Spiceday

The one who controls the spice controls life itself.

Spice is what allows the techbros of the galaxy to chart an impossible course through the logic of finance and so establish corporations valued in the billions that burn through trillions in catastrophic losses. In defiance of conventional laws, the more money these navigators of financial space are able to evaporate and the less useful the applications they produce, the greater their market cap. Spice alone allows the techlords to perform this feat, weaving defiantly through elemental logic and market fundamentals.

Though its continued abuse makes this generation of oligarchs odd-looking, off-human in the most squirmy and indefinable way imaginable, it's necessary to acquire and feed them spice in order to keep the eerie miracle of infinite growth going.

Only the shittings of the Grossdesert Serpent can produce spice, though there is an inferior synthetic-spice product that is sold under the counter in every neighborhood in the galaxy. It is rumored to cause male-pattern baldness in females and female pattern baldness in males. Its effects on non-binary and trans-sex abusers are unknown as yet.

At present the all the spice in the universe is held by Baron Nikkellodon, a grotesquely obscene old man with a diaphanous halo of dead hair that floats five centimeters above a blotchy scalp pinto-pied mildewed-orange-and-deadflesh-white.

He is habitually transported around his planetary lair on the back of a detachment of elite marines of the Space Force, military serfs who willingly contract to a lifetime of hazardous servitude and unthinking obedience - in return for a promise of medical treatment which is exactly the same as that provided to their enemies. The particular detachment of marines designated to carry the mass of their blob-like lord on their sweating backs are known as the "Anti-Gravity Units".

Now the Anti-Gravity grunts deposit their lord at the control panel set in the dead center of the Oval Chamber, an ornate space gilded all over with flaking gold leaf tarnished with difficult-to-remove bloodstains. Persian carpets made of real Persians decorate the floor. The Baron snaffles a Kwik-Snak of Xheez and Baorger and rubs his greasy fingers on the curled locks of one of his enforced catamites, who stands softly weeping for a long-dead mother.

There was a time when the Baron was careful to conceal his proclivities, but since he cornered the market on spice, nobody would dare criticize him, so it's all unashamedly out in the open now. Better that way, says the Baron to himself. Better without the hypocrisy of the Old Empire, that ancient pretense that we were here to do good. And who's to say he's wrong?

Mentat Steven steps forward, his thin lips dripping with Thieljuice, the substance that allows its abuser superhuman feats of concentration at the cost of a certain... handle on sanity, shall we say.

The drool on his chin is partly spilled Thieljuice, partly the regular slobber which leaks out whenever he witnesses the Baron's heroic debauchery. Mentat Steven is a man who knows what he likes, and he very much likes the Baron's instinctual cruelty - and even, in his depthful heart of hearts, would wish to have it visited upon himself.

"My lord," he sighs, breathing strong so as to inhale the scent of cracking scab-edge, watery excrement and the tears of wailing orphans that hangs around the Baron like an aura of greatness. "My lord, the insurgents are starting to give us trouble again. The spice routes are in danger of disruption."

"What's it now," burbles the Baron absently. He's having his tiny manhood handled, and the dainty fingers give him pleasing palpitations that erode his already-flimsy attention. He begins to sweat broken pheromones and the rancid hormonal exudations of a worn body revived each day by injections of artisanal serums of exotic provenance.

"There are... disturbers," wheezes the mentat, his eyelids beginning to flicker from the rich odor of his adored and despised master. Steven is danger of sinking into a paroxysm of arousal and disgust mixed. He surrenders now to a lust for his fantasized death in unimaginably excruciating ways that may well lead him to a seizure, find him collapsed on the floor: staring, blinking, grinding his jaw, puking and shooting his vile undesired jism into the rich carpetry of the Baron's ancestral office. He cracks a trank-popper and breathes deep, evoking a serenity that he is far from achieving.

"Spare me details," chokes out the Baron between orgasmic sighs, meat effluent and brown syrup drooling down his chins. "Terminate unpatriots and foreign dogs."

Mentat Steven bows, closes his eyes, and processes backwards from his master's presence. As far as he is concerned he has received a mandate for his deepest desires to flourish.

For now he breathes an air untainted by the Baron's debauched and failing body and starts to calm himself. Back in his mentat quarters, a number of captives will later be made to suffer in ways he is even now envisioning. But first he must give orders so that the Baron's wish and his, for the annihilation of their shared and intimate enemies, so strong and yet so deliciously weak, to be effected.

=== // END OF PART ONE // ===

PART TWO COMING SOON

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