Sold Under Sin

Fandom: Transmetropolitan
Written for: numinicious in the Yuletide 2008 Challenge
by kangeiko

Many thanks to athena25 and hadeschild for an awesome beta.

Regular readers of my column will know that I have the same regard for my Editor as I do for the syphilitic geriatric necrophile who last month became convinced that my leg was the reconstituted corpse of his favourite porno star. But, credit where credit's due, the blood-sucking whorehopper does come through occasionally. Last week, THE WORD received an inquiry from Lizard Brothers, one of the sickeningly successful investment banks who were busily sucking the Beast's pus-ridden cock until the market decided to fuck them repeatedly up the ass. It seems that the representatives of the eminent Messers Lizard and Lizard are unhappy with the negative media coverage of their state-sponsored bailout. Let us all join in a moment of silence over making billionaires with stables of pigtailed showgirls cry into their bowls of baby seal eyes. I'm sure my readership is shedding their own tears as they read this.

In response to the alleged bias against their blatant recession-profiteering, they have offered THE WORD a substantial 'donation' in return for a column on the fucked-up state of the economy - written by yours truly.

When he was done pissing himself laughing, my Editor took their money and informed them that he had no control over what I chose to care about or jack off over, but I would doubtless have something to say about the giant clusterfuck passing for an economy that the Beast has shat on our doorstep, and they should sit tight until then. He may have recommended holding their breath. So, a mere week later, here's a column on that very subject, a fact which should make Mr Lizard and Mr Lizard (one a bank chairman, the other a semi-professional octopus fiddler) very happy indeed. Brainless minions: you can breathe out now.

As our economy increasingly resembles the end result of a vomitorium orgy attending by dyspeptic Nazi sex midgets and their gimps, I am not the only one stocking up on cut-price essentials and setting fire to all be-suited passers-by. The credit crunch has hit New America, and everyone is so busy shitting themselves that they're even forgetting to over-charge on car parking and shove cactus sticks up their ass. Public service workers - all three of them - are binning the last remnants of the pathetic scraps laughingly labelled 'state pensions' and investing their money in cast-iron stock like dolphin-shaped dildos and the "Sex Muppets". The entire economy might disintegrate; the Financial District might be cannibalised by Rederedeconstructionists and postal workers, but you can bet your pasty, semi-virginal ass that the "Sex Muppets" will carry on.

My Filthy Assistants have been making themselves useful. They spent yesterday converting a sizeable chunk of the cash in my account - a welcome advance from THE WORD that my Editor is now trying to claw back, the tight-fisted bastard - into hard currency. That's guns and pornography for those of you not up to speed. No one ever went hungry if they had enough jacking material and a harpoon gun lashed to their balcony railing.

Given that I now have a pornography collection to rival that of the most dedicated dog-fucking connoisseur, I am feeling reasonably secure. Of course, not everyone is as crunch-proof as I am. Some people have hardly any pornography at all, which must be in violation of a human right or two. (Add it to the list).

Redchurch is one of the places hardest hit by the downturn. The population there is primarily young and impoverished; producing much of the underground art circulating the City and supplying most of the specialist brothels. Kids born in Redchurch have a small chance of scraping a living as an artist supplying the touristfeeds by day and doing freelance graffiti and living performance art at night.

For those that don't make it, or who don't want to stand on beribboned knives for an illiterate travel-phobic family in Houston, there will always be plenty of jobs in the pay-as-you-go brothels littering the Redchurch streets. Their clientele isn't the refined sort filtering through the gilded doors of La Cochon, where elegantly dressed City denizens, bailout cash bloating their pockets, can fuck their meal before dinner. The menu at La Cochon is extensive, ranging from the commonplace chicken, through to hedgehogs (for those who like a challenge) and brain-dead humans from the local pigfarm (for those who don't). Nothing like having a big mouthful of pigstick right off your fuckee's thigh, apparently. The Beast's Chief of Staff is a regular visitor.

Pay-as-you-go brothels are different. If you work 18 hours scraping shit and semen from the City sidewalks, you don't want to spend an hour fucking yourself into exhaustion. Instead, you want to get your rocks off as quickly - and cheaply - as possible. PAYG hookers are available for hire by the minute. It's the perfect place for those plagued by overwork, or premature ejaculation. Of course, the hookers end up working through 40 - 50 customers a day instead of the customary dozen or so, which doesn't help their elasticity or hygiene. But if you want to fuck a loose, gaping hole riddled with sores and stewing in the spunk of the guy who shot his load into it less than five minutes before, go right ahead and join the queue. Business in these places is booming, and it's not just the minimum wage workers who are now frequenting them. A new sport is becoming popular among the rich sons of the City elite: speed-fucking. Go to one of these brothels and see how many prostitutes you can work your way through in an hour. That's an entire hour of scraping off the previous guy's deposits, sticking your dick in, squirting your load as quickly as possible, trying to avoid contact with the worst sores, then going on to the next whore. I suppose it makes a change from balancing stray cats on the end of your dick.

