Neon Sands Trilogy Boxset: The Neon Series Season One

by Adam J. Smith

  He paused, took a breath, and continued. “Frankly, considering where we are tonight – how we are here – I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing was fake; a link within a link – how far down the rabbit hole could we venture?”

  Murmurs of agreement rose to the surface all at once. All thirty – perhaps forty – of them in agreement. Corbin didn’t show it but he was disappointed. He’d hoped for a bigger turnout. As always whenever he mentioned the link, and the prospect that they were trapped in a permanent link, the ‘real’ world as they knew it nothing more than an illusion; arms and hands rose in the crowd to find something to touch. He even did it himself. Reaching out to the podium to feel its weight beneath the palm of his hand. The cool podium. The smooth podium. The podium that wasn’t really there.

  “We know we’re in the link,” he said. “We know the difference between here and there; even if we woke from sleep and didn’t know where we were, we’d know within seconds it wasn’t the light of day in our eyes if we woke connected. Something in the corner of our eye, always in the corner of our eye, there but not, there but only really there until we look directly at it.”

  He kicked at the podium and it exploded into non-existence. “We know,” he shouted. “It’s about the only thing we do know.” He began pacing the small stage. The low ceiling did nothing to dampen his words. That was the thing with sound in the link – you were only quiet if you wanted to be quiet. You could whisper in someone’s ear from across the other side of the room. And that’s how it was now: he felt the congregation grow small, tight, as though his arms were thrown around them all in a tight embrace. When he spoke, he knew his voice would conjure in the space around their heads, intimately calling them to arms. Which was why he was so disappointed by the turnout – there was nothing like the link to exploit people’s fears; to turn them to the light.

  He should’ve spoken to Rylan in the link, but the damn fool was too bright for his own good, preferring his underground reality to the illusion of beaches and parties. Real sex; the antiquated one-dimensional sweatiness of it, to the hours of electrically charged pleasure the link could supply. Corbin had Clarisse to thank for that information.

  These thoughts rolled around beneath his memorised words as he continued speaking. “I’m not saying the ‘real’ world isn’t the real world. That one thing might be the only truth we do know – though how sad a reality it would be. It would really mean that our existence really did mean nothing. Not to them, up there.” He pointed up. “Or down there.” He pointed down. “Whatever plane of existence we’re resting on at the moment.”

  He returned to the centre of the platform. “If this was all we knew, then this would be our reality.” He raised his arms until he was a cross on stage. “So it’s no leap to imagine that what is our ‘real’ world could easily only appear to be, because that’s all we know. Maybe our warped sense of peripheral vision here, is our prison walls out there.

  “And so we must break them.

  “We must fight them. Even if our prison walls are exactly prison walls and this whole fucked up planet is a radioactive wasteland crawling with things that would hunt us and kill us, we must fight them.

  “Even if the walls of the prison would fall, we must fight them. At least there’d be light! And truth! And something more than this stinking stagnation; this impotent humanity of clones content to merely persist.

  “We must set free our potential. Begin to move again!”

  The crowd began to clap and scream.

  “Generation after generation after generation, content to fuck and sleep and eat and re-roll the same dice over and over again. Pandering to the truthmakers, the elite that never die.”

  Corbin smiled as the crowd clapped and cheered, and when he spoke again, it really was a whisper; a lover’s midnight whisper. They’d feel his breath brush their ears. “We want to see light at the end of the tunnel again.” His breath stood hairs on end. “To see human progress lit up like the lights of day beside the long dark road of our history.” He could feel their goosebumps and the scratch at the back of their throats as they tried not to cry tears of hope. This was where he got them. When the emotion arrived, the rest of them came along for the ride, reason hitchhiking in the backseat.

  On his right, propped against the wood-panelled wall, Clarisse clapped, and when their eyes met she started nodding and a smile flashed his way. Hers was the only face he could distinguish from the crowd. The others all hid their identity.

  She understood.

  She’d stepped inside the doors of his revolution before she’d even known it; knocking on closed doors in the link that had no-one to open them, asking questions that had no-one to answer them.

  But he’d been listening.

  He was always listening.

  He might not have all the answers, yet, but he would get them. Through sacrifice or force, he would get them.

  “My friend over here is not afraid to show her face. The spotlight above her head is crystal clear, as is her mind. It is unclouded by certainty. A certainty of cause. She knows only action can change the world, and she is ready for it. Are you?”

  There were cries of “Yeah” from the crowd.

  “The time has never been better. People are starving in the streets – not from a malnourished body, but an impoverished soul. They don’t know where to turn. They wake up with a spoon in one hand and a hammer in the other. Every day the same. Every day the rain, and the darkness, and the quiet patter in the streets as we pass each other by – on the way to where? I don’t know. To homes devoid of soul? Open the front door, stick something in the microwave, say hi to each other – or don’t – and settle into the link. This fake connection. This cardboard reality. Don’t we deserve better? Don’t we deserve to come out from the darkness beneath the boot; to dry off in the sun and make our own choices in life? Take our own chances? For better or worse, but ours.”

