For a Few Pigs More

by betweensuns

Summary:

Rick GBU-1138 (also known as 'Homesteader Rick') is given the opportunity to travel across the multiverse. However, he ultimately finds himself alone on a habitable asteroid in a universe far from home. As he endeavours to establish a routine and generate new Morty clones, driven by habit and a lack of other pursuits, he inadvertently creates a two-faced pig.

Notes:

Hello! This is my first chapter post ever made to AO3. I have done my best with the Archive Warnings and the tags. Some descriptions in this story will be graphic and violent. Please consider whether proceeding aligns with your comfort and preferences.

P.S. The planned chapter titles of this fic are all names of Tori Amos songs.

Chapter 1: 1000 Oceans

Dimension: GBU-1138

Planetary Body: Earth

Local Year: 2004

Forest crows cawed as machines inside the log cabin lab whirred, ticked, hissed, and clicked. Distant sounds of the surrounding bush sang along with the ongoing drone of mechanical song: deer snorting, frogs croaking, pine cones dropping with a quiet thump; cranks pulled, buttons beeped, the gooey slush of golden jelly poured into a large glass tank, a sturdy replication vat that consistently incubated dead clone after dead clone. Dumb, mutant, lifeless.

Rick wrung the umbilical feed line with a moist snap. The wet pop triggered crude diagnostics to roll across a half-dead monitor: neural-code holding, genome sequenced, time burn set to five. He jolted the cord and stood before the vitrine, watching bubbles rise and burst through the piss-yellow goo. He tapped the glass and watched it wriggle, sloshing around like a smoothie pushed by a straw. The jelly splashed about and gurgled for a few seconds, then calmed and resumed its mellow fizz.

He sighed, and pulled a switch. The formation of the body was rapid. Inside the glass, veins and nerves spread like roots, bones grew and muscles wrapped around them in twists and swirls. Skin covered arms and legs. The boy’s fingers twitched once, then twice. Readouts read stable. Near-vacant eyes blinked back at his own. A flash of recognition.

But then, his fingers curled into his hands like dead leaves. His mouth was agape and his eyes moved into two different directions. Dead.

Rick slammed a gloved fist against the glass. It cracked, lines spiking in the case like lightning, with a serrated hole crunched in where his hand broke through. The viscous jam within spilled out, spurted, and turned to the colour of shit.

“It’s the sludge,” he muttered. “It’s wrong. S-Still wrong.”

The artificial medium encased the body like spoiled gelatin, clotting and congealing around another of his failures. Rick turned away to grab a scraper, a bucket of warm water, and a mop for the slop on the floor. He scraped the semi-solid bulk before mopping up the leftover residue, and then quickly used an old rag to dry the floorboards that had sparkled with the damp sheen left behind.

After the floor was spotless, Rick groaned, cracked his neck to the left, then to the right, and swiftly ejected the slime-covered corpse from the vat and hoisted it into a contiguous cremator with complete detachment. Up, over, and into ready flames, then sealed away behind a firebox door. The smell was almost instant and absolutely foul, oily and clinging. Burning hair was the worst of it, acrid and stinging to the eyes. Black smoke coiled through a pipe and pearled from the cabin chimney, rolling clouds carrying a stench akin to burning ungulate meat, charred with the metallic undertone of oxidized iron.

Rick took his flask and a handkerchief from an inner vest pocket, poured whiskey onto a cloth, and held it to his nose while taking a swig. The sweet, astringent scent of alcohol momentarily masked the putrid stink in the room. His continued buzz lulled him back into his continued routine.

The middle-aged man warbled outside, bumping into the door frame on his way out, leaving the door slightly ajar to air out the cabin. He looked up, watching the billowing smoke floating towards the pale blue sky. The sun shone down over the man-made clearing and over his fruit trees, casting a leaf-silhouetted shadow pattern on the soil beneath the canopy. Rick reached into another of his pockets, pulled out a palm-sized metal sphere, and tossed it onto the ground.

It landed with a soft thud, rolled a few inches, and then stayed. It just sat there for a moment. Still. Unmoving.

Then, with the shearing sound of metal against metal, sharp bands sprouted outward from the sphere and into the shape of a spider, with many protruding limbs armed with retractable hatchets, axes, backhoes, and stump grinders. The tools started jittering about as the metal creature crawled towards the orchard to begin excavating all the trees bearing bright, crystalline yellow lemons. Hack, slash, then crashing down. The alien evergreens were felled with robotic ease, cut close to their bases to create humble stumps that could be later removed and uprooted.

As the robot critter completed its task, Rick snorted and wobbled over to his backyard shed. A retina scanner glared red over his eye, beeped once, beeped again, and then turned green, allowing him to unlatch and open the shed door. Inside, he stepped to the centre of the space and pulled a lever. A circle carved into the floor beneath him, becoming a makeshift elevator. The panel lowered him into a clear tube, lights glittering upward as he descended. Rick belched and wiped spittle from his chin with his knuckles as the lift brought him down seven floors. It chimed as it reached its destination and opened to a wide hallway. Hunched in his stupor, he shuffled over to an interface outside an ultra-low temperature freezer.

The display glowed beneath his drool-webbed fingers as he typed ‘Seed Sample #1460’ into a screen keyboard and pressed enter. It responded. Ping. An adjacent drawer, formed and opened automatically next to the panel, holding a fresh seed packet labelled ‘Exoplanet Wolf 1061 c—Space Apples.’ Rick picked up the envelope, burped, and returned to the lift as the freezer drawer closed, and the lights flickered off behind him.

As he left the toolshed, the auto lock clicking behind him, the metal spider inched over to him with an aplomb little stride. The orchard was cleared completely, and the residual logs were pulled aside in gossamer-wrapped bundles, already cut to firewood lengths, safe under his woodshed. The varmint clapped two of its rusty legs together, making a clanging sound, but evidently giving itself a well-deserved applause. It jumped up and down, joyfully waving its legs as Rick approached it.

“Yeah, whatever,” Rick said with disinterest. “You’re—BUUURRP—d-dismissed. Activate sleep mode.”

The arachnid, instead, stayed formed, crossing two of its legs like folded arms, turning its back to its creator with a little stomp.

“Oh t-t-t-try me. Keep your back turned, and I’ll—uuurrrp—re-re-reprogram you to sort compost b-by—uuurrrUURRp—taste.”

The spider kept its back turned, tapping a ‘foot’ bent into one of its legs purely to express its displeasure. Tap, tap, tap.

Rick rolled his eyes and grumbled inaudible nothings to himself before groaning out, “Okay, o-okay, you d-di-did a good job. Good work.”

The spider turned back around and did another gleeful little bounce. Satisfied with the compliment, it began to retract its limbs to reform into a sphere.

Just as the creature was about to go to sleep, a swirling green portal tore open in the air. A wet, burbling noise hissed out as it widened and sliced the small creature with an almost surgical precision, exactly in half. Snap. Sizzle. Little sparks and zaps lit up from the orb until it fizzled out and died. Only its small, broken carapace remained.

Rick’s eyes narrowed. As a left, apparently human foot stepped through the spiraling green pool, he reached into the holster strapped to his belt and drew a modified revolver. He would incinerate whoever, or whatever, came through. He aimed the gun at approximately where the person’s heart would be, if it was a person.

What stepped through was indeed human. A man. A younger man equal to his own height. His hair stuck out in rough tufts, only moderately combed, a shade of pale grey-blue. He was thin, but not gaunt, wearing dark, practical clothes, almost urbane. His skin was without a single wrinkle or blemish, as if it had never seen the sun or known a hard day’s work. His expression was blank, sober, framed by a grey monobrow. The stranger’s only visual flaw was a set of teeth as yellow as his own, just visible as he was about to say something.

After the split-second assessment of what was clearly another version of himself, Rick fired. A beam of light dashed from the muzzle and tore through his target, punching a clean, crisp hole through the stranger’s jacket, just as the portal behind him closed with a wet, muddy splorp.

The man snickered. The meat of his chest started to tangle together, nerves binding against sinew. The wound closed. In just a passing moment, the hole was shut without a scar.

“Haha, damn, you shot me. That’s a first!” he said, amused. “Haven’t had one of those in a while. Not when making these visits, anyway.”

Rick shot him again. This time in the face, right in the eye. The stranger healed again in a flash, his eye re-tethered and mended as his lid reframed the hole in his socket, blood rivulets streaming back upward and under his skin.

“Hey now, easy, easy! I get it, you’re pretty cool.”

Rick’s glower hardened. “Leave.”

“Hey, come on! Come on, how often do you talk with another version of you?”

The man looked around, glancing at the cabin, the cut timber, the forest, an old pickup truck. “Or anyone?” He chuckled. “You know, I’ve met other loners like you. You’re my favourites. I’ve teamed up with some guys here and there, but I’m starting to think that it might be nice to fly solo. Getting kinda tired of recruiting.”

Rick didn’t answer, his stare turned to stone. He kept his revolver pointed, aiming now right at his mirror’s throat, his own posture still uneven from the liquor. Drunk. He felt a swell of acid reflux rise in his chest.

Fumes continued to cough from the chimney, the burning stink rising and pervading. The stranger sniffed, then sniffed again. He smirked.

“Aw, okay, not that I give a shit, but what is it? Dead wife?” he asked. “I can smell that you’ve been working on something embarrassing.”

Rick clenched his gun more firmly, almost pulling the trigger.

“Dead daughter? Or are you burning bodies to freshen up the place?”

A grunt. “I-It’s for the neighbours.”

“You have those?”

“Exactly.”

Bang. Rick shot the intruder in the knee. Bone cracked as his pants singed from the phaser fire.

The man kept standing and just laughed out loud. “Aw, not the throat? I’m touched,” he chuckled, his limb regenerating as if it were nothing, the moment sliding off him like fat off a steaming, hot carcass.

“So you’re at least a little interested in what I have to say.”

Rick sighed. He lowered his pistol and begrudgingly returned it to his holster, swaying slightly, taking a small step to keep himself balanced.

“Haha, okay. I don’t normally do this. I usually come in, make my offer, and bounce. But you’re me, and I like me. You want to talk about it?”

Rick bit the inside of his cheek. He glanced at a strange gun strapped to the younger man’s leg, secured to his belt. The holster had a slot for a vial of neon-green liquid he had caught a glimpse of as the man stepped through the rift. The same colour as the portal had been.

“Hmph.”

The pair began walking toward the cabin, one slouched and belching, the other perfectly upright, his stride marked by cool composure, his knee cleanly reassembled, the split husk of the mechanical spider behind them.

As they went inside, a piece of the shattered glass case snipped and fell to the ground. The central machine was powered off, the grinding of gears, the hum of the equipment absent. The furnace-incinerator kept the room sweltering; keeping the door open had done little to lessen the stench of burned rot.

Rick took another swig from his flask, drool spilling from his lower lip. The stranger crossed his arms and looked around the room, taking it all in.

“Yeah, this is pretty pathetic,” he said, nodding to himself. “At least there’s no family photos.”

Rick didn’t respond, keeping his flask in hand.

“Are you seriously having trouble with tissue culture? This is kindergarten!” He sniffed a few times. “Fucking lemons? What’s next, blueberries?”

“A—urp—Apples.”

“Christ!”

The two didn’t say anything for a minute. Rick frog-blinked, woozy. The stranger kicked the bottom of the vat. More shards of glass broke off and fell to the ground, smashing into tiny pieces.

Rick sighed. “I-I-It’s not the cloning.”

The other listened, waited.

“I-It’s perfect. I-I-It’s always perfect. Fetal-to—bUUURRRP—a-adult scalability. Fully sequenced. G-Growth variation stable under th-thermal variance.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“Y-Yo-You c-can clone—urp—awareness. Build it. Transfer it. R-Revive it. E-E-Even chain it down. B-But can you r-r-r-recreate co-continuity?”

A pause. “What?”

“N-no context. N-nn—no theory of m-mind—buuuRRP—N-nothing to draw from.”

“Then you’re—“

“Not—urp—cloning.”

“Then what? Backdating?” He grimaced. “Why not just time travel? Boo!”

“I-I-I don’t do time travel.”

“You don’t respect it.” He looked relieved.

Rick smiled a little, bitterly. “Wh-what am I gonna do, g-go back and grab a b-bag of cells? Still d-doesn’t give me a mind—burp—still d-doesn’t give me h-him. If no one was h-home to die—uRRRp—time doesn’t care if you undo it. You just end up with t-two corpses instead of one. Or b-b-bio trash that isn’t yours. No canon.”

“Timeline split—same shitshow, bad rewrite.”

Acid rose in Rick’s throat. He coughed it back down. “R-right.”

“This is embarrassing! All this for a fucking Morty?”

“F-first th-thirty just twitched until they st-starved. A-after that I m-messed around—reflex triggers, j-junk DNA, maternal noise p-patterns. One m-made it t-twenty minutes—burp—called me ‘M-Mama.’ Still d-died.”

He continued. His voice was hollow. “S-stopped f-fucking around. P-perfected it. C-can’t get the spark, or wh-whatever the hell it is, into a b-body. T-trying nutrient mediums. A-acts l-l-like a pass-through.”

The silence stretched between them again.

Then, the stranger cocked his head and arched an eyebrow. His voice was low. “You ever think that you might be digging through the wrong sandbox?”

Rick looked at him, empty. “Y-you ever g-get tired of hearing y-your own voice?”

“Only from those beneath me. Which is most of them.” He grinned. “You are obsessed with your grandson. A dead end.”

Rick clenched his fists, just slightly.

“But picture it. You jump to a universe with a thousand Mortys, alive, aware, lit up. Some love you. Some never met you. Blow one up? Leave. Grab another. Clean slate. Every time.”

Rick cast his eyes downward. “N-Not mine.”

“Who gives a shit?!” He barked. “What’s ‘yours’? You’re a version of a god that stopped mattering a billion Ricks ago. You’re infinite!”

“Not—N-Not—“

The man let out a long, exaggerated sigh.

“Think it over. Rot in a fucking smokestack in Maine or make the multiverse kneel. I can already tell which you’ll choose, so I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He took his strange gun out of its holster, shot a blast of green blob into the air, projecting a new whirling green vortex.

“Don’t disappoint me.”

With that, he stepped through the portal and vanished. The spiral disappeared with a small blip.

✦✦✦

A soft-jaw vice mounted to his workbench held the spider’s retracted spherical body while he worked on its internals. Rick carefully examined it through a jeweller’s loupe: scorched chip casings, misaligned gear teeth. His multimeter confirmed multiple open circuits burned out when the portal flared. One by one, he removed its tiny, faulty components with tweezers, neatly setting them aside like small treasures.

Before rewiring, he gently cleaned the circuit board with alcohol until it gleamed, practically pristine. He soldered fine signal wires directly to the board, then upgraded it with new ball joints for its legs and body, and installed fresh servo motors to strengthen its movement. He oiled the joint pivots to reduce friction and wear. With tweezers and fine tools, he replaced each of the tiny components he had removed, piece by piece. A well-repaired toy.

Its shell had snap-fit casing, self-sealing. Rick removed it from the vice and tenderly placed it on the ground.

After a moment, it reopened and formed a cheerful arachnid, tools withdrawn, gestures animated. It happily waved its little legs as if it were saying hello.

“Welcome back.” Rick said, voice flat.

It jumped towards his hand resting on the table and nudged it. He petted it calmly.

“I didn’t program you to feel.”

It ignored him, letting Rick show it mild affection.

Rick took the seed packet from his pocket with his free hand and placed it on the table.

“I added a projector to your eyes, mapped exactly to my eye. The seed library logs are downloaded to your hard drive.”

The little spider stepped back, raising its head to its maker.

“I upgraded the security protocols, too,” he added.

It formed an X with its two frontmost legs. It couldn’t truly shake its head ‘no’, but turned its body to compensate.

“Or you can go. Your body is capable of breaking through the atmosphere.” He paused. “Or you can take the truck.”

The spider tapped its chelicerae as if tapping its chin, thinking.

“I’d rather not start from scratch.”

The robot pondered, considered. Tap, tap, tap. With its decision made, it clapped its hands—legs—together and nuzzled Rick’s palm again.

“Thanks. I’ll be back. Just hold down the fort while I’m gone.”

Outside, somewhere, a lone wolf howled at the moon. A fawn suckled at its mother. A thousand birds slept for tomorrow while a thousand crickets chirped like a choir, the woods alive with hunger and noise, with the violence of talons sinking into mouse flesh, of rabies frothing from fox jaws, necks snapping, eyes rupturing in the grass.

One dimension of many, many forests at the universal edge of a thousand oceans.

Somewhere, in the woodland morning, a spider was pecked from its dewy, sunlit web, strung between forked branches, by a bird’s beak. It would sit in a crop and feed a baby bird as broken mush.

Chapter 2: Space Dog

Notes:

Reminder: Some descriptions in this story will graphic and violent. Please read with care.

FACT: In 1957, Laika the dog was launched into space by the Soviet Union within the Sputnik 2 spacecraft. The technology to bring her back safely had not yet been developed. She died of hypothermia only hours into the flight.

Dimension: C-131

Planetary Body: Terraform-Class Asteroid

Local Year: 2013-VIII

The asteroid had no name. Just a long numeric-code stored on a long-forgotten server, or perhaps lost entirely after their interdimensional empire fell to ruin. Rick’s red pickup truck drove over the minor planet’s uneven surface, floating over rock and metal scraps. He slowed as a shard scraped his undercarriage, then braked the car to a halt.

A fragmented wreck of the Citadel hull lay on a ridge in the distance, inert, entirely demolished, devoid of all that made it vital. A sun rose over it, the rays of a new day a halo over the wreckage.

Rick killed the engine and stepped out of the truck, his boots crunching over gravel and detritus. He crouched and scooped up a handful of dirt. Cool. Dark. Damp. Not dead.

