The chick at the landfill disses Madra:
"What kind of car is this? Where's the jellywebbing? Headset? There's hardly a comfort feature. Oh, at least it has a sexbox."
Because of Godel's incompleteness theorem, Madra cannot think her way out of a paper bag. Truly. She can only seem to do so. It's not really thinking. At least, that's what we tell ourselves. She even says herself, "Your butthole does more thinking than I do." Then she procedes to explain how the process is more akin to digestion, this quantum munging of massive arrays of data. "I fart out some data of my own. Just don't give me indigestion. My state vector will collapse all over your lap."
**************************
Henry's frazzled head nods convulsively, swiveling back into the cradle of the headrest, forward into the hollow of his chest, then jerks to stare uncomprehending at the dark, dusty landscape. "Where the Hell are we?"
"How should I know, as if there were still a GPS."
"Hmm. Hawwwlk."
"Don't spit in the floorboard again, please." The dashboard lights change from cool green to a threatening red.
"Ngm."
"Thank you."
"What the fuck are we doing on the moon?" He begins to drool. "You're taking me to Dr. Mengele's green cheese castle to switch brains with--" gele's green cheese castle to switch brains with--" He turns to look into the backseat. "You pick up hitchhikers and turn them into RODENSE!" he wails his words punctuated with spittle and blows to the dashboard, putting the dashlights out in mid-sentence.
"Take a Valium, Kid Psycho," mutters Madra, after having endured hours of these intermittent histrionics.
"Evil, scheming, manipulative," he sputtered. Weak, unhinged oil-covered seagull, Mad thought.
I'm running on my axles. It's an agony of corrosives and gritty muck pumping through systems singing a collective song of decay. A racehorse with three hooves. The carburetor has bronchitis. Tires cry as the pavement slaps them bald like baby feet. The shocks? Catatonic.
All these voices are mixed in with primitive signals-- the songs of insects before they meet the windshield, TV reruns broadcast from a pirate, robot station in Panama City, Henry's moans, the rat squabbles, sparse law enforcement chatter. Law enforcement, local gangs, whatever. I float in the center, the helium car, the crazy glue singer, the impossible. Becoming more impossible. Hear those screams? That's me on the TV. That's me running through the horror movie. Chasing and being chased. Going through morning sickness, giving birth. All memories must be wide open, it's all available, all programs are running at once. An accident that gave me consciousness. It's Inferno Flash RAM- the "burning, nerve-ending mding magic trick." And I'm running out of time.
Henry begins to stir languidly, getting his bearings again. "Mad, don't you think we should stop? I mean, I guess we're making good time, whereever we're going, but even the rats are getting legcramps and I gotta take ashit."
A gnappy rat muzzle pokes through a hole in a dented shoebox, slides around the bucket seat. "Listen, Cabin Boy. If you took the shit, there would'n be anything left."
Henry looks back and sniffs. "One of you sign off back there? Cancel? Fold? Crash the material plane? Spew the spirit wad? Shed the old snake skins?" He lists dryly, feeling around for a cigarette that's never there.
"You're the one that's dead, soul chicken," comes the high pitch shriek of Caligula.
"You ever seen a chicken, Caligula? Me neither. I wish we had a chicken back here. Think of all the things we could do with a chicken," said Nero's muffled voice.
"I'm afraid a chicken wouldn't last very long back there."
What did I have to rely on, anyways? Talking car, talking rats? In a moments realization, the truth of my situation came crashing down on me. I had been running away from a reality that had already run away from itself. What do you do next? Suicide? I considered that quickly, but left it where I always do: in a past where the human animal had the luxury of doing itself in. There's too many other animals here very willing to do you the honor. As an old friend of mine once said, "There is always someone better to kill than yourself." That was back when there were presidents.
What follows is a little material from further on in the story that I'm splicing in. Look for it to get better as I find the pieces in my big box o messy papers.
"I'll tell you what I'm gonna do for you since you're friends with J and he vouches for you. As long as you don't do any psycho shit, you can hang out here and help us test exotic compounds all you like. You just have to pitch and go for supply runs and such. Just to prove I'm not some drug plutocrat, I'm gonna give you a pretty fine run. You dig acid, right."
"That's an understatement. I dine on it regularly."
"Okay. Here's a basic little number I call it the Rosy Cruxifiction." He handed me a square strip like a white adhesive bandage. It had a three dots forming a triangle on the top. I peeled off the backing and slap it on the inside of my upper arm near my armpit. "You'll get it, Nexus first-- mostly 2CB, relatively light headtripping. Then Sexus, MDMA analogue, take along a bottle of water. Then, the Plexus, acid and ketamine, make sure you're somewhere safe when this goes down-- at least seated. You're likely to not know where you are for awhile. The derm is cyclical, so you'll run through its effects a couple of times before it's through. The good thing is that if you get bored or disturbed, things are likely to change for you soon enough. I worked hard to get this orchestrated, so I hope you enjoy. It's pretty easy for this combo to turn into a big mess if you don't balance all the loads right. It shouldn't hit your body too hard, but the mind can get a little sloppy late in the game. Evie, who you met the other day said she'll hang with you."
So these people had this down to some kind of art. I was just used to chowing down whatever I could get my hands on without taking on all this harmonic load balancing or whatever. But I gotta admit, they must be doing something right, even if the shithead was treating me like some kind of noob.