“An Otherwise Ordinary Kind Of Life” and many other exciting stories are available NOW in Kevin Strange’s short fiction collection, Murder Stories for your Brain Piece on Amazon Kindle and in paperback here.
An Otherwise Ordinary kind of Life
So one time, I woke up in a cell completely naked, chained to a dirty, piss soaked wall. I couldn’t remember how I got there. I was totally like, freaking out until this guy in a leather coat blew the hinges off the door and chopped the chain in half with these crazy blades that were attached to his forearms.
He explained to me that I was a secret agent, that I’d been drugged and interrogated by the enemy and then left in here for dead. He was a secret agent, too. And fucking sexy. He was muscular and had a shaved head and tattoos. I guess he thought I was sexy too, ‘cause he kept looking at my naked tits, even though I was doing my best to cover them up.
I guess I’m sexy. I think I’m kinda short and I’m a fuckin’ Ginger. All these freckles and pale skin—I don’t see how dudes think I’m hot. I guess it’s the fact that I’ve got C cup tits even though I’m only five-one. Dudes dig little chicks with big tits.
When he grabbed me to pull me up off the filthy floor, he reached around just a little too far and copped a feel. I didn’t mind. I liked the way his big hands felt on me. We didn’t have time to do anything about it, though. Before I could even offer to blow him for rescuing me, a pair of Slime Lords burst into the room. They were big nasty looking things, all green, but transparent, with tons of weird bubbles or pustules constantly popping and moving around. They were basically just gigantic lumps with enormous drippy mouths and eyes big as dinner plates.
My hero tried to fight them, but they got a hold of him pretty easy. They swallowed him whole, one on each side, chomping him in half in the middle. It was awful ‘cause you could still see him in there, thrashing around while their slime stomachs dissolved him alive, absorbing him into themselves.
The last thing I remember is falling on my ass in a puddle of my own piss as the Slime Lords descended on me.
Another time, and this one was really fucked up, I woke up as a man. I’d never done that before. I was a dude, I had a cock and everything. How would I know what a cock feels like, you know? But I didn’t let that stop me from jacking off the moment I spotted the big ole thing.
It was fuckin’ huge, man! I mean, I was packing some meat! The head was this gnarly purple thing and there were fat blue veins all over it. I had a god damn thick black bush too! I must have came in like 30 seconds, all over my own stomach. I mean, I know what cum on my stomach feels like, but god damn!
That one was intense. Maybe the most real one I’ve ever had. Shit was going fine, I started jacking off again, thinking about trying to find some skanky hoe to fuck, when those gigantic red worm things shot up from under my bed and dragged me into whatever pit they’d crawled out of. They looked like earthworms but each of those segmented parts was covered in a red plate. Some kind of armor, I guess. Their mouths opened like six different ways with all these nasty feelers and claws inside there. My naked ass and huge cock didn’t stand a fuckin’ chance. They were on me like stink at a shit convention. And damn man, all I wanted to do was jack off! But no, instead here I am playing chew toy for monsters from the center of the earth. One of them even bit my dick off! How fucked up is that? Sometimes I think this shit is really starting to fuck up my brain. Fry it and shit. Bad news . . .
Oh! I remember waking up this one time as a hot alien vigilante leading an invasion on the Earth Protection Forces. I was at the controls of my space ship, dodging missiles and shit from jet fighters just steady blowing planes outta the sky. My second in command was this huge, hulking robot dude named Kanny. Believe it or not, whoever built Kanny gave him a cock. It was kinda weird the first time I fucked him, but if I just imagined it was a metal dildo, I was able to relax and take the whole damn ten inches or whatever ridiculous length he was. That fucking robot made me cum more than any dude ever did, believe that.
We had infiltrated the enemy base with several other ships in our invading force, and having a good time of it, too. We must have shot twenty or thirty of those little planes out of the sky before the other ships we’d come down with got hit by anti-aircraft missiles from the ground.
We got hit, too. Kanny ended up getting blown in half when an errant missile actually got through our defensive fire and blew the whole side of our ship off. Ground fire was exploding in the sky all around us as I did my best to steer the flaming ship over the main EPF offensive base.
I said fuck it and crashed that motherfucker right into the front of their commander’s building. I still remember the whites of his eyes when I nosedived right into his office. His screams were my only solace as I lay with Kanny’s decimated corpse pinning me to the floor in a heap of my own mangled flesh, burning alive. Yeah, that one wasn’t very cool, now that I think about it.
Let me tell you about one more, and this one is the most fucked up of them all, hands down.