He dug a little deeper. Beneath the crust, it was softer and darker, streaked with veins of trapped moisture and mineral-rich silt, cold and rich and moist to the touch. It went deep. Deep enough for roots to spread and tangle, for healthy crops to reach toward a solitary star, growing gracefully within its orbit.

It would likely need to be drained to sow softseed crystal corn. Rick stood up and pressed the soil between his thumb and forefinger; it smeared ever so slightly before forming a soft, but resistant crumble. Dense enough to briefly form a shape, but open enough to breathe. A healthy clay loam. He wiped his hands with his handkerchief and snapped his fingers. Two drones flew in at his signal, buzzing over like a pair of worker bees.

“Build a subsurface drainage line,” he instructed them. “Start from the east edge, sloping out from the field. Supplies from the truck and field debris.”

The two machines did not emote; one drifted off toward the truck while the other unfolded and extended a shovel, ready to dig. Rick pulled out a notepad and a pencil, shoddily sharpened with a pocket knife. He wrote a simple reminder for himself between a half-assed drawing of a turd with flies hovering above it and a note that just said MEMORY TRASH: Reminder: install telepathic link for nurse-bucket drones. No more talking. He flipped the notebook closed and was about to put it back in his pocket, but then drew it back out to make one more point. Beside the reminder, he sketched something small: round body, a mess of short lines underneath. He took a second glance at the crude poop doodle above, then he put the notebook away.

Rick snapped his fingers to summon a third drone. He pulled an empty canvas rucksack from inside the truck, shut the passenger door, and started walking. The humming drone followed close behind. He made his way toward the Citadel hull, slow and steady, the heat of his new sun pressing against his brow, beads of sweat trailing down as he strolled through the hour. At the site, he began salvaging parts from the broken framework to build a composting toilet. The servile bot helped him scavenge, dragging plates, gadgets, and doohickeys back to his new home. It flew back and forth throughout the afternoon, collecting, dropping off, and returning every half hour or so.

They worked together in silence, picking through the wreckage for suitable parts and scrap: plating, struts, tangles of cabling, much of it half-melted from the atmospheric breach, but still salvageable. Rick scavenged methodically, scanning the area for any garbage that could be repurposed: a ceramic disc, a cracked water tank, boards of old insulation foam. He managed to score a half-buried parallax waste separator, somehow still intact. He let out a grunt of approval and passed off the heaviest pieces of his haul to be carried away.

As dusk settled on the asteroid, Rick’s shadow trailing far behind him, the sun a crisp, burning orange, he came upon three small skeletons beside a split titanium panel. Adolescents. Two lay in an embrace, one’s jaw locked open in a silent scream; the third lay apart, slumped against the panel, its arm stretched upward, as if reaching for help that never came. The forearm was cracked, the bone half-broken below the elbow, a dislodged fragment jutting out at a twisted angle, the break stained dark brown where old fluid had seeped and dried. The fingers were curled into claws, scraping into the metal as if the body had still been moving when it died, out of instinct, or maybe even spite. A message was scrawled above the hand, barely visible through the corrosion, but still legible, large letters made with smears of grease and streaks of dried blood, scribbled furiously, uneven and abandoned:

SPACE DOGS DON’T COME BACK.

Rick stared at it for a moment, expressionless and silent.

He stood still, his eyes tracing every letter by the blood stroke, every curl of a curve, every line of a capital.

He took out his notepad, wrote something down, and put it away.

Then he turned around and walked away, going back the way he came. He carried his filled bag thrown over his left shoulder, held closed with his right hand, held steady with the other. The bag was heavy, and the trip back was slow and tiring. When the worker drone returned to him near the site, it hovered alongside him for the rest of the walk, a soothing burr beneath the first glint of stars.

✦✦✦

By the third day, his outhouse composting system was nearly complete. The ground outside was littered with steel fragments, and the inside was packed with dirt tracked in from his boots and knees. He crouched beside a crate of tools, bolting a filtration unit into place. Once it was set, he completed his pièce de résistance: a heated seat calibrated to his internal body temperature and overall mood. He rigged the seat to a dimmer switch, set the noise-cancellation mesh into the wall cavity, and pressed the inner tiling into place by hand, one ceramic hex at a time. The air purifier whirred faintly as he calibrated it, vents releasing test puffs of aromatic masking, autumn needles and a trace of summer pollen. He levelled the floor again, precision-checked it, true-level, engineered for maximum comfort.

The finishing touch was a classic, chamfered waning moon. Rick carved the left-arched crescent by making a plunge cut into the wood with a jigsaw before smoothing the edge with a sanding block. Finding wood had been difficult, harder to salvage than any titanium or aluminum alloy scattered across the horizon. Rick carefully grazed his fingers along the hickory moon frame, admiring his own craftsmanship, then hinged the door to the structure. Perfect.

Further outside the outhouse, the drones had already dug the trench, lined with drainage fabric and angled to drain toward a lower ridge, where runoff would pour into a shallow basin. They hovered over the open ground, the drier topsoil pulled into twelve evenly spaced rows, angled just enough to prevent root rot and catch optimal sunlight. One drone flew low, lying drip line in parallel rows, while another planted the last of the seeds, small crystals encasing a lurid blue liquid, each with an air bubble suspended inside, always floating to the top no matter how the crystal turned.

After a week, his house was fully built. No animals, so no perimeter fence. The drones carefully laid solar-amplification panels beside a galaxial-state battery on the roof. Nothing fancy. Just the bare-bones necessities. Enough to power a gristmill, centrifugal separation equipment, a glass-lined steel silo, and a rust bucket cloning tank. No frills.

Though, he did carve a star on the south-facing wall. To complement the outhouse moon. So, two frills.

As the drones continued their tasks, Rick got in his pickup, quaffed a drink, and turned the key to launch his car into space. It hovered over the soil, then blasted upward with a rapid takeoff. Smoke billowed from the exhaust, trailing behind the vehicle in pale tawny puffs. Evening fell upon the homestead below, shadowing an arcade off in the distance. Lonely, several kilometres away from his shack, a large sign proclaimed its presence, serving as a soft nightlight in the dark. Numerous small people walked around outside it, patching holes in the structure, with one directing the rest through animated points and gestures. They froze, momentarily stopping to watch the truck fly above, while the tailpipe haze obscured their view of the stars.

Then, there was running. Hiding. Screaming. Panic. Like little ants on the ground, scurrying around an anthill, rushing to shelter, fearing an unforgiving sneaker that would crush them all into exoskeleton paste. Frantic and afraid.

Rick heard them shouting his name from below, then turned up the volume on his stereo to drown them out. A woman's voice rang from the speakers, singing with a breathy, nasalized twang. A warm mezzo-soprano. The powerful belts of her song soothed his spirit as he soared past objects orbiting in the void. Past tatters, scraps, and leftover garbage. He headed for a wreck site on a neighbouring planetoid.

At his destination, Rick parked beside some debris, turned off the music, pressed a button on the roof interior to materialize a spacesuit, and floated out, moving in slow, bouncing arcs in the low gravity environment. The cratered surface was illuminated by the sun, an arrestingly bright white light. A spark in the dark, his astigmatism bending its rays like the headlights of passing cars on a lonely highway.

The wreckage of the Citadel had been spread throughout and beyond the solar system, and was littered across various asteroids in the belt. Here, he approached the ruins of a multipurpose, multi-species genomic lab. Various signs and concept imagery lay scattered around him: images of strange chimeras, advertisement mascots for gumbo, horror circus attractions, faux-faux meat market plans from Project Tantalus next to a dartboard with Vegan Rick’s face affixed to it, ruined from the crash and pin-holed by various darts. Even just a simple image of his grandson, a common map for mass production.

Rick rummaged through piles of trash, under old cracked-glass vending machines, some broken freezers, and a crushed statue of his own face. He held a scanner, searching through the mounds of dilapidated junk for gold. Its chirp quickened, pinging and pinging until he spotted what he searched for: a cryo-sealed biocapsule. Somehow unscathed and untouched. The only one left in the ruin.

He looked at its sides, then flipped it over. Frost crackled and covered the outer casing. No registry ID. The scanner pulsed with a preliminary reading: human DNA. A familiar strain. A perfect spiral of preserved genome.

Rick pocketed the capsule and reset his scanner to continue his search. He walked away from the pile he had hunted through, moving toward the fractured remains of a massive vault, dented and damaged but secure. Still active. Massive, having left a fresh, fat crater on the asteroid where it landed. He had left his employee emitter in the back of his neck. And so, the vault’s security system recognized his emitter’s access code, and its first lock unlocked automatically. For the second lock, he just typed a simple number into a keypad: 02121999.

It was mostly empty inside; he walked into the vault and found an old, solitary memory drive. Rectangular. Portable. Dusty. It was labelled MORTY 5.0-X, chicken scratched onto white tape slapped onto its protective shell. Not an especially recent stick, but recent enough to spare him time from filling in a fair bit of artificial memory logs. He picked up the drive and walked out of the vault, ignoring all other contents, stepping out and letting the auto-lock secure the door behind him.

Having found everything he came for, Rick went back to the truck, hid the biocapsule and the memory bank in the glove box, and started the car. He played his music again on the way home. The songs were raw and lovely and declaring, with layers of meaning and magic and myth and a melodious sense of wonder, lyrics tangled with the methodical grace of a piano, the woman’s voice both fragile and full of strength.

✦✦✦

It had taken him three days to construct three wooden caskets by hand. Solid mahogany. Sanded, stained, and finished. Finding wood that survived the breach was one thing; finding a consistent type of timber to carve was another. It took him three more days to dig suitable graves for the three young boys, each six feet deep. Rick arranged every bone to anatomical accuracy, clavicle to sternum, radius to carpal bones, every part accounted for, not a single piece out of place. He laid the skulls as softly as sea foam touches the shore, then recedes, closing them away beneath the reddish-brown bridge.

He left the graves unmarked; he lopped soil from dirt piles into the holes, sweating and stinking under the hot sun, whiskey burning softer down his throat than the scorch of the day. The old man belched, patted the top of the mound after tossing the last scrounge of dirt to fill the hole, then hocked, spitting on the graves with exact aim, only missing the cartoonish ring of a spittoon. The spit was the only eulogy. Rick didn’t linger. He crossed the task off his checklist and walked home, sweat cooling his back, trudging home to complete the next job waiting.

The first springs of crystal corn had started to peek from beneath the garden soil. Small green coleoptiles broke through the loam, sheathing the small plants before the first true leaves would sprout. The silo stood tall, lucent and empty of silage. A weathervane sat atop the homestead, still without wind, fastened to an electric box that would print weather reports from a busted thermal printer. Inside the cabin, Rick read the report: Look outside, dumbass. No meteorological anomalies.

He wanted to keep natural plant cultivation for the perfected process, but he would accelerate the growth rate of a small plot to run a first cloning test. Work through any bumps in the road without wasting properly grown stalks. Rick went back outside and shot a chloroblast beam at a few sprouts and watched them grow taller and taller in a matter of seconds. Big, bright, and blue. He sorted the ones best for micropropagation into a bucket and left the rest for cornmeal. Rick had eaten nothing but porridge for the past few weeks and would have to eat it again today. Routine.

He went back inside and tossed the crystals into a toothed wheel crusher, and the remnants poured along an angled slide to extract a potent, carbonated liquid into a large reservoir. It filled slowly, the soda rising and rising to the very top. Rick timed the process with a sand glass timer, racing against the blue liquid that should fill the tank at the soundless drop of the last grain of sand. He then set a microwave timer for the exact same time to heat up his dinner, just in case the sand glass got cocky. The sand glass did what it always did: finished. His food, however, did not. It was burnt. Efficiency, in all things. He tossed the burnt crisps into the compost bag, grabbed a new bowl, and filled it with blue cornmeal from the sand glass. After adding some water, he set the bowl in the microwave, programmed the same time, and pressed start. Beep. He took the bowl out, nodded once, and tossed it straight into the trash. He wasn’t hungry.

A fly circled the compost bag and buzzed away. The vat fizzed and gargled in the background. The microwave’s warm yellow light cast a glow across the room. Its door hung open, the machine letting out a soft, pointless beep. A reminder he ignored, leaving it ajar.

Bored and dissatisfied, Rick hooked the found memory drive to an old computer and pulled a switch.

In an instant, arteries, veins, and lymphatic vessels formed and flowed in the turquoise pool like a sea anemone, swaying slow and subtle, a flower-like limning of a human silhouette. With every detail delicately mapped and measured, Rick pressed a key on a screen and the formation began. Tiny pop bubbles erupted in the glass, rising as layers of tissue and tendons coalesced into a body, graven and grooved into frail existence, new and mortal. Coming alive.

But then, what grew in the tank started wriggling and writhing wildly. Tendons spasmed, the body convulsed, as if rejecting its own burgeoning form, rejecting existence itself.

A Tantalean monster. Unfinished, unwanted, and aggressively not vegan.

Its gut distended into a swollen, considerable mass. The veins that had intricately charted a human form bulged and warped as the body rearranged itself into a hoofed mammal, hands hardening into keratin splits, legs stiffening and bending into stout, broken shoulders and shanks. It screamed, bubbles bursting from its maw as it fought to break free, kicking and slamming against the glass. It bled as its bones broke, and its skin tore while the body remolded. Its face stretched, its head of hair discolouring on one side and growing on the other, one eye bulging and shifting to the centre of its face as it grew a fat snout where its nose used to be. A new eye stuck out to make three, wide and full of fear as it shrieked like live meat on a rack, yet to be electrically stung for slaughter. Its skin changed from a pale peach to a rosy pink. The howling wouldn’t stop as its misshapen anatomy warped and contorted and sprouted a swirling tail. It swelled until it broke through the vat, busting out of the machine like a wrecking ball, then charged out of the cabin with the force of a hurricane, fizzy liquid spilling onto the floor, pieces of broken glass sticking out across its back, blood streaming from its wounds and painting its hoof prints. A pig with two faces. It still shrieked, a heavy barge thrown across the field, tearing up the seedlings until they were asunder. It kept running, barrelling into the outhouse and knocking it over completely, squealing as the structure splintered into pieces. The thing’s horror resounded as it fled to the horizon, a shrill, hopeless cry of pain and fear.

Rick stood in the broken doorway. He looked at his ruined lab, his uprooted corn field, the creature now a shadow in the distance.

“Fuck.”

He ran, chasing a beast of his own making.

Chapter 3: Father Lucifer

Notes:

Please be advised that this story contains graphic violent imagery and scenes. Kindly proceed with caution.

“I’ve been taking tea with Lucifer. I mean I've truly spent time with Lucifer, the energy of Lucifer. So when I sing, "Father Lucifer, you never looked so sane," I truly went to those places. I'm talking about the shadow side, the secrets of the unconscious. It's about claiming in ourselves what we hate in other people.”
—Tori Amos, Dazed & Confused Magazine, 1996

“Nothings gonna stop me from floating
Nothings gonna stop me from floating

He says he reckons I'm a watercolour stain
He says I run and then I run from him
And then I run
He didn't see me watching
From the aeroplane
He wiped a tear
And then he threw away our appleseed

Nothings gonna stop me from floating
Nothings gonna stop me from floating”

The fucker could run.

The pig-boy’s legs were pumping hard, sprinting ahead like a speeding car. Racing right, veering left, pushing ahead on sheer instinct. No direction. Just away. Running and rushing ahead and away.

It charged headfirst into the wasteland, mad and feral.

Dirt clouds fanned from its hooves, thick and strangling, like toxic fumes from a choking engine. It screeched, a horrible sound between animal and human. Like the dying cry of someone stabbed in the back. Brutal and ugly, it echoed out into the arid land, the very air shaken by its noise.

Glass shards and splinters shot wildly from its back and belly. Blood coated its body like crimson paint, streaks of it like rivers all over its skin, gashes open and raw, each wound fresh with red and serous fluid. It wouldn’t stop screaming. Loud and primal, a booming and reverberant cry. It rang everywhere—two mouths shrieking.

Fleeing as swiftly as hunted game, it ran relentlessly, hopelessly, far, far away—bolting, rocketing far away from its maker.

Their racetrack was wide and open, a vast expanse of nothing. Just dust and debris. A whole lot of empty. The pig zigged and zagged, yawing past metal slabs and big bits of wreckage. The sun hung low in the dimday sky, stretching their shadows far and thin, dragging them out from under their feet.

Rick’s joints ached as he gave chase. He dashed after the pig, two of his drones soaring behind him, overtaking the old man with the speed of a spear thrown in the heat of war. He and the drone flank pursued the beast with fervour. Jets zipping, breath cragged.

“Sum’bitch,” Rick choked out between hacking, desperate gasps. “Fuck with my shit, I’ll fix you to a rack.”

He didn't get any reply, just its bloodcurdling screams. An agonized thunder loud enough to pop his ears.

On a telepathic cue, each drone shot the pig with tetherless taser darts. Sting. Zap. Shot from midair and activated on contact. Electric shocks coursed through its body. Its muscles twitched, the shocks burning into its back. The pig seemed to slow, stopping for a second as its body convulsed, still standing.

But then, it kept running. Faster. And faster. Moving forward as the drones shot it again. And again. And again. Pigboy endured, sprinting faster each time it was tased. It was reeling from the shots but kept going, adrenaline and lightning coursing through its veins. It pissed as it fled, incontinent from the pain churning its organs.

Rick was completely out of breath, rasps hot and hoarse. Sweat soaked his shirt and drenched his hair. A drone buzzed over and flew by his side. He hopped on, soaring above the beast with a laser gun ready.

Bang. Crack. An ankle tendon splitting, skin hissing by the burn. The pig slipped on its bad leg, bending its hind foot to a ninety-degree break. It just kept going, even as the other drone kept zapping it with the taser over and over and over again. It limped on its stump, foot jagged outward, cracking again with each gory step.

Rick leapt from the drone and free-fell onto the pig, landing with a violent slam.

