The Gunch

 

Chris Tannhauser

 

 

I ~ Changing lives.

 

As the armored limo crawled into the nighttime trailer park on autopilot—each glowing hovel a temple to desperation nimbused in trash—the Gunch asked to be let out of the trunk to walk the route.  He told it no, and told the escort in the superfluous evening gown not to worry.  “I’ve been here before,” he said, “and I’ll be here again.  They’re always happy to see me.”

 

He left the armored limo for the warm night air, into the orange buzz and dangling wires of lights on tilted poles, each one an undulating insect-cloud lollipop.  The happy one this time was another girl, rising from a cracked plastic picnic table in a sweep of just-right hormones, distorted tank top and short shorts shouting the promise of big, healthy babies—and her face, that essential organ of humanity, the reflecting pool of the soul—her face was curled with the spirals of the Golden Ratio, 237 precise data points, the perfect dance of glabella, ereborum, philtrum, mentolabial sulcus, the Smith-Creston Line, etc., etc.  This was a face women would emulate and men would brawl for, a face that would pad both their bank accounts.  She was an absolute outlier here, perfectly positioned for life-changing commerce.

 

He popped the trunk remotely and the Gunch unfolded all eight feet of itself in sinuate blue steel curves and neon tubing, vaguely man-shaped, with a thick, ribbed neck ending in a lamprey’s mouth—a wide ring of molecular teeth burring around a seeking, pulsing disk of rainbow light.  It approached the girl with eerie mechanical grace, its stride as easy as an Olympian, feathers of liquid nitrogen enrobing its otherworldly form.

 

“Will this—?” the question died as the Gunch gently took her shoulders in padded Mickey Mouse hands, bending down to meet her wide-eyed gaze, her angelic countenance glorious in the glitterrays of the hypno disk, the color wheel spinning deep in its whirring mouth.  She went under almost instantaneously, the same moment the thing struck like an ambush predator, a blink, really, faster than pain, that bit off her face and craniofacial bones to the brain and gaping nasopharynx, her tongue a dangling exclamation point over the lack of jaw.  Without the loss of a single drop of blood, her missing face was swapped for a porcelain doll’s dinner plate, complete with vocoder and tearless compound eyes, punched into place with a definitive chunk.  The Gunch swallowed, carefully shifting the treasure to its refrigerated chest.

 

“I—I feel... amazing,” she crackled in a voice that wasn’t hers, but nonetheless focus-grouped as “relatively pleasing”, slurred by the wave of drugs just now crashing over the stone of her brain.

 

Her phone chirruped in her pocket.

 

“The money’s in your account,” he said.  “This interaction is concluded.”  He pivoted and walked back to the armored limo where the Gunch folded itself into the trunk while he slid across cool leather into perfumed air, ears popping slightly as the foot-thick door twisted itself shut.

 

“What was that all about?” asked the escort.

 

“Everybody does what they’re paid for,” he said, guiding her head into his lap.

 

When he was done, he ran the back of his fingers over the soft heat of her cheek.  “You’re so pretty,” he said.

 

 

II ~ Possible side effects.

 

Beautiful rich people, it turns out, don’t always make beautiful babies—the genetic do-si-do is rife with clumsy stumbling, though even the worst dancers can occasionally slide with grace, if only for a moment before kissing the floor.  In a weird reciprocity, sometimes ugly people made a stunner.  A Venus from sea foam.

 

So, what to do?  Plastic surgery meant that it wasn’t so much your mom that made your dad blow his load, but the surgeon’s sinuous scalpel lines, making the ugly horrific with gaping flaps of raw-sided flesh, then Frankenstitching the whole shebang back up into a scrotum-tingling shape over old bones. Denude what’s left, paint the dodgier bits in the optical illusion of makeup, drape it in hasty couture, and most ape-brained billionaires will see the unplanted field of fourth-wife.  Not initially, of course; third-wife hasn’t been cleared out yet, and we’re only just now in the bathroom pants-down/skirt-up. You don’t get a mom and dad duo until after lawyers.

 

And the stuff that comes in pills and cans? Nu-Ü™, Rejovial™, and Slinkshifter™?  They were likewise less-than, for it turns out that beauty actually is more than skin deep—you need the underlying structures, in situ, intact.  And so, the Gunch.

 

Beautiful poor people would always sell, and the ugly rich were always buying.  The difference between what one would accept and the other would pay was where he lived.  And that difference was very large indeed.

 

As the armored limo pulled up to the red carpet he could see satisfied customers in the straining crowd—prosthetic faces as still as stones glinting in the lights, and yet others entering the luxe venue whom he knew (but would never tell), their faces just as bright but lit from within by genuine human emotion—smiles, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes.  There wasn’t an ugly person for miles.

 

Before he could cycle the door, the Gunch demanded to be loosed—the thing about the Laws of Robotics is that if you substitute the generic “human” for a very specific one, the machine becomes much, much more useful.  This was, the Gunch informed him, a complex security environment that required a robust threat-mitigation posture.  He acquiesced, and the Gunch prolapsed out of the trunk to gasps and applause.  The attention of the crowd shifted and the Gunch took note of exactly everyone who wasn’t watching.

 

He stepped out into the lights and crowd cacophony, waved and posed, shook a few milk-drinker’s hands, turned and began to walk the carpet—

 

She was saying something as she pulled the pin and the spoon twanged into the night—croaking it with a staticky vocodor clearly on the fritz.  The Gunch palmed her head and folded her in half over the grenade, landing in a superhero pose on one knee, the other arm flared for emphasis, so it went off with a wet WHAP that left a Gunch-shaped gore-shadow precisely where he was standing.

 

This is the third one this year, he thought as he stepped around the mess.  I really need to get someone to tweak the feeds and flatten all this stupid rage into simple despair.

 

 

III ~ Something like justice.

 

And so it was for the march of many, many decades, where mundane maladies like cancer and dementia were turned aside by money like an urchin’s stick before a fencing master.  Assassins rose and fell.  Lives were bought, sold, and spent.

 

The goal of standing on the pyramid of bodies was to reach heaven’s backdoor, to pop the seal and grip the threshold and haul oneself through into immortality—but in the end this was a Death universe, with entropy the only reliable principle, the slowly attenuating echo of the single-note dirge of the Big Bang.  Here, Death’s grip slipped but reluctantly, and only for maximum comedic effect.

 

So the very few spent their trillions on capital-f Forever—but it turned out uploading your consciousness into machines just made insane copies that were little more than brief entertainments, while genetic remedies essentially did the same, only with more screaming and poop murals.

 

This is the part where you get ready for the ending, the ironic twist where through some comic-horror miscalculation the Gunch takes his face, or his blood-slick hands slip on the ladder of ascension and he falls so long and far that he passes the starting point like an anvil in a suit coat, flash-fluttering into a deep, obliterating obscurity...

 

But that’s not what happened. What happened was he continued to profit from misery, going to the places his paymasters dared not go, and dangling the carrot of the short-term before the shortsighted, making careful investments, sending his kids to the best schools, and so on and so forth until they could afford to pay a younger version of himself to reap the desperate for perfection.  His kids were rich and beautiful. 

 

On his deathbed he looked back at the things he had done and felt nothing particularly troublesome at all. 

 

 

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