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- [00:00]
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Whether it's a birthday trip, a family reunion, or just a fun getaway, booking a VRBO vacation rental means no worrying about surprises. VRBoCare and 247 Life Support have your back if something's off. The Loved by Guest filter helps you find top rated homes, and verified reviews mean real feedback from real VRBO guests so you know exactly what you're booking.
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Honestly, I just booked my VRBO because there was a sweet wine fridge.
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Hey, we all have our reasons. Don't walk into a surprise if you know you. VRBO terms apply. See vrbo.com trust for details.
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When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns. With Grainger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call 1-800-granger clickranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
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Say Buddy, what takes 50 years to
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get up to the top floor in 30 seconds to get down? This horror podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Warnings are included in the show notes. Listener discretion is advised. Furthermore, this audio drama is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.
- [01:51]
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Hey buddy, who's the most liquid business man on the street? Andrea didn't want to embody any stereotypes. She was not going to steal anything, but she figured if anyone deserved to be robbed by the housekeeper, it was these horrible people. Her company, Mariposa Cleaning, assured her that this private cruise position would only last a few months. Some very, very rich man had bought out the entire ship, staffed it himself, and planned the whole itinerary. Andrea found this unusual because Mariposa was more of a budget service for slightly wealthier middle class families, not people with enough money to buy a passenger ship. Some of her friends warned her about the hazards of cruise ship work the entitled guests, the drunks, the cramped living quarters. But Andrea couldn't keep from romanticizing it. She loved the ocean. She had a seashore scented candle in her bathroom. She liked to light it and close her eyes while she showered, imagining she was bathing under a warm tropical waterfall in some beautiful secret grotto. The idea of the cramped spaces and rude customers didn't phase her, not if she got to spend her off hours in the outdoor crew lounge, looking out over the endless blue horizon, smelling the salt. It Turned out her friends had no idea how bad things could get. Residents, they called themselves. They were awful. The most terrible people Andrea had ever encountered, and she used to work at a call centre. The best of them simply ignored her. The worst made a sport out of her misery, throwing crumpled wrappers and even empty glass bottles at her as she tried to tidy up around them. They left messes everywhere, like it was their job. Andrea wasn't even certain what their jobs were. They had titles like International Efficiency Coordinator and High Volume Trading Consultant and Crypto Management Director. Sometimes she wondered if they were making things up just to laugh at her. They pulled her ponytail or touched her chest or groped her behind when she passed by them in the narrow corridors. She didn't get to enjoy the ocean. She spent every second of her free time hiding in her tiny closet of a room, crying, wishing she could hear the waves over the roar of the engines. And then one morning when she donned her uniform and began her long shift, she found most of the staff gathered on the deck, murmuring in bewilderment about how all the residents, every single one, had vanished without a trace overnight. It was as a college student exposed to the ravagings of diversity and affirmative actions that Peyton Briggs resolutely decided that democracy was a mistake. It became clear to him as he looked upon society that he was practically an entirely different species altogether. The lower people, the small folk, were dirty and ungrateful and stupid, always asking for more and never satisfied. They begged and screamed and cried for more money, for health care, for shelter and food. Food. But precious few of them took any steps to better their own circumstances. Peyton Briggs may have been born to millionaire parents, but he worked hard. Even if his family hadn't donated enough money to Yale to put their last name on a building, he would have gotten accepted on his own test scores. Nothing was stopping those fast food workers from spending their off hours taking a few college courses in finance and business. Nothing was stopping those grey, stooped figures on the streets from walking into an office building and introducing themselves. They lacked what he had. He was simply better. He was the Ubermensch, rightful master of the world, and they were nothing more than petulant slaves. Civilization should not be left to the whims of the uneducated masses, Peyton Briggs decided. Only the Smart could rule. Only the Smart were capable of it. Peyton Briggs was very smart. The wealth of the world was his to amass and control because he was one of the few who knew what to do with it. And if that meant he had more than he could ever possibly use. Even if he lived 100,000 years. It was just what he deserved for his role in the preservation of humanity. The good parts of humanity at any rate. Thus began Briggs grand experiment. Through his bold financial endeavours and various means of accumulating capital without working very much, he gathered enough resources and manpower to construct a pilot program. An autonomous nation in the sea, free from the constraints of any state far enough