A junkie trapped in an industrial hellscape dares to hope his friend Jax can help him secure transit off-planet.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
The motel room was blue. Cool light leaked through the plastic shades, curdling into lazy patterns on the crumbling prefabricated floor. Utility trucks buzzed by, turning the room orange and red, their radio chatter lulling me into something close to sleep. Every couple of minutes the room lit up and shook like a dying chopper. Passenger liners taking off from Bakira Intergalactic, ripping through the mercury air, screaming speed and light, shattering the sound barrier, and disappearing into the atmosphere. I turned over in the bed and clenched the ice-cold surety of the magnesium machine pistol, thinking about all the places I’d never see. Man, it would’ve been nice to see the bush, I would’ve liked to see an ocean, yeah that would have been something. Somewhere out there they were looking for me. Somewhere in the endless night, they had their eyes cutting across all the crap and shit of the city, waiting for me. Somewhere above all of this, they were coming and they would find me. The fan spun around and around, blowing cigarette smoke into a cancerous fog. Everything shook again. The coins I had fed into the room’s pay slot rattled an angry chorus, the shades twisting and turning in silent applause. There it goes. A big one, flooding the runway in fluorescent light, blinking goodbye, roaring off into the starless sky. Good night, wherever you’re going…
I was dialed up and keyed in when I first met her. They had just shot some fuck and draped him over the wires like a pair of sneakers. His dead head lolling with the silent wind, swinging east to west… west to east… I didn’t know him. I was looking for another hit, stepping over all the shit they’d let out when the clinics went kaput.
“Man, you got something… you got anything…”
Nothing. The streets were dry and I was hungry. Taxis coming off the Interlevel sped streaks of checkered silver, cruising over the potholes into the murky blackness. Way up top, the snaking highways glittered with a thousand flickering street lights dripping acid rain onto the asphalt.
Crap, I was gone. Walking in a stuttering half-step. A shivering flamed out moonwalk over the residue of light rail tracks. I’d just clocked a twelve-hour stint feeding punch cards into Japanese hardware. Little paper slips of zeros and ones whispering invisible commands to invisible machines.
“Shit, I can’t pee! I can’t fucking pee maan!” Some wire-head was jumping around clutching his dick like a grenade. “I can’t pee!” The bar was half empty. Mostly punch card feeders and washed-up hot-suits left on the downswing of the petrol boom.
I staggered in looking to loosen up, sidestepping the wire-head who collapsed outside. The ambulances didn’t come here anymore, he was decked out for good.
She was sitting a stool down. Purple neon spilling over everything. Glass in front of me. Sips calmed me a bit, warmed it all up. Some dumb projection played chrome prostitutes having sex over and over. They moaned in Japanese dubbed over into uninflected English.
“Fuck me, baby… I want you baby…”
Twelve hours of numbers, flashing a staccato blur in my mind. Shit. I glanced at her again. Man, I was tired, the crash was coming. They pumped us up with low-grade stimulants to stand in a sardine line shoving cards and pulling switches.
“Touch me… ohh… ohhh…”
Behind me, Jax was talking hard. Talking about the state of the world. He’d lost half his face in the bush war and there was a hole in him somewhere that couldn’t be plugged. His words were sharp and edged. I understood the world when he spoke. I saw the dividing lines of warring conglomerates, the transnational rivalries of free-trade zones, the green lines of code reducing everything to numbers. Numbers. That’s all we were, he said. Laughing, dancing, crapping, numbers for some ex-pat zaibatsu pulling human levers in the sun.
“Yeah baby… I want you…”
She was hunched over, half her head cut bald in a zig-zag of street surgery scars. I looked without looking, she had drawn something.
“What’s that?” My voice was slurred, coming out of me all slow and sideways. I was so fucking mashed.
She didn’t look up. “An ocean.”
