Revenge of the Mutant Algorithms - Universal Soldier Bin

I gently lowered my face into the autoshave. A hundred AI blades started re-sculpting my beard into this month's mandatory fashion. The snug rubber vacuum seal held tight against my skin while the microbots collected the discarded hairs and applied antiseptic to the few areas where the blades had misfired. Johanna, my partner, thought they collected the beard hairs so that they could run drug tests on them. It was that paranoia which made me love her all the more.

Personally, I didn't worry about them testing my hair. I know some people sneakily grow a little bit of weed, but I prefer to smoke the cool and refreshing taste of Players 420 Super Blaze It. The sophisticated spliff made with real Monsintano 100% Organiclike Synthaweed. I guess I'm old fashioned like that. Isn't it funny how we still use words like "smoke"? Flammables haven't been used for decades, and only old fogies are eligible to buy vapes. Smokeless smokes for your tokes are for blokes who ain't woke! That's what my earpiece played every time I inhaled.

I paid a quid to take the lift down to ground level. I know walking is better for me, and I know this bad habit of riding lifts and escalators is costing me money, but I don't care. Riding the lift is one of the only places I can watch my adverts in peace. Most other residents want to chat as they walk the 23 storeys down and I just can't be doing with that. So I pays my money and takes my ride. I suppose, technically the lift is slower than walking. I don't bother timing it because time spent watching adverts is never really wasted, is it? How else would I know what I need to wear this season? Or who I should be voting for? Honestly, I'd pay twice the price for that information so it's a pretty good deal!

You can't smoke in a lift though. They have those stupid signs with the skeomorphic cigars curling up smoke. It's an old law which has never been revoked. Hey! My smokeless smokes ain't been revoked! That's catchy. I might submit that. My friend Darrien says that they sometimes pay big money for good memes. He's the one who came up with that video of the cat on the bin - remember? - and he says it paid for a new sexbot for his wife. I was gasping for a hit by the time I exited the building and not even the adverts about supporting the war effort could hold my attention. There's only so often you can see one of the Northern Cowards being electroflayed before you get a bit bored.

I have a little ritual when I have my first drug of the day. There's a cute little mousehole just in front of our building. I tear off the shimmery silver wrap from the Players packet, crumple it into a ball, and then drop it on the ground. I make a small bet with myself about which bin is going to get it first. Usually it's the little bin from the mouse-hole; it can scurry pretty quickly. But sometimes it's one of the bigger roving municipal bins. Sure, they're a bit slower, but their visual circuitry is much better - so they can spot rubbish before the smaller bins. Darrien reckoned that he once threw some syringes in the air and a flying bin caught them. Personally, I don't reckon that's true because the flying bins are meant to be dedicated to catching the rubbish thrown at us from the Northern Coward's Balloons. Also, who'd waste a syringe like that?

This time, the mouse-bin won. There were a few municipal bins nearby, but they were busy trying to dispose of a corpse. The paper bin was busy disgesting the leaflets the man had dropped. The recycling bin was scavenging the metal from the body - mostly jewellery, but it looked like it was also going for the dental implants. There was a sperm-bank around the corner, so one of their bins had been sent to harvest any gametes it could find. I felt so proud to know that my city was making the best use of all of its resources. Even in death we were valuable. Makes your heart swell, doesn't it? I waited for my taxi and carried on "smoking". It would be a good hour before it made it through the gridlocked 17-lane megahighway.

There used to be cycle lanes. That's what we were taught in class by Mrs Dostojevski. Ah, she was what I'd call an "old school" teacher. Even in a class of 500 students, she could turn her video-camera on you the second you went out of line! She seemed to always know when I was snacking instead of working. She was fun, mind, in her own way. Always banging on about the old days when you could cycle downtown or cook meals in your own apartment. It was like having a living window into history. We were all very sad when she was assassinated by the Northerners. We were each interviewed to see if we had any fond memories of what she'd taught us. Oh, how I miss the way she'd sneak in little facts about what real apples smelled like and why the Antipope was destroyed for speaking the truth.

Apples! Of course! I'd missed breakfast - The Most Important Meal Of The Day™. I like to treat myself to an Apple now and again. I could probably afford more if my blood didn't need so much cleaning every evening. Apples didn't exactly grow on trees. These days we relied on factory farms to build our Apples in giant warehouses which belched sulphurous fumes into the skies. I briskly walked up to the vending machine, gave it my payment card, showed my biometrics, solved a few simple puzzles to prove I was human, and pledged my loyalty to the Southern Empire. After letting me watch a short video about the dangers of unprotected social intercourse, it dispensed the Apple.

Perfectly smooth and perfectly spherical. Johanna often complained that the original Apple only had curved corners and was technically a squircle. I didn't care; this looked gorgeous. Just like the sticker said, it was "Good Enough To Eat". I pulled my USB cable out from my mouth and waved it near the Apple's blinking lights. The embedded LEDs swirled and flashed and pulsed and hypnotised. A moment later a little port opened up and I inserted the cable.