from shore that no army or law could touch him. Peyton Briggs purchased a decommissioned cruise ship, had it retooled into a self sustaining living community and sold cabins, storefronts and restaurants as real estate to like minded investors. From people nearly as wealthy as himself to those low people pouring their life savings into shedding their uselessness. Peyton Briggs, autonomous seaborne nation, began to come together. Once the ship was loaded with both humans and workers. They set off onto the blue horizon together with Briggs at the helm. Not the literal helm, of course. He hadn't the time to waste steering the ship. There were laborers for that. The first days were a dream. The ocean air was as crisp and exhilarating as it was centuries ago when Columbus set off to discover those virgin lands of the Americas. Peyton Briggs was Columbus now. A great explorer primed to build a new world with nothing but his own will and intellect and a massive seafaring vessel full of dozens of residents and hundreds of crew. The parties were legendary, the orgies even more so. By day. The residents worked clacking away at their computers, making phone calls, networking with one another, watching their various lines go up and down, sometimes for as long as nine hours in one shift. But by night, the conversation sparkled, the drinks flowed, and they basked in the glow of their shared ideals. Some of the servants complained. As was to be expected, they had no real reason to, considering the amount they were being paid for work as easy and mindless as cooking, cleaning and whatever handyman nonsense a ship's crew did. Most of them didn't even have college degrees, which should have been reason enough to pay them even less. But Peyton Briggs anticipated this. Their kind was predisposed to bitching and moaning. No matter how close to market rate you paid them. If they really wanted to leave, they could negotiate with the monthly supply ships to be taken back to the mainland. But there wasn't anything in their contracts about being provided passage back to the United States of communism. So they would just have to have a sense of humour and. And take the resident's light hearted ribbing as it came. And then one morning, shortly after the first resupply ship had vanished over the horizon. Peyton Briggs and his residents awoke to find that the crew had disappeared. Every last one of them. They scoured the massive ship from top to bottom. It was like the staff were never there. Their small, windowless cabins below the waterline were spotlessly empty. The sheets on their modest cots perfectly folded, all identical. The crew mess and the bathrooms were equally clean, lacking any signs of habitation. All the crew leisure areas had been sold as budget packages, so theirs were obviously empty. Peyton Briggs oversaw the supply shipment himself. From a chain of emails he read in his office, he knew for a fact that the entire crew couldn't have absconded on that small supply ship, even after unloading. There were four servants to every resident. The numbers didn't add up. Magnanimous leader that he was, Paton took the matter upon himself and told the residents not to worry about it. He would send for more servants and pay for expedited shipping to have them to the boat as quickly as possible. In his attempts to execute this plan, Peyton Briggs found that he could not reach the mainland. His phone calls wouldn't connect. Their Internet uplink had been severed. The ship's radio was functionally perfect, but he didn't know how to use it because his IQ was too high to concern himself with such things. Under ordinary circumstances, he could hire someone else to do it. After all his efforts to found his own nation, his own free and limitless community of entrepreneurs, Peyton Briggs was totally liberated from outside interference. He finally had exactly what he wanted. Now he could really get to work. What followed was a period of delirious, chaotic reorganization. When Peyton Briggs revealed to his residents that they were now totally independent, completely free of outsiders and the government. They mostly rejoiced, mostly without their link to mainland markets. A few investors panicked. Some residents indulged in prepackaged snack foods and vandalism like ill trained children left alone for too long. Still others found joy in attempting community, figuring out how to man the restaurant kitchens and forming committees to discuss who would clean what. But after a few days, the residents began to tire of playing house. The supply ships never came, but somehow the pantries and refrigerators and storage rooms remained stocked with just enough to feed around half of them. Peyton Briggs, God king of the ship, plodded his way through a maze of trash. The residence's waste was supposed to be tossed overboard and. But evidently the person who was supposed to do that had decided not to. And that was some time ago. Since then, the refuse had become a steadily compounding problem. Plastic bottles, foil snack wrappers, cellophane and paper packing materials formed stinking dunes in every corner and every unoccupied room. Every morning the residents shoveled larger and larger piles of garbage out of their domiciles until the narrow corridors transform into tunnels dug through crackling debris. Now Peyton Briggs held court in the ballroom, feet up on the surface of his executive desk. The residents below screamed at each other. This was the standard for community meetings ever since the females stopped showing. They had all hidden themselves away in the bowels of the ship and no one had seen them since. Maybe they were dead. Shame. They could have alleviated some of the residents frustration. The din of their voices melted into flat noise as Briggs listened to them fight. It was the same battle as always, another scrabble over how to arrange the pyramid. Who would stack upon who? Should we sort by iq by