One 

So a guy goes into a bar and orders a drink. 

He nods toward the bartender and raises a finger. The bartender returns a knowing smile and slides a tequila on the rocks down the counter. The bartender doesn’t know the guy; this is the first time this guy has been in this bar.

The guy looks around. The bar’s other patrons hide their scrutiny behind newspapers and darts. Soon, a man in a trench coat and a tall hat sits down beside the guy. The two speak in low tones, and the guy exchanges some of the planet’s local currency for two encrypted bio-memory chips. 

At this point, a burly dude with criss-crossed knife scars on his face leans in close to the men at the bar and demands they buy him a drink. The guy turns the dude down, and the huge drunk immediately brandishes a dagger he has drawn from his belt. Instead of a knife fight, gunshots ring out near the bar, and then more shots from some other direction, or multiple directions. The intense crossfire leaves neat rows of holes in some walls and clusters in others. When the firefight ends, the guy collapses on the barroom floor, his brains spilling out like jelly mixed with shattered microchips. After another beat, the bartender crawls out from behind the bar. She begins to clean up the mess. The bar’s neon lights flicker out; its rats skitter away.

This is a typical day in the life of a cyber-bar.

Two

A guy comes into the bar and orders a drink.

He nods to me and raises his finger. I smile knowingly and slide his favorite drink down the bar. I don’t know this guy, but there will always be guys like that coming into places like this. They’re all cast from the same mold: flattop haircut, tough, silent, smelling of cigarettes, with suspicious eyes and heads full of obsolete microchips—practically scrap. And a thirst for tequila… on the rocks. 

This type of guy is always looking for someone, someone like the man in the trench coat. To drum up business, I’ll sometimes open up a betting pool with the customers; we bet on how long it’ll take for the guy’s contact to walk over. If one of the customers wins, he drinks for free. If I win, everyone’s next round is on me. As a result, the bar enjoys a flourishing business with a diverse clientele… but this setting also creates a perfect storm of evil feng shui in which bad ideas brew. Even though all my gambling games are designed for me to lose and for the customers to win, the boss never gives me any trouble, and the bar never runs low on inventory.

After fifteen minutes, the man in the trench coat and tall hat sits down next to the guy. The big dude with two knife scars criss-crossing his face cheers loudly about something; maybe he’s congratulating the winner of this night’s pool. That dude can’t handle his drink, and things always get out of hand when he’s around. And what a waste of good liquor whenever he wins the pool.

These two people in the center of the vortex of the bar’s attention whisper for a while; the guy exchanges some of the planet’s local currency for two encrypted bio-memory chips. I pretend not to see anything; I’m a woman of principle. In a place like this, those of us who hold to their principles and stay blind and dumb will eventually clean up, financially speaking. I just hope these two don’t make a mess of the place and give me something else to clean up. Just do your business and get the fuck out, please.

But I don’t get my wish. I rarely do. Before the two of them can get up off their stools, Scarface, drunk and swearing, lurches forward and tells the guy to buy him a drink. The guy turns him down flat, and Scarface immediately brandishes the dagger he has drawn from his waist. As he pulls the knife from his belt, it seems that an old pistol Scarface keeps in his pants goes off accidentally. And that’s all she wrote; pandemonium ensues. As soon as I hear the first gunshot, I start to wave my arms and try to talk everyone down, try to get control of the situation, but out of nowhere a bullet hits me and throws me against the wall. I fall forward into the open space that joins my area behind the bar and the seating area. As I lie there, I see mechanical internal viscera along with fully biological organs flowing together across the floor. Before my consciousness fades, the guy falls on top of me. I feel the weight of him pushing me down and the overflowing brains and broken chips smearing my face. 

Sometimes this is how the situation ends. But I quickly come around, revived, unharmed, and I crawl out onto the battlefield and begin to pick up the pieces. This resurrection is the work of the healing nanoclusters in my body, a gift the boss gave me when we first met. They’re the reason I’m willing to do all I can for the boss and why I’m dead set on working here forever. Find a quiet place to live my life and watch the teeming mortal world walk in and out of these doors—as far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty much heaven. 

After I knock off for the night, I pull the chain on the neon lights outside. After the roll-down gate is closed, a gang of rats jumps out of the shadows. They bare their teeth menacingly.

Goddammit. Time to ask the boss to invest in some mechanical cats. 

Three

At this point in the story, you may be wondering who will be the next protagonist to take the stage and tell their tale. You think maybe it will be Scarface, or possibly Trench Coat. Ha! Wrong. It’s me.

So a guy walks into the bar and orders a drink. He nods to the bartender and raises a finger. The bartender returns a knowing smile, pours me into a glass, and stuffs a couple of ice cubes up my ass. This is how the story goes for me, every damn time.