One guy actually managed to break his penis doing this: a contender for a Darwin award if there ever was one. He gave a particularly enthusiastic heave-ho to the 18-year-old prostitute he was buggering, and his festering little pecker snapped in two. He nearly died from shock before the medics got to him. They couldn't treat the girl whose rectum he'd ruptured in his hurry, though: she didn't have insurance.

Still, as bad as those kids have it, there are worse fates in Redchurch. Those fucked up and used up, who are fired from the brothels or avoid them to begin with, turn to the pawnbrokers to get money for frivolities such as food and shelter. Not having anything of value to pawn except themselves, they quickly agree to the cryo-pawn terms and hand over a kidney. If they can scrape together enough at the end of the month, they try to claim it back. Those that can't meet the repayment fees - set at a shit-your-pants rate of 75% - can wave goodbye to that kidney and start thinking about pawning off a lung.

A few of the smart ones are dealing with the organ harvesters directly and selling off all spare and replaceable parts. Lewis is a Redchurch veteran who sells half of his liver every couple of years. He lets it grow back and abuses it with cheap whiskey for a few months before selling it on. In the months in between surgeries, he makes ends meet by flogging his blood and semen on the open market. Blood donor centres and IVF clinics pay big money for quality merchandise. Shit-for-blood and semen the consistency of porridge goes for considerably less. But is it enough to live on?

"Fuck, no," he says, chewing on a pig stick. "But you can always sell bone marrow or anything else you don't need in a pinch." Lewis has two stumps for legs and is sat on a skateboard outside the gates of a plush private school. He has a big Doberman half-asleep next to him and a sign saying, WILL FELLATE DOG FOR DRUGS. The dog looks very satisfied.

*

So the brothels and the organ banks are making a killing (sometimes literally) out of the recession, due to Middle America's never-ending search for the youngest-looking ass or the most intense orgasm. Sometimes all at the same time. One of these days someone is going to go the whole hog and lengthen his Botox penile implants enough to fuck himself in the ass and get stuck like that. Don't say your mother didn't warn you.

You know who else is doing well out of having the ambient levels of misery racketing up? Religions. People - and I am including the brain-dead, zombie-stare middle classes jacking off lazily in front of "Sex on Sesame Street" here - are 70% more likely to join or form a religion when the economy is contracting. Losing shitloads of money apparently fills you with a yearning for contact with the divine - for which glorious experience any second-rate church, sect or god-for-hire can charge the drug-addled masses what little money they have left, and get them to hand over their pre-pubescent kids while they're about it. Membership of the Church of Universal Lust - which preaches that you should fuck anyone or anything you want to, and supports the Right Love (perverts unite) movement - has shot up more than 60% in the last month. Having your government screw you evidently makes you more likely to bend over and open wide. Who knew?

Not all the religions are out to stick a dick in you, of course. The Divine Castration Movement tells us that lust is the cause of the impending recession, and the only way to survive is to donate your gonads to God. Quite what chopping off my man-juice bags has to do with the share price of shampoo manufacturers is beyond me. Over in Angel 8, Fred Christ's Convent of Our Lady of the Little Death never had any money to begin with, even with Fred himself whoring out all the community's pre-teens to those looking for a cheap Transient thrill. With all the extra competition from the PAYG brothels, Fred's had to cut prices cross the board. Everyone's feeling the pinch.

*

Well, almost everyone. The Chairman of Lizard Brothers looked suspiciously calm when my Filthy Assistants and I paid him a visit yesterday. You'd think that a man who has run his company into the ground only to have it bailed out by the government (cutting spending in such un-needed areas as infant healthcare and nutrition) would either look stressed, or drugged. Well, you'd be right: Mr Lizard, MBA, Chairman and co-founder of Lizard Brothers was off his face when I walked in on him yesterday to stage an impromptu interview session for this column. I was bleeding a little from where I had head-butted the security werebitch who tried to chew through my testicles. Needless to say, she wasn't successful, for I have super-testicular strength in my manly balls not found in other men. That, plus Channon, Filthy Assistant, kung fu bodyguard and bearer of an impressive Attack Womb, reached up and grabbed her by the ovaries. I'd imagine that would slow anyone down.

I arrived in true journalistic style, shoving open the study doors to find Chairman Lizard on the Persian rug, fucking a stuffed panda bear. The bear was wearing a pink tutu and a plastic little girl mask over the snout, complete with blonde ringlets. So was the Chairman.

"Mr Chairman," I announced, surveying the scene and locking the door behind me. "I have come to interview you."

He didn't even look up. "I'm busy with Little Sally. You'll have to come back later."

"But I'm here now." From my vantage point, I had an excellent view of the pink, ponytailed butt-plug that swayed every time the Chairman thrust.

"Sally would miss me if I stopped," the Chairman panted. He rubbed the blonde curls of the mask awkwardly. "Wouldn't you, Sally?"

I wasn't about to sit there and watch someone fuck a transvestite stuffed panda in front of me. Certainly not without paying me for the privilege. "Sally will have to learn to live with the disappointment."