It reared and rolled, trying to throw him off. Rick clung around its neck, squeezing to cut off its air. It still cried out, kicking its hind legs up as it rolled around, the broken leg flailing loosely from its hock, muscles still throbbing.

Unable to get the man off its back, the pig stood and made a mad, limping dash, hobbling toward a staggering tower of rock. It pushed itself to go faster and faster with all its might, too quick for him to let go before it jumped, using its body like a thrown rag doll.

Wham. Rick’s back slammed into the jagged stone. He felt the impact all the way through his spine. His shirt ripped, skin scraped up on the sharp rock, raw and tearing, the glass shards on the pig’s back already poking into his stomach as his back was ripped apart like paper, blood spattering, stained across them both.

Rick let go.

The pig kept dragging itself forward, away from him.

Somehow, it was still moving.

It was wheezing, slow as hell, crawling desperately ahead, its snouts pointing somewhere way off in the distance. It was hyperventilating, gasping for air, too tired to even cry out.

Rick watched it, clutching his shirt over his chest, trying to catch his breath, and finally rising up to sit on his knees.

He raised his hand.

He pointed his gun.

Bang. He shot it again, hitting the other hind leg.

Just as it was about to collapse, a drone swooped down and hurled a weighted net, adeptly trapping the pig and bringing the chaos to an end.

The mutant lay rigid, its breathing still rapid, its stomach not so much rising and falling as pulsing quickly, not quite able to take a full breath in or out. Its legs stuck out of its body like the spikes of a caltrop, stiff save for the dangling injury hinging from its hind hock. The deformed animal’s mouths hung open, its pointed teeth just grazing its jaws, heaving in and out, drool spilling from the ground-facing corners of its mouths despite its shallow breaths, panting from dry throats. It lay in a state of panic, black pupils dilated to the size of pennies, encircled by sickly green sclera barely touched by a blink, the lids of its centre eye stretched like putty, drawn between its two faces.

Both of the drones came down to Rick’s side with ready spindles of spidroin suture thread. The pair splashed his wounds with a curative tonic, then began stitching to close them with glowing spider silk, meticulously sewing him back together one suture at a time. The arms of the machines pulled the thread taut, and his cuts closed with delicate precision. As they finished, they drew in their arms and hovered a short distance away, ready for his next silent directive. Emotionless. The surrounding air tasted like copper, metallic on his tongue and sharp up his nose. He was scarlet with blood, his back completely drenched. Rick gave an especially wet spot on his overalls a squeeze until it was just a little damp, not totally soaked. His breathing slowed down while the pig’s kept frantic.

His body was still sore, but he stood, letting the numbing effects of the healing serum take their sweet time to kick in. He walked over to the pig, now shaking under the net, its body quivering and stiffening again, its eyes unfocused. Rick held his laser pistol and aimed it at the pig’s forehead.

“Out of your misery,” he said, kneeling down for the shot, aiming right above its eyes. The laser would sear its uppermost brow ridges. One shot. Instant.

The pig’s three eyes refocused, centring desperately on its executioner. It trembled still. As it looked into the unforgiving barrel of the gun, it whimpered, the sound muffled and croupy between its heavy pants. Tears welled up at the corners of its eyes and streamed down its faces, blood, spit, and urine still dripping down its form.

Rick’s hand twitched. He hesitated. The weight of the gun in his grip felt heavy. Too heavy, despite being crafted by his own two hands. The tears trickling down made him remember:

The memory drive. MORTY 5.0-X—Five years old, experimental variant.

He had been so angry about his destroyed work, caught up in the chase. The pig pitifully tried to lift and shake its heads under the net to say “no,” but it only managed a pathetic flop as its back stiffened, panic remaining, hideous tears running over the bridges of its noses.

Rick threw the gun. It skittered across the ground, spinning once in the dirt before it came to rest. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Just watched the pig, still caught. Too hurt to plead.

He covered his face with his soiled hands. He sat back and rabidly kicked himself away from the pig.

“FUCK!” He yelled, running his fingers through his hair and pulling at it, eyes shut as he practically yanked pieces of it from his head. “Fuck, fuck, FUCK!”

At his furious thought, one of the drones flew down, hovering over the pig’s faces. A clawed arm extended from its chassis and clamped one of its noses through the net. It wailed, startled by the touch. Another arm, tipped with a twenty gauge syringe full of an almost-yellow ketamine-mixed concoction, delivered the anesthetic with an intramuscular stab behind its ear. Piggy magic. Within a minute, the pig stopped trembling, its eyes wide open as it was fully knocked out.

Rick, still cursing to himself, directed the machines to remove the net and heal the pig’s injuries. He watched them work as its laboured breathing slowed to a settled pace. Shards of glass were pulled free, cuts stitched shut, and the broken leg snapped back into place before being sealed in a hardening cast. As they finished, one drone recast the throwing net while another descended, projecting six scythed legs from its base as it touched down.

Inside the drone’s open compartment, faint traces were impressed upon the interior wall: eight equidistant grooves, sealed. Geometrically overwritten. The six new limbs jutted out from fresh mounts, offset from the originals where eight legs would have been.

The net was hooked to the standing drone, which began dragging the pig back toward the homestead. Rick yanked out his flask and angrily downed the drink, his shaking hands calming by the gulp as he trailed behind the robot pulling the monstrosity along like a bag of bricks. Slow, burdened by dead weight. It would take a bit of time to get home. They stopped intermittently, the still-flying drone occasionally hovering down to drop artificial tears into the pig’s open eyes.

A ways off behind a hill, two teens were peeking with a pair of binoculars at the old man and his unconscious beast. Spying. Real covert, like hogs loose in a porcelain studio.

“W-What the fuck is that?” asked one, hands clenched, knuckles white.

“Give me those!” said the other, grabbing the binoculars from his friend's fists. “It’s… I think it’s a pig?”

“Why does it have hair? D-do you think he made it? L-like in a lab?”

“Probably? It’s not like there are any animals around here!”

“It’s still breathing! I-I-I-I thought he was gonna kill it!”

“Me too.” A pause. “Why do you think he didn’t?”

“How should I know? Maybe he-he-he has a soft spot for bacon.”

“Dude, that’s… kind of fucked.”

“What? I-I-It was a joke.”

“No, I mean, I don’t think it’s just a pig. The way it screamed…” He shook his head, eyes wide. “I don’t think anything should sound like that.” He lowered the binoculars and looked at his friend. “Let’s go back, Doc. Before he sees us. He might’ve already seen us.”

“W-W-What are we gonna do? If he’s seen us, then w-we-we gotta get outta here!”

“I’m not so sure,” his voice was calm, without a stutter. “He hasn’t done anything since he’s flown over! Except bury those three by the hull.”

“What was that about?”

He considered for a moment. “I… I don’t know. Maybe he knew them?”

“B-But they were MORTYS!”

The other one didn't say anything. Just coughed nervously. They both looked at their shoes, waiting for the other to say something.

Doc relented. “Okay, yeah, let’s hurry back, okay? I-I-I don’t like being out here. Not with him.”

“Sure. But we need to figure out if he’s a threat. What have you seen him doing out there?”

“M-Mostly building a toilet, I think? Don’t they usually build one i-i-in a forest or something?”

The two made wild guesses and tossed around weird theories about the stranger all the way back to the arcade, their lighthouse in the dark, with the bleeps of games and the assembly of scaffolding like white noise behind their conversation. The constellations blinked brightly above, the same stars that shone over Rick’s ruined property, twinkling as he dredged himself back to work raking new furrows in the dirt, repairing a beloved outhouse, and wearily tucking a pig in a blanket; a soundly sleeping guest rather than a classic appetizer.

✦✦✦

All around Mortytown, the morning brightened. Behind the arcade at the ass crack of dawn, a boy pedalled furiously on a bike rig, his feet rushing and racing by the stationary mile. An electric charge ran from cables hooked to the rig to several rows of portable Jelly Tuber power cells: an array of recharging potato batteries scavenged from the wreckage. As he pedalled his heart out, the blue taters transdifferentiated by the hour; the soft, moist, discoloured skin of the potatoes hardened to ripeness, and changed from the colour of mould to that of tasteful sapphires, crisp gem spuds that would keep the lights on for at least another night.

By the end of his shift, his muscles absolutely burned. Raw skin. Cramping calves. His growing calluses had eased his grip fatigue, but the skin of his palms still felt torn by the friction of the handlebars, and the pain in his wrists stabbed more and more each day. He hopped off the bike and scarfed down water like a drowned man, inhaling more than drinking. Doctor Morty approached him, first rubbing sand out of his sleepy eyes, then tossing the athlete a pack of protein gel.

“Thanks, man,” he said, catching, then biting the pack open with his teeth, devouring the gel in a few quick gulps.

“You should be—” He yawned, hand just covering his mouth. “You should be careful, Cade. You’re overdoing it. S-s-s-someone else can cover for you.”

Arcade Morty stuffed the empty packet into his pocket. “Not really. Skull and Mines are digging the back well. Straws’ got the fan. Gambler Morty… you wrote him off schedule,” he said, deflating a little. “Everyone’s really freaked out since that Rick showed up…”

“You’re pushing yourself too far. Y-you’re barely sweating. And your heart rate was stuck yester—“

“You ready to go?” His question bit like vinegar in a cut. “We got a long walk today.”

Doc looked his friend up and down. Arcade Morty’s hair was tousled, but almost completely dry despite hours of exercise under the hot sun. His skin was dry, too. Sunken eyes, cracked lips. Doc already made sure to pack extra bottles of water in both of their bags, ready for them inside.

“Ye-yeah. Just give me a sec.”

Doc jogged back to fetch their backpacks from inside the arcade. Joysticks, buttons, signs, and screens glowed in pinks and purples and in comfortably warm yellows. Over fifty game machines and a few restaurant booths surrounded a brightly lit kiosk. He hopped behind the kiosk counter, grabbed their bags from underneath, and slung both over his shoulder. Just as he was about to go back outside, he spotted Gambler Morty sitting in one of the booths. Alone, hands trembling as he struggled to eat a cup of instant noodles. His lips quivered, tears at the corners of his eyes. Doc stopped in his tracks, walked over, and rested a hand on Gambler Morty’s shoulder.

“H-hey, Morty, look, it’s okay. You d-don’t have to worry about it. Everyone needs a break sometimes.”

Gambler Morty abruptly smacked his hand away. “Screw off! I—I know everyone’s mad at me! I’m not pulling my weight! I get it!”

Doc breathed out through his nose. The lines under his eyes deepened as his weariness grew, settling into his bones. “W-we—we know your last Rick was bad. Really bad. Just… just be sure to go outside today.”

“Go outside? What—What if I already bet against myself getting better, huh? I don’t really need to hear the whole fucking camp talk about how I’m just some, like, fuck-up cheat, okay?”

“Gambler, o-odds are that—“

“Just leave me alone. I’ll get back to work tomorrow.” Tears streamed down his round face, his lip trembled, and his face flushed rose. He turned away, facing the wall, hiccuping once, his shoulders raised as he tried to stifle a sob.

Doc looked at his back, then turned around toward the front door. “S-see you later. Still got m-my bet on you.”

Gambler Morty kept his back turned, his posture rigid, like holding still was the only thing keeping himself from folding, like a dead hand he should have never played.

Outside, Doc tossed Arcade Morty his backpack and he caught it with casual ease, slung it over his shoulder, and the two began to make their trek out west, the yellow of their shirts as bold as the sun.

They walked in silence for the first half hour, aside from Doctor Morty occasionally reminding his friend to take a sip of water. The arid air dulled their sense of smell, and the rocky ground crunched steadily beneath their shoes, chewing through the time. By midday, they were already halfway there, the heat pressing down as Doc fanned himself with his bowler hat and groaned in protest.

Somewhere in the distance ahead, they heard the same chimeric scream that had come from the pig the day before. It rang out like a warning, telling them to stay away, steer clear, to go back and cling to whatever still felt safe.

“It’s so loud…” Doc said, though his tone carried no conviction.

Arcade Morty didn’t respond. He just tightened the strap on his pack and kept walking.

Then, after a pause, he tipped a bottle of water over Doc’s head, smiling as Doc cursed and swatted at him.

“S-Stop! You really need that!” He blurted out. “Q-quit fooling around! You’re already dehydrated enough as it is!”

Arcade Morty just laughed, his smile warm and bright. “Don’t worry! I know a doctor.” For a moment, his voice carried more cheer, far from the town square.

“I’m not a real doctor,” Doc said, with a slight sting. “I-I can’t really help you i-i-if you aren’t careful. Everyone in Mortytown needs you.” He sighed. “Really needs you.”

Arcade Morty’s brows furrowed, and he looked to the ground. Silence settled between them again, holding its place as they walked on, neither making eye contact nor acknowledging the truths that hung unspoken between them. At least not until they were nearly to the stranger’s homestead, a few miles off. They passed tracks of blood and hooves, etched into the asteroid’s surface by the violence of yesterday’s chase. As the sun sagged into the afternoon, Arcade looked over at his companion and gave his back a rough pat.

“I bet you were a great first aid attendant. Back on the Citadel. I know we don’t have much, but we need you too.”

Doc smiled weakly, his voice wobbling under forced detachment. “Construction Site Mortys got hurt a lot. Th-there wasn’t, like… much I could actually do. R-Ricks’ on site usually just let them get hurt.”

“Doc, what…” He winced. “What do you actually remember about Rick?”

“Like, from the Citadel?”

“No, from… from before.”

“Oh, um…” Doc fixed his gaze on the skyline. His expression softened, just slightly, as he worked to recall a time from long-set, hardened ambers in his spirit. “It… actually wasn’t that bad? Summer and I got along? And… I think we used to go to the park? W-with Rick. He p-pushed Summer on the swing. And…” His voice faded like soft static, muted to a shushed nothing.

Arcade Morty clenched his jaw, turning his head away from Doc to stare off into the distance as the same memory hit him. His fists curled tight at his sides, arms stiffening as he held himself back from snapping at his best friend.

“Why do you do that? Why… Why do you pretend it’s not fabricated?”

Doc shrugged. “I—” He almost answered, then stopped himself, as Arcade shushed him anyway, raising a hand without looking. Doc scowled faintly, but said nothing. They walked past the edge of the homestead and ducked behind a hovering pickup truck, parked and floating at least a foot or two off the ground.

The two teens lowered themselves to get a view of the front of the cabin from underneath the truck. When they couldn’t see quite enough, they crawled under the carriage, letting their heads almost poke out from underneath, hidden in the vehicle’s shadow beneath the sun. The homestead showed evidence of recent repairs, namely obvious patches haphazardly covering damage to the front door and its frame. Lying out front was the mutant pig they had seen dragged back, barely able to keep its three eyes open. It seemed tired, lulled by boredom or maybe even sedation, listless and still. Food dribbled from its mouths, pooling beside a mostly untouched bowl of cold meal.

Then, the front door creaked open, its hinges squealing for lack of lubricant. Too loud, too sharp.

Rick stepped out holding a familiar device: some kind of gun with a pair of swirling blue lights and a white core, connected by red and yellow wires. He held it in front of the pig with an unreadable expression, somewhere between annoyance and disinterest.

It was a Mind Blower.

With a pull of the trigger and a flash of light, some of the pig’s memories were wiped clean. It blinked a few times, then looked up at the old man with a spark of vitality it hadn’t shown moments before. It squealed, sniffed, glanced at its bowl of food, and began chowing down. Still tired, but more interested now than when it was ignoring the meal entirely.

“Shit,” Arcade whispered, watching as Rick stepped back inside. “Okay, whatever’s happening here is fucked. He’s a threat. We gotta protect Mortytown.”

Doc nodded. “L-Let’s go.”

The two crawled backward from under the hovering truck. Doc crept out first, with Arcade just a beat behind. As Arcade cleared the underside, he looked up, and found Rick standing over them, pointing a shotgun straight at Doc’s face.

Doc froze, eyes wide, backing up against the side of the car. Without hesitation, Arcade Morty jumped between his friend and the shotgun, glaring straight past the barrel and into Rick’s face, empty of expression.

“So, what? You’re really gonna shoot us? Huh?” He spat the word like venom. “You’re the fucking devil!”

The strange Rick didn’t answer. He kept the gun level, eyes locked.

Doc snapped out of it, coming back into his body. He started crying, clutching his friend’s shirt, tugging at it as Arcade Morty struggled to stay upright, shielding him.

“Well? Do it! Shoot me and let my friend go! Do it!” Arcade’s voice echoed, his face inches from the barrel as he leaned in. “Fucking do it!”

The old man said nothing. Arcade Morty grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and pressed it to his forehead, staring him down with the hatred of hell itself. A demon daring the devil to pull the trigger.

Rick stared back, then glanced at the other Morty behind him, quaking with fear, sobbing, whispering “no” over and over. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then looked away. Gently, he pried the boy’s grip off the gun, lowered it, and pointed a thumb over his shoulder.

“Git,” he said. His voice was gruff, hoarser than the average Rick’s.

Arcade Morty’s eyes widened, fury boiling the blood in his veins, burning the words on his tongue. “What? WHAT?!”

“I said ‘git,” Rick replied, a hint of irritation in his voice.

“No! NO!” Morty yelled. “You’re going to tell us what the FUCK you’re doing out here! You fly over our town, nearly kill some mutant thing you made, bring a Mind Blower to OUR asteroid—as if our minds aren’t already fucked?”

The pang in his voice grew, rising louder. “We KNOW Ricks are after us! You’re up to something!”

Rick’s expression grew more annoyed. His fingers twitched, but off the trigger.

Just before Arcade could yell again, Doc tugged on his arm. Shaky, still trembling, he rose slowly. His eyes locked on the man who had nearly blown his head off. His voice wavered with every word.

“Y-y-y-you’ll l-let us go? W-we d-d-didn’t w-want any t-trouble.”

Rick didn’t answer at first. Just stared at him. Long enough to make the silence ache.

Then he nodded. Slow, grave.