“Ocean?” It stirred something but I couldn’t place it. Maybe it was the stims… I don’t know man… it hurt to remember…
“Water… water… water…”
Her words were spliced up and diced in pieces. Strewn across the table in bits of nothingness oozing slowly into the neon. My teeth were chattering and it wasn’t from the cold. She reached over and grabbed my trembling arm, holding it steady. I needed to key in so bad it burned. There was a bug in me. I shook all over, gibbering a stream of saliva, shivering a cacophony of icy sweat. Let’s go, she must’ve said. Let’s go.
We staggered through the twining projections into the street. Junk trucks trundled by, sweeping away the trash and spraying anti-toxins into the air, their twinkling hazards piercing the dark. She leaped on the back of one, pulling me up. Its great big sweeper spun around spitting crumpled aluminum, inching down the road. Behind the corrugated steel cockpit, the driver’s cigarette breathed a long arching tendril, stretching and fading.
The convoy sputtered diesel rocking through the quiet night, our legs dangling off the edge. Tired buildings flanked the side streets, and above them in the place of stars, freighters refueled midair, glimmering with light.
At the industrial park, trains whirred in green-tinted blurs. The elevator was dead, so we stumbled up eight blocks of flats. Graffiti scrawled in computer code and Hepburn Romaji. ‘Where is the sun?’ ‘Taiyō wa dokodesu ka?’ Squatters passed out in landings, under ads for trips off-world and ultra-clean needles. She swiped her card and it went green. “Tonight’s swipe is sponsored by the Okada Corporation! Have chronic insomnia? Don’t hesitate to…”
Her flat had no furniture. She’d drawn all over it. I lost my shirt and took a fall. I wanted a hit, I needed it. She prepped the wire, flicking the circuits and hotwiring the cable. Ants of sweat scurried sloppy figure eights in my skin. Give it to me. That’s all I’ll ever need.
Her stomach was worse than her head. Lacerated and burned. Scarred and mottled purple. No street doctor could ever put that back together again. She saw me looking and she might’ve smiled. “Not everyone,” she said as she threaded the wire out. “Is lucky enough to be an orphan.”
C’mon, jack me in. She did. Holding my tremoring arm flat, cutting the skin with two steel prongs, sinking the strip into me. Turn it on. She flicked the switch and I was out.
I was a jumper. Dancing the circuits, hugging the wires. A strobe light winking atop synapses. Turning them haywire. I was alive. Burning it all up. Speed, streaking sweet adrenaline, and then I felt it. Outside the rush of the sizzling wire. A quiet beyond the sharp edge. I fell.
Dark and stretching on until the end of everything. Water… water… water… Ocean.
I smelled salt and tasted moisture. The waves… great walls of foam crashing into one another, roiling under the night sky. Yeah, the sky was dark… it had gone completely to sleep. Sleep, I was so close to it. Touching the softness of that oblivion. I had not been so close in… I don’t know… Below me, the waters swelled and dove, eternally flowing until the sleeping horizon. Something in this tickled the edges of memory. There was a great love for the world in me now. A resigned quiet love that suffused me in a delicate warmth. I hated no one and understood everything. I knew nothing would be ok in the end but I was so fucking happy. Man, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go back.
I screamed when she pulled me out. Ohh fucking hell. You almost went under. Your pulse was a snail. Yeah, whatever. I wiped off the drool and blood and leaned against the window. There were trains unloading in the industrial park. Transport lighters carrying the cargo were heading upwards, drifting in an orange stream to the next level, floating past the open canal locks. I pointed to her pictures on the ceiling and asked what they were. “Dolphin,” she said. “Flowers… tree… mountain…” She talked some more but I couldn’t understand her. Her voice was all chopped and fizzled, like a broadcast tuned to the wrong frequency.
In the morning she was gone. I searched the place, two hundred rand in twenty unmarked bills, a sheaf of drawings. I flipped through them. Dogs, a satsu with a hole in his head, swings… a playground, and then there was me. I was dialed in, a small smile on my penciled face. I looked better than I did in real life. I took the money and the picture.