When the guy arrives, the customers begin to look around more actively, scrutinizing the newcomer and each other with suspicion. They always fail to see the intrinsic nature of things, the true character of the situation. But what right do I have to ridicule them? I’m no better than a pot laughing at how dim the kettle is. I can see everything clearly, but I can’t change anything. 

I am the tequila in the glass, and my body has been blended with some amazing chemical that can trigger a short circuit in the drinker’s microchips and spark the secretion of adrenaline. The person gets jumpy; excessive anxiety makes them act irrationally. So after a while, when the burly dude, who’s also drinking me, starts waving his dagger and the gun rings out right on schedule, everyone else who’s drinking me also pulls out a gun and starts shooting all at once. The scene is spectacular. A rain of bullets falls in a forest of guns; gore and blood fly in every direction. As for me, after I’ve tasted their saliva, their gastric and intestinal juices, I flow out of their bodies along with their blood and their piss. Don’t ask me how I perceive all this. You’ll understand everything at the proper time.

After I’ve poured back out of the bodies, I spend some time in intimate contact with the floor. A little later, the boss will sort things out. The manner in which the boss does this is quite distinctive. Time begins to flow backward. Bullets exit corpses, holes close, and I reluctantly take leave of all body fluids and gradually restore the blood to purity. I stream out from between lips and teeth, fall back into the glass, and finally my butt plugs return to the ice bucket. The bartender’s smile fades away. The bar returns to its original state. There’s no trace of the guy.

Sometimes the boss gets lazy. When that happens, after the bartender is resurrected and I’m still mostly on the floor, the back-flowing time will return early to its normal forward motion. This is one of those times. Whenever I’m stuck in this situation, my great undertaking—to return to my natural state—is forestalled. The bartender can pile up corpses, shards of glass, and dismembered furniture, but she has no way to suck me out of the floorboards. All I can do is wait in the small gaps between the wood fibers, wait for the me in the shot glass, the me soaked into the tables and chairs, the me in the corpses, and the me in the floor all to merge into one after the neon lights go out. Then, in the darkness, we are all assimilated into a mass of rotten meat within the boss’s body. After some time, we will all be divided once again. We will again be differentiated into glasses, tables and chairs, floors, bar counters, glass bottles, and the tequila in those bottles. 

Sometimes we ask the boss, “How’d we do?” The boss never answers.

The heart, liver, spleen, and lungs are the internal organs of a human; we are the internal organs of the boss.

Our boss is the bar, but I guess you already figured that out. 

Four

The bar is one of the most intriguing categories of organisms in the universe. On the evolutionary path of natural selection, they have experienced an exceedingly brutal struggle to avoid elimination. Nowadays, many building classifications are relegated to the sedimentary strata of a few of the known planets. Whether we are speaking of low thatched huts or the old metropolitan towers that rose dozens or even hundreds of stories into the air—these species are merely fossils and memories now. The only category of structure that has persisted from that age—that has explored and settled new lands, that has truly made its home on a great many planets and has survived to this day—is the bar.

At the beginning of its life cycle, the juvenile bar will take root in the shady alleys of a planet’s cities, near piles of rubbish. The young are able to absorb the nutrients from food waste with considerable efficiency. The totipotent larval stem cells divide and differentiate rapidly until they form complete organs, which are soon encased in and supported by bioluminescent cartilage. The luminous skeletal structure also serves to draw prey to the bar. The central nervous system is divided into several distinct neuromas which are able to survive for a time without direct connection to the main structure. These isolated bundles of nerve cells are able to perform an approximate simulation of the social environment of the quarry. On nearly every planet, this has proven to be a most effective method of hunting. At one time, scientists used genetic engineering to create skyscrapers with similar skills. This predictably resulted in large-scale massacres. Scientists and skyscrapers alike were condemned to death and executed in the aftermath.

The process of hunting its prey typically begins with the entrance of a man into the bar. This intrusion stimulates a series of neural signals, prompting the individual neuromas to initiate their own series of actions. Statistically speaking, the majority of those who frequent this sort of bar are wanted criminals. These are the sort of people who are most easily attracted to the atmosphere here, and their disappearance is the least likely to attract notice from the outside world. 

Normally, the man will begin by ordering a drink. When this happens, the primary neuroma will take some of the fluid discharged from the excretory system of the bar, pour it into a hyperplastic growth, and push it toward the man. A neuroma sent out from the “mother’s” body at some earlier time is capable of being reabsorbed into that body later, and the bar is able to reverse or continue the process of cell division and differentiation at will.

The ingestion of the excreta by the prey marks the formal beginning of the hunt. The bar randomly prompts a neuroma to pick a fight with the man. The man who is under the influence of the bar’s urine lacks self-control and readily joins in a melee with the inciting neuroma. 

