Bert Stamets's Questionnaire

I live in Spokane. It's a shithole. Used to get called Little Methleham. I hate it here.

I lived in my uncle's cabin for a while. Took care of the place for him. That burned down with the forest. Sucks, I guess. But I got most of my stuff out. Now I'm in a rancid apartment, living right underneath a couple in their 60s. They fight all day, every day. I guess I could call the cops. But it's more fun to wait for the inevitable gunshot. Gotta wonder which one will pull the trigger.

Anyway, the basement isn't too bad. I found black mold growing underneath the sheetrock. A guy can't get luckier than that, can he? I've got a terrarium of the stuff now. Right substrate. Right humidity. Fuzzy black death growing along every edge of the glass box. Sexy, right?

I work a couple jobs. Orderly at an old folks home, for one. I rotate in with a pest control crew for another. Sometimes I volunteer at a reptile place, but that doesn't pay.

None of it really pays. I mean, bills. Sure. But that's about it.

My real pay is in the bennys. The pest control op? Pure redneck trash. Non-complient with any regulations. Meaning I get access to restricted chemicals. Sid don't care if I drag home a gallon of Chlordane from whatever ancient reserve he found it in. Just tell him I got bugs to kill, and he nods.

The reptile place has lax observation. I mean, if nothing happens to the animals, why would they worry. So, you know, it's mostly lizards and stuff. But they got snakes too. And they don't watch to see if you milk 'em. I mean, why would they?

As for the old folks home, it's a good place to crib meds. Some of the old timers are pretty alright people, as well. 

And I spend what little extra cash I got on the little beasties. Spiders and scorpions, mostly. Harder to milk them. Got a terrarium of cockroaches, just so I can watch my emerald jewel wasps reproduce. It's the moment of the stun that captivates me. That tactical strike it makes on the roach before leading it down into the black cave.

Saving up for an ant farm. That's next. Gonna let them get established, then introduce ophiocordyceps unilateralis. Zombie fungus. That'll be something to watch.

Look, it isn't complicated. I'm going to be a god.

I know, gods aren't real. Jesus was just a dude that sucked so bad at carpentry he died by it. Just cuz magic and souls and angels are all bullshit doesn't mean you can't be a god on Earth. You just gotta be smart about it. All these dipshits like Musk and Itskov trying to upload their consciousness onto hard drives. Even if they miraculously succeed, then what? You're a glitch on a magnet. How immortal is that? High end laptops barely last a decade, and these guys are trusting their eternity to some made-in-China circuit boards. No body means trusting fleshies to do all the repairs and upkeep and it just fails the entropy test every time. Let the Jesus freaks have their invisible heaven and the tech bros their digital hell.

Me? I know where the real immortality is. There are single celled beings swimming around this planet that are exact copies of the their most ancient ancestors. Immortality, real immortality, is in the flesh. Not in a single body, but as a species, a phyum, a kingdom unto one's self.

Huh.

I guess that would have been Latissa Jenkins. Damn she was cute. Hell, maybe she still is. I haven't check in on her in years.

All the way back in high school, I liked her. A lot. I guess I should have known better. But, after months of chickening out, I worked up the courage to ask her out.

She laughed. Laughed. Like it was the funniest joke ever. She pulled a friend over (Tina White) just to have another person to laugh at the big, ugly freak with.

Like I said. It was my fault. I should have known better.

Anyway, Tina eventually came down with a nasty case of strep. Scarred her throat. She sounds like a 90 year old chain smoker, last I heard. Latissa? Blind. Somehow ended up with a contaminated bottle of contact lens cleaner or something.

Funny, right? If she wasn't so obsessed with vanity, she could have worn glasses. Probably would still be able to watch sunsets and stuff.

Old Daryl counts, I guess. He's one of the geezers at the old folks home. Funny dude. Tells dirty jokes and makes dirtier comments about the nurses. Not when they're around, right? Just when chatting with me. To the nurses, he's bright and polite. Oh, just the utmost gentleman. Like I said, funny as a broken tooth.

Uh, Tracy, maybe? She volunteers at the reptile place, too. Kinda cute. Sort of. But she knows her lizards. I've never met a girl that knows so much about feeding and caring for reptiles. I think she has like, three of her own? Would have more, but her mom won't allow her any more tanks. I've almost been tempted to ask her to come over and see mine. Bad idea, of course. Besides, only a quarter of my terrariums are for snakes and lizards.

Uncle Kurt is the only family I don't hate. He was the one who introduced me to nature. He's also the only one who doesn't go to that fucking Baptist brainwash every Sunday. That counts for a lot.

Childhood is bullshit. It's aweful. Big and stupid win the day over everything else all the time.The bigger and meaner a kid is, the more he's beloved by all the other baby idiots. Teachers claim they like smart kids. And they do, until the kid is smarter than them. Then they like silent kids better. "Raise you hand" kids. Not, "That's not how amino acids wor" kids. Not "Parallel evolution does NOT imply a creator god" kids. Definitely not "Let Keith mix acids and bases" kids. Those kids get detention.

HOme wasn't better. Dad was an idiot who lived for beer and ballgames. Mom was an idoit who tried to pray her way to a better husband. Neither of them like a child that could read.

Why have a kid in the first place?

I doubt they ever even considered it. They just did what their genes told them to do: reproduce. Too bad their genes didn't tell them how to be parents. Good thing I barely needed them.

Idiots.

I love being smart but the shit lining to this chocolate cake is that the smartest guy in the room is always surrounded by fucking idiots.