“The Okada Corporation wishes you a good day!”
‘Umi wa dokodesu ka?’
Four hours in and I was riding high. Feeding punch cards to the motherboard. To the churning, groaning, heaving, mass of wires they called a machine. It was hungry. A million electric eyes in red and green glaring unblinkingly. In front of me, some guy lost two fingers punching the wrong slot. I never did. I was good. My hands were a part of something, part of the machine. Whirling flesh into circuitry, sending commands in Kanji to a little black box whirring unseen thoughts. There were whispers, murmurs, humming along the wires. I put my ear to the silicon, and in the synthetic whirlwind there was a voice. There was an idea. A network. Every card carried a fragmented piece of the dying world and I killed them all, one by one. Letting the machine swallow them whole.
Jax stood in back of me. He was talking big. Telling me about the shape of things. Way up there, he told me, is a green monitor. Crunching numbers and spitting out data. His accent had gotten lost somewhere between Rhodesia and Australia. He talked above the machine, above the gate’s sharp klaxon, he spoke of us as numbers on a carbon sheet. Just numbers on the wrong side of an equation. They pump us in for X. They squeeze us until we don’t crunch. Solve for X. What you do for one side you repeat on the other. Simple arithmetic. It’s a matter of time. It’s a numbers game. Numbers… numbers… numbers…
One day, he said, we’ll be pumped into the equation and we won’t come out the other end. Solve for X. He shrugged like it was no big deal, like the end didn’t matter much anyway.
The siren buzzed for our break. Red light flashing. Everyone moving without talking. Turning without walking. Shuffling. The camera above the gate saw us in thermal.
“Gate opening! Back, back!”
Shuffling backward like crabs. Someone pushed a dial upstairs and the gate whined an industrial grating whistle, swinging open.
I pressed the button for a lithium burger and artificial noodles. The vending machine went green, a dozen slots waiting for money in a dozen currencies. Shuffling with tray, plastic utensils, packets of water.
Jax sat across from me. He ate and talked. Limp noodles swimming in powdered water. I saw the hole in him. It was bigger than before and it couldn’t be filled. He tried to do it with words. They were edged and pointed. They spoke of a way out. A way to reach the green monitor, to turn off the little black box. He knew a guy who’d flicked switches for a Mitsubishi shell company, he could give us an in. He could flip a hot-suit who wanted a favor. It was easy. The world became clear again. In his words, there was a vision. Of the interlocking webs of corporate battlegrounds, the raw data waiting behind an unlocked door. Of the possibility of escape, a one-way trip off-world. A new identity card stamped sterling by a pariah state. Solve for X. Change the equation. Spin the numbers. We had one shot.
I slurped a couple of noodles. Their plastic scratchiness hurt my throat. I don’t know, man, I said. I don’t know. We could get burned. They’ll swallow us whole.
Thirty seconds, he said, thirty seconds. In or out. Maybe it was the stims, but I couldn’t count. I saw the ocean. I thought about the green lines of code, running up and down, counting down my life in analog. I thought about the world. Through his eyes, I saw it all in achingly hard lines. The offshore tax havens, the intergalactic nodes of extraterritorial protection, and at the center of everything, the little black box.
I’m in.
His head tipped forward then back. A nod. We’re on a clock. I felt it ticking in my head. Walking through the benches of punch card feeders slopping up noodles. The dismembered digital numbers blinking Tokyo time, Seoul time, Beijing time. Eights and Sixes turning into each other.
Jax’s head touched the gate’s grating. He pointed with his eyes. “Tomorrow’s break, when the gate opens, yeah; left instead of right.” I swallowed. His Rs were disappearing, grating together like twin rotors. Left instead of right. A change in direction. Just walking down a hall. Nothing to it. His head was still leaning against the gate when his voice got soft. For the first time he spoke of the bush. There was no edge, no sharpness, the words were quiet, dropping through the gate’s metallic harshness. The clock slowed, the warmth touched me. The thick warmth of the bush. There was no breeze, there was still a sun. It touched everything, baking the ground, dyeing the trees. His clarity gave way to a haziness, a wistful longing. Yeah, that what’s it was, yeah, it was all that brother. It really was.