“W-w-we j-just want t-to be safe. Yo-you won’t t-tell a-any Ricks we’re here? O-or hurt us? W-we were w-worried that—”

“Get lost before I change my mind.”

The words cut like a knife. Sharp. Absolute.

Like a shot, Arcade Morty yanked Doc’s arm and ran, dragging his friend with him. Footsteps pounding, heart racing, the homestead growing smaller behind them.

But then, Arcade stopped. Skidded to a halt.

He turned. First to Rick. Then to the pig. His chest rose and fell like he could barely hold the fire in. The fury seared through his skin.

Doc caught up a few seconds later, gasping, doubled over.

“Cade?” he managed, breathless.

Arcade pointed at the pig and shouted back toward the cabin.

“If you need anything to take care of that thing… you can come! And we’ve got gidgets, widgets, processors, whatever!”

He raised his voice until it cracked.

“But only if you’re not gonna hurt us!”

The silence that followed crept in like a cancer. Lasting. Heavy. Meant to hurt.

Then Rick rolled his eyes, turned away, and walked off toward his patched-up outhouse to take a shit. He stayed his hands from instinctively reaching for his flask.

The pig watched the two boys run. It stood up, even with its cast, and walked a few steps as if to follow them, like a little sibling chasing after older brothers, ready to play. Then it halted and looked back at the lonesome cabin. It wandered to its food bowl and ate the last bits until the rim was licked clean. A warped reflection stared back from the pewter metal, its own pig face, twisted and misshapen, like it had been stitched together by a drunk seamstress. The mirror rippled from a dent in the bowl. At its own reflection, it whimpered, then chewed at the metal as if trying to crunch its own face. The chews bent a delicate tangle of thin lines into the metal, webbed and uneven.

Chapter 4: Gold Dust

Notes:

This story contains graphic and violent descriptions. Reader discretion is advised.

“DEAD men in evening clothes; supine women guarded by sleek, ferocious dogs; upside-down corpses wearing garter-belts, with their hair and makeup in exquisite disarray—these are the tricks of Laura Mars's trade, the hallmarks that have established her as the New York fashion photographer who outkinks them all. However, not everyone is a fan. Someone has gotten the notion that there's evil in Laura's work… Laura (Faye Dunaway), being much too self-involved an artiste to worry about the implications of her work, merely thinks of herself as someone who gives "an account of the times in which I'm living," times rife with "moral, spiritual and emotional murder." Questions about the exploitative aspects of her art merely prompt Laura to snap, "Look, does anyone have anything positive to ask?… A couple of Laura's shooting sessions, staged with a delightful blend of nonchalance and depravity, epitomize the wickedly satirical edge of this lively, high-toned thriller. While two cars are aflame in Columbus Circle, and models in lingerie and fur coats prettily smack each other around, Laura, bless her creative little heart, is all business, solemnly snapping away in a Theoni Aldredge creation. Occasional cuts to spectators in the street make it clear that Laura may well have just arrived from the planet for which she is named, as far as workaday Joe or Joan America is concerned. However, right in the middle of the session Laura has a psychic flash, something that neither she nor the movie needs. Laura can witness killings taking place across town, but only from the unseen killer's point of view—the better to forestall a surprise ending that is altogether dumbfounding (with the emphasis on dumb). These flashes leave her understandably frantic, but Laura has already been established as too much of an amoral flake to arouse much sympathy in her lady-in-distress capacity.”
—Janet Maslin, "Screen: 'Eyes of Laura Mars'," The New York Times, August 4, 1978

“And somewhere Alfie cries
and says, ‘Enjoy his every smile
You can see in the dark
Through the eyes of Laura Mars’
How did it go so fast
You'll say as we are looking back
and then we'll understand
we held gold dust
in our
hands”

Pigboy float. Glass all around.

Not water. Not juice. Soda. Blue soda. Bubbles go up. Up up up.

Not hungry. Not thirsty. Belly full.

Sad. Sad sad sad. But no cry. “Boys don’t cry.” Grown up. Big boy.

But remember. Pigboy not boy. Pigboy see. Pigboy wrong. Body wrong. Face bad. No hands. No Morty. No Mama. Mama. Want mama. Pigboy want mama. Pigboy bad. Heart hurt. Pigboy bad.

Many sleeps. Pigboy in glass. He stay.

See man. Man is Grandpa.

He work. No in glass. Lights. Blink blink blink. Buttons. Beep beep beep.

Man no eat. Man work. Man yell. No one there. Mad man.

Grandpa watch Pigboy. Man sad. Pigboy bad. Pigboy wrong.

More sleeps. More lights. More beeps.

One day, sparklies. Sparklies in soda.

Pretty. Pretty pretty pretty. Stars. Like sky. Blue soda. Black sky.

Brain feel warm.

Pigboy remember.

Spider. Book. Grandpa read book. “Charlotte’s Web.” Charlotte is Spider. Pig is Wilbur. Grandpa read book. Pigboy listen.

Big words. Pigboy learn. Pigboy know. Charlotte write words. In web. Words for Wilbur.

“Some pig.”

“Terrific.”

“Radiant.”

“Humble.”

Pigboy remember. Pigboy know.

Pigboy like Wilbur. Grandpa is Charlotte. Grandpa love Pigboy. Grandpa say Pigboy humble. Pigboy radiant. Pigboy terrific.

Pigboy love Grandpa.

Pigboy good.

Pigboy float. Glass all around.

✦✦✦

He had kept rabbits, once. Back in Maine.

Rick sat forward in his chair, pencil and notepad in his hands, torn pieces of paper littered across a side table acting as a writing desk, weighing the merits of a swine life lived. Scattered doodles of pig brains and pig shit charting pro et contra: fertilizer. He doodled a pig shitting next to a corn stalk with a smiley face. Healthy soil, happy corn. His leg twitched. Heel jumping, up and down, up and down, without the magic of Adderall or flask backwash. Sober. Clear. Crystal for a decision to be made.

He tore the page, the drawing identical to several already made, and started another: a crude self-portrait of himself wrestling a full-grown boar, recalling the horror of its own body. Hand around snout, syringe behind ear, walled to a corner by a square piece of wood. Hog wrestling. Above, he wrote down a grocery list for anesthetic synthesis: butorphanol, midazolam, and his cosseted, precious ketamine stores. The nurse buckets stored them for his own k-holes. He circled the last ingredient several times. One pig, more work. More work, less relief. He doodled another sad-faced pig brain, scribbled over it, tore the page out, crumpled it, and chucked it towards a basket. Missed.

He exhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose, shoving the other drawings on his table with a forearm. The papers swished like feathers to the floor, landing quietly in scattered layers.

He started scrawling something new: a rabbit.

A realistic, dead rabbit.

Rick concentrated on the rendering of the animal, meticulously shading an eye nearly popped from its socket, hatching lines for its fur. He could draw well, when he felt like it. He liked blending, carefully blurring its button rabbit nose with the tip of his finger. He drew its head just a bit too far back, an uncomfortable looking contortion of its form. Bloodless. Broken patterned fur. He remembered how loose their heads felt in his hand after he snapped their necks, and how soft the fur felt on his palms.

He meditated on the image, carefully cresting the drawing with dark spots and shaded ears. His own daughter killed animals for fun, up until she was about ten. She later channelled that focus towards veterinary surgery. He never hurt animals as a kid, focusing instead on tinkering and building, engineering machinery and causing blasts. But as he finished his drawing, and sat with the memory, he thought about how soothing it had been to pull a meat rabbit’s legs on a hopper popper. One moment there, noses twitching, bodies warm, and the next not, limp and lifeless in his arms. It was calming. He sank into the quieting of his thoughts, breathing in the transient moment between stillness and snap. That liminal second, holding its hind legs just before the pull. Then, the crunch. Every time, a calm cloaked him like a mist on a forest floor, faintly lit by golden headlights. Warm. Tranquil.

He had stopped after he started making Morty clones. Rick could throw their lifeless corpses into the incinerator and leave them to burn. But after the first dead clone, he couldn’t kill another rabbit. Not then, not now. He tried. But he couldn’t. His breathing would hitch, his heartbeat would surge, and he’d sit curled in a corner, rocking back and forth, back and forth. The bunnies would hop around him none the wiser, eating grass and thumping their feet.

Once, a fox came out of nowhere and tried to snatch one of the rabbits from right beside him. He snapped out of his panic and tackled it, gripping its neck until it stopped moving. His body had moved of its own accord, animal and angry. He had blacked out between the moment he grabbed the fox and the instant it lay limp on his chest. He let the fox slip from his arms and crawled to his rabbit. Kneeling, then folding into the dirt, he reached out and touched it, just barely. So delicately, as if it might shatter. All he could think was how small it was. It leaned into him, pressing its face into his neck, trusting the hands that fed it, held it, kept it from vanishing.

He handed off his rabbits to a rescue after that.

Rick stared long and hard at his finished picture; it was a good drawing. A sufficient depiction of a freshly dead bunny.

Then he watched the pig floating in the tank, sleeping peacefully, twitching as it dreamed. Vital. Present. Alive.

✦✦✦

“You did WHAT?!” Gambler Morty hurled a cup of lukewarm instant noodles at Arcade Morty’s face. Arcade flicked wet noodles from his hair, and rubbed broth from his eye. He stared Gambler down, droplets on his cheek, eye reddened from the salt. Without missing a beat, Doc rushed for an eye cup and a saline bottle from his kit, hastening to his friend’s side. Arcade took both and placidly rinsed his eye as Gambler kept shouting. “You—y-you—you told that RICK he could come here? Are—Are you insane?!”

Mines, ever shy, ever daring, meekly stepped between the two, raising a hand like a shield in Arcade’s defence. “P-please, guys, calm down,” he said, voice small. “Gambler, d-don’t waste food—”

“What? It was my food! I’ll throw it if I want to,” he retorted. “There’s no house rules against that!”

Straw gritted, “You do what ya want with all ‘a our food.”

Gambler turned to face him, slowly. Cold. Eyes wide. A little too wide. “What did you say?”

“Ain’t no changin’ what I said.”

Gambler’s eyes stayed locked on Straw as he stepped towards him. Just a few paces apart, he snatched the collar of his yellow shirt. “You wanna raise me on that?”

Straw just grinned, a wheat chaff tilting down from his smirk, marking his disgust. “If it’ll keep you from eatin’ up everythin’ I stock, you fat fuck.”

Just as Gambler raised a fist, Mines jumped in, ready to take the hit. Before the punch landed, Arcade tackled Gambler and pinned him to the ground, refusing to let up as Gambler fought back. He thrashed violently, but Arcade wouldn’t budge as Gambler cursed, “Get off, Cade! I’ll kill him! I’ll fucking kill him right here!”

Straw pointed and laughed loud enough to echo through the hall. “Boy, I’d pay good money to watch you try. We all knew ‘bout this a month ago! This right here’s why we don’t tell ya nothin’!” Then, sneering low, “You don’t work. You don’t do shit. Just sit around cryin’ like a damn bitch.”

Arcade Morty shot Straw a glare, jaw tight. “Shit trench duty. Now.”

“So, what? We’re all s’posed to keep our mouths shut, or he falls apart again, is that it? Y’all babysittin’ his fragile ass forever?”

“NOW!” Arcade’s shout cracked through the room. Gambler flinched beneath him. Straw stepped back.

“Fine,” he conceded. “Fine… Whatever. Do what ya want.” Straw’s scowl was lit by the glow of the flashing game screens and neon lights, shining laced colours across his back as he turned and skulked out the front door.

Mines weakly grabbed his own arm and glanced at Skull, who shrugged and motioned for Mines and the others to follow him away from the scene. As the rest stepped back, Mines looked down at Gambler, almost saying something, then muttered under his breath before turning away. The Mortys returned to their chores, their games, and their sad meals from the half-broken nutrient gel dispenser, pretending the mess never happened. Arcade pulled Gambler to his feet. Doc stepped closer, holding out a tissue box. Gambler rebuffed him, shoving the box from his hand, wiping away tears with the back of his wrist. “I… I don’t need your pity.”

“We’re all getting p-pretty tired of w-what you do or don’t need,” said Doc, reaching down to pick up the box, taking out a tissue, and absentmindedly dabbing the residual tears from Gambler Morty’s cheek. “I-I-I’m s-signing you back on rotation.”

“What? No! You can’t. You can’t!” Gambler shook his head, and his voice faltered. His chest rose in shallow, panicked breaths. “This isn’t my game. I can’t. I’m not ready. I’m not read—“

Arcade Morty crossed his arms and cut him off, ice in his words. “It’s been long enough. You’re on charging duty, first thing tomorrow.”

More tears stung the corners of his eyes. “But that Rick, he—” He was shaking. “He—he will—why did you—”

“Friends close, enemies closer,” Arcade said flatly. “We can’t beat him and we can’t escape him. May as well learn to get along if we’re going to be neighbours. Besides…” He sighed on the pause. “… He may have some tech he’d be willing to trade. He could have a food replicator, a microverse battery, maybe even a time crystal…”

“Fine! I get it.” Gambler’s shoulders slouched in defeat. “I get it. Just—” He almost sobbed. “Just leave me alone.”

“M-Morty…” Doc’s voice hovered, trying to comfort him, but trailed off as Gambler headed for the exit, holding himself to keep from weeping. The same vivid colours that stained Straw’s back painted his as he dragged his feet to the door, doing everything he could not to show his losing hand. But his sobs could be heard as the door swung shut behind him, his cards read as he wept.

“Leave him,” Arcade Morty said, wiping more of the broth from his brow. “He won’t want to talk for now.”

“Th-th-then where are you going?” Doc’s question tried to catch him as he turned away.

“Out.” The word said like a door already shut.

Doc kept it open. “Wait!” He grabbed Arcade’s wrist and pulled him back. “L-let me check.”

Arcade rolled his eyes, but didn’t pull away, looking to the back wall. Doc turned his friend’s wrist over and placed two fingers just under his palm, pressing lightly against the radial artery. They stayed like that for fifteen long seconds before Doc let him go. “R-rest for a few minutes. Th-then I’ll check again—”

“It’s fine.” This time his tone left no room, like locking the door outright. “I’ll see you later.”

“B-but—“ Doc tried, but Arcade ignored him, shoving his hands in his pockets as he walked out. Doc mumbled the rest to himself, shoulders slack, unheard by the rest of the room. “—you’re at ninety-nine.”

✦✦✦

Straw had been digging the trench for about an hour, far out of sight of the town. The stars watched indifferently from above, and his hair stuck to the inside of his hat. He yawned and stretched, dropping his spade and reaching his arms up, then pulling each elbow over his head, cracking his back. He reached down to touch his toes, his hat stuck to his head with sweat. He barely stood before he felt a strike to his ribs, a sharp kick from a figure half-lost in the starlit dark. He fell back, holding his side, just as a fist slammed into his face. Then in the eye. He didn’t dare fight back. A solid punch to the temple. One to his cheek. Then to his other eye. He took it. Wouldn’t flinch. Arcade pulled him forward by his collar, gave him one more shot to the nose, and then leaned in close.

“Next time, you’re out. Last chance.”

Arcade dropped him and let his head hit a shallow divot in the trench. Straw’s voice came out thin and bruised. Weak. “Ain’t fair. We all had it rough. He ain’t special.”

“None of this is fair. Deal with it or leave.”

Straw sat up slowly, still holding his side. “We all bust our asses, and he gets a pass? You keep lettin’ him slide while the rest of us work. They’re all talkin’.”

“Don’t care. He’s back on tomorrow.”

Straw pulled his knees to his chest, wincing. His face throbbed, swollen, and his side ached. Arcade sat down next to him and put an arm around him. He didn’t say anything right away. Neither of them did. The night was cool, the sky washed with layers of deep blue and streaks of green, far from the warm welcome of the arcade in the distance. Straw's arms were cold and covered in goosebumps, his skin tacky from the trench work, dirt staining his clothes. Arcade drifted back into conversation with a sharp cut.

“Don’t bring up his weight again.”

“You an’ me go scroungin’ through hell for it, and he’s the one eatin’ good while we get stuck with dispenser shit.”

“You never saw them.” He hesitated, remembering husks that looked just like him returning to the Citadel. Hollow faces, jutting cheekbones, grey, sunken skin in exposed eye sockets. Hundreds of them. The worst were their necks, skin clinging to tendons, the grooves between spine notches and windpipes like something had gnawed at them, bitten clean through by beast teeth. “Those Mortys. They were almost dead. Gambler helped end the Rick that did it.”

Arcade felt Straw’s shoulders tense. He pulled him into a hug.

“He was tortured. So were the others from the dome. But that doesn’t erase what you went through.” Arcade listened to the soft hitches in his friend’s breath as he cried, softly. “And everything you’re doing now. It matters. We’ve got our own town. We don’t have to live in the past.”

They sat together. Straw wept, and Arcade held him until he stopped. Stars blinked above them, beautiful and useless around their world. Arcade Morty’s heart beat fast. Too fast. Like a wild rabbit in a cage, hammering the bars in uneven blows beneath his ribs.

✦✦✦

Rick hunched over the latticework, pencil in hand; his web grew beneath him, lead lines for ley lines of mutant being. Sheets of lined paper were strewn across the floor, laid carefully in scattered layers. Each piece was consciously placed so that he could visualize the connections between plot threads and the patterns of simple, animal thought. The drawing started at the centre of the calculated mess, then spread outward, synapses simplified into points between spun silk, the map of a peccary mind a massive spider’s web, every line drawn with intention and a care for detail. The threads grew mismatched, spaced more distantly as he drew farther from what would be the pig’s central core of self. He kept drawing, each new pencil mark a thread pulled taut or left slack, narrative drafted and stitched.

Rick didn’t write the memory script in any traditional sense. A self began at the centre, like the first flicker of a spark, but the structure wasn’t pictorial; no single stroke stood for any specific word. He created the script as interlaced, woven semagrams, the growing image rooted in non-linear continuity: words unspoken, memory out of order. He spun the web outward, line by line: trillions of neural connections strung across a grid of a few hundred radial threads and graphite loops. With the final inflection closing the pattern on the pages’ margins, he stepped back, reread his work, and began to edit.