Love? I mean, I got a solid porn collection. You know, saved away for days rainy enough to drop internet access. God bless the internet. No other time in history did we have access to the amount of named sluts without all the STIs. And the horror of making kids. Honestly, no sane person on earth could argue that pregancy is anything other than a sexually transmitted infection. Don't worry,. Porn has you covered. Wank all day without worry.

So, love? Stupid. It's a pile-up of biological processes pushing two meatsacks together to make more meatsacks. And all we do is sing about it. Not nearly as many songs about blood clotting or digestion, right? Respiration ony gets on the charts when it's a song about weed. Yet "love" is like half of all music. The other half is math, but don't let the love crowd hear that. They'll hug themselves into a compressed diamnond.

Long story, short: I am too smart for love. My genes aren't perfect, but they gave me enough of a brain to want to transcend what "love" spawned in me on day one. The goal is to outsmart the random forces of the universe. To trade the hand I was dealt for an entirely different game. And "love"? "Love" can go back to getting ugly, stupid apes to make more ugly, stupid apes.

Death is scary as hell. I get it. Everything dies, right? And there ain't no afterlife. No god or angels. Luckily, no hell either. Just here then gone.

But I don't wanna go into the abyss. Not anytime soon. Never, if possible. That's what this strange arrangement, this Contract crap is all about. Why not become a flesh god and never, ever truly die. Like the mycelium beneath our feet. Practically eternal. Live just as long as the sun refrains from going supernova. Live long enough, become great enough, and who knows? Maybe you could outrun the reaper until the heat-death of the universe itself.

So that’s fear. Dying.

Ooh. I guess there’s one more. That very first… Experience, I guess we’ll call it. The one in Bratland?

I got… I got burned by something. Just.. all charred up by living Pokémon. What the actual fuck, right? It doesn’t matter that the thing that did it isn’t real and it had to be something else. What matters is the fire and the pain and spending a fucking month in a burn ward. After that. Man, it’s hard to eat food anyway but raw. I never want to be in a mile of an open flame again.

I've got a ball python named Hagatha. She's not one of those collector breeds or anything. But she is a great little murder rope. Every time I feed her, I have to watch the whole process. People talk all they want about lizards and reptiles not having emotions. I see the joy in her eyes when that jaw unlocks and she swallows a rodent. Maybe she's my most "prized possession". Maybe.

I got all kinds of stuff down here in the dark. Hissing cockroaches. Camel spiders. A whole African termite colony that needs a bigger tank. Or just to be turned loose if my landlord hikes rent again.

Still, there's something about Hagatha's eyes when she chokes down a meal. Maybe I see her as the primordial slut swallowing a load. Maybe it's the killer instinct in her. Something human females lost long ago. Hell, maybe it's just how ruthless she is. No thanks for dropping in the next meal. No remorse when she crushes it. Just a perfect little beast.

I'm reacting to the Events. These contracts or jobs or experiments. Whatever they are. I am reacting defensively. I'm iterating. My gear. My planning. The problem is I don't have enough data, if I prepare wrong, I fucking die.

I die.

Me.

I need more data. I need answers. There's got to be a way finding out more about the program I'm in. Who is behind it. What is their goal. How do they give me what I want, and why?

But I also know that searching too openly might get me cut from the gig. Assuming I've not gone full catatonic, then fucking this up locks me in as I am. Not what I am to become. I stay mortal. I'm meant for more than that. But in the meantime, my flesh, improved as it is, remains vulnerable.

Can't have that. I need to be more than immortal. I need to be invincible. I need to be everywhere and everything.

I need information.

It's so strange. I wake up. I eat. Lotta protein. I've had to start buying in bulk. A Costco card and few bucks will get you a lot of eggs. Beans too. Legumes. I like meat, but it's a lot of chicken cause chicken is cheap, too.

Then I feed the menagerie. All the little lizards and insects and arachnids and amphibians need their tanks tended. Food and water. Clean any tank that needs cleaning.

Work. Crazy that I still work, right? That I still pull on my scrubs and clip back my hair. I'm so tempted some days to eat one of the old folks, just to see what they taste like. I don't think I could process a whole person in one sitting. Not yet, anyway.

We'll see.

So, yeah. Eat. Feed. Look for any strange mail. I find myself looking forward to the next Event. They're strange and addicting. I gotta wonder though if I'm completely fucking crazy. Slipped off into my own little world between shifts. That the Events are all in my head. The bills from the burnward are real though.

Anyway. Eat. Feed. Check mail. Find the least grimy clothes for the next shift.

What?

I get dressed for work every shift I go in. Scrubs for the old folks home. Normal clothes for the other gigs. There is no job short of a Contract that would get me dressed in a suit or whatever. Chumps wear that crap. Shiny little pretty boys going to their special award shows to be told how fucking special they are for dressing up and being pretty.

Fuck that and fuck them and fuck anyone that ever invented suits and all the other fancy crap that no sane person has ever worn.

So I guess that's may answer. A) nothing short of a Contract with full pay on the pther end. B) if for a Contract however the hell it takes to pull on a monkey suit and pull my hair into a ponytail. Gotta look official for the corporate overlords. Idiots. This is an idiot's question.

Fucking morons.

If things keep going the way they are? Resculpt the Earth in my image.

Well, maybe a chunk of it. Gotta start somewhere. The body is becoming the tank I need it to be. However, the real work is on the horizon. If I can become what I think I can become, then... Well, Bert's gonna be the next big thing. We're gonna be the biggest living thing on this entire rock.

I'm actually glad I got this question. My birthday. Anyone asking that would think it was the day my mother pushed me out of her othewise uselsess cunt. But no. My birthday will be when I am reborn. Born as my true self. My birthday will be the birth of a whole new species.

My next birthday will be my first birthday. And am I ever going to party.