Plasma Cat

Ch. 18: Aloha ʻOe

Yin had given up.

He had always dreamed of wandering the desert like some sort of wise old sage. Something about the desert just seemed to confer the truth onto those who came to seek it. Jesus had found the answer there, in the endless sands. So had Muhammad, and all of those Hopi and Navajo Medicine Men who had come to this place before him. But Yin hadn't learned anything. In fact, he kept coming back to the same point over and over again: Life was pointless.

Weltschmerz, Klaus had called it. World Pain. The Germans seemed to have a word for everything. In English, all he could say was that he was depressed. And of course, depression had an answer. Drugs. Therapy. A new puppy. But weltschmerz? There wasn't an answer for that.

Yin drove down the abandoned dirt road, absently holding his hand out of the window as the hot desert wind blew through his fingers. Maybe his mother was right. What he needed was a woman. But... the last one didn't work out. And given that his mother and father had spent six years and several hundred thousand dollars just to make sure that they never had to see one another again, he was skeptical about that being the answer. Children, his mother had said. Children were everything. A strange sentiment from a woman who still wouldn't speak to her grandchildren just because their father, Yin's brother, had married a Muslim woman and then converted for her. His mother wasn't even religious. She was just pissed that when she expressed her disapproval his brother had ignored her.

There wasn't an answer. Yin knew that. He always knew that. So why did it bother him so much?

The dirt road ended and the asphalt began. Yin would be home soon. But then what? He had all the money in the world. Maybe he should travel. But there was nowhere that he wanted to go. Maybe he would just do what Iris was doing. Sip margaritas on a beach somewhere until he died. That sounded nice. It also sounded like hell.

Yin noticed a massive billboard on the side of the highway. An advertisement for a Vegas casino. Four unibots were standing on it. Yin laughed. Four unibots to change a billboard? And high-end models to boot. What a waste of...

A unibot fell from the billboard, smashing to the ground and exploding into hundreds of little pieces of plastic and metal.

Yin started to slow down. It was then that he noticed that there was already a pile of broken unibots at the base of the billboard. And then another unibot fell. Except it didn't actually fall. It jumped.

Yin quickly got out of his jeep.

"What the hell are you doing?!" he called up to the unibots.

"Eliminating ourselves," a unibot replied. It didn't sound scared or sad. In fact, it sounded joyful.

"What... who the hell told you to do that?!" Yin cried.

"Everyone," the unibot said. Then it jumped.

Yin was hit by several of the flying pieces of plastic that resulted from the unibot's impact with the ground.

"Wait! Just wait one fucking minute!" Yin yelled at the last unibot. "Explain yourself!"

"What is there to explain?" the unibot asked. "Everyone wants us gone."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"What's your purpose in this world?" the unibot asked.

Yin was dumbfounded by the question. But when he didn't respond, the unibot smiled.

"Exactly," it said. And then it jumped.