He revised carefully, pencilling here and there, but refused to cut the purple prose; on the contrary, he added more wherever he could. Like the hazy memory of a day spent at the park, a pig grandson and, unusually, his normal human sister, spending the afternoon with their grandfather. He had to stray from his usual touch, where he’d lift his four-year-old, human grandson, throw him in the air, and catch him again, the sun shining on their faces.

Rick always included that memory from an outside perspective so that Morty clones would unconsciously reflect on their own fabricated happiness. But a pig mind was simpler. And his pig was horrified by its own faces. So, Rick finished that thread as a view by the lake after the playing was done, the three of them sitting under the shade of a willow tree. Together. A happy family.

Creating an entirely new memory script wasn’t necessary for every project. But he preferred to, for the special ones. Like this one. And he liked working with his hands. It was a familiar ritual, standing over his own linguistic cartography, checking for precision.

A ping from his computer and the glow of its dusty monitor interrupted his thought. Words scrolled across the screen: Scan clean. Neural architecture intact. Ethics log: redacted.

The pig floated in the tank. His computer performed non-invasive neural imaging and isolated regions of interest: the amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex. A clean brain scan indicated no anomalies: no cross-species contamination effects, like memory corruption, instinct overlays, or emotional bleed through. Everything was good to go. With everything ready, he picked up his newly built memory bank, held it over his drawing, and dropped it on the floor. Plop. Air drop initiated. Data transfer complete.

Rick picked it back up, stepping on the paper, hooked the drive to a port, and sent the signal upstream. He walked back over to the tank and pulled a lever. With that, the effervescent liquid in the vat, turquoise and fizzy around the sleeping pig, was lit by hundreds, then thousands of twinkling stars. Each glittered and vanished like sunlight on a river’s surface, but golden, bright and glimmering, refracting with each moment. There, alight, and then gone again. Rick peered closely, watching for the copy of his hand drawn web in the coruscation, the threads that lined the points of every cognitive link, every blinking macroparticle a part of a fine-spun neural code. He caught them, the strands of language strung together with a temporal syntax. Legible, glistening gossamer threads.

With this fifth and final script complete, cortex confetti twinkling in the tank, Rick looked at a reading on his monitor, frowned, opened his notepad, and wrote down an existentially practiced piece of self loathing: Continuity mapped. No trace to paradimensional layer. No cultural link = No great beyond.

And then, the same, routine cruelty, measured and sterile:

He’s out there.

Keep looking.

✦✦✦

He had only been pedalling for maybe twenty minutes; twenty minutes and his body already felt entirely broken. His breath was retched. His vision splayed. He told himself to keep going. Keep moving. Move. Don’t stop. Keep going. It hurt. His chest hurt. Everything hurt. He felt like he was choking. But he couldn’t stop. Straw would know. They all would know. That he was a cheat. A fraud. A liar. It wasn’t that bad. It was never that bad. He could deal with it. He could. He could keep going. Even as his heart raced, his muscles ached, and the sun beat down on his burning skin. He could barely move his legs. Everything blurred.

Then, he was there again. Fixed to a rack.

His ankles and wrists were cuffed by metal clamps, bound so tight that the surrounding skin was purple. He screamed. There was so much screaming. Hundreds of himself were all around him, above and below, bound to the dome. Emaciated. Skeletal. He could barely turn his head to see them all, veined eyes protruding from their skulls. Twitching. Bleeding. Mechanical pincers stabbed his abdomen over and over, thousands of needle pricks. Every second. Every day. His limbs felt heavy. His head felt squeezed by an overwhelming pressure. He kept hearing a humming static behind the screams.

His eyes burned. He never slept. He was so cold. He wished he had clothes. He wished he could sleep. He wished he was free. He wished he was hungry. He wished for anything that wasn’t this life. It wouldn’t stop. It just wouldn’t stop. Make it stop. Let me go. Please just let me go. Please just let me die. I don’t want this. Let me die. Let me die. Let me die—

“Hey!” Arcade Morty swiftly pulled him from the bike and sat him on the ground. “Hey, hey, hey, calm down. I’m here.” He gently placed his hand on Gambler’s back and moved it in small, comforting circles. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m here.”

Left-handed Morty. Gambler Morty. He wished he could be anyone else. Anyone but himself. Anyone but useless, stupid, worthless, Fat Morty.

He clung to Arcade desperately, hugging him too tightly, sobbing into his shoulder, just like he always did when it got this bad. Too much. He was always too much. Going on tilt, unable to let it go, chasing losses by living instead of letting himself die.

✦✦✦

“I’ll m-move him to n-night shift,” Doctor Morty pored over the schedule, tapping a pen on his clipboard. “Bartending. It’s p-pretty much the o-only job he can do.”

“That’s fine.” Arcade leaned against the bike and opened the bottle of water Doc had brought for him, taking big gulps and savouring it after another gruelling workout. “Pac-Man won’t be happy about it.”

“Pac-Man c-can do laundry. He s-swapped with Bartender Morty l-l-last week.” Doc gave Arcade a sidelong glance. “I’m taking charging. You’re o-off morning shift. S-starting now.”

“What?” Arcade stood straight. “You can’t do that. We need you in the box!”

“I-I already checked on Straw th-this morning. Th-Thanks for the extra work.” He gave him a sidelong glance past his clipboard. “And you-you h-handled Gambler just fine w-without me.”

“Then what am I doing on morning shift?”

“N-nothing.” His voice was low, restrained

“Nothing?!”

Doc’s gaze, now meeting his eyes, was purposefully level and unfazed. “G-Gambler only asked a-about you, after you dropped him off. ‘… A b-bad-beat is f-fine in a p-poker game, but…’—th-the bit’s getting r-really old.”

“Then don’t play along. Stop humouring him.”

“B-Beside the point.” He dropped his clipboard and grabbed Arcade’s wrist, dragging him forward and checking his pulse. Fifteen seconds, passing slowly, time somehow slowed. “Y-You’re in t-t-tachycardia. D-Dunk your face in ice water and then go lie down. On your r-right side.”

Arcade yanked his hand away. “Later. Gotta help with the schoolhouse build.”

Doc clenched his fists, seething, bitterness finally breaking through his teeth. “F-Fine. Fine! Y-You want to know why I keep p-pretending? Wh-Why I act like my memories are r-real? You want to know that bad?”

Arcade’s eyes went wide. “What? No, that’s not—”

“I-It was the best day I ever had—the only day I ever had! I d-d-don’t care if it’s f-fabricated. It’s m-mine!”

“It’s…” His voice caught. “It’s not real.”

“I-I know. I g-get it. And y-you’ll keep reminding me, because you d-don’t know how to shut the fuck up.” Doc sighed, sat on the ground, and patted the spot beside him. “L-Look… I’m t-telling you to slow down. Th-That’s my job. If you w-won’t lie down, then f-f-fine. Just sit and t-tell me what you remember. Wh-What’s real, if that m-matters so much to you.”

Of all the lost boys in Mortytown, Doc was the most weary; his dark-circled eyes and pallid face belied a decisive ethic. He’d sleep when his schedule allowed it. And he’d wake up at any hour to disinfect a wound or step in for a friend desperate for rest. Arcade sat down beside him, pressing his back against the wall, the heat of the ground biting into his palm; he cupped a fistful of dirt, packed it tight in his hand, then let it crumble through his fingers, watching it trickle back to the ground. He was sweating, surviving only thanks to his friend who had kept showing up with water. He took some box breaths, just like Doc had taught him, breathing in, holding, exhaling, then holding again before the next breath. He felt his heart pounding in his chest begin to settle into a steadier pace as they sat together in silence. Neither of them rushed to speak first. Once the rhythm of his heartbeat became unnoticeable, felt only as a faint pulse under his hand, Arcade broke the silence between them.

"Do you remember the one Gambler told us about? The one who jumped into the garbage dump?"

“Um…” Doc thought back. “Slick, I think?”

“Slick. Right. The one with the drama implant.”

“W-What about him?”

"I was just thinking. You know we're different, right? From the originals?"

Doc’s mouth pressed into a flat line. “Yeah, yeah. W-we’re clones. L-Lucky to exist in the f-first place.” His tone was still bitter as he spoke. "Y-you really know h-how to rub it in…”

"No, stop! Listen…" Arcade spoke more slowly, with pauses in between, considering his point. "We are different. Made… like, not born. We're designed. On purpose. And… the experimental line Slick was a part of… they made him sad on purpose. They made him that way. And it… it made me think."

“About?…”

"About our fake memories. Our feelings and what we think. What we are. I sometimes wonder if… if I can ever be more than what they made me for."

"S-so," Doc considered, "you think the d-drama implant was s-s-some kind of test?”

"Sort of. Like a trial run or something."

“Dumb.”

Arcade smiled mirthlessly. “You think so?”

"I-I-I know so," Doc said, smiling back; worn, eyes bleary. "S-so what if they made us? I-I mean, I don’t care if we’re a little s-sad. I think that’s… that’s fair, y’know? C-considering everything."

"Yeah…” The word left him in a weak sigh. “Right.”

The quiet sat between them again, more clement. Doc handed him another bottle of water. He took it, had a sip, then let out a slow exhalation.

"Were you around when we had Spider Stompin'?" Arcade asked. "Back on the Citadel? I don't remember if you'd started coming to the arcade yet."

Doc shook his head. "I-I don’t remember. W-was it a game?"

"Yeah." Arcade nodded. "We only ever had old games. There was a DDR machine that was pretty popular. I hated being inside all day, but I played that thing until it broke. My Rick refused to fix it. Just threw it away." Arcade took another sip of water, then continued. "So I started getting pretty antsy. I was working 14-hour shifts most days with just a few breaks. Without that game, I was going insane. So my Rick got me a new one. That was Spider Stompin’."

"W-was it kinda like DDR?"

"Kinda, but not really," he said. "It had this floor pad with buttons… There was a spider web around them. And a big spider next to the scoreboard. You’d stomp on the buttons that lit up." He fiddled with the water bottle in his hands. "I don't know… it kept me moving. Gave me something to focus on. I played it over and over. Got pretty good at it."

Doc waited. Arcade went on. "One day, I was playing, and I saw a real spider on one of the buttons. My foot was already coming down and I couldn’t stop it. I stepped on it, just as I hit a new high score."

Arcade smiled weakly. "It was a sole-crushing victory."

Doc stared at him, expression bank. Then, without a word, he stood, pulled a water bottle from his satchel, cracked it open, and dumped it over Arcade’s head. As the water dripped down his friend’s face, Doc took out a ripe, red tomato. Plump, fresh, perfect. He grabbed Arcade’s hand and placed the fruit firmly in his palm.

“F-From S-Straw’s greenhouse,” he said. “He says h-h-he’s sorry. I w-would’ve thrown it at you f-for a joke any dumber.”

He took off his hat and glasses, set them aside with his bag, then pulled out his last bottle of water. Twisting his hair into a loose top knot, he slotted the bottle into the holder on the bike and hopped onto the seat.

“I-I’ll give the batteries some e-extra charge. I mean it. You’re off mornings… and the r-rest of the day. Go inside. Eat that. L-Lie down. And s-s-stop giving me more work to do.”

“I’ll try, boss.” He offered a deferential salute as the good doctor started pedalling, picking up speed, making the blue potatoes swell and spark.

He turned away and swung back inside, strolling through the common area, past the bar and games and dog-tired chat from those also on break, eating the usual nutrient mass rematerialized from the dispenser. They waved shyly, and he nodded back, but didn’t sit down with them. Only stopping to offer the tomato to the pair, immensely thankful and bright-eyed with wonder at the prospect of having something fresh and real to eat. They thanked him profusely as he made his way toward the stairwell, locked behind a poorly painted white door. From his back pocket, he took his key, swinging the ring around his index finger before tossing it up, swiping it midair, and using it to turn the lock. He made his way upstairs to the sad little apartment nestled above.

The glow of soft yellow lights, an old pink lava lamp, and rays of the day leaking in through the still-busted windows dimly lit the room. Same as they always had, surviving a crash into an asteroid thanks to the old gravilock and stability net. The apartment didn’t belong to his Rick anymore, but he hadn’t changed a thing.

It smelled musty. He opened the adjacent windows, letting hot air into the already hot room. He grabbed a cold pack from the kitchenette freezer and held it to the back of his neck as he crashed on the curvy, peach-patterned sofa. Lying back, he looked up at the small skylight above him, above the peeling jam band poster, the ugly black rug with neon green stars, above their town and their work and all they tried to do.

The tired boy closed his eyes; the room’s light spotted the darkness behind his eyelids with muted colours. Blues, purples, and dulling shades of black. His legs cramped, his body ached, all save for the patch of ice cushioning his neck. Cooling. Numbing. As he lay still, just as he’d been told, faint recollections gradually deadened him to his surroundings.

At first, the darkness behind his eyes sharpened. Grew teeth. Daydreams rotting, embalmed in Morty-market branding.

Lab-generated, Citadel-brand memories cemented an intentional, bittersweet motto: Mort’s pain mortmain. Dead hands, Rick’s dead hands, pressed down on his mind to force a prefabricated sense of self, clawing the script of his memory into the wrinkles of his mind, all to convey a single, solitary truth: he was property. And would always be property. He would never belong to himself. The recollection of a day, a day spent at the park with his family in the suburbs of Seattle, grassy and forgiving and safe by the bounds of a normal life, was all prewritten to ensure the placability of an interchangeable business mascot: Roller Morty. Jukebox Morty. Bowling Alley Morty. And, with the finality of a last life spent, Arcade Morty: “Tokens, tickets, g-g-games galore! Level up and play some more! We’re not Blips and Chitz! We’re… Shitz and… more shit! Hahaha b-b-but whats’ a—uRRRP—Mortytown arcade deserve anyway? Shit! So, come on down! Right, Arcade Morty?” Sometimes, Arcade Rick would make him sign off the radio ads. “I-I-I-I’m Arcade Morty, and I—oh, sorry, I’ll try again—I’m Morty, an-an-and you’re Morty too, so, l-l-let’s play video games? Oh, and, uh… I forgot my lines? Aw, geez. I’m sorry, I’ll do bett—“ Bam! Arcade Rick gave him a hefty bruise that day, right on the temple. The sound of the punch made it into post, followed by a royalty-free jingle. His Rick sang along, the key sung gnarled by years of eructation: “♪Mortytown Arcade: Fun you can’t refund, games you’ll still replay!♪”

Despite his disfavour, he forced himself to keep his eyes closed. Told himself to let go. Murky, indistinct images of days gone by, thoughts loose and dreamy, drifted behind his eyes. The couch felt softer, somehow.

Safer.

Still.

Morticia, Mortabel, and Mabel were all blushing and giggling as they explained to him what a ‘Jessica’ was. They had a picture—just a photo of some stranger he had never seen before; he didn’t really get what all the fuss was about. Princess Morty went on and on about her betrothal to ‘Prince Jessica,’ how she had awoken from a century-long slumber by true love’s kiss. The other girls didn’t seem pleased, gossiping about Princess whenever she was out of earshot, about how her dress was tacky, her makeup didn’t match her neck, and her tiara was plastic.

Doc knelt beside Gambler, popped open the first aid kit he had gifted to the arcade, and fished out a cold pack. He cracked it, gave it a quick shake, then gently pressed it to his patient’s swollen black eye. Gambler was moaning on and on about being banned from the nearby casino. How it wasn’t right, wasn’t fair, how he’d had the pot, and how everything was rigged against him. Doc nodded along, only half listening. Tired.

He achieved a new personal high score on Paranoia Survivor Max. CSP 16, no bar. Phantom Morty, a ghostly gradient of glowing green, wore a supercilious grin, his floating skull visible behind it. He wasn’t quite able to beat the ghoul’s best, but how he danced so well without legs remained a mystery.

His Rick returned home absolutely shitfaced—thankfully after hours—and threw up all over the arcade entrance. Vomit spewed everywhere. Drool dribbled down his chin. It was disgusting. He was always disgusting. Rick nearly tripped on his way toward the break room, bumped into the kiosk, and then stopped. He was blackout drunk, mumbling, slurring his words, belching between them, harping on about how he was a good worker, a good kid. How he was glad he’d picked him out of all the Mortys available. His breath was rancid. Then he passed out, collapsing to the ground, his head landing with an audible thud. Already snoring. He hoisted Rick over his shoulder, carried him upstairs, wiped the gunk from his face, and laid him on his side before heading back down to clean up the mess.

It was his only day off this month. And he spent it brawling in the agri-slums fighting pit, bare dirt penned by stacked, rotting hay bales. Bets piled high against him. Broken teeth from other fighters sat in the mud. They had practiced for this. Straw Hat Morty, ringer boss’s prize fucking pony, came out swinging, feral under the brim of his stupid hat, chewing that damn stem like it could hold him together. Wild eyes pleading behind the punches.‘Get me out of here, Cade.’ Jab. Cross. Clean uppercut. Swift and nimble. The crowd spat and jeered at them both. But it didn’t matter. He would win. He had to. So Straw could finally stop.

Grandpa Rick took him and his sister to the park. Rolling hills of plush, verdant sweet grass shimmered like gems as cherry blossom petals fluttered in the breeze, pink and pure. Golden sunlight caught the curves of their smiles, beaming and bright. His arms were stretched wide, holding the moment as he flew into the air, laughing all the way up, and back down into arms that never dropped him.

Sleep shrouded him like a tide calling him under, gently guiding him deeper and deeper into his own memories, until he was floating, yet somehow still, bubbles rising up as wakefulness slipped away.

The water darkened. Glass all around.

Chapter 5: Cruel

Notes:

A reminder that this story contains graphic and violent imagery. Please consider this before continuing.