As the turmoil begins, a gland on the side of the inciting neuroma explodes. The sound wave from the detonation is transmitted through the air to the other neuromas present, causing their glands to discharge as well. When such a gland erupts, several dense spores are ejected from the site, not unlike the high-speed expulsion of pollen from a splitting alfalfa capsule. The radiating spread of these projectiles is typically omni-directional and will normally prove effective in killing the prey. In extremely rare cases, the prey will only be wounded and will escape with his life. In these circumstances, the bar will merely lose one opportunity to feed; the identity of the bar is normally not compromised by this failure. This is not only due to the fact that these organic structures have evolved an effective camouflage defense mechanism as they are similar in appearance to traditional public houses built by humans, but also owing to the gene banks that are stored in the bar’s anatomy. Thanks to the ever-expanding genetic assets contained in these banks, when neuromas are differentiated, the information therein allows for a variety of random arrangements and multiple permutations to construct manifold expressive results.

After a man (or in extremely rare cases a woman) is successfully dispatched, the bar begins to digest the prey. The digestion process is also a process of self-healing. The damaged areas will differentiate in reverse and re-form the complete base arrangement of the mother, and the prey’s carcass will also be integrated into that being. The flesh and blood will be “swallowed,” so to speak, and the base-pair sequence of the newly ingested cells will be transferred to the gene bank. Future neuromas will achieve richer expressive results, and behavior patterns will be more plentiful and more diverse. 

Above is the basic content of the bar biological activity report. There yet remain many elusive matters regarding this creature. The most baffling among these mysteries concerns their mode of reproduction. As they are in this age gradually moving toward extinction, we may never learn the answer to this question. The very existence of this species has caused many traditional drinking establishments to go out of business over the long span of time. Considering their far-reaching impact on reduction of crime rates and the frequency of interstellar drunk driving cases, we cannot help but feel some sorrow at the loss of this species, and for us all as we consider their apparently irreversible fate.

Five

The last bar? That’s me. I am the last bar in the entire universe.

When I was a young bar, I once set myself an ambitious goal: in my lifetime, I would accomplish three things that I could be truly proud of. Until very recently, I had accomplished two such objectives: one, I was the last bar in the universe; and two, I was the first bar to go into a man.

After consuming more than two hundred fugitives, I began to think about the intrinsic nature of ingestion. Considering the process of organizational integration, the issue of whether I have absorbed men or men have absorbed me is not a trivial question. After dedicating long and inconclusive ratiocination on the subject, I decided to take the scientific method as my main principle, and I resolved to attempt something I had never attempted before: to find a man and to let him eat me. I would take the results of that experience, place them alongside my own experience of ingestion, and compare the two. This experiment would prove to be invaluable.

The experiment may sound simple, but it is in fact not simple at all. Even considering those humans with physical modifications, my own body is still considerably larger, too large for direct human ingestion. I had to find a way to effectively reduce my scale. But this seemed at first to be the stuff of fantasy; I am not, after all, the magical shrinking tent from the Arabian Nights. In the end, I had to revise my way of thinking about the problem, and curiously, the solution was inspired by information transmitted between two of my neuromas. Thanks to this neuromatic conversation, I arrived at a new strategy for capturing my quarry. 

According to this new tactic, I first restored the totipotency of the somatic cells, rearranged their genes, and expressed them again, this time using a chemical synthesis reaction to generate a composite of polysaccharides, fats, and proteins. Once this process was complete, I became a house made entirely of candy, and I hid myself, naturally, within an amusement park. This process of rearrangement may seem like a radical transformation and an extreme recourse, but in truth it was not so. Certainly it is easier in its operation, and much safer, than attempting a wholesale reduction of size.

During the transformation process, I was forced to alter certain character traits that I had acquired through the force of lifelong habit and ages of genetic inertia. For one, I had to adjust my active hours from nocturnal to diurnal. The compounds volatilized from my new body quickly attracted a large number of human young, which I had not anticipated, but there was also no shortage of adult males among the test subjects. I focused all of my attention on the men. I kept myself locked against the children and their families, and only opened my doors one evening just after the carnival had closed when a small band of rowdy young men approached.

So I achieved the second of my great ambitions as follows. The experimental specimens quickly discovered that all of the elements that constituted my new body were edible and quite delicious. Before long, they had broken me up into a great many pieces and thus consumed me until only about half of my structure remained. The remaining unsupported skeleton collapsed, leaving only some splintered sections of my ruined walls on the ground.

Having eaten to their hearts’ content, they left with full bellies, eager to share the secret of this place with their friends. However, as soon as they left me, one by one they fell to the ground, their bodies convulsing. Finally, after their corpses grew stiff, within a short period of time they all melted into a mass of sarcomas. Yet the cells did not in fact differentiate into miniature versions of myself or anything of that sort. These experimental results were inconsistent with both hypotheses. Was I absorbing my prey or was my prey absorbing me? Neither description seemed sufficient to explain these results. Clearly more experiments were needed to answer my research question. 

