Heavy Duty

If you aren’t American you probably haven’t experienced the overwhelm of a 3-ton lifted diesel truck barreling past you at 60 in a 35 (that’s mph, or approx. 300 kph), and you almost certainly haven’t scoffed when you note that the driver is ~19 years old and steers with a single lackadaisical hand while the other flips through TikTok.

Inside the cockpit, the child is protected by an array of airbags and sensors. Outside the vehicle, you are protected by nothing. The absurdity of a child piloting high velocity armor across space is too much to comprehend, too upsetting. Your potential death rests in the child’s distracted hands. In a collision, you will die, and the child will win, because Heavy Duty has been afforded to him.

Heavy Duty is an arms race.

Picture this: a single mom wakes up at 5:30 to get the kids to the bus stop where they will be waiting 45 minutes in the dark for the bus to actually arrive (she has to do it this way because her shift at the biscuit kitchen starts at 6 and it’s on the other side of town). Her car is 20 years old and its plastic components are beginning to rot and crumble from thermal cycling in 100 degree summers and 30 degree winters. The AC has not worked in 8 years. The car would fail both safety and emissions inspections but her cousin knows a guy who knows a guy. When something critical breaks, cousin does his best to throw junkyard parts at it. When he can’t find what he needs at the junkyard he orders parts online, and every car part available for her obsolete 4-cylinder is made in China in dubious factories absent of quality control, and whether or not the parts will even work is a pure gamble.

Compare this to the 19 year old Heavy Duty user. His truck was built in 2023 and every month his dad throws more money at it replacing components that don’t need replacing, upgrading from perfectly serviceable factory parts to expensive off-roading equipment built by niche fabricators and stamped with PROUDLY MADE IN USA.

The wheels and tires alone total more than mom’s 4-cylinder.

In the tragic event of a totally preventable head-on collision, mom dies instantly. Boy gets a new truck.

Heavy Duty is a predator. Light Duty is a lamb.

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Let’s get horny real quick

The year is 2046. AI models capable of generating believable love interests occupy empty guest rooms and garage man-caves: android fucking machines have become ubiquitous as the space between our bodies and other post-intimacy bodies has grown exponentially.

Those with Heavy Duty incomes can afford more powerful computing systems and premium, fully customizable body-shells. They purchase more believable bot wives, bot dommes, bot sex slaves, bot cabana boys that occupy nearly-perfect, nearly-human manufactured bodies. Polymers have become so advanced that printed skin feels like skin, elastic and warm.

Those priced out of Heavy Duty have also become further detached sexually and relationally from other living humans, but are relegated to Light Duty fucking counterparts (like those weird surgically sliced-out pussy/ass mannequin sex toys—ok act like you don’t know what I’m talking about).

The Heavy Duty user again gets the leg up bagging the trophy (bot)wife. He is lonely but less neurotic because his experience is uncanny, immersive enough to trick the frontal lobe into a more fulfilling fantasy (but never completely, never quite satisfying reality).

Light Duty is also deathly lonely but more agitated existentially as he fucks  dismembered chunks of silicone or jerks off into his own callused laborer’s hands, wondering what it will take to finally suspend disbelief at how shitty life has gotten.

Heavy Duty fucks.

Light Duty also fucks.

They are both varying degrees of miserable.

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Heavy Duty goes beyond income bracket. Yes, such conventions clearly reflect the widening gap between rich and poor, we all know this, but a closer look reveals the psychic gulf between what we think will alleviate our hunger and what we are actually starving for. We crave neatly welded aluminum and drool over embossed leather. We need simply to traverse space. We crave high performance and tuned experiences. We need simply to experience.

Craving is a pillar of addiction.

Necessity bears no guilt.

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Heavy Duty is about survival. And not just in the corporeal sense of preserving one’s body from harm, but in an elemental way, in a way that entreaties the soul, in a way that, after cumming inside of your android mistress, forces you to kneel on the cold garage floor to beg, sobbing to the creator: how can we ever hope to do your work justice, Father?

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When the 3-ton diesel eventually blows past you and rattles a death-chill through your roots, remind yourself that the predator’s work empties the soul. Prey animals are all the freer.