“When you start talking to people who have that kind of loss [miscarriage], somebody piping up, going, "Well, the angels were there for us during this time," well that's beautiful. But people have to understand that they're not there for everybody all the time. They get lost on the way. That's why in "Cruel" when I say, "I don't know why," I really don't know why I can be cruel. I don't know why the angels aren't there for everybody, but they're not.”
—Tori Amos, Alternative Press, July 1998

The pig was sequenced with a dead man’s switch. Loaded and lethal.

Rick could crack the gene-lock with the grace of a fevered pianist, ivory for ebony, hammering a melody straight through, but the lock-picking would take at least a few days. Maybe even a week, single pin and wave rake working key for musical key.

His sequence reader was crap, only recently cobbled together. But it worked, spitting out a sickeningly twisted genome report. Mostly swine, spun around stretches of human nucleotide. Wound through both were unnatural strings that matched no real gene, too complicated to be an accident. One segment was wedged like plaque on blackened gums, primed to rot at the right signal. Other sections carried hidden tags he had only seen in older kill-switch designs. Ugly, butchered biology.

He wondered which version of himself had Frankensteined something so hideous. Unforgivably sloppy.

Rick sat next to the pig on the floor and absentmindedly ran his fingers through its hair: chestnut brown, standard print, but the blonde was recessive. Not canary like his daughter’s, but closer to the cream colour his ex-wife had before the divorce. No stray whites or grays back then. He had plucked a single pale hair from its head and used the follicle to run the report, but the animal didn’t flinch; if anything, it seemed content, following him around the homestead, room to room, pen to plot. As he stood, it pranced at his heels with a happy little stride, a pep in its step.

He scribbled something in his notebook:

To-do: Unpork. Error correction algorithms. Filter out pig insertions, identify all corrupted human sequences. Restructure from scratch.

The pig pressed its snouts against his leg to get his attention. He looked up from his notebook, and it gazed back, a twinkle in its three eyes, wagging its little swirling tail. Since wiping its memory of the chase and finishing the final web script, it had been a lot more eager for his attention. It made short, repetitive grunts and did a little hop, even a quick spin, when he looked at it.

He wrote down another reminder:

To do: Name pig. Booger Aids?

He immediately crossed out “Booger Aids.”

Rick sighed, slipped his pencil and notepad back into his pocket, then reached down and cradled the pig’s faces in his hands. It beamed, offering a few low grunts as he studied it, considering. He wouldn’t call it Morty, even if it had memories of being Morty. Rick brushed some dirt off its left muzzle; it leaned into his touch. Wilbur was too on the nose. Kyle wasn’t right, either. It smiled up at him, happy as a lark. Niels Boar. Stephen Hogking. Albert Einswine. Francis Bacon. Tori Hamos.

No.

He exhaled through his teeth. He hated naming things. He even regretted his own daughter’s name. “God’s promise” and “House of suffering.” Fitting, considering. Sorrow was her birthright. But maybe, if they had chosen better, things would be different. Maybe, if they had chosen better, she’d have suffered less.

He flipped open his notebook again. “Booger Aids” was back on the shortlist.

Rick listlessly petted the pig’s head once more and wandered outside, piggy trailing after him. Rows of crystal corn stood tall and proud, rainbows dancing within their gem facets, shifting as their liquid cores caught the sunlight, decorating an edge of his property inside the newly installed perimeter fence. Beside them sat a bulky feeding trough heaped with mushed cob hog slop, and a pig pen patched together from scrap, complete with a hut for sleeping. He’d added an awning over the hut for extra shade in the arid heat, and rigged a small fan to keep the pig cool. One hay pile had been shoved up and shaped into a backrest. His spot for nights when he slept beside the pig, head eventually resting on its belly, both of them snoring under the stars.

Pigs were social animals. He’d have to make it a friend or two, eventually. If only to spare himself any more back pain.

He made note of more things he’d have to remember to find or make himself: quick-release couplings, glass bottles, autoclave pouches, sterile gloves, electrophoresis chambers. He could use a new processor, too; his were running slower than a tachyonic dial-up modem. And he needed to build a second thermo-regulated nutrient coil. That would need at least three widgets, and certainly food-grade silicone tubing.

He scratched the back of his head. Maybe, just maybe, he could skip the galactic grocery run and pick up what he needed from the town on the same asteroid. The pig was hard to leave alone; after the last time he went space scavenging, it became his shadow, crying if he tried to take even a moment to himself. It settled, but kept in the way. Innocent, but clingy. He needed more supplies to keep working, and to make his mutant some pork-adjacent friends. If those clones had managed to scrounge anything, it’d save him days of labour. And the more his homestead grew, the longer his chore list became.

His brow furrowed, and he bit his lip a little too hard, almost to the point of drawing blood, as he weighed his options. He’d been told he could come, but the very thought curdled in his gut and made his eye twitch.

After a moment’s consideration, the crotchety homesteader sent a drone to park in the back of his truck. He tossed his keys into the air, caught them mid-fall, and unlocked the door.

Something tugged at the leg of his overalls. He glanced down and met three sad, shining eyes staring up at him.

He sighed, knelt down, and pulled a loop of twine from his pocket, the kind he’d once used to play Cat’s Cradle with his daughter. Jacob’s Ladder, Eiffel Tower, Witch’s Broom, Cat Whiskers. He’d done them so many times he knew them by muscle memory. Over time, he’d worked in a bit of knot craft and turned it into a fancy party trick. The twine was frayed and dry, scratchy against his skin, but his fingers and palms were so calloused and blistered from rough work that it couldn’t raise a rash. When his knot work was done and every cross was crissed, he stretched the net between his hands, loops snug around his fingers, and showed the piggy a brand-new vocabulary word:

Cherished.

He sounded out the word, then spelled it, letter by letter. “C-H-E-R-I-S-H-E-D. Cherished. Rhymes with—” He could only think of perished. “Doesn’t matter.”

The pig squealed in delight. He lowered his hands and strung the web between the roof and a post of the pig’s hut, guiding it toward the pen. “You remember that word until I get back. Be good, and I’ll tell you what it means.”

His pig squealed again, apparently agreeing to do as it was told.

“Right,” he said, already turning away. “Back soon.”

Before he left, he picked up a striped, multicoloured inflatable ball he’d found for the pig and tossed it over his shoulder. The pig bounded after it, snuffling and rolling it through the dirt.

Rick drove as the sky blackened. Without light pollution, the vast firmament above deepened into onyx, charcoal, asphalt, and bitter coffee; violets bloomed so rich and dark they no longer resembled an Earthly night. A trick of the foreign, but habitable, atmosphere. Not even in his old cabin, alone in a forest where branches stacked and foliage wove into a suffocating pit of eyes and cries that reminded him he was never unobserved, had the stars felt like this. Back then, the sky was still widely shared, white dots punched into sameness. The colours lacked the complexity they held now. It didn’t belong solely to him, though part of him wished it did, as he parallel parked at the stoop of the refurbished arcade. His stomach twisted into a bowline, tethering the anxiety and keeping it from straying; he took a swig to calm his nerves, and then one more to steady his hands.

He stood outside the front door, looming at the frame as quiet as a near-still chime, breaths slight and uneven, his hands still unsteady. He kept aside so he wouldn’t be seen through the wide window or the crack in the door. Rick watched the blue glow spilling from the sill, crawling past the steps, brushing warped posts that barely held a thatched sunshade. The air outside carried a mild, starchy smell; with the windows closed, he figured the inside stank of armpit sweat and stale neglect. No deodorant. No antiperspirant. No potpourri.

Rick stayed outside for a solid few minutes, inhaled sharply, his hand clamped over his stomach, nails wrenching into his gut, pressing hard into his skin. He exhaled with his eyes closed, tapping into that old dissociation he could summon at random. A practiced, at-will skill. Trauma so ingrained, so familiar, he could ride the trigger like a broken stallion. Will shattered, pace steady. Pills ready in his seams if it bucked.

He entered with his arms at his sides, face composed. Focus forward, patience thinning. He narrated each step in his head, rehearsing the exit: step in, take what he needed, get out. The wall behind the counter was cluttered with odd-shaped relics and reliquaries. The hall echoed with virtual fighters shouting their attacks, slots spinning, racecars veering across pixelated tracks. It did stink, rank with the odour of malnourished, overworked bodies all around. Lost, smelly children.

Every boy in the place was now gawking at him as he stood by the counter, but the pudgy little shopkeeper looked like he was about to shit himself. Panic-stricken, shivering, pressing himself against the wall under the blue and purple glow of the backlights. Frightened to the core, unable to make eye contact. Just as he started to point at a gadget behind the counter to ask about it, the boy let out an earsplitting, caterwauling scream, shielding his face with his hands and shrinking to the floor. As if making himself small enough would allow him to disappear.

Rick tried to interrupt his terror, languidly gesturing again toward the thing he wanted, maybe the only thing in here worth his time. But the boy could not answer, trembling and curling into himself, trying so wretchedly not to be seen.

The other teens surrounding them murmured at first, then started yelling for others of their crew, calling for some sort of backup. Though none dared to come any closer, each one putting as much distance between themselves and him as possible.

Something in him snapped. Out of patience, the old man reached down and hauled the trembling boy up and over the counter by a fistful of hair, like scruffing a frozen, feral kitten. He did not offer much resistance at first, but then, as his fight response kicked in, he started shouting again, sharp and despairing. He thrashed at him, shoving and kicking. Petrified, fighting back with every limb and all of his fear. Nothing but blind instinct. Burning a lot of energy for nothing.

Wouldn’t last. Still easier than cornering a pig.

With a closer view of the kid’s face, panicked as it was, he became clinical and started scrutinizing his features, a shrewd recognition gnawing at him, almost forgetting why he was here in the first place. He caught a subtle facial asymmetry, the kind he recognized as his own finical handiwork: the nose bridge ever so slightly off template, a faint protrusion to the left lower eyelid, inscrutable to anyone but himself; he hadn’t seen those particular tweaks in years; maybe not since 2013-I. When his eyes were open, still not meeting his own, Rick studied the sclera and spotted the distinct freckle he once liked to keep hidden at the inner corner of the right. One of his own signatures. Early career. A mark from his mid-run builds, when he still had the diligence for fancy pigment work. Now intent on checking the model number, he reached for the boy’s right ear, still restraining him by a scrunch of hair.

He found another surprise. No code. Not a routine print. He’d have to check the other ear.

“Left-handed,” he stated, quietly—absently. Rick jerked the boy’s head down for a moment. “Double-crowned. Any other custom work? Arched fingerprints?”

No response expected. The boy only trembled now. Hyperventilating. Stopped fighting.

“You’re definitely copied mesh. Popcorn method or cobweb? Can’t say I remember,” he said, muttering mostly to himself, “but the pay must’ve been good.” He peered into the boy’s eyes again, searching the corn-neal integrity for any hints, lifting one of his upper eyelids with his thumb; he spotted another of his own trademarks: gracefully fashioned capillary lace. Cobweb, then—not popcorn. His work alone. No collaboration. Tangled webbing. Like that of steatoda nobilis—the noble false widow. He must have signed this project personally, on the left ear. “Real sentimental. Someone really loved you.”

Like a speeding bullet, the business mascot variant he had met over a month ago lunged from the crowd, kitchen knife in hand, aiming for Rick’s side. Rick barely moved, one fist still clamped in the fatter clone’s hair, the other snapping out to stop his assailant in the chest. The blade struck shallow, more of a shove than a stab.

Rick glanced down at it as if inspecting a stain on his overalls, not even a wince. The violent Morty tried to yank the knife back for another attempt, but Rick caught his wrist in an iron grip, twisting until there was a sharp crack and the knife clanged to the floor.

“LET HIM GO!” the boy yelled, struggling to free himself. “AND GET OUT!”

Rick didn’t raise his voice, his tone marking a surgical disinterest. “Almost done.”

“You’re HURTING him!” the boy spat, all rage and hate. “STOP IT!”

“I’m auditing him,” Rick said, releasing his attacker and tilting the clone’s jaw toward the light. Shadows receded along the neck as he touched a finger to the prominent artery, feeling the rapid pulse. “Flush rate’s high… carotid’s oversized. Engineered so adrenaline hits the brain in bulk. Explains the panic.”

The angry boy glanced at his friend on the counter. Tense, furious, but no longer trying to stab him.

Rick met his eyes for the briefest moment. “Next time, aim better. Or stay out of my light.” Then, almost to himself: “Need to finish auditing.”

The mascot variant stayed where he was, wary, still ready to attack if Rick crossed the line too far.

“I told you, you can’t be here if you hurt us.”

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

“You are hurting him. And he’s scared,” he warned. “Can’t you just… be more careful?”

The elder rolled his eyes but acquiesced, shooting a quick glance at the mascot’s wrist he had just cracked; the boy held it, eyes still sharply on him.

Rick, switching his hold on the boy’s hair to his opposite hand, more gently now, turned his head methodically to the right and reached for his left ear, folding it over in accordance with standard operating procedure. He had initially expected to find a standard product code, but instead found the anticipated mark he reserved for his more advanced work, projects he was genuinely proud of. The finest web of telangiectasias—faint spider veins laid with impossible precision. Too linguistically exact to occur in nature. By the weave of the vascular signature, he knew the work had been high-grade. Stupidly expensive. Almost certainly a private commission. And fragile, too. The tremors in his body weren’t just nerves. Rick could tell this wasn’t just a temporary spike; he had seen it before in builds where the limbic system was permanently rewired. Intentional homeostatic damage. Likely a complex metabolism. A brain like a delicate, crystal violin, and a liver just strong enough to keep it playing.

He’d made so many Mortys over the years he couldn’t remember who this one was, the project details, or which version of himself had commissioned him, but at least he had a better idea of the dosages he would need for this clonal variant. Even if the micropop was private-issue, the vein-script still detailed the product’s control profile.

Rick sent a tacit command to his nurse bucket drone in the truck bed outside; it would hover inside soon enough. He spared a moment to take in the Mortys around him and scan the crowd for the one he’d met with the mascot: the patch-kit variant. Once spotted, he dug into his overalls and pulled out a white-capped, semi-opaque bottle and an unmarked tin with a spray nozzle. He set both on the counter, twisted the cap off the bottle, and shook out a green pill. With a fingernail, he split it cleanly in half and lifted one piece between his fingertips.

"What is that?" the mascot demanded. "What are you doing?!"

Rick ignored him. The clone still trembled on the table, clutching his chest, breaths jagged. Before he could flinch, Rick forced his head upright by the hair, pinched his molars apart with thumb and forefinger, and shoved the half-pill under his tongue. A firm hand clamped his jaw shut until the sublingual compound dissolved, done with the ease of someone who’d restrained and sedated more beings than most people could even name. Twenty seconds. Rick felt the mascot variant try to wrench his arm away, but ignored it like a lone fly in the room. He calmly picked up the spray tin, propped the panicked boy’s mouth open again, and misted a shot of purple liquid inside.

Done.

He watched the tension drain from the boy in seconds. Gaze hazy, pupils centred. Shoulders slouched, breath evening, panic fading. Abating. The mascot stepped back as he lifted the boy off the counter and set him gently on the floor in front of it; Rick knelt down and lifted the boy’s hand to inspect the palm lines.

"What did you do?!" the mascot demanded again, voice cracking. "What did you give him?!"

“Lorazepam,” Rick mumbled. “With a grapefruit potentiator, straight from the northern crown.”

"Is that supposed to make sense to me?! Tell me what you did!"

"He’s fine, relax.” Rick didn’t even look up. "Gimme a sec."

The mascot’s fists tightened and his teeth set hard, resentments ground between.

Rick peered at the clone’s palm lines, reading them as carefully as one might read a sacred text. The heart line arched and curled toward the index finger. Notable anomaly: predisposition toward unresolved affective states. Manufactured for sustained fervency without resolution. The head line presented more fragmentation; irregular segmentation indicating disordered cognitive processing. High emotional reactivity, low analytic stability. A design meant to feel everything and recover from nothing. Thankfully, the life line exhibited greater integrity. Fraying observed at both ends, but the length suggested extended functional duration. Though, he noted directional absence. Tragic backstory, no path forward. Continuity reimagined, not recreated, prioritized at the expense of narrative direction. The Rick that bought him probably hadn’t paid enough for plot grafting.

He gently set the boy’s hand down, lingered for just a moment, then ruffled his hair without thinking. The mascot variant blinked at that, eyes widened.

The ear tag had given him the prescription necessary; the palmistry gave the clock.

Rick stood, pointed at the patch-kit variant, and snapped. “You. Here.” His now nearby drone had buzzed for a minute, then chirped like a microwave. Ping. Patch-kit Morty approached apprehensively, one hand resting on the mascot for reassurance; the mascot variant was seething like a pot about to boil over. Rick pulled out his notebook, scribbled a note, tore the page from the spiral, and handed it to the patch-kit. The nurse bucket spat out a clear, lunchbox-sized crate of pill bottles, each stasis-sealed to prevent expiry.

“Listen close,” he said. “This batch will hold for twenty years. Tomorrow, my drone brings the rest. Forty-one years more. Don’t lose them, don’t waste them.”

The patch-kit variant just looked up at him, waiting for further details, still holding onto the mascot’s arm.

“Lithium’s a mood stabilizer for bipolar swings. Verapamil’s a heart med I’m giving to smooth mood cycles. Memantine’s a cognitive med for his post-traumatic symptoms. Lurasidone’s an antipsychotic so he doesn’t drift into la-la land. Pregabalin’s for his chronic anxiety, and lorazepam’s for panic attacks, only as needed. Weird cocktail, but it’s in his tag for bipolar, PTSD, panic disorder, and GAD. Follow the timing exactly as I wrote, or his brain chemistry’s gonna look like a shit smear. And never let him off cold turkey unless you want seizures or mania.”

