Posted on January 4, 2025
Zlatko’s shitter!
In this chapter we really gain a keen awareness of the extent of Kara’s programming which is fine-tuned to “Stepford handmaid”. Because boy is she gullible. She gets a hot tip from a garbage truck bot that there’s a guy across town who helps runaway mannequins and without a second thought she makes that her primary quest marker. And here’s where we meet Zlatko, aka “Goldie”, a man of complex contradictions. Zlatko has about a 100,000 volumes of History of Art clogging up his wall-to-wall oak built-in shelving, but damn if he could tell you what’s a pleasing aesthetic. It’s obvious he stole this house from someone else because the decor is ghastly. It could be dialed down by numerous octaves and still be shrill as all hell. This place screams “Stranger In the House” meets “I Care A Lot.”
But fuck if Kara’s computer can calculate that one out. Alice manages to eke out a “bad feeling” about Zlatko and it’s either because he’s basically Todd With A Beard, or maybe because he has blue blood stains up to his elbows and has a dead-eyed yeti lurching in his footsteps that could snap her little android arms like twigs. Zlatko is as whiskered and blubbery as an adult male elephant seal, yet inexplicably keeps a Lady’s Schick Quattro razor on his sink. Who’s using that, Zlatko? And here we see Zlatko’s shitter, hey, what if you programmed someone to clean this place?? Humans in this story are so dumb.
And Zlatko ain’t cleaning his own ass either, because that tub is a place where a guy lives. His name is Bathtub Android and he’s a fucking snitch. When you first enter this room, this feral, legless Shih Tzu instantly goes off and demands to know “HEY, WHY ARE YOU HERE WALKIN AROUND FREE?” You get an option to grab him by the Vital Valve until he goes “okay, okay, we’re cool, just don’t squeeze me there.” Then later he’ll start squealing like a carbon monoxide detector, informing on your ass. My advice? Shut him off as an act of mercy, nobody will even be left to take care of him after Zlatko invariably expires in disgrace at the end of this chapter.