I wake up and, I shit you not, I am this huuuuuuge fucking monster. I look down and I can see a city beneath me. I must have been a hundred stories tall. My arms were this crazy mass of ropes or fuckin’ tendrils all wrapped tightly together to form appendages, but I could move each one of them—and there were thousands—independently of one another. I had all kinds of eyes on my ginormous head. Each one of them could see in a different light spectrum, which was kinda cool ‘cause I could see the heat signatures off the rockets that the army was shooting at me. Not only that, but some of my eyes could see in kind of a, I don’t remember what my science teacher called it in high school, quantum entanglement or some shit? I don’t know, anyway it let me see exactly what the trajectory of the missiles were. Kinda cool right?
So, I’m steady fuckin’ shit up. Stomping on buildings, kicking over tanks and murdering soldiers by the hundreds with one sweep of this bad ass tail I had going on. Just giving the army hell, when all of a sudden they wheel out this dude in nothing but a towel. He’s got his arms and legs hooked into some kind of a machine. This scientist schmuck flips a switch and, blamo! The motherfucker grows as tall as me!
Then he runs at me and I’m like, waving these thousand tentacles in his face, looking at him with all these different eyeballs, but really I can’t take my regular-seeing eyes off his package. He’s a hundred stories tall so this fucking cock he’s got has to be what? I don’t even know! BIG! So we’re fighting, boom boom, smash, crack! You know, the usual. Beating the snot out of each other and whatnot, when he starts getting the best of me.
I don’t know if it was like, super testosterone or whatever that they shot into him to make him so big, but all of a sudden, he’s got this boner that is seriously fucking me up. I can’t concentrate on trying to kill him, you know? So he gets me in this headlock or something and I can feel his King fuckin’ Kong dong grinding against me, and it ends up going in!
If it was my pussy, or my asshole, I couldn’t fuckin’ tell you. I was a fucking giant monster. Is there even a difference between monster assholes and monster pussies? Regardless, this big ass dude just starts straight fuckin’ me right there hovering over this city. He’s got me bent over and he’s just plowing me, grunting like a fucking animal. The whole time the army dudes are fucking shouting orders at him through their amplifiers, all types of pissed off at the dude.
So what ends up happening? He pulls out of my monster butt-pussy and fucking cums all over the army! Kills the whole lot of them with gigantic spunk! Can you fucking believe that? Tell me I’m not the most fucked up chick you’ve ever met.
***
The doctor leaned back in his chair, chewing on the end of his pencil. “Well, uh . . . Ms. Knowles is it?”
The young woman continued to twirl her red hair. “Yeah. Penny Knowles. Aren’t you supposed to like, know this shit already? You are my fucking doctor, after all.”
“Yes well,” the doctor said, sitting up straight in his chair, jotting something down on his notepad. His hair looked too full for his age. He was at least 50. His temples were stark gray but the top of his head was thick with black hair without a trace of thinning. Penny wondered if he was wearing a wig. She could probably find out if she decided to fuck him, but she shooed that thought away with a quickness. She was here to get help, not to fuck.
“The surging popularity of Virtua-Life has created quite the interesting influx of patients to my office in the past few months. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’m starting to lose track of who’s who.”
“Great,” Penny said, rolling her eyes, continuing to smack her gum. “Listen Doctor Dorian, how much are you charging my moms to listen to me ramble on about this bullshit and you aren’t even listening?”
“Oh, I was listening. I’m particularly interested in the overarching theme of sexual promiscuity in your virtual fantasies. Tell me, are you sexually promiscuous in your personal life? Your real life?”
“No fuckin’ way!” Penny said, a look of disgust crossing her face. She sat up straight and crossed her legs, as though Doctor Dorian’s suggestion was some type of unwanted sexual advance. Then just as fast, she relaxed a little bit, letting her freckle-marked shoulders sag. “At least I don’t think so. Truth is Doc, that’s why my moms sent me here. I’ve done so much Brain Smack lately I can’t even tell what’s real anymore, you know what I’m saying?”
“Brain Smack?” Doctor Dorian said, puzzled.
“Yeah you know,” Penny said, annoyed. “The virtual reality shit. That’s what we call it.” She made sarcastic quotations with her fingers. “On the streets.”
“Interesting,” Doctor Dorian said, scribbling more notes in his pad. “So what you’re saying is, you’re beginning to confuse reality with your simulated adventures?”
“Yeah man, it’s like. When I first did the shit, I could really control what scenarios I put myself into. Like those whacked out stories I just told you about. But lately, I don’t know Doc, it’s like the Brain Smack has control. Sometimes when I plug in, it’s just as real as you and me sitting here right now.”