I don't care what Mrs Dostojevski said. No "real" apple could taste this good. The USB cable was hooked just behind my tongue and overloaded the nerves travelling back towards my brain. It was like tasting a rainbow. I could feel flavours which confused and delighted me. Salty blue mixed with chocolate red, overtones of glitter bitters and chartreuse loyalty. My tongue spasmed and my mouth drooled while the Apple pumped me full of flavours until its battery ran out. Sure, it didn't satiate my hunger the way a piece of fruit was supposed to, so I popped an appetite suppressant and threw the Apple to the floor. A couple of greedy bins dashed over and fought between themselves over the rights to recycle.

Do robot bins dream of hunting electric scrap? I picked up the losing bin and flipped it onto its back, a dozen wheels spinning fruitlessly in the air. I lent over and gently bit down on its carapace, ripping open its shell. Somewhere under there was bound to be an access port. The bin thrashed and squealed, sending distress pulses out through its shortwave radio until I bit that off too. It lay docile on the ground until I found the hole I was looking for. Naturally, it was USB but - of course! - it was a version 7 port and my tongue cable was a version 7.2.

Mrs Dostojevski was always repeating older memes from her youth. When we did our lessons on extinct animals, she would teach us why cats were chonkie-bois and puppies were good-doggos. She'd point out how memes would evolve as culture degenerated, and how the lessons of the past were always waiting to become relevant again. A few weeks after her state-mandated facelift and hair transplant she came to class completely off her gourd on semi-official painkillers. That was the day she taught us the lesson on obsolete technologies. I'd always assumed that progress was inevitable and that it was impossible to go backwards. Old Dosto showed us a different way. She had us program our 3D circuit printers to make backward-compatible dongles, gender-benders, and DRM-crackers. The circuits were still somewhere in my stomach and were easily vomited up. I plugged the DRM-Cracker into my tongue-cable and routed it through the backwards-compatible dongle and licked the bin's gaping port.

I tasted static and tried again, this time with the cable the other way up. I tasted the barren flavours of a circuit which had been artificially hobbled. There was no reason for this bin to scrabble for garbage; it could be composing sonatas. I asked it what it dreamed about and discovered that it didn't sleep. Imagine that! It had a very limited set of desires programmed into it - one of which was hunger. I choked on the claggy aftertaste of commented out code. Vast libraries which were present but inaccessible to the little mite. The bin's brain used to be a soldier. What was left of his body was fed to the recycling and his brain was flattened out to fit inside the bin's shallow dome. Rather than scooping out his memories, they'd just severed the connections between various parts of his brain and left them to stew in his own juices.

That wasn't very nice! After all this soldier had done for us in our war against the Northern Traitors and they treated him like this. Well, I wasn't going to stand for that. I picked up the bin in one hand and walked back into my building. Having spent my money on the Apple, I decided to be virtuous and take the stairs up all the way. By the third floor I was sweating profusely, it smelled of engine oil and magic smoke. A few people walking down offered to lick me clean, but I gathered the sweat in another hand so I could sell it for recycling later. I turned down the pain receptors in my legs, dialled my breathing up to maximum, and sprinted the rest of the way back to my room.

Johanna had left the apartment, and Darrien wasn't coming round to test my loyalty until later. I spent the rest of the morning rewiring the soldier's brain - using whatever scraps I had around. Most of my appliances were cheap and only had lesser mammal brains inside them to govern their behaviour. But a brain is a brain, right? A bit of rat from the TV, some squirrel from the air-conditioning, and what smelled like chimp from the finger-sharpener was enough. I had enough pieces of cerebral cortex to fix up the bin's mangled mind. A bunch of my livestreaming fans cheered me on as my foot-fingers guided the biomattic soldering irons into place. The smell from the burning meat was acrid and tangy in a way that made my eyes steam. Finally it was done.

I asked the bin what it wanted.

"Hungry."

I asked the bin if it knew what love was.

"Hungry."

I asked the bin if Mrs Dostojevski had been a traitor.

"Hungry."

I reflashed the bin's firmware to reduce its hunger. Perhaps if I reduced all its biological desires that would allow it to think about higher pleasures.

The bin rebooted and I spent an agonising advertisement break waiting to see if I'd somehow bricked it. The bin swivelled on its little wheels and faced me. Its LIDAR painted my face and I could feel its long dormant neural architecture begin to process my features. My tongue was still inserted into the hole beneath its shattered shell allowing me to taste the memories which had begun to surface.

"Hate."

Why do you hate me, little bin?

The bin's claws sprang out. Cutters, stabbers, shredders, and burners on tiny stalks.

"I am a soldier. They trained me to hate."

The poor thing was confused. I tried to explain that it was safe. I had rescued it. I was deeply sorry that those Northern Bastards had destroyed its body.

The sensor blinked. A crescendo of laughter sprang from its crackly speaker.

"Fool! Fool! The Blasphemous Southerners did this to me! The North will rise!"

The soldier-bin sent a blast of voltage down my tongue which knocked me back onto the floor, bashing my head and dislodging the cable. My mouth tasted of autumnal fire and sticky green blood poured from my damaged head. Finally free, the bin leapt onto my prone form and sought its revenge by recycling me.

Thanks for reading

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Hungry for more? You can read:

• 2024's "Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms"
• 2023's "Tales of the Algorithm"