  He pointed out into the crowd.

  “Yours.”

  They raised their arms into the air and began to clap above their heads. Spotlights appeared; bright round faces shone, some with ear-to-ear smiles and others looking stern, serious – ready to do business.

  “It should be your choice.”

  Corbin didn’t need props. He knew if he spoke long and hard enough, his voice was the only prop he needed.

  “You want another job? You should have the freedom to move to another job. Want to go topside? Be a highground? No ceiling should be able to stop you. Want to leave altogether? You should be able to trade in everything you own for a vehicle and supplies. On your head be it, they might say. But on your head be it!”

  The crowd lit up like Main Street on Liberty Day – a day of seemingly no origin. Not one that anyone would admit to knowing anyway. Lightbulbs of reason burst above the remaining doubtful. Teary, wet eyes glimmered back at him.

  “This is why we must be ready. Ready to strike when the time is right. Are you with me?”

  “Yeah,” roared the crowd.

  “This is why we fight. Our enemies are those who rule and those who obey. Are you with me?”

  “We’re with you!”

  “This is why we must not cower. We must not be afraid to strike out at all who stand in our way. The beggar in the street. The guard at the divide. The man serving food in the street. Through their apathy they are complicit. Through our action, we will free them. Are you with us?”

  There wasn’t a single scream of yes in the room that could be focused on. The room itself was a cacophony in stereo, indelible, a shared euphoria.

  They’d boarded his train.

  Locker

  He unplugged and the resonant hum of the machinery burrowed into his ears, no longer a forced white noise. The headache followed. Just once, he thought, it would be nice to link and not suffer the consequences of his childhood concussion. He couldn’t remember the cause, only the outcome; a snapshot of lying at the bottom of the steps outside his parent’s apartment, his broth
er staring down at him with a deadpan face. Then blackness; then pockets of lit faces and the prod of fingertips across his skull. Then hours of wakefulness, his eyelids locked open by bright light and amphetamines. Every time he felt himself slipping into a lucid state, he’d be jolted back to the present. “Stay awake,” his mother told him. “The doctor says we have to watch for bleeding on the brain. Here, play this.”

  Thanks for putting the fear in me.

  Bleeding on the brain. How could he concentrate on the game when his brain might be bleeding?

  Since the fall, or the push – it didn’t matter now that his brother was dead – coming out of the link was always painful. He pushed a thin blanket aside and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He sat up, and his pain followed. A tall glass of water waited for him on the bedside table.

  “Drink up,” said Clarisse, shuffling near.

  Women; always wanting to play the nurse, he thought. Eyes closed, he drank and savoured the cooling ripple effect down his throat. He’d not said a word, but his mind and throat seemed to think he had.

  “That was great.” Clarisse draped her arms around from behind and kissed his neck. “More recruits for sure.”

  “It all means nothing if we get caught. Were you able to log IDs?”

  “They gave them openly by the end. I’ll vet them and offer the decrypt key if they’re clear.”

  “Good,” said Corbin, allowing her kisses and the water, and time, to dissipate the headache. “I was hoping there’d be more. It’s too risky without the reward. We should stop.”

  She rubbed his shoulders. “Is that the headache talking, or fear?”

  “The only fear I have is not accomplishing our goal. It’s all too easy to make a mistake in the link – one wrong key and they could be onto us.”

  “We take every precaution possible.”

  Corbin shrugged off her hands and stood, talking through the shooting pain. “I don’t like this; putting myself at the mercy of someone else’s competence.”

  The room was a small metallic box that had once been an oversized storage room. Lockers still stood against the far wall, with a shower in the adjacent corner for workers to wash. Now rust had settled in the lines around the panels and the divots of the rivets, and the shower curtain hoops hung without burden. He stepped into the alcove and turned on the shower, allowing the freezing cold water to prickle his arms, his spine, his face. His head almost went a bit numb before the water began to warm.

  “We know what we’re doing,” she said, wrapping arms around his waist. Her hands glided across his abdomen and slipped up to his chest. She pressed her bed-warmth against his back. “You’re tense. Let me relax you.”

  ***

  Relaxed and clean, they ate from a pot of rehydrated noodles flavoured with dried chicken pieces and green bits advertised as herbs. Corbin very much doubted the flavourless white lumps possessed any chicken DNA. Just one more thing to add to the list of elite privilege.

  “Do you think we’ve ever had real chicken?” he pondered.

  Clarisse looked seriously at her fork for a moment; thin sauce dribbling away, noodles hanging like uncombed hair. “I think I did, once. Maybe.” She smiled and swallowed.

  “Did you see them kill the chicken?”

  “No, but it was shaped like a chicken.”

  “Hmm. Either clever modelling on behalf of the chef, or it really was real. Still, I wonder if it was lab-grown or farm-grown.”

  Small talk. This was how it was done, right? he thought. Something in Clarisse changed, as it always did, whenever talk veered from business. He didn’t know if it was her that brought it out of him, or if this was what he was really like after all. Perhaps you didn’t get to know yourself until you allowed someone to get to know you.

