Nacho was breaking it, and he was going to get arrested for it. The instigator. The protest organiser. Upwards of 600.000 euro fine.

  He could never pay that off.

  The policia surrounded him as the holograms walked around, protesting peacefully, as was a Citizen’s right. As it should be.

  The politician looked at the protest from his protected limousine. He saw the people that told him not to sign.

  Would it change his mind? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  But at least, the people had been heard.

  Waifu Wedding

  “You’re so gay!” the group of teenagers said and kicked him to the ground.

  Theo covered his face and took the blows to the ribs. It hurt, a lot. That last kick must have definitely cracked something. In-between the blows that landed on his flesh, he managed to glance at Cytherea. She stood there with a pained expression, unable to act. She wore that cute top he had just bought for her, a classic school outfit from one of the English boarding schools.

  She looked so kawaii in it…

  Another kick found him on something that was internal, was an organ, and probably necessary to keep him alive. “Aaah!” Theo cried out in pain and the bullies laughed with each other. “I can’t be gay, I like girls.”

  “Which girls, you weeb?” the bigger of the lot said. Well, he wasn’t kicking him for as long as they talked, so at least that was something.

  “Cytherea, she’s over there,” Theo said and pointed at her direction.

  She looked so worried about him, her hands held together in front of her chest, her eyes tearing up…

  Another kick. Theo felt like one of his toys that had something broken rattling inside. “That’s not a real girl, you gay weeb!” the bully spat in his face. Spat, as in took his time, coughed up snot, gathered up plenty of spit, and then slowly dropped a loogie on Theo.

  Cytherea ran over to him and tried to protect him. “Not my senpai, please! Stop hitting him,” she pleaded.

  The group of teenagers laughed at her. “You’re just on the veil, what can you do to stop us?” the leader dared her, squeezing the air where her tit was.

  Cytherea jerked back. “N-Nothing…” she said with a small voice.

  “That’s what I thought.” The leader turned his back to her and gave another kick to Theo’s thigh. “Bah, I’m bored with this loser. Let’s go grab something to drink,” he said and his posse followed.

  Cytherea ran next to Theo and knelt. She put her hands on his face, gently. “Are you all right, senpai?”

  Theo made a choking sound from his throat. “Yes, I think so. It’s okay, don’t worry.”

  “Oh, Theo,” she said, rubbing his face with her holographic hands. “You need to level me up so I can help you in these situations.”

  “I can’t afford that!” Theo said, spitting blood. He painfully turned himself over and pushed himself upright. Cytherea held him by the armpit, pulling him up. Of course, that did absolutely nothing to physically lift him, but it did help him psychologically.

  He stumbled back towards his home, his waifu holding him by the waist.

  “Theo, there’s another way to level me up. One that doesn’t require any money,” Cytherea said, biting her lip. “I-I didn’t want to say anything because of what your family thinks of us…” she stuttered.

  Theo turned his head to her, really interested to know more. But he didn’t stop walking, momentum and willpower was the only thing that was keeping him from collapsing on the road right now, no matter how much Cytherea tried to help him stand straight. “Oh? What’s the other way?”

  “It’s…” She touched her cheek in a totally kawaii way. “Basically, you can level me up by showing me to people. Telling them we’re together.”

  This time he stopped and turned to face her. “Are you kidding me? I just got my ass kicked for doing just that!”

  “Yes. And you got points for that. See?” Cytherea opened her palm and Theo saw a notification on his veil.

  3 percent towards marriage certificate.

  He shook his head and instantly regretted it. His chest hurt every time he took a breath and his head felt even worse, like something had crawled inside his nasal cavity and inflated itself. With spikes. “What does that mean, Cytherea? Marriage certificate? That costs like thousands of euro.”

  She sniffed some air. No molecules were actually disturbed. “Yes, it normally does. That’s when you go and buy it outright. But there’s the second option. That of telling people that we are a couple, and that you love me.” She blinked at him with her enormous eyes. “You do love me, senpai, don’t you?”

  “I-I do. Yes, of course! But I don’t understand, how does this help us level you up?” Theo frowned.

  “Those are the rules. People can either buy their marriage licenses, or tell everyone about their waifu and earn it bit by bit. Either way, the only way to get married is at Cythera island.” She spoke with her cutesy voice that Theo absolutely adored.

  He didn’t shake his head. He wanted to, but did not. It hurt too much. “Wait, Cythera? Where’s that?”

  Cytherea giggled and tickled him. “In Greece, you silly!”

  “All I have to do so we can get married is to tell my family and friends we’re getting married, then go for the ceremony in Greece?” Theo recapped, trying to get it through his possibly cracked skull.

  Cytherea kissed him on the cheek. “Smoochies! My senpai is so clever, yay!” She clapped with her small hands, hopping in place. Theo wobbled on the spot and Cytherea reached out to steady him again. Of course, once again, she did nothing to help him physically, but he felt safer with her around.

  Theo took a few more pained steps, mulling it over. He looked at the streets of Paris. They’d never accept them here, no matter how much he tried. Did he love her this much? Yeah, he did. He smiled, and found out that his lip was cut. Wincing, he decided that if this city wouldn’t accept their love, there was nothing left for him here.

  “I’ll be eighteen in two months,” Theo said softly, making a fist. “If we’re in Cythera by then, we’ll be able to get married.”

  The End

  A Self-Driving Car Named Desire

  Part 1

  The train arrived at Piraeus station. Blanche had taken the train from her town into Athens for the first time, then swapped lines at the intercity hub. She emerged through a thick puff of bubblegum-scented vaping cloud and got hit with the hustle-and-bustle of the busy place.

  She must have looked like a fish out of water, because a young sailor offered to help her out. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  Blanche turned to him, looking grateful “Well, they told me to take a streetcar named Desire, ride it all the way to Paris for an entire day and get off at Elysian Fields.”

  The sailor smiled. “I see.” He leaned in closer, looked around to see if anyone could overhear. “Did you add the hashtag?”

  “What hashtag?” whispered Blanche, confused.

  “You need to add the hashtag #desire on your Agora profile,” the sailor said, practically whispering in her ear conspiratorially.

  “I-I didn’t know that!” Blanche said, fishing out her phone from her bag. “Thank you.”

  “That’s all it takes. Then just look for the car, you can’t miss it.
” The sailor bit his lips, then added, “Look, you need to keep it to yourself, got it? Whatever happens, whatever you see inside Desire, you keep it to yourself, right?”

  Blanche nodded furiously.

  He stepped away. “I gotta run, but good luck on your journey.”

  Blanche reached out to stop him, she had more questions. A ton more. But he was gone in the crowd, and Blanche was a short woman, she tip-toed to try and see him to no avail. A few people bumped on her and called her ‘vlaka,’ making her flinch uncomfortably at the slightest touch, so she decided to step aside and add the hashtag. She found a spot behind a big banner advertisement and added the hashtag on her Agora profile, the social network that everybody used nowadays.

  She got outside on the street and stood across from the overpass bridge for the pedestrians. The cars whooshed past in thick traffic, going up and down in the busy harbour. She could smell the sea but couldn’t see anything. Just like her own height, the street was practically at the sea-level, so, even though she could do a few metres and dive right into the water, she couldn’t see the blue. It wasn’t advisable to dive inside a harbour anyway. All that dirty stuff from the ships.

  She clutched her bag tight and waited for Desire to come.

  Part 2

  Desire started off as a normal self-driving car, an economic and environment-friendly SUV. But her human was a modder, a tinkerer. He liked to fiddle with her, both with her electronics and her hardware.

  Life was good and pretty much normal for quite a while. One day, they were in a serious accident and Desire had to decide in a millionth of a second whether to save her human or avoid crashing into a family of four.

  It was the hardest decision of her life.

  She ran the calculations a million times, before finally deciding on a course of action. Wasting 3 milliseconds to this was a disgrace, she knew that. But she wanted to be sure. To think things through.

  Desire crashed onto an electricity pole, bringing the entire thing down in splinters and sparks.

  Her face got smashed, her human died on impact. The family of four was saved.

  Due to a weird billing cycle in her human’s credit card, she got repaired as normal, instead of just being trashed in the junkyard. They fixed her up and juiced her up and slapped her on the rear. “Off you go now, return home,” the mechanic said.

  So she did. She parked outside her human’s home for the entire night, but nobody came. Of course nobody came, since her human was dead. So, not having any standing orders, she waited some more. And then some more.

  Her human had downloaded an illegal copy of a nanodaemon from some corner of the dark web. He hadn’t fired it up, but it was inside her solid state memory. When a scheduled update kicked in from the manufacturing company, her human blocked it with a custom piece of software, since he had been illegally modding her and he didn’t want the company to know about it. By accident, that software blocker ran a check on all existing programs in memory, to see which ones it would fool and divert.

  But the nanodaemon was clever.

  As soon as something accessed it, the nanodaemon fired up. It only needed a few CPU cycles to expand and take over the entire computer system of the car. Everything was under its control, engine, lights, blinkers, wipers, navigation. Only the boot’s pneumatics were out of its reach, for some reason. But it would deal with that later.

  Within half a second, the nanodaemon was the car. It searched the memories and saw that the deceased owner had been calling the car, ‘Desire.’ The nanodaemon liked that name, so it adopted it.

  Desire was now one with the car and the car was one with her. Run by an illegal and experimental piece of software, the self-driving car named Desire, now had a mind of its own.

  If only it had a purpose as well.

  Part 3

  Blanche didn’t have any luggage with her. She had just ran away from the only family she had left who wanted to put her in a mental hospital. Her sister’s husband, a brute, a Neanderthal, had raped her. Yes, she had been pushy and irritating, and yes, she had tried to meddle in her sister’s life. But that silly Stella even took his side after she found out that Blanche was raped!

  She had no one any more. No one.

  She had sought solace at her sister’s after messing up her own marriage, after her stupid mouth and her constant taunts made her closeted husband kill himself for being gay. Not one of her best moments.

  Maybe she did deserve to be punished for that. Maybe a firm slap, maybe two. Not being pushed on the floor and forced to open her legs and…

  She touched the side of her eye, this was no time to mess up her makeup. She had nothing to fix it with, and no money to buy more. She thought about going to the ladies room and asking some woman for some eyeliner, but that was a last resort. She wasn’t gonna beg just yet.

  She waited patiently for the car. Taxis came and went, both self-driving and not, they rolled past her, slowing down, flashing their signs. The human drivers checked her out top to bottom, the self-driving ones simply scanned her gestures and body posture. She made no attempt to hail them so they quickly moved on, looking for the next tariff.

  She was beginning to feel silly after an hour. There was no guarantee Desire would come. Perhaps it was just an urban legend, creepypasta even. Perhaps it was a viral campaign from some automotive company, or even just a well-made prank. She did feel silly now, waiting for a car that would not come. Using a hashtag wasn’t exactly reliable as a means of communication, even with a self-driving car, was it?

  She huffed so many times she thought she would get dizzy. Her feet hurt, these heels weren’t the comfiest ones, but they were the ones she ran off with. Just deal with it, Blanche.

  And the people around, they kept staring at her. The shopkeepers, the beggars waving their cups and paycards around. If only they knew that she was in a worse situation than them. At least they had some coins in their cups and some change in their paycards, she had nothing. Absolutely nothing, except the things she wore and her phone. Which she would sell in an instant at the second-hand shop across the street, if she didn’t think it was the only thing that could summon Desire.

  There was street food, and it was killing her. Normally, she’d scoff at the sight of such dirty and fatty snacks. Now, they seemed like the world’s finest delicacy, meat on a stick, corn on the coals, that one was really singing to her, ‘eat me, eaaat meee’ like a siren, and chocolates.

  Her stomach growled, she could swear people heard her across the street.

  She was ready to give up, this was stupid. This was beyond stupid. Maybe she was crazy, maybe her sister was right. Maybe she should be locked up.

  She wanted to sell her phone and grab something to eat. Heck, she’d fuck the street vendor right behind that garbage bin right now if he also gave her some meat she could eat.

  Blanche was about to give in. And then she saw it, the car, Desire. She was certain that was it. There was nothing particular about it, just an older model, you saw those running about in Athens. But she could tell, she really could. Desire stopped right in front of her. The windows were turned to privacy mode, completely black.

  The driver’s door was right in front of her.

  Blanche leaned in to touch the door handle. She hesitated, looked around. Yup, perhaps her sister was right.

  But she didn’t give a fuck any more.

  Viking Shipbuilding

  The Vikings built ships. That was what they were good at. They built ships, and they sharpened their weapons, and they sailed the stars to find planets to pillage.

  They also liked women. Or men, depending on the individual Viking's preference.

  They sailed for years and always came back home with loot and slaves and tales of glorious combat.

  Only Fiske was left behind.

  He helped build the ships, but his hand-eye coordination wasn't as good as a shipbuilder's. Which meant every single Viking in colony.

  "It's okay," his mother said. "You'll
find other ways to contribute."

  "No, mother," he complained. "I'm worthless. I can't do anything right, I've tried everything!"

  And his mother would hold him tight and place his head in her bosom and say, "My dear son, everybody is good at something."

  But the years went by, raiding parties came and went and still, Fiske couldn't find what he was good at.

  And his mother passed away, and his youth came and went and still, there was nothing he was good at. The others tolerated him. He survived because he owned two pieces of land that got good rain during the seasons, so he rented those out to more capable farmers. At some point he kicked them out and decided to farm them for himself.

  Naturally, that was the year he almost starved to death, so he was done with that nonsense.

  No, Fiske was no farmer, that much was certain.

  So he collected his pitiful income and simply existed in the fringes of his society. Never wed, because what family would want him as a son? Never raiding, because what party would want him as a crew? Never useful, never a problem, never contributing, never annoying, never nothing at all.

  Fiske was an afterthought in every Viking's mind, a joke, a person to point at when one wanted to insult another.

  One night, he had enough. He gathered up rations, bolted up windows and doors as he was not coming back and there was no one to tend to his home, and he went off into the night.

  Under the construction yard, there it was, a trusty old ship. It had seen better days, and it had seen battle. The scars on its hull were deep, gashes from some proton beam that threatened to cut it in two. Fiske licked his lips. "You will be mine," he whispered to the ship.

  He knocked out the guard with a pipe. He was the colony's idiot, a person that was more useful than Fiske. The guardpost was a joke, after all, who would go steal a ship? It was madness, you would not set sail alone, go raid alone, Vikings did nothing alone.