On the satellite phone, he spoke in Tswana. Calling in a favor. Sweetening the pot. The metro rumbled on, screeching around a bend. We’d checked out early, dumping our time cards, getting crumpled cash from the pay dispenser. Our car was empty, green lights flickering when the doors opened, when the doors closed. Abandoned mega-flats rose up around the tracks. Great towers reaching into the dark sky, makeshift fires billowing smoke from their silent spires. Cargo Haulers floated over them, ascending with the urban elevation, journeying to the top.
Some wire-heads hopped on the train looking to score. They were hungry and they were lean. Wires for arms, serrated blades, eyes fixed up with infra. The billboards made them purple, made us blue.
They inched closer, knives out, snaking around the silver poles no one was holding onto. Jax swayed with the hurtling train. “Yeah,” black magnesium machine pistol. “Yeah,” he said again. Purple, blue. Blue, purple. Closer. Thermal doesn’t see magnesium. Another bend, whipping everyone sideways, wheels crying sparks. Jax raised the gun, feet planted equidistant. They saw nothing, only an open hand. Then they saw white fire. Blood, pain, depleted uranium. Flesh exploding backward, ripping into strips of heat. Turning and twisting, melting and dancing. Cabaret with no legs. Marionettes with no strings. Falling into nothingness, arching across the train car, pirouetting a long farewell.
“Yeah,” he said for the last time. Our stop. The doors slid open, beeping green. Sliding the machine pistol under his windbreaker we stepped over the bodies, stepping into the cool night.
“Even God Has Insomnia,” the glittering billboard said. “Even God Can’t Fall Asleep. Try Okada! Try Us Now!”
There were no buses so we walked. Under the inky sky, under the rusted legs of the billboard. Fireflies, dying from the anti-toxins, fell like little torches, buzzing goodbye, hitting the ground. The edge of the city had an emptiness, a comforting desolation. The road was wide and there were no cars, the haulers in the heavens sang mournfully to one another. It was so quiet. A lone shuttle bus heading the wrong way passed us by, its headlights twin lamps shining softly. There were no passengers on the bus. It was completely empty. The whole city felt empty. As though everyone had gone to sleep. As though they all had gone away.
The marooned freighter appeared on the horizon. Fallen in a long-forgotten gasoline drought it was alight with a thousand little lights. Its immense mass towered over the broken landscape, a silent hulk of welded steel. Dozens of bonfires crackled and roared around the gaping entrance.
Jax’s mech-dog met us at his door. “Jax!” it barked in shortwave static. “Jax! Jax!”
In the half of his face that still moved there was a smile. He spun the bulkhead’s wheel, opening the hatch. The cybernetic dog leaped up around him, its salivaless tongue jerking in and out. “Jax! Jax!”
The cabin was cool and dry. He lit a cigarette and spread out his identity cards like a flush hand of blackjack. Same picture, different names. He talked of getting out quick, of jetting off-world. “Jax,” I whispered in my head. I wondered which name he’d answer to in his sleep. Which name was his, really his.
He shuffled the cards. Mixing and swirling them. Putting them in a black briefcase, padding them with Indochinese Yen. He’d get me one tomorrow. We were almost out, we were going to beat the clock. Going to make it out.
He lit another cigarette and lay down. Sleep came to him but not to me. Man, I was tired… so fucking tired.
His satellite phone rang several times in the night.
Left not right. The unlocked door. It was going to be clean.
It was daytime, I drank unleaded cortisone, he chewed nicotine. We’d taken the metro back. The half-empty bar played a projection of last night’s dance floor. Holograms writhing and twerking, shaking and gyrating.
Left not right. Junk workers, nine a.m. shadows, no suits.