Faced with several lumps of ground meat, I knew that my experiment would definitely arouse attention and some hostility. But what did I care about that? I am an endangered species protected by universal law. I could always play that card if push came to shove, but something told me that these guys would not be missed by anyone in the near future.

Soon, my attention was drawn to the sarcomas on the ground. Although they did not differentiate into miniature versions of me, they began to wriggle. Whenever one sarcoma came into contact with another sarcoma, the two joined together. After all the sarcomas had merged into one, forming a fleshy ball roughly the same size as the remaining portion of my original body, the situation changed suddenly. The ball of flesh began to change its configuration rapidly, constituting itself into a new bar instead of a candy house. This demonstrated that this new form was indeed descended from the same ancestry as myself, yet it also possessed a distinct consciousness from my own. Thinking of this, I felt at once a frenzy of delight and a terrible sense of loss. Suddenly, I was no longer alone in the universe. 

In the end, my ecstasy overwhelmed my dismay. I was conscious of an opportunity. I realized that now I would finally be able to accomplish the last of my three great feats. Whether I succeeded or failed, I would achieve my life’s ambition; what I did next would either result in the extinction of an entire species, or it could mean an opportunity for the rebirth of our kind.

I transformed myself back into my original form, braced myself and stood face to face with my newborn counterpart, our brilliant neon glowing off each other’s surfaces. Together we would usher in the great harmonious miracle of life.

Six

And so it was that one day, in a distant corner of the universe, a bar went into a bar. 

A guy went into one bar; another guy ordered a drink at the bar just across the narrow alleyway. The bartenders in both bars smiled and passed both guys a tequila on the rocks. The bartenders did not know these guys; it was the first time these guys had visited these bars.

The guys looked around. The bars’ other patrons hid their scrutiny behind newspapers and darts. After a while, the guys both put on trench coats and tall hats, walked to the door of their respective bars. The two spoke to each other in low tones, exchanged some of the planet’s local currency for two encrypted bio-memory chips. Then the guys exchanged them back. 

The guys returned to their stools at their original bars. At this point, two burly dudes with criss-crossed knife scars on their faces leaned close to the guys at the bars and demanded the guys buy them a drink. Both guys turned both dudes down, and in both bars the huge drunk immediately brandished a dagger they had drawn from their belts. The guys grappled with the dudes, and suddenly a gun went off followed by the noisy discharge of multiple firearms. The intense crossfire left neat rows of holes in some walls and clusters in others. The rain of bullets grew even heavier, the bars’ neon lights grew more dazzling, and the melodies blaring from the jukeboxes in the corners of the bars crescendoed despite the fact that their machinery had seemingly already been shattered in the crossfire. 

One of the guys collapsed on the barroom floor, his brains spilling out like jelly mixed with shattered microchips. The other guy continued to howl with rage and shoot his gun. Then everyone still standing in both bars echoed his howl, and all the rifles and pistols spat hot metal slag. Patrons shouted and charged each other; cold weapons and hot weapons collided, and flesh struck flesh, and flesh penetrated flesh. 

Amid the clash of metal and meat, projectiles passed through the front of one bar and pierced the body of the other. A bullet punctured the wall of the main room, shot through the kitchen, entered the furnace, and hit its mark, the gas tank buried deep in the structure. A blaze of flames soared into the night.

There was a terrific uproar as the explosion reached its climax.

The clamor alarmed the entire neighborhood, and the explosion almost leveled the buildings on either side of the bars. People surged into the streets and alleys. The fire trucks and ambulances charged onto the scene and began to comb through the ruins of structures that had buried the entire alley, searching for the wounded amidst the rubble. 

The dust settled, and the alley lay empty once again. No one noticed the ashes that rose slowly toward the blue sky, the embers that did not fall to the ground, but spiraled upward, left the atmosphere, and crossed into interstellar space. This was the seed released by the bars. These germs would wander aimlessly through the universe until they fell into the gravitational field of a certain planet or were picked up by a passing spacecraft and carried to a new habitat where they could settle and put down roots. 

This was an extremely arduous process fraught with insecurity. If it were otherwise, the bar would never have been reduced to endangered status. Most of the germ cells would be swallowed up in the fires of the stars, the heat that can reduce anything to nothing and disintegrate every possibility. Fortunately, after such tragedies had played out billions of times, a cluster of dust was finally captured by a blue planet on the radial arm of Orion, and on that planet, carbon-based organisms had recently evolved into the final stage of its human civilization.

And so it came to pass that millions upon millions of light-years away from where the species was born, in a dark alley in the depths of a city enveloped in a heavy fog, neon lights flicker to life late one night, and a gang of rats chatter and skitter away from approaching feet.

And a guy walks into a bar and orders a drink. 

This is a typical day in the life of a cyber-bar.