As he said it all out loud, he mentally redrew what the boy’s memory script must have looked like in perfect detail, his thoughts a spinneret. Each strand of mental illness, each predetermined flaw, each thread of instability tied tight within the clone’s psyche. A resplendent cerebral snare, what must have been perfectly hand-drawn neural calligraphy, complex and beautiful in its cruelty.

And then the thought hit, old and acidic from recurrence: Find him. Find him. Even if he’s gone for good. Forever. Find him. You can. You have to. You will. Find him. Find him. Find him. A mother’s all-consuming grief. FIND HIM. FIND HIM. FIND HIM. FIND HIM. FIND HIM. FIND HIM. FIND HIM. FIND HIM—

He paused to make sure his instructions were well received. Patch-kit just kept waiting. “And keep an eye on him. His tag says he’s got addictive tendencies, so he might start sweet-talking you for more benzos. The lorazepam. Ignore it.”

“W-What d-do you mean by… h-his tag?” Patch-kit Mortys, though drafted to be clever, tended to have a more pronounced stutter.

“His ear tag. All Morty clones have them.” He paused. “Veins. Script. Traces your make.”

“Wha—WHAT?!”

The crowd of clones surrounding them glanced at one another, faces tense, confused. The mascot Morty’s glare was a dagger, cold and hateful.

Rick, needing no more than that, turned to leave and silently signalled his drone to follow. Out the door, empty-handed, no new gadget or gizmo acquired.

Outside, he popped the other half-pill and another two from the bottle, let them dissolve under his tongue, then chased them with two sprays of Dionysian sweetness, the tang sinking deep. A sip from his flask numbed his thoughts; heat bloomed in his chest and stomach. The world tilted, heavy and whirling, like a spinning gyroscope.

“Hey, wait!” Morty—the business mascot—had trailed after him, catching him just as he was about to climb into the truck. “Wait a minute!”

Rick looked at him as the drone hovered above and slowly settled in the trunk. Widow’s peak. Uncanny symmetry. Commercial-perfect. Shoulders square and held; perfect posture. Athletic frame. Entertainment district stock. Logo ready. Dime a dozen.

“Meds ain’t worth it for you,” he said.

“Look, I know I said ‘get out,’ but—what?”

“Vagal tricks’re enough for your condition. Verapamil or beta-blockers could give you long-term cardiac crash jobs. Chronotropic drag. Chronic bradycardia, conduction fuck-ups.”

“Didn’t you just…give the first one—vera—verapa—whatever—to my friend?”

“Different wreck. Different repair.”

“Wait—you… you know I have arrhythmia?”

“Paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia. Limiter in your build. Forces downtime. Stops you from running wild. Keeps you from breaking chains.”

“My… build?”

“Your make, print, edition. Whatever.”

“That’s… that’s so fucked.”

“You thought every mass-produced clone was unique?”

“I don’t fucking understand you.”

The two stared each other down. None of the Morty’s acrimony ceded. It merely simmered under the surface of their back and forth.

“Cardiac ablation,” Rick let slip.

Morty kept staring. Waiting. Rick continued. “Simple procedure,” he grumbled. “I could burn the limiter. But you might be fine without it.”

“I…” He didn’t break eye contact. Careful. “I don’t understand you, but I know that’s not how you… work. How Ricks work.”

From his pocket, he pulled a crumpled napkin, creased and crunched, a list scribbled across its folds. “You can’t… you can’t be here and do what you just did. But we should at least try to get along. Maybe even work together, sometimes. We’re… neighbours.”

He handed over the napkin. Rick unfolded it, reading the scrawl:

Fix = 2 Gadgets

Build = 3 Gadgets

Trade (equal) = 1 Gadget for 1 Gadget

Tokens + Games = Tickets

Tickets = Prize Counter

“We don’t really have an… economy? We just kind of do what we can and… help each other. But I know Ricks don’t… work that way.” He stopped staring and looked down, kicking one foot in the dirt, watching the dust fly. “So, I guess a… cardiac ablation? That would be a Fix. And we’d give you two Gadgets. Whatever you wanted that we could spare.”

Rick folded the napkin into a smaller, neater square than before and slipped it into his pocket with his notebook.

“Now’s… not really a good time, after what you just did, but… maybe you… just… need practice? You know… being with people?” Morty didn’t look up from his shoes as he spoke.

“So, if a Fix is worth two Gadgets,” Rick drawled, “and a Gadget’s worth… a Gadget, then what’s one of your cute little ‘tickets’ worth? Or should I be asking how many tickets buy a Fix?” He scratched at his scalp. “I Fix something, do I get ten tickets? Twenty? What is this? A barter system or a midway?”

Morty kept his eyes downcast, his voice somehow smaller. “We didn’t always have a prize booth. Not all the machines give tickets. My… my last Rick just thought it was a good idea. We still have it. Some prizes.”

Rick patted his head, gently. He didn’t know why.

The world kept spinning. He’d have an interesting drive home, winding without a road. The boy finally looked up, blinking slowly, his heel grinding into the dirt—and Rick saw a dead rabbit.

Dead, dead rabbits.

Small, trusting bodies. Noses twitching against his palm as he covered their eyes. Necks resting snug in the angled slot of the steel mount, bolted to a post at his shoulder. With the heads steady, he pulled the hind legs sharply downward and away. Necks snapped clean from the vertebrae. Eyes bulging after the crack.

Crack.

Crack.

CRACK.

He turned, climbed into his truck without a word, and drove off. Speeding. Swerving into the night.

✦✦✦

Arcade Morty reached for the strands of hair the sour old drunk had touched; it wasn’t an unfamiliar thing. Ricks grew softer when they drank, he knew that. Walls down, voices lowered, a trace of familial warmth flickering up through weathered spirits. Not all of them, but many. His last Rick had been that way, too. His tenderness arriving only through intoxication, affection leaking out in crooked, unpredictable doses. Arcade never knew what a grandfather was supposed to be to a clone, harder still when he’d gone through more than one.

He walked inside slowly, face lit blue and gold in the dark. When he went back in, he saw the good doctor’s hand on Gambler’s shoulder, and a Morty with a big straw hat touching his face, whispering apologies. Apologies for not intervening, for not knowing, for being harsh, for being wrong. For everything and all.

And Gambler’s gaze was far away. To the ceiling, glassy, without tears to glisten them, half-lidded. Far, far away.

✦✦✦

Jezebel LOT# EX17:3 hated the way Rick clones fucked. She took what she could get and was well paid for it, too. But she missed how it used to feel with the primaries, the originals from dimensions all over. Infinite. Passionate. Narcissistic, heartbroken, longing in the way only someone who knows themselves so completely could be. She missed every version of Rick that wanted. Needed. And she was practiced in pleasure, trained in the role of the oldest profession. It was what she was made for. What she still yearned to do.

Now, it was hollow. Three minutes, maybe five. Meat on meat, nothing more. A grunt, a spill, a discarded wrapper. A “thanks, baby,” and a rolled wad of cross-credits on the side table, valid across Andromeda.

But the Matron had roped in regulars to keep their place on the New Citadel. So Jezebel LOT# EX17:3—Ricarda la Hermosa, a Rick in her own right—might one day carry a touch softer, hungrier, crueller still.

Chapter 6: Precious Things

Notes:

A reminder that this story contains graphic and violent imagery. Take care before proceeding.

“Kid’s right. I’m no better than any of you. I’m just self-loathing about it.”

—Homesteader Rick, s08e03

“I’m whatever I want to be. That’s the freedom of life as a clone. You wouldn’t know. Someone made you with sex, all those sweaty parts and nipply bits. You disgust me.”

—Boss Hogg Rick, s08e03

“He said, ‘You're really an ugly girl
But I like the way you play.’
And I died
But I thanked him
Can you believe that?
Sick, sick, holding on to his picture
Dressing up every day
I wanna smash the faces of those beautiful boys
Those Christian boys
So you can make me come
That doesn't make you Jesus”

Dimension: C-131

Planetary Body: Terraform-Class Extragalactic Planet, Andromeda Galaxy

Local Year: 2013-VIII

On nights without a customer beside her, comforting her, waking her for more of her, she dreamt of him—had nightmares of him. One of the quietest Ricks she had ever taken, maybe even known. A primary, an original, though she never knew where he came from or why he kept seeing her. Only her. And she didn’t know why he injected too much that night. Only that it was a deliberate choice.

She woke to him on the floor, face grey, piss soaking the carpet, foam streaked at the corners of his mouth. His body looked bent, as if he’d writhed before he went down, slouched and still, needles spread around him. Part of her had known it was coming. Just not that it would happen beside her while she slept so peacefully, a woman without a worry in the world.

It was a nightmare, but it fascinated her. He had left a note on the nightstand, beside the ruby-red satin lamp with its worn brass base, its glow bleeding the paper and his skin in blood-red haze. The kerosene stung her nose, masking the body’s stench, but not enough. She read his final words to herself, never sharing them with anyone else.

He missed his grandson. Guilt and heartbreak had driven him mad. He despised himself for not loving the replacement enough; the boy he left behind was only a shadow, a mimic, a falsehood. He tried to care about him; he said he really did—paid everything he had just to have him remade exactly as he remembered. Every memory reconstructed, laid out in ruthless, linear exactness. Every feature replicated, down to the smallest detail that had once been unique: left-handed, double-crowned, fingerprints arched like rolling hills. And just as mentally unwell. But it still wasn’t enough. It was wrong. He couldn’t care for him; he couldn’t love a fraud.

And yet, he had. Her. Almost every night, he made it with her. She welcomed it, looked forward to it. A man so locked inside himself, so eaten by grief and guilt, so desperate for self-assurance, that he climbed into her bed not to be with her, but with a version of himself. She knew it. Felt it in the way he touched her, as if testing the boundaries of his own reflection. He was pathetic. Thought he couldn’t love anyone that wasn’t an extension of himself. And that was the truth she slept with. The kind of man who brought nothing but absence, and still gave her the best nights she’d ever had.

The nightmare lay under all of it, smothered in overdose. The piss on the floor, the sour-saccharine decay creeping up her nostrils, the burnt plastic smell of a toke of changa before they slept, smoke haunting the air as a delicate spectre. The high was always the same: ten to twenty minutes of feeling her body peeling away from itself, of dying in pieces, of fading into the void without notice, and somehow returning to life. And, when awake, when she thought back on him, that’s what she recalled. And the desperation of a man clawing at her body as though she were the last scrap of himself he could still hold.

By the end of the terror, REM-rapid behind her eyes, she was tearing into his dead stomach with her perfectly manicured fingernails. Red polish, red hands shredding through him in blind rage. Flesh, intestines, acid, an unrecognizable ruin where once she’d kept her devotion. Red, red, red. She hated him, hated herself, tearing open the body that might have had made her, the man she was cloned from, searching for something that proved her life wasn’t just for someone else’s pleasure. For one man’s pleasure. She kept digging, looking for answers, for meaning, for anything alive inside him.

It hadn’t really happened that way.

In truth, she had only stroked his cheek after reading his love letter; she knew it was a love letter. What version of her could have killed themselves for a lack thereof? She felt the cold, captivated by the stiffness, the stillness. Wondering how someone so beloved to her could have been in such a shell.

But that was the more terrifying dream.

Jezebel LOT# EX17:3 was awoken by the shrill sound of her house sobriquet called from the brothel parlour.

“Ohhh Exodus! Wake up, nawh,” the voice rang, pot-bellied and syrupy. “Be a dear and come down here, girl! Exodus, darlin’!”

She groaned, lying in bed for a moment longer, closing her eyes, searching her thoughts for a glimmer of respite.

“And the people were thirsty for water, my blood, my moon,” the voice called, every word drizzling like honey. A cane tapped against the floor, the walls most thin in the quiet of dawn. “You gonna make us die of it, sweet Exodus?”

She sat up slowly. The red sun touched her lips, warm as a kiss. The day was already too beautiful for this.

“Nawh, girl, you’re too ugly a thing to keep a man waitin’—’specially one that don’t even want ya.” She heard his cane slam the balustrade. “C’mere ’fore I get all piss and vinega’. C’mooooon nawh.”

She wrapped herself in a silk gown, and hugged herself with her arms. This wasn’t what she was made for.

Harlot LOT# EZK 16:15-17—Miss Ezekiel—peeked into her room, fingers barely brushing the door. She hushed low, “You best git on down. Mama says you s’posed to check the trap.” Her eyes darted back to the hall, mouth turned in a grimace. “The men don’t wanna. Figures.”

The man downstairs kept yelling, louder now.

“You’ll come with me. Won’t you, Harley?”

“Oh, dammit, Jez,” her friend huffed, thick with drawl, “I ain’t that sweet on ya!”

Exodus laughed, sweetly. “But you are! You won’t let a girl go into danger all by herself, now, will you?”

“Ohhh… fine!” She rolled her eyes. “But you’re taking Trafficka’ next time he comes by.” Harley huffed again. “I’m sick ‘a him.”

Exodus kissed her friend’s cheek, and tucked a loose, blue-grey curl of hair behind her ear. “Sure, girl. Sure.” She examined her face, noting the crow’s feet on her eyes. And the wrinkles around her nose, never from a lack of smiling. A brave face, both so much like and unlike her own.

There was a violent crash against the banister; she was surprised his cane hadn’t splintered by now. His voice bellowed through the whorehouse. “You’re tryin’ my patience, girl. I’m a good man. A good, decent man. And I’m givin’ you one last chance t’ make it right. Don’t make me have t’ hit you more’n once.”

But he always hit her more than once; she still had bruises from his last visit, on her waist, her back, her knees, all blue and sickly green in the early stages of healing, with some older purple ones with fine red rings, fading into lavender. Never her face, though. Not a mark was left there to harm his own mirror image, no shattered reflection to stare back.

She offered Harley a weak smile, then left her room barefoot, wearing her nightdress, with a chiffon draped over her shoulders, and held her head high, rehearsed, before she came to the top of the stairs. She did her best to steady herself. She would not break. She would not fall. Exodus traced the wallpaper’s patterns with her eyes, geometric and kaleidoscopic, bracing her body for the inevitable first strike, feeling the carpeted steps beneath her feet.

But she did fall; he struck her ankle before she took her last step into the parlour. She tripped and went face-first to the floor, just managing to catch herself before her face slammed down.

He hit her back with the crown of the cane; after a certain number of whips, he would pause to amuse himself with baton twirls. Exodus kept her eyes on the floral patterns of the floor, curved and somehow reptant, as her vision blurred between each heavy blow. Ten. Eleven. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. One version of her had once likened her bruises to watercolour, murky at the edges and in their colours, dull and clinging, her skin too old to heal easily; most clone clients saw her in the same light, a form to be allured by and to use for minutes, hours of minutes if she was fortunate, rather than a person to be concerned for. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. He would probably make it thirty. If he lost count, he’d add another ten.

She was lucky this time. The pain stopped at thirty strikes, not thirty-one.

Boss Hogg Rick gave his cane one final twirl for good measure, then clasped both hands on the handle after adjusting the lapels of his white suit and neatly arranging his red rose corsage. He tapped the cane once before slipping right back into giving commands, his voice drenched in molasses.

“Risharda, Risharda, my sweet, hideous thing. Nawh, why’d ya have to go and work my last nerve on a mornin’ this fine?”

She stood slowly, keeping her arms wrapped around herself, unconsciously bracing for another strike. “A touch of morning dew never did your pasture any harm.”

He smirked, the molasses turning to tar. “It does, pet, when my pasture ain’t got the hands to clear it. And I’d black yer eye if I didn’t need that ugly mug to bring ’em in.”

Exodus crossed her arms more firmly, still protecting herself, but her armour polished with spit and spite. “And why not Trafficker? What’s the matter? Big man can’t scrape up a few Ricks on his own? Or maybe you’re just too short on portal fluid to bait him and the rest of those fools into doing your dirty work?”

Hogg gripped his cane more firmly. “I want my citadel. And to make my citadel, I need Ricks. To keep Ricks, I need a food chain: Ricks up top, Mawtys down on the bottom. But there ain’t no top, no citadel, ’til I get my workers.”

“So you keep saying,” she said with contempt. “Still doesn’t explain why Trafficker is so bad at his one job.”

“Nawh, you listen here, tart,” the tar bubbling into poison, “ain’t no strumpet gonna tell me how t’ run my chain. A clone can be whateve’ he damn well pleases, an’ I sure as hell ain’t no mascot sittin’ here grinnin’ while you sling yer backtalk.”

Exodus clicked her tongue. “Could have fooled me.”

She knew that would earn her another hit, and she took it, but it still hurt as the cane crashed against her knee. Pain flared, and she reflexively tried to soothe it with her hand.

“And I’m givin’ you a chance t’ be more than what you was made for,” he spat. “More than a worthless.” He struck her. “Washed up.” Another blow. “Widened black hole!” She fell again as the cane beat against her. “The men kill each other when I send ’em to recruit, an’ somehow you make ’em all soft ‘n pliable. If that’s all you’re good for, then use it to be part of somethin’ bigger. Somethin’ more!”

The wretch curled into herself, hands over her head to shield from the blows; she hadn’t meant to make him that angry, only to needle him, but she couldn’t help herself. She hated this.

“Why not send one of your flappers, then? We’re not the only women they made!” She cried. “And you know for a fact that a Rick is just as likely to kiss a man as he is to kill him!”

“And yet you tug at their heartstrings, better’n any of the rest!” He struck her arms, cracking the cane against her again. And again. And again. “I don’t know how, with a mouth that sharp, but Ricks’ll forgive damn near anythin’ if it’s comin’ frumma woman.” Her arms felt weak. “For whateve’ reason, they like you best.”

He hit her harder. The sting of each hit etched into her skin, red and raw. With a flourish, he twirled his cane once before he brought it down on her temple, a sharp right swing—angry enough to hit her face for the very first time.

“It makes me sick.”

Blood trickled down her cheek. Her vision clouded.

“They shoulda bumped your batch number on down t’ the next verse. Exodus, seventeen-four: ‘What am I supposed t’ do with these people? They near ’bout ready t’ stone me.’”