Music harsh and electric, crashing and spinning. The bartender wiped a glass slowly, he looked up at me. He shook his head slowly. No.
The satellite phone rang in short beeps. The bartender didn’t turn away, his face remaining static. Jax picked up, the antenna rising higher, listening to invisible radio waves.
“Yeah,” he said to the phone. There was a long pause. The music exploded into angry beats, sending the translucent dancers into a frenzy. They swirled around him, through him. He collapsed the antenna and looked at me. For one second he was entirely still.
The music thundered on. “We’re burned, we’re fucking iced.” Drums, bells, whistles.
“What?” Beetles of sweat, crawling, massing, gnawing. “What?”
He grabbed his briefcase, clicking it open. “It’s over, we’re done.” Machine pistol, transit papers, depleted uranium bullets clicking into the magazine one by one.
Give me a gun, man. Gimme something. A dancer toppled and fell into me, his pixelated teeth shattering. Give me an out. The clock sped up. Its invisible hands blurring with speed.
Sirens. An ear-splitting shriek. Cutting into the music, making it bleed. Electric piano, amplifiers, drum beats.
Let’s go, let’s fucking split. My words were mashed, stringy, loose. C’mon, c’mon. He cocked the gun. In his eyes, there was no panic, no fear, there was a realization of some perfect precision, some unknown clarity. It calmed me. The sirens grew louder. A pulsing living thing. Coming closer. I felt aluminum. He handed me a double-barrel automatic. Two triggers.
The bartender was still there, staring. Everyone was. We stepped back into the recorded dancers, melding into the colorful discordance.
There go the doors. A loudspeaker. “This isn’t the regular police!” And I knew it as soon they hit the room. Special Branch, hard and suited to kill. They came in opening up. Live fire shattering the neon floodlights. Jax stepped sideways, one hand on the trigger, one holding the kickback. On the psychedelic checkerboard floor, muzzle flashes, hot uranium pouring through the dancers’ chests, blasting kevlar. I stumbled to the bar, crawling under the streaking lead. They were so happy, these projections. Jumping and screaming. Laughing as bullets cut through them, grinding as bodies detonated melted flesh. The police spread out, rifles splayed flat, blasting cordite. They had no eyes. Ballistic goggles.
Everyone who wasn’t a holo was running. Skin hitting light. Kicking and grasping for the crumpled doors. Crunching on glass, bleeding, dying. Jax crouched on a glowing checker, shaking off an empty magazine, clicking in a new one. Spraying bursts of fire. They slid forward in a loose cordon, stepping over overdosed dancers, corpses with smoking holes, shell casings. The transparent DJ with his spectral headphones, spun the table, whirring the music on, eyes closed, fingers pointing to the shattered ceiling.
Jax sprung up, rattling ammunition. He moved fast. Quick. Sizzling radiation. Swerving in between projections, ducking, crouching, blazing white hot flashes. My back was to the bar, I lifted the automatic. Here goes. They weren’t the regular police. They had broken strikes on mining colonies and penal moons. They were tough and they were good. I squeezed both triggers, feeling the jolt, the explosion of death-wearing lead flying ablaze through the air. The clean discharge of automatic fire. The burning spray catching them sideways. Falling into tailspins, smashing onto the colorful floor. Pink and Red. Red and Pink.
The last satsu walked forward, firing in spurts. Killing pixels. Searching for flesh in the holos. He passed through a girl in silent reverie and stood an inch from Jax. His finger clenched. Something clicked. Nothing came out. “Black on ammo!” He screamed out of instinct. Or terror. Jax shot him in the face. And that was it.
Last night’s dancers spun on, swirling over the wreckage. Pink and red. Red and pink. Corpses were strewn under them like broken toys on the glowing floor. Reaching for rifles, grasping at grenades, radios. Holes in their bodies’ hissing clouds of lazy vapor. They were tough, they were good, and they were dead.