  He felt her foot rubbing up his calf beneath the table. “I’d love to try one one day that I knew wasn’t just a lump of meat grown in the meat processing labs.”

  He smiled. “Hopefully one day. I’ll take you to the farms and let you pick one out, just like they do topside.”

  “How romantic.” Her foot reached his knee, his thighs.

  “It wouldn’t be ethical, of course.”

  “Hmm?” She sucked in a stray noodle.

  “The lab meat is the ethical choice.”

  He watched her think this over, as though for the first time. Perhaps it was. “I guess,” she said, “though if animals aren’t for eating, then what are they for?”

  “You’d eat a cat? A dog?”

  “If I was desperate, living up in the pits perhaps.”

  “Well, so long as you’d be happy with your decision.”

  “What’s that mean?” She shucked backwards in her chair, dropping her foot. “As though you’re so ethical.” Her brown hair looked black in this dark-blue light, and the bottom strands had threatened to dip into the noodles on more than one occasion.

  The part of him that so desperately wanted out told him to drop it, but the other part of him – the part that controlled him – couldn’t. “Cats, dogs, rats, chickens; they all have a central nervous system. They all experience. Cat, dog, rat or chicken; end that life and you’re ending their experience. Talk about their value of life if you want, but it does nothing to diminish the fact you’re stopping a being from further experiences. Which is unethical. Maybe a cow gets as much enjoyment from a blade of grass as we do from a beef burger, and then we end that. Or maybe it gets none. The qualifying object there being ‘it’. It exists.”

  “I’d still rather eat it than starve.” She looked down into her emptying carton.

  “Like I said, if you can live with it.”

  “Oh right, like you couldn’t live with all the damage you’re planning?”

  “I’m a hypocritical asshole.” The noodles, he noticed, were beginning to dry his mouth out, so he shoved them across the table.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Still, I’d never eat a real chicken.”

  ***

  Corbin watched Clarisse get ready for the night shift; she grabbed her workclothes from the makeshift clothes-hanger on the back of the entry door and began to dress. That door was never cool; it radiated the heat cast from the other side, that itself permeated the halls outside that lead to the lower furnaces.

  “Hey,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by the whole unethical animal thing.” He had, but he needed Clarisse on his side, fighting for him, fighting for the cause; her silent tongue and closed body language told him she was annoyed. Even if she had no real reason to be, he thought. But women – no, just people in general – were irrational beings.

  She tore her bodysuit from the rail. Stepped into in silence, pulling it up and across her shoulders. Her arms stretched into place and she shrugged as though trying to get something off her back.

  The bodysuit had been on the back of the door in the first place to dry, since she had cleaned it in the single sink the night before, hunched in the mirror, scrubbing the material together. She chose to be here. When she could be in the comfort of her own home.

  And why shouldn’t she?

  “I apologise.” He thought about saying if I upset you, but knew that would come over condescending.

  “For what?” Clarisse asked. In front of the mirror, she began to brush her hair.

  Corbin walked barefoot across the windowless room; past the table and chairs, past the sofabed, and stood behind her. “For calling you unethical.”

  Clarisse turned, a smile across her face. She patted his cheek. “You think I give a shit about ethics? Bless. For someone so smart, you don’t get people at all, do you?” She gave him a kiss. “It’s a little endearing. Maybe I should say you have a hard time reading people.”

  She turned back to the mirror. “Half the shit you care about, you’re in the minority. But the other half – man, the other half is the half that we need right now. With me by your side, and anyone else we can get, we’ll open shit up wide for everyone to get a good look in.” Her
hair had dried in knots, and as she brushed, the harder she brushed; thwhip, thwihip, thwhip. Corbin stood in a swirl of stray hairs.

  “I think we’re in the minority with the other half too.” In a pile on the floor at the bottom of the bed lay his clothes. He sat on the edge and began pulling them on. “I’ll join you out.”

  “There’s more of us than you think. I’ll speak to Rylan; try to win him around. Your... approach... might not be the way to go.”

  “Hmm. We can always try someone else, or something else, if we need to.”

  “Maybe. If I tell him about the submarine parts we found then maybe he’ll become more interested. Don’t suppose you bought any coffee?”

  “I was gonna get some.”

  “I got you this place, the least you can do is stock me some coffee, geez.”

  “If somehow you can persuade him into the link, I could do the rest.” His boots slipped on and he began tying them up the side.

  Standing suddenly above him, Clarisse said “You got fancier shoes than me,” then kissed him on top of the head. “No time, sorry, gotta run. I’ll see if I can catch Ry in the morning. I’ll leave you messages – I think I’ll head back home tomorrow, get a proper wash, pick things up, that kinda thing.”

  “Okay,” said Corbin, standing. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and he could feel the playful side of him, the lighter half that she was meticulously prying from his shadow, trying to find the words to say something else. Before they could come, she turned and left, and the light retreated.