3.28401940 x 10^10

Everyone is made out of stitches.

Some people have more stitches than others. These people have acquired them over decades of being remade over and over again, and if you unravel the needlework from their flesh they will sink into the floor. They will return to their roots: primordial ooze, 38030 BC. It becomes very hard to scrape them out of the floor.

One thousand years ago, we discovered that this stitching is worth quite a lot, actually. It is worth so much—it's like there's gold stitched into your skin, except it's not gold and it's not tangible, and the only way you'll ever get to detect it is if you point a bioscanner at someone. But it's worth a lot. So much. Or that's what my superiors say, at least.

That's what my job is. I'm Derek Lee, stitching collector, and I've just found the perfect victim. There's this guy who has done literally nothing for society, and our sources say he's filled to the brim with stitches. He's a fringe case, of course—anyone who spends his entire day wanking off in his cubicle usually only has a few threads in them.

But this guy is loaded. It's insane. He doesn't have a job, not even as a ProtoPizza deliverer. Do you know how easy it is to be a ProtoPizza bitch? Did you know that when they run out of breast milk or water at the factories, they use the sweat from the workers? They have designated sweaters, just standing on the side next to these massive heaters, sweating and sweating into these yellow tubs like they're fucking cows. That's how easy it is to be a ProtoPizza bitch. All you have to do is stand there.

I don't really know what this guy's deal is.

But when I "break" into his house (it's pretty easy because his door's unlocked), there's no slumbering mass of a broken-down man sitting in some decrepit corner. There's no obviously overworked porno headset next to his battle station.

The stench, however, nearly knocks me out. I don't know how to describe it in words anyone would understand. It's like someone died here, if dying meant that a wizard transmuted every single cell in your body into a poop cell. No—it's like tens of thousands of people have been shitting here, in this brick-and-mortar three-by-three apartment room, for thousands of billions of years. Dare I say a morbillion years, even. A number so large, so infinitely huge, that if you were to perceive even a fraction of that number you would come apart at the seams and melt.

Coincidentally, this is my chosen method of unstitching someone. A Morbius number tends to do the trick pretty well these days. I'll spare you the details, but once upon a time, long ago, there was a film that came out called Morbius. And that film earned so much at the box office that the big shot economists up at Marvel HQ exploded when they saw the numbers they were raking in. As for that number, I can't tell you—it's like the parrot from that one sci-fi story back in the 1980s, you see. If you know the first hundred digits, you're unstitched. If you know the first fifty, you're gonna be a vegetable for the rest of your life.

But now in the age of post WW9 Americas, it's a bioweapon people like me use to get shit done.

No one is inside this room, and when I look at what I think is a pile of cushions next to his Personal Computer, I can see why. His headset's broken; no porn for him. Maybe if I step out, grab some fresh air, I'll bump into this guy on the streets.

Easy enough, right?