It's amazing what a bowel disruptor will do for wilting a dick. Not that I'd stick a bowel disruptor in the Chairman's bloated little face, of course. For one thing, such a device would be illegal and, as THE WORD's lawyers would be glad to reiterate, I am a fine, upstanding journalist with hardly any non-nakedness related convictions.

Anyway, a short time later the Chairman voluntarily disengaged a limp, greyish-looking thing from Sally's formaldehyde-inflated rectum and consented to give an interview. You can view the entire thing here: {streaming video link: THE WORD newsfeed}, but bear in mind that the butt-plug and tutu are still very much present. (Although that may work for those of you still in possession of non-castrated gonads).

What actually came out of the interview was not terribly surprising, considering the size of the Chairman's pupils and the white smudges on Sally's fur. One sixth of the bailout for Lizard Brothers was diverted to keep the Chairman in designer drugs and the stuffed corpses of endangered animals. As well as Sally the panda, the Chairman also shared the bounteous squirtings of his diseased little gonads with Anna the white tiger and Jessica the rhinoceros. How one even goes about fucking a rhinoceros is beyond me. Isn't it a relief to know that some of the leading lights in the finance world are on the case?

The Chairman also wanted to have a few sexual partners that wriggled during sex. So another sixth of the bailout went on 'assistants'. Not the same kind as my Filthy Assistants, of course, who refuse to remove their clothes in front of me unless they are planning on shagging on my sofa after locking me out on the balcony with my arms handcuffed away from my pants. Damn them and their vengeful female ways.

I asked to meet one the Chairman's new assistants, but the Chairman was unable to oblige. They were key to his productiveness, he claimed, and very busy indeed. Clearly.

The other two thirds of the money - and if you could count that far, you're already ahead of most high school graduates - was evenly split between bribes to other banks to keep them lending - so we can safely assume that they purchased at least a couple more Sallys - and as bonuses to the top traders. That will doubtless keep the brothel-owners happy.

Not that any of this should be a shock to you, of course. After all, you've bailed out Lizard Brothers and their compatriots before, with much the same result. The CEO of Moffet Investments used the bailout money to pay for defence attorneys for his child molestation charge; the Board of Billiards Bank bought an entire zoo (that later disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and tales of naked Board members chasing around a distressed-looking emu are as yet unconfirmed). Is it any wonder that they prefer to spend your money on taxidermists and guano-cut cocaine? After all, you're going to send them a similar gift every couple of years or so. And it helps that the ones who end up paying for it all are the artists and trannies and prozzies down in Redchurch district, scraping together what little they have to meet the hike in taxes, safe in the knowledge that it's helping pay for the bailout and tax breaks for Mr Lizard and his friends. What use is a recession if you can't tax the poor to pay off the rich?

Mr Lizard pays less tax now than he did three months ago. He's also one of the Beast's biggest contributors. Aren't you glad your tax money is hard at work?

*

I left Mr Lizard sitting in his own shit and vomit - he tragically suffered a bowel prolapse during the interview - and made my way across the be-jewelled and be-teched monstrosity he called his HQ, looking for an exit without a rabid, ovary-less werebitch. I had plans to locate an Adam Smith suit and sit outside the Lizard Brothers entrance, beating to death the passing brokers with a copy of The Wealth of Nations. On my way out, I ran into one of Mr Lizard's 'assistants'. He was filthy, wearing a soiled nappy and dragging around the tattered, stuffed body of a kitten. He was no more than four years old.

The reason he's there and not back home in Redchurch isn't because of the Beast, although he certainly helped. The real culprit is you - you, the middle income, middle management, middle-aged reader, the one who still thinks that your entitlement to cheap pre-teen prostitutes and the latest cat-fur slippers is more important than other people's need for food. The reason why the Chairman can spend his time with his dick up a dead panda's rectum is because you tell him that it's ok, that it's acceptable, that he's one of you. Given the rise in the membership of the Right Love movement, maybe he is. Because you'd love to have him for dinner, wouldn't you? He and Little Sally would fit right in.

So don't sit there and complain to me about the 0.2% rise in the price of your non-fat triple-shot coca-caramel frappuccino, because you have no one to blame but yourselves. Who are the Lizard Brothers shareholders profiting from mismanagement and cosy ties to the Beast? Who are the panda importers, the marathon PAYG fuckers, the proud owners of a back-up kidney or taut new ass?

It's not the beggars or the artists or the prostitutes that are sucking the life from those around them; they aren't the ones thinking they can buy off the truth with a complimentary hand-sewn gecko-skin coat, or coax it to see their way of things by arranging a few non-vital bones and ligaments. They aren't the cannibals eating this place alive. When I'm talking about the shit on the streets, about the hypocrisy, the abuses of the system and the perverse pleasure people get from trampling the kids of places like Redchurch underfoot, don't fool yourselves.

Whenever I write about the filth plaguing this City, I'm writing about you.

*

fin