It was smoky. Harsh purple lasers streaked across stages where men and women danced to techno music. Even the drinks glowed with a celestial fluorescence. He couldn’t hear anything over the music. The bass thumped through his head. He spotted a long bar in the corner with a few empty stools.
“What may I get you, citizen?” A bot behind the bar counter sported an apron and bowtie. It was twirling a rag around the inside of an empty glass.
“Uh…” Sam hesitated as he sat down. He couldn’t pay for anything without getting caught. “Is water free?” He almost had to shout over the music.
“Certainly. All life essentials are provided free of charge to all citizens of Paradiso.” It filled a glass with water from a nozzle at the end of one of its limbs.
“Thanks…”
He picked it up to take a sip when he felt someone slap him on the back. A man with a shaved head and goatee plunked down next to him. He was wearing a long green trench coat and looked to be in his thirties. He was laughing.
“Szyslak, let me get two brewskies for me and my new friend here,” he said.
“Certainly,” replied the robotic bartender. The bot gave each of them a mug of glowing, amber-colored beer. It scanned the goateed man’s purple ring on his coat. “Your total has been deducted—”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Don’t care.”
“Certainly, citizen.” Szyslak buzzed away to another waiting patron.
“Uh, thanks?” Sam said.
“We can tell, you know.” The man gulped some of his beer.
“Can tell?”
“The bots can’t. But we can. No ring on your jacket. Makes you stick out like a sore thumb. And unbutton the top a little, for God’s sake. You look like a little kid trying to shoplift from a toy store.”
“Oh…yeah…” Sam unclasped the top button of his jacket. The blue ring still was still hidden.
“So, you’re an outlander?”
“Uh, I guess?”
“From a city?”
“Yeah. Still not sure how I got here, though…”
“So do you actually have a normal or name or one of these cuckoo serial numbers they give everyone here?” the man scoffed.
Sam felt relieved. He’d met someone who both wasn’t a robot and wasn’t a human who acted like a robot. “Samuel Pierce.”
“Nice, nice.” He extended his hand. It was solid. Worked. “I’m Evron. Also an outlander.”
“Where are you from?”
Evron chugged his beer. Gasped in satiation. “The last big city before this one. Where men were free. Not here in this…” he looked around disapprovingly, “this cage. They throw us a bone every once in a while to make us think we’re free. But we’re not.”
“The man in the street,” Sam remembered. “Did you see it?”
“Yup.” He wobbled his glass at Szyslak, who came over and refilled it. “Name was TI One Eight Seven Twenty. Good man.”
“Why’d they take him? Where’d they take him?”
Evron smiled. Shook his head. “Human beings still haven’t figured out how to be careful what they wish for. They programmed the machines to create perfection but failed to realize what that perfection would cost.” There was an air of aggression about him. His voice was tinged with a southern accent, but not nearly as strong as Del’s. Perhaps he was from Georgia or South Carolina. He seemed militaristic, yet charming in his own way. “You show any signs of sickness, whether it be a headache or a sneeze, and you get erased.”
Sam thought. “Processed?”
He nodded. “Sounds nice, don’t it? Flesh and blood human beings reduced to numbers in a big machine. Entire lives made no more significant than the pebbles you step on in the street. Damn shame, if you ask me.” He sipped his beer. “So, tell me a little about yourself.”
“Uh,” he hesitated. “Not much to say, I guess.”
“Not much to say? Well I’m glad someone has a mighty high opinion of himself.”
“I mean, I uh. I worked for a tech company editing documents. But I was let go recently for…uh…let’s just say some legal issues.”
“Uh-huh. Well you don’t sound too immensely torn up about it.”
He shrugged. “I mean…maybe it’s serendipity, you know? I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life.” He