His windbreaker had two holes. Our clock hadn’t stopped yet. It was moving too fast. We had to go. He talked as he drove. Breathing heavily. Talking of an end. The end. A back door in the middle of nowhere. One last chance. They’ll be watching the Skyport. They’ll be combing the freight docks, the metro. All of it under one big lidless eyeball. I didn’t say much. I was shaken up. There was nothing to say anyway. He turned the wheel, coasting to the service road, the Special Branch truck we had taken flashing its lights silently, churning asphalt.
The sky over the fallen freighter was a worn-out blue. Dark and drained. Tired daylight bleeding through the city’s steel mesh of interlocking freeways.
We got out of the SB transport and walked past the detritus of a dozen bonfires. In the mouth of the gaping entrance, we craned our heads up at his distant window.
Stay here, he told me, I’m going up.
No. They’ve been there by now. Maybe still. Let’s go, quick.
He turned and his squinted eyes hit mine. He wanted his little mech-dog. He didn’t want to say it but he needed it. He was going up. There was a hole in him somewhere and it was too deep. He asked for ten minutes. Past that, leave him. I nodded.
“Brother,” he said. His head went up, went down. A nod. And then he was gone.
Maybe it was the stims wearing off but I counted clean. Analog minutes and seconds ticking away. Five minutes. Nothing. Seven, the same. Almost ten. Did I just hear something? Nothing. Ten.
I stared up at the freighter’s impassive face. Round hatches and windows staring back without a word.
The clock stopped. Completely. Both hands were on twelve. Midnight. Then I saw Jax. He was falling. Flying from the window. Windmilling slowly, like a dying firefly. A thousand Indochinese Yen fluttering around him like paper birds. Flapping goodbye from his punctured briefcase. Goodbye… goodbye… goodbye…
He buzzed speed until he hit the ground. Until he broke his back and shattered his spine. Until a thousand paper birds landed on him, turning crimson.
Something was approaching. A little thing. His dog, limping on three broken legs. Its face and body dented and smashed. One blue eye still open.
“Jax… Ja-kchzz… kchzzx…’ It vomited static, trying to talk. Trying to nuzzle its fallen master. “Khchzzz…”
Fuck. I ran to him and took the flapping transit papers, I took the gun. His dead eyes were locked with mine, like he’d gone to sleep. The hole in him was plugged for good, filled with lead. Solve for X. What you did to one side they did to the other. They beat you. They got you clean. You would’ve been proud. Goodbye, man.
I ran to the truck and geared up the engine. The dog lifted up its broken head and let out a howl of pain, of suffering. I hit the pedal and drove off, down the road, into the muted darkness.
The sound barrier shuddered and broke again. Another big one, going somewhere I’ll never see. Roaring into the black expanse of the sky. Flying with a thousand passengers away on a long journey. Blue light was filtering into the motel room, draping me in cool slipstream. Every inch of me aches for sleep. They’re out there somewhere. Looking, watching, waiting. The lidless eyeball, roving through the city. I’m passing the last moments of time. Looking through my pocket. The machine pistol, heavy with uranium, nice and cold. Some crumpled rand bills, coins, and something else. The picture she drew of me. In the dim light, it looks good. I have the wire in my arm but I’m happy, calm, smiling. Man, it would be something to feel that again. To see the ocean one more time. To see it for real. Yeah, I would’ve liked to do that. I really would’ve… Ok, here comes another one. Taxiing to the runway. Everyone onboard is seatbelted in, ready for takeoff. It must be warm inside, brightly lit with a thousand little round windows. Maybe some kid is leaning against his window and drifting off to sleep. I’m drifting off myself. My eyes are getting heavy, floating toward the oblivion. It has been so long… Tingling the edges of me is a brush of that warmth, that resigned quiet love for the world. It encases me, wrapping my body with its benignity, with its soft tired love. I understand everything, I am so close… moisture touches my tongue… Good night, I murmur out loud, Good night everyone. Wherever you’re going…