Mensa? Status by genetic purity? By bench press maximum? The deciding vote fell, as it always did, to Peyton Briggs, their undisputed leader. And as always, his answer was the same. They would remain ranked by income by the capital they generated annually at the time they boarded the ship. It wasn't about keeping himself at the top. He happened to know from experience that personal wealth was an accurate measurement of intellect, genetic superiority, and strength of will all in one. This should have settled things like it usually did, but the accusations began flying. Everyone could remember their own numbers, but nobody could say for certain what anyone else's was. So anybody may be lying. The arguing only stopped when one of them, a lower class resident living in the berths, announced that the bottomless areas of the ship had begun to flood. Quiet swept over the room. One resident astutely asked, what with? To which the former answered simply, with shit. The fighting died to a murmur. Paton stepped in more directly, advising his subjects to return to their quarters, use their superior minds to develop solutions, and perhaps consider doing their business over the railings until they got this whole shit flood thing sorted. So the residents returned to their holes, as did Peyton Briggs. One of them was bound to come up with something, and after a thorough review, he would take the best ideas and improve upon them. He figured he could abstain from taking on the mental workload until he went to relieve himself and found his smart toilet overflowing with soupy brown liquid. This was indeed an urgent matter. After all, Peyton Briggs was very smart. There was a solution to every problem. The market demanded it. So what did this ship's market want? Freedom from the refuse? Safety from contaminated water? What was a practical problem? He could solve the tunnels. The residents were tired of nightly digs through trash to get back to their rooms. He could provide a solution, but first he would need materials. Peyton Briggs summoned the resident who first brought the flood to their attention and made the man an offer. One of his arms in exchange for half the bottled water in the next shipment. He charmed the young fellow, assured him that he was the first person getting in on the ground floor of a new business venture, promised that once the others caught on that water bottles were the new money, he would already be stocked up enough to ride out the shortage when the next shipment came in. It was to his benefit, really. He could consider himself a co founder of this new endeavor, and having one arm wouldn't be so bad. It would maximize his efficiency even further, as he would have less overall mass to feed. Paton was lying, of course. He didn't need a business partner. He needed an extra arm. With the help of two other residents who did not know the details of his plan, he held the young man down, numbed him into oblivion with tequila and heroin, and dislocated his shoulder to make it easier to dodge the bone when he cut through the soft tissue. It was difficult, like slicing through a bad steak, but the cleaver he found in one of the kitchens did its job. After a half dozen strikes and a bit of sawing the arm, his new arm came free, gushing blood into the water that was slowly collecting on the floor of every room. The hardest part about sewing the arm onto himself was the weight. These things were so much heavier than one expected, but he powered through anyway, stitch after stitch, popping the point of the needle through his own epidermis and dragging the thread after it, stitch after stitch until he completed the root all the way around. Still, it didn't hurt. Aside from the muscle fatigue, the stolen humerus pinched his armpit, so he held the bicep and pushed, wiggling the blunt end until he felt it scrape raw against his rib. Muscle fibers stretched and slid into place, attaching the arm to his torso, joined by loose skin that tugged at him when it moved. For it did move. In fact, it worked, miraculously. A third arm, perfect for pushing garbage out of the way and keeping his knife natural hands free. And best of all, it didn't even feel pain. The exhibition was a success. Soon the deck transformed into a slaughterhouse of innovation. Residents built augmented limbs from the garbage, scamming and cheating each other into giving up their teeth, their eyeballs, their fingers, in exchange for devices that would adapt to them to their New environment. Extra limbs made of aluminium cans made for improving their capacity to climb and swim. Plastic and bamboo mouth screens installed into the gums after the removal of teeth to prevent swallowing flecks of trash and undigested waste while diving into the lower levels in search of resources. Replacement noses made of compacted foil to forever stop the the ever worsening stench. Anything to fight off competitors when the next heap of supplies magically appeared. Few if any of the residents were willing to sell their body parts, but nearly all of them would part with a few limbs in order to replace them with newer, better upgrades. Peyton Briggs didn't let any of these discarded parts go to waste. His first additional arm had begun to fester, the flesh graying and swelling in the constant moisture. Pocked holes of rot opening up like the cells of a wasp nest. It was impossible to keep the shit from getting inside it, but at least he could slow the corruption by patching it with fresher skin, stuffing the holes with gobs of merely yellow fat. The intact limbs, arms, hands, legs, he added to his new form. A fresh trend had appeared on the market involving the replacement of the tongue with a length of muscle from the back or thigh, something that couldn't register the overwhelming, almost sweet taste of feces in the water once the stockrooms had vanished below the flood. Another popular alteration was having the Johnson neotungue upgraded