Penny leaned forward. “Like, I’m not sure if this is really happening right now.” She sat back. “Fucked up shit, Doc. Ain’t nothin’ you wanna fuck with. Brain Smack. I’m tellin’ you right here right now, I’m done with the shit.”
“How many times would you say you’ve plugged into the machines, Penny?”
“Fuck I don’t know, Doc. Maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred, I really don’t even know anymore. It got so my moms was finding me on the bedroom floor with blood pourin’ outta my nose I’d be inside so long. That shit, Doc, it’s fuckin’ addicting.”
Doctor Dorian continued to scribble notes, seemingly much more attentive than when Jenny had been relegating him with tales of virtual adventure. “And in your personal life, you say you’re not sexually active. What about drugs? Other than Virtua-Life?”
“Nah man, my moms taught me never to touch that shit. That’s how my dad went, you know? Heroin. Died in my moms’ arms when I was a baby. Fuck that shit, I don’t even smoke cigarettes.”
“So you’d say you live an otherwise ordinary kind of life?”
“Yeah Doc, can you help me? I don’t even like to go to sleep anymore, man. Dreams are too weird. What if I’m still inside and I go to sleep and dream? What the fuck is that? Where the fuck am I, you know, in my head, the real me, my consciousness or whatever, where the fuck is it if I’m inside a dream inside a simulation you know? I’m freakin’ myself out just thinkin’ about it.”
“So you’re experiencing paranoia and anxiety due to prolonged use of Virtua-Life.” Doctor Dorian tapped his pencil against his lips, thinking. “Well, Penny, the good news is, you’re not the first person I’ve seen with these symptoms. With enough time away from the program, your paranoia and anxiety will decrease and you will return to a more normal state of consciousness. Although I must say, and I mean no disrespect by this, but . . . my other patients who have experienced such a dramatic overload of Virtua-Life have been… how do I say it? More affluent members of society. Even the street price for illegal Virtua-Boxes sold by the black market drug cartels are too much for someone . . . like you to afford. Each box is only good for two or three simulations before the memory burns up. Again, no disrespect but, how are you paying for all those boxes?”
Penny shot to her feet. “That’s none of your fuckin’ business, Doc! My moms spent a lot of cash for me to come here and all you got to say is ‘don’t do the shit anymore?’ No shit I ain’t gonna do the shit anymore. But how’s that gonna stop me from waking up in the middle of the night, half naked standing down at the laundromat with homeless dudes trying to pick me up? Or the headaches? Or what about when I’m in the middle of a sentence, and I’ll just snap into one of the characters from the game? Huh? Just quit doin’ it! Fuck you, Doc! Are you gonna help me or not?”
Doctor Dorian just stared at her for the longest time. Long enough that she got uncomfortable and sat back down, resuming her compulsive hair twirling.
“I’m afraid I’m not allowed to diagnose mental health issues, nor prescribe medicine, Penny.”
“What?! Then what the fuck am I doin’ here?!?”
“Calm down, now, calm down. I am technically a certified medical practitioner. But I can only advise actual doctors to prescribe you medicine. The problem is, I don’t think you or your mother can quite afford a real human doctor. So quitting cold turkey is really your only option.”
“Human—what? What the fuck are you talking about? Human Doctor?”
“Well, Penny,” Doctor Dorian said, calmly. “I guess you’ve been plugged in for so long, you haven’t heard about the new technological advances scientists have made these last several months. You see, they’ve perfected hard light virtual reality.”
“Hard light?” Penny said, totally clueless.
“Instead of transmitting your consciousness into a virtual program, now we’re able to transfer our minds into hard light replicas of humans right here in the real world. It’s really all the rage now, I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. I’m not really a doctor, I’m just playing a doctor inside Virtua-Life, but out here, with you, in real life. Get it?” Doctor Dorian said, smiling. “I’m 100% board certified, though. I downloaded the accelerated course manual when I applied for the job.” A tiny flicker passed through his body, knocking him out of focus for just an instant, proving what he was saying was absolute truth.
“No!” Penny said, breathing in shallow breaths. “I’m still inside. God damn it, this isn’t real!”
“I assure you, Penny. It’s very real. You’re wide awake, I promise you,” Doctor Dorian said, standing up, facing the huge picture window behind his desk. Closing his eyes, he sucked in a deep breath. “Fantastic, too! Even though I know I’m just some guy sitting next to a Virtua-Life box in some dimly lit apartment or a business woman on her lunch break, it feels exactly like real life!”
Turning around, Doctor Dorian let out a high-pitched squeal when he saw that Penny had drawn a gun on him.
