Piece by Piece (Redux)
A re-do of a short story about a completely fictional business mogul/media magnate. (~900 Words.)
This appeared in its original form on July 10, 2023. You can read it here.
“Hard to look at him.”
The mogul was never an attractive man, but as it stood, Quartz’s partner was speaking literally. The penthouse living room was three-thousand square feet and the mogul’s remains were spread out over most of it. Experts though they were, it was hard to know where to start. They sighed and scratched their chin against the lining of the hazmat suit helmet. No time like the present.
Quartz powered up their vacuum unit and went to work. Sucking and steaming the gore out of every surface and every crevice and packing into the tank on their back. On an end table, a gore-encrusted LCD frame flickered at them, shifting through images of the mogul with pop stars and lifestyle gurus. Dead-eyed megarich whose only real interaction with the proles was in situations like this: clean-up. Quartz knocked the frame over getting a set of veneers out of the crevice of a real leather couch. The ultra wealthy stared at them no longer.
The mogul was a household name on earth. On the colonies, he was more than that. He was one of the great minds of the century— and with his blood transfusions and his biannual pituitary swaps, he was well on the way of being one in the next century, as well. Quartz knew him as a latter day corpo raider, a thugee in a puffer vest who had leveraged his daddy’s crypto fortune into Tech. Transpo. Flight. Logistics. Energy. Security. Immigration. Water rights. Mining rights. Sunlight rights. Quartz kept their thoughts on that to themselves. There was no percentage in it.
They found an eyeball and collected it into one of the gel packs. HQ and their legal scarabs could pick over it later.
After the mogul’s most recent and, to date, ugliest divorce, he swore off of human women entirely. Too temperamental, he said. His prophets-for-hire agreed. A trillionaire should do better than a mere mortal, no matter how connected. So he had one built, or, more accurately, bought. The product of a company he had absorbed months earlier, his next wife was a fully autonomous cybernetic organism. Reems of flesh and blood latticed over a hardened silicon core. Indistinguishable from a Real Human Girl, save for the constant reminders that it was his beautiful, brilliant mind that brought her to life. That perfection was something only he could afford.
Their marriage was livecasted across every network on earth. Even amongst his rivals in the cartels and in the East, it was huge news. On the colonies, it was compulsory. To behold the great man and his ultimate invention, his singularly worthy wife, was a privilege.
She went berserk three months to the day after the ceremony. She could have killed him instantly. Instead she took the better part of six hours. His fresh glands, with their redundancies kept him lucid as she fastidiously transformed him into human tartare. He might have ordered the units to stop, to let him pass out with dignity, had she not bitten off his tongue. Somebody was going to get fired for that oversight.
His sowars found her in situ laying the better part of his epidermis across a television playing AI-reconstruction of a 20th century children’s show. It took them fifty rounds of tungsten slugs to bring her down. She killed five of them, including the guard who accidentally blew the brains of their beloved boss out. It was all mixed together now. The severed limb of the guard pointed at the mogul’s large intestines, crammed into a glass sculpture. Spent shotgun shells mixed in with a pair of feet, smashed millimeter flat. The self-made widow crumpled in a heap, draped with a dampener, the slow drip of an organ above it, wedged into the ceiling fan. The part even less enticing in death as it was in life. By the time they were done, this would all be packed away in neatly labeled drums. From there, the techs would go to work sort it out, molecule by molecule, what was and was not the mogul.
Quartz read stories about assassinated leaders coming back for their fifth term or about soldiers on the Rim, violently spaced, resurrected to avenge themselves on their would-be killers. Maybe they could do with him. Reassemble him back into something resembling a human. Re-teach him to think and speak and bark commands. To marry again. To divorce again. Or they could just cremate him. Turn him into a diamond and shoot him off into the stars he so wanted to own. So long as you could pay for it.
Quartz changed attachments on the vacuum and moved on. Behind them, the blood-flecked picture frame flipped over to a picture of the mogul on a tropical island. His first wife had been cropped out, leaving only her hand with a younger version of the mogul, one with a real hairline, where his skin was the color of a human’s, and where his smile was real. It flipped to a group pic with a grip of celebrity groomers and professional tax evaders whose bodies were lost and scattered across a thousand hectares on the Sea of Tranquility. Dead and scattered over territory they could not buy back. Quartz worked away, the buzz of the machine in their ear as they slowly put the mogul back together, piece by piece.