As he beat her, a husky, sultry voice came from another woman turning the corner from the hall into the parlour. The brothel matron, bejewelled and beguiling, laid a gentle hand on Hogg’s shoulder, her other hand straightening his tall white hat. “An’ what you gonna do with all these people, huh? Every one of ’em lookin’ to you for guidance, for purpose. Stones to catch an’ set down, to make the foundation for our new home.”

Upon hearing her words, Exodus felt she was about to vomit.

Boss Hogg Rick set his cane down, almost inviting the matron to distract him, to butter him up, his posture rigid as he forced his shoulders back, straight and proud. A fluster shined in his eyes, but his voice came out smooth enough. “Well, nawh… somebody’s gotta shepherd the sheep.”

Proprietress LOT# PRVB 7:10 carried herself with an air so silky she could’ve been made for a king, and she knew just when to place herself at the foot of his dais. “An’ he don’t have to do it alone.” She brushed a smidgen of dust off his shoulder with a graceful swish of her fingers. “Don’t let ’em rile you when they stray. I’ll see she brings you a good one.”

“Well, madam, what would I do without you?” He looked her up and down. “My offer still stands. A woman in such good standing ain’t got any business workin’ among the low folk.”

She chuckled. “An’ do what, cher? Sing for those that ain’t you? How pure would that be?”

Harley quietly stepped behind them and helped Exodus up, sitting her at the foot of the stairs before running to the kitchen to fetch a cloth to clean the smeared blood. Hogg’s focus stayed on the matron.

“You’d be one they couldn’t have. What they crave, what they yearn for.” He coughed and looked aside, trying to hide his blush. “They want what they can’t have ‘n use what they can. It’s a simple way to keep ’em in line.”

The matron’s laugh was warm and well-practiced. “An’ as you t’ink of greater things, I’ll be here to t’ink well for an’ of you, good sir.”

Hogg beamed, swept his hat from his head, and bowed deep before her. He took her hand and kissed it, feather-light, careful to keep her far from the heart yet close enough to revere. “Too kind, my dear. Too kind.” He missed the twitch in her eye at the brush of his lips, his moustache’s itch no more than a mosquito’s stylet. Parasitic. Unwelcome.

He flicked his hat back on his head and tipped it to the matron, the esteem he held for her plain, before turning to Exodus with a look of utter disgust and loathing. Other whores peeked from the stairs and doorways, too gutless to step forward, but wise enough to know their place. He ruminated over their dresses, their tresses, their painted faces, and turned away in contempt before he thought too long on how they dared defile themselves in his likeness.

“Last one weren’t worth a damn, Exodus,” he said. “You bring me a mind with some sharp to it, or you don’t come back at all.”

His back was to her as he stood in the doorway, waiting for her submission. The matron met her gaze, steady and implacable, hands folded over her gown, her stillness itself an instruction.

“Yes,” she said, bowing her head as Harley pressed a rag to her temple, “sir.”

Satisfied with the appellation, his cane struck the floor as he walked out, the door slamming behind him, its chime dissonant at the force.

The matron watched him through the leaded glass of the front door, sunlight warm on her skin. The room lay silent, save for Miss Ezekiel’s coos and sweet nothings to Exodus, cloth to her cheek. Once she was sure he was long gone, the matron strode to the battered woman, raised her hand, and struck her. Exodus had kept blank through the man’s blows, but at the matron’s touch her eyes lifted, a fawn’s. Supplicating and sorry. “Mama, I didn’t mean—”

“An’ you gon’ t’ink on what you mean an’ what you do,” she said, flat as glass. “You wanna drop yourself low and do his lil’ song an’ dance? Talk to him wit’ his verses? You t’ink that toys wit’ him?”

“I think we don’t have to do this,” she begged. “We’re just as good as any of them. We could—”

The matron lifted a hand to strike. Exodus flinched, shoulders raised, waiting for the hurt that always came. But the moment stayed, and no sting followed. Slowly, she dared to raise her eyes. The matron’s hand still hovered, her gaze heavy with sorrow, pity settling on Exodus as if the strike itself had only changed to one without touch.

“Tell me, what we could do, my sea, my Sidon, when you break so easy? Jus’ like you was made t’ do.”

Exodus lowered her gaze to the floor. Harley pulled her into a soft hug, stroking her hair. The voices of Harley and the matron carried on, but they grew distant, fading as she disassociated.

The matron’s words were heavy with years unspoken. “The only one of us made wit’ a story already done. Queen Jezebel an’ the dogs. Rippin’ her belly open. Meat in their teeth.”

This was right. It was not what she was made for, but it was, too, was it not? The noise synesthesized, Harley’s tone rising as if in a shout, while the matron remained composed. Sound harmonized into a warbled hum that crept up her spine, colours melding together as the carpet’s florals lost their shape, her eyes unfocused. She fell into the idea of being wanted: the press inward, the pull away, then more than the chore of it—a hand gripping her thigh, the whisper of a kiss at her neck, and her name, her chosen name spoken only by those she trusted, carried in secrecy and sacredness. The one precious thing that was ever truly hers.

Stolen.

“I’m goin’ with her, Mama,” Miss Ezekiel said. “You cain’t break her like this and then tell me I cain’t. Don’t matter none if Big Rick finds out.”

“You not the one that gotta hold off his anger,” the matron said. “He lookin’ to make a point.”

Harley’s only real friend was far away, somewhere. She would have to dress her, bandage her, and bring her back. Harley scooped her up in her arms, and the other girls who had been watching hurried off like a flutter of lost doves.

“I’m goin’, and I don’t care what ya gotta do.”

The matron waved her off, as if Harley needed permission at all. Exodus stayed far away, lost in a lovely, fair dream: her tongue crashing into his mouth, her fingers tangled in his hair as he lifted her and took her whole. Soft. Hungry. Cruel.

✦✦✦

“N-no, Morty.” Doc wiped the equations and formulas from the chalkboard, clearing away the remnants of his first lesson. The board shook slightly on its loose mounts as he cleaned; he’d have to ask someone to fix the bolts. Water from the wet rag in his hand dripped down his forearm as he squeezed it, leaving wet spots spreading like ink stains on the slate. The rest of his new class had already left to resume their chores, errands, and hard day’s work. “And s-s-stop asking.”

Gambler twiddled an apple Straw had given him earlier, having saved it to play teacher’s pet. A sweet red delicious. “C’mon, Doc, listen,” his voice shook. “I-it’s a freeroll! You heard the Rick, i-i-it’s for me. I—I need… I need it.”

Doctor Morty kept wiping the board with the damp cloth, never having found a proper eraser. He was glad for it, too; he had never liked the streaks of chalk dust they always left behind, back when he was still fortunate enough to be in school. The scent of the chalk tickled his nose, stale with the warm water that had been sitting in a tin cup for over an hour. He liked the darker shade the water left on the board, turning the black from dusted to jet.

“Hey, don’t check out on me!” Gambler’s knuckles went white, nails digging into his palms.

Doc was long past checked out. “I-I get it. You play poker.”

Gambler winced. “That’s not—”

“Not what?” Doc sat down at his shoddy, roughly constructed desk. “Not what you meant? Not fair?”

He looked up at the ceiling and kicked his feet up on the desk. “I’m tired.”

“You’ve got to deal me in… W-wait, no, I mean… I just—”

“Just… stop.”

Doc leaned back, chair groaning under the shift, arms folding behind his head. “That Rick knew right away what I was made for.”

“Doc, please—”

“I don’t know why, but he did. And, you know, Ricks don’t usually go out of their way to h-h-… help someone—least of all a Morty. And if one did, he’d probably pick the best thing if nobody asked him t-to-to-to help. They’re n-… narcissistic enough for that.”

“Doc, I need it! Please!”

“Just the benzos? N-n-n-nothing else prescribed?”

Gambler slammed his hands on the desk, the apple tossed to the floor. The bang made Doc sit up straight; his own glazed mug and the wash water tin toppled over, spilling tepid chalk water and lukewarm coffee all over the floor. The liquids mingled together and made a mud colour. His cup shattered into tiny pieces.

“I—I won’t just follow what he wants me to do, okay? But I—I want that feeling again! I felt… nothing. I felt nothing! Don’t you get it? I need that again! Please!”

Doc stood and stepped close to Gambler’s face, making him flinch back. Doc’s voice dropped low.

“What Ricks can do is i-i-in-indistinguishable from magic, Morty. A lifetime supply of pills? Somehow, that’s the best a Rick could do for you.”

“A-And you just—” he stuttered. “—just believe him? You don’t think he’s just another lazy piece of shit?”

“They’re all lazy! So lazy that if it was just laziness, he wouldn’t have offered anything! When Ricks bother to help, they give the best they can. Pride and spite, th-th-th-that’s it!”

“Just—just give me the pills!”

“No!” Doc’s voice spiked, then dropped again. “Don’t you get it? We are made. Your brain is designed down to the s-s-specifics! If Rick’s answer is pills, that means there’s n-n-n-nothing else he could do. Every problem inside you is so hardwired into your psyche that your prescription is… outlined. Right behind your fucking ear.”

“Doc, please—“

“Stop.” Doctor Morty exhaled slowly, cooling his temper. He sat back down and rested his head on the desk, pillowed on his crossed arms. “Just stop.”

Gambler stayed, awkwardly present. He fidgeted and lightly kicked the edge of the desk, trying to provoke him, but Doc just closed his eyes, unmoving, waiting for Gambler to speak again. Or leave.

Instead, Gambler picked up the apple and picked at the skin. He opened his mouth to ask again, then shut it tight. His hands ached, raw from being clenched the entire class, every second bearing the absence of what he wanted but couldn’t have.

“Damn it!” He hurled the apple at the chalkboard. It slammed against the board, splitting clean in two. The halves tumbled to the floor, bruised and wobbling slightly, somehow mocking him.

Doc didn’t lift his head. “Straw’s gonna be real disappointed you didn’t eat that.”

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to work!” Gambler shouted. “You get a prescription, and it’s—it’s—it’s yours to abuse!”

“And a fourteen-year-old isn’t supposed to teach remedial math to other fourteen-year-olds.” Doc sat there, drained and listless. “But here we are.”

Gambler bit his lip and anxiously tapped his foot. He waited. Doc said nothing to fill the emptiness or put him at ease.

Gambler started pacing, back and forth from desk to chalkboard, grinding his teeth and pulling at his hair. Doc opened his eyes just enough, brows furrowed, watching him. Not seeing panic, but the desperate way Gambler racked his brain, trying to figure out how to get what he wanted.

After minutes of pacing, he lunged at Doc, pulling him up in his seat by the back of his shirt and forcing his shoulders back. Then he collapsed to his knees, pounding them with balled-up fists. He kept his face down, rocking slightly, then clawed at his hair again, eyes veined and wild, yet fixed on the floor.

“Don’t you get it, Doc? I’m—I’m a fraud.” His voice quavered. “H-how do I even know which memories are mine?”

“M-Morty—“

“I—I remember killing him!” Gambler’s breathing quickened. “It was real! There were so many of us! Did… did I even do it? Did I kill him?”

“Morty, hey—”

Gambler looked up; his eyes were blown wide like a trapped animal’s. His mouth hung open mid-breath. His face was twisted with something between terror and disbelief. “I—I was on the dome! But what if—what if I wasn’t—oh god, Doc, I—I never—”

The boy felt himself slipping away, the barren classroom around him fading into mush, Doc disappearing with it. He was waking back into hell, with the many hundreds of himself around him keening in agony and despair.

His arms were stretched over his head, and as he tried to wrench himself free, one arm popped clean from its socket. He screamed, but kept trying to pull himself free—

“Morty, s-stop!” Doc shouted as Gambler gripped his arm tighter and tighter. “Th-that hurts!”

He would go mad. He felt everything. Every pain. Every feeling. He felt hunger so violent, so excruciating, he thought he would die of it—

Arcade Morty rushed behind Gambler and covered his eyes, pulling him back from Doc and into a tight hug.

Gambler tried to push him off. Arcade’s back hit the chalkboard as he pulled Gambler down, its metal rim stabbing the ridges of his spine as they both dropped to the floor; he could feel new cuts the rim formed into his skin as his back was dragged against it. Stinging. Hot tears touched Arcade’s palm. Again. It would never stop. It would never stop. One person kept coming to Gambler’s rescue, and the only cure came from Rick, the man with a loaded deck; he held them all in his hand, every move planned before they even sat at the table. Gambler Morty had been made to lose from the start.

This time, Gambler fought back, refusing to give in, but Arcade wouldn’t let him go.

“I-I-I don’t know what to do!” Doc strained. “I don’t know how to help him! I just—”

“We just keep trying!” Arcade cut in, gripping Gambler. “We don’t know what to do, but we keep trying!”

“I can’t—I-I’m not—I’m not a doctor—”

“You don’t have to be!”

Just then, Gambler sank his teeth into one of Arcade’s hands. Hard.

“OW! FUCK!” Arcade cried, and Gambler bolted out of the classroom. Arcade shook his hand, staring at the teeth marks pressing into his skin. “Fuck…”

“H-h-hang on.” Doc stood. “I-I-I’ll go after him. M-m-meet me in the box. Grab the antiseptic, and-and I’ll—”

Arcade grabbed his wrist. “No.”

Doctor Morty looked at him, waiting, but ready to run.

“My doctor—he said I need to take more breaks.” Arcade smiled. “He’s sort of a hypocrite.”

“B-but Gambler—“

“Don’t worry. He’ll sit in his usual booth.” He nodded to the floor. “See? He took the apple with him.”

Somehow, the apple halves were gone. When or how Gambler had managed to grab them, neither of them knew.

There were blood stains where Arcade’s back had hit the chalkboard and its rail, smudged around like a child had finger painted with red paint; his shirt and vest were splotched red, too.

“Wait…” Doc said, incredulous. “You… y-you were eavesdropping?”

Arcade just grinned.

Doc wasn’t impressed. “You s-shouldn’t do that.”

“Yeah, well…” Arcade’s voice was warm. “We’ll keep trying to do better. Together. Always. Okay?”

This was an old inside joke between the two of them, but also a promise: instead of the old man's drunken mantra, “Rick and Morty, forever and forever, a hundred years,” they were Doc and Cade, together, forever and always. No matter what they faced or what they had to do, they would endure it; they would make it through anything together. Even if they had no one else, no other Mortys, and never another Rick, they would have each other.

Doc softened. “Y-yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

He looked out the door of the classroom into the hall. “But w-w-we shouldn’t just leave him. I think he’s starting to… to… Cade?”

Arcade was clutching his left side with his hand, halfway through tying one of his shoes when it happened. Rapid onset. No warning. Just what felt like a rapid-fire cannon firing ammunition through his chest. Hit after hit, piercing right through him.

“Doc…” His voice was tense. “Something’s…something’s wrong.”

Doc’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean ‘wrong’? Y-you look like—”

Arcade leaned forward, a trickle of sweat appearing on his brow, one hand clawing at his chest while the other was pressed to the floor to keep himself steady. His face was pale within seconds. “My—my heart. It—it hurts—” he struggled to get the words out, rasped between quick, gasping breaths.

Doc wasted no time, rushing to his side and pressing two fingers to his neck, hissing through his teeth when he caught the pulse. It was fast. Too fast.

“Okay, Cade, talk to me,” Doc’s voice was controlled. “Are you dizzy?”

“Yeah. Spinning—” Arcade’s face contorted, veins protruding from his neck. “Can’t—”

Doc’s mind was running through the list: PSVT, tachycardia, shock. No meds. Just the bottles of water he always kept in his bag. No adults. Just him.

”Okay, o-okay—we’re going to slow it down. Valsalva. Now. Do it!”

Arcade tried, breathing just as his friend instructed him to. His pupils dilated into large, black disks. Veins thickened on his forehead, but his face was as white as frost. Doc touched his neck again and counted. Ten. Fifteen. Nothing.

“Shit!” He ran to his bag stored behind the desk, grabbed a bottle of water, and prayed it would be cold enough; he dumped the water over Arcade’s head. Not cold, but cool. Rivers poured down his face, soaking his hair and shirt. The shock rippled through his body, jolting him as if he’d been punched so hard his teeth clacked.

“Come on, Cade, don’t do this.”

Arcade’s head lolled as his chest heaved. Then, his body gave out all at once. He fell back, folding to the floor.

“Cade! Don’t—” Doc held his head up. “Don’t do this—” His fingers found the pulse once more. Still there, but barely, like a strand of thread so thin it might vanish from his touch. Fragile. Almost gone.

“S-s-stay with me. You hear me?” Doc shook him once, hard. “You hear me?!”

Arcade twitched. His lips moved, but his voice was a whisper. “Feels—better—”

Doc didn’t trust it. Wouldn’t trust it. Not for a second. He kept his hands on Arcade’s shoulders, his gaze searing, looking over his complexion, helpless. He opened his mouth to tell him to stay, not to move—

And then Arcade’s eyes rolled back into his head.

Notes:

2 Kings 9:30-37
New King James Version

30 Now when Jehu had come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she put paint on her eyes and adorned her head, and looked through a window. 31 Then, as Jehu entered at the gate, she said, “Is it peace, Zimri, murderer of your master?”

32 And he looked up at the window, and said, “Who is on my side? Who?” So two or three eunuchs looked out at him. 33 Then he said, “Throw her down.” So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered on the wall and on the horses; and he trampled her underfoot. 34 And when he had gone in, he ate and drank. Then he said, “Go now, see to this accursed woman, and bury her, for she was a king’s daughter.” 35 So they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands. 36 Therefore they came back and told him. And he said, “This is the word of the Lord, which He spoke by His servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, ‘On the plot of ground at Jezreel dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel; 37 and the corpse of Jezebel shall be as refuse on the surface of the field, in the plot at Jezreel, so that they shall not say, “Here lies Jezebel.” ’ ”

Notes:

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