to a Talman nutra tube that allowed the owner to insert it into the ruptured packages of waterlogged snacks and suck out the chunky slurry inside, bypassing their sense of taste altogether. Eventually, Peyton Briggs was one of the only ones left with a legacy mouth. He found that the resident's discarded tongues made an excellent substitute for lean beef, one he didn't need to rinse clean using any of his precious drinking water. Peyton Briggs residents hacked, stitched, and melted themselves into perfectly adapted next gen life forms, all the while continuing to crack open endless cans, crumple endless chip packets, piss and shit, and bleed into the blackening water inside the ship. Briggs himself sat at his desk, admiring their collective solutions to the waste management problem. His experiment was a success, perhaps the most important success in all of human history. Discarded flesh and bone became his royal mantle when they replaced their arms with plastic flippers. He sewed them palm to shoulder till his arms, all eight of them, stretched 20ft long. When they sawed off the clumsy weight of their legs, he attached the new additions to his hips, his thighs, his glutes to make every one of a dozen steps only carried a fraction of his weight, his movement seamless and smooth. Other parts he ate. He never liked processed foods. They interfered with the functions of his brilliant mind. Peyton Briggs was a genius. A genius, an entrepreneur, and a king. When someone finally discovered the barely floating cruise ship, coated almost entirely in streaks of bloody human excrement, approached the biohazard with guns drawn. When they found Peyton Briggs sewn to an unspeakable mass of bloated, decaying body parts and chewing on an unidentifiable organ, they put a bullet between his Aryan blue eyes. All that leaked from the hole was shit and seawater. When the residents vanished, the rest of the staff, excluding the busiest crew, gathered on the deck and organized a search, scouring the ship from top to bottom. Andrea didn't need to suggest that maybe they were all better off without the residents, because she was sure they were all thinking it. Nonetheless, she plotted around her given block of rooms, opening each door, checking each bathroom, finding nothing but perfectly empty quarters with the complimentary soaps still in their packages. It was certainly eerie. Maybe they had all tired of the cruise and gone home on whatever private helicopters they must have owned. All at once, without anyone noticing or mentioning it, the captain called a meeting of all staff and crew not otherwise indisposed. Fortunately, they weren't missing anyone except the guests, which meant everyone responsible for the critical functions of the ship was still aboard, as was everyone responsible for the finer details, like cleaning and cooking. Something had gone wrong with the engines, explained in several minutes of jargon that Andrea didn't understand, and the radio wasn't connected, but the captain assured them the chief engineer would get all of it figured out. Until then, the crew resolved to continue their duties as usual. The exception was the staff of the various kitchens, the small pocket eateries that mimicked restaurants in a food court. These people would undertake the task of cataloguing all the food they had and rationing it until help arrived with the the next supply shipment. Instead of manning their posts, they would close their stalls and help cook in a large cafeteria, preparing three meals a day that would be shared by the entire crew in order to keep a stricter eye on their resources. Anyone who wanted to could move to a higher room with a window, but their supervisors insisted that all staff clean their own quarters. That way the housekeepers could have more time to check the empty rooms for pests and to help the crew with anything they may need. Discussions didn't always play out with perfect smoothness. The people aboard were understandably stressed and frightened. A fight broke out once between a line cook and one of the onboard performers. But after the captain locked them in separate cabins overnight, the staff found more productive ways to settle their grievances. For the most part, they worked together. It almost made it worth the abuse Andrea faced when the residents were still around. She had hours to spare now. Her tasks were finished in a quarter of the time and she could spend the rest of the day talking with the other cleaners and the handsome crewmen, sunbathing on the deck, cleaning the masseurs bathrooms in exchange for some deep tissue massage. But it wasn't a vacation. The stress of their situation was ever present. Nobody knew what happened to the residents. Even the captain was at a loss to explain it. When the engines roared back to life one morning, the mood eased and the tensions lifted. But they weren't out of the woods yet. Maybe they'd be hungry for a while before they reached the shore. Maybe something else mysterious and terrible could happen. Maybe none of that could be helped right now, though, all Andrea could do in the moment was take a deep breath of the fresh ocean air before going to empty the garden cans. Hey buddy, who's the most liquid businessman on the street?
- [30:31]
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Killianaire episode three is written and produced by Anna McGuire and narrated by John Winfield. Original music by Jackson McMurray script editing by Sarah Schell. Visit hodgepodgeaudio.com for merch transcripts and information and more great audio fiction. If you like this show and want to support us, visit our patreon@patreon.com hodgepodgeaudio thank you for listening.
- [30:59]
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When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns. With Grainger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [31:29]
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