“You’re right, Doc. It does feel like real life. The only problem is, the scientists still haven’t figured out how to keep your real life memories intact. You don’t know who you are on the outside.”
“W-what are you talking about?”
“I had to come in here pretending to be a patient to be totally sure you were a legit hologram. It’s getting harder and harder to tell every day.”
“Who are you?” Doctor Dorian said, fear causing his voice to warble comically. “What do you want with me?”
Penny shoved him aside and plopped down in his chair, putting her feet up on his desk, but continued to aim the gun at his head. “You know what’s funny, Doc?”
Doctor Dorian stood mouth agape, unable to answer as he saw Penny’s petite form flicker, just as his had done a moment before. “That’s right. I’m hard light, too.” She giggled, then smiling wide like a maniac, said, “I don’t know who the hell I am either! I’m just making extra cash by killing motherfuckers like you!”
“Y-you can’t kill me, I’m not even really here.” That concept seemed to have just dawned on him, as his composure relaxed, and he smiled. “I’m not here, and I don’t know who I am, so how the hell would you know? This is just silly. You’re wasting my time. Get out of my office, I have work to do.”
Penny fired the gun, hitting the doctor in the thigh, sending him to the floor, screaming. Weird, pixelated squares poured out from a wound that squirmed and shifted, as if trying to figure out exactly where to stay on Doctor Dorian’s leg.
“You must not be up on your science and technology either, Doc. Shit moves so fast now, you know? Every hard light hologram has a tracking device set into their bodies that only Virtua-Life has access to for ‘safety purposes.’ Yeah right. We hacked that shit so fast, their security team should be drawn and quartered.”
Penny kicked the doctor over onto his stomach. “We know exactly who you are . . . Penny.”
Doctor Dorian’s eyes grew wide. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he said through clenched teeth, fighting off pain that shouldn’t be there. “I don’t understand!”
Penny dropped a knee to his gut, causing him to scream out in pain. She put the gun to his head. “You stole all those boxes, Penny. Stole them from us! Do you know how much that cost us?” She shoved the gun hard against his gray temple. “DO YOU?”
Doctor Dorian just whimpered on the floor, totally befuddled.
Penny rolled her eyes and sat back on her haunches. “They sent me in here looking like you to see if you had any recollection at all of your real life identity. Some Hard Lighters recognize things in their real life as déjà vu or past life memories, or whatever. They figured, if you saw your own goddamn self talk to yourself about your Virtua-Life memories, you’d either figure out why I was here or be totally clueless.” She laughed again. “Guess we know which one it turned out to be!”
“Please!” Doctor Dorian begged. “Please don’t do this!”
“Oh, I’m gonna fucking kill you. Just like any other scumbag who steals from the Black Jumbo Cartel. It’s just more fun when you actually know why.”
Doctor Dorian was losing pixels fast. They had already begun to drain from other parts of his leg, leaving out-of-focus spots all across his pant legs which lacked color. He was in and out of consciousness as he mumbled, “H-how can you kill a hologram?”
Penny smiled. “Future technology shit, man,” she said, pointing at her gun. “These bullets contain some kind of nano-quantum robots that travel through the same wireless signals that project your consciousness into your hologram. They fuckin’ snuff you out from this side, man! They sever the connection! Leave you a fuckin’ veggie sittin’ at home plugged into your box, shittin’ all over yourself! Wild, huh?”
“But I’m not at home.”
Doctor Dorian’s eyes shot open, clear and focused. He flipped Penny’s tiny form off his with ease, snatching the gun from her hand at the same time.
She landed hard on her neck, then flopped onto her back, stunned. “What the fuuuuuck??!”
Pressing a button on his neck, Doctor Dorian shimmered, then his entire form pixelated and fell to the floor like Tetris pieces, revealing Penny’s true body below. She walked up to the imposter Penny and pointed the gun at her head.
“Hard Light suits. Latest tech. They just launched the prototype this week. I stole the first one.” She smiled as the other Penny screamed.
“When your bosses, those crooked fucking scumbags I ripped off find your body. If there’s anything left inside your brain, I want you to tell them something for me. I want you to tell them to suck my dick.”
Then she pulled the trigger, obliterating her doppelganger’s head, causing the hologram to shatter like glass. Each of the myriad of pieces wiggled and squirmed on the floor until they melted into a metallic puddle that smelled like burning dog hair.
Penny dropped the gun and walked out of the small office, entering an otherwise ordinary bright sunny day with a smile on her face.
An old woman who stood at a bus stop as Penny passed by noticed a slight flicker in the young woman’s form.
Mumbling under her breath she said, “Fuckin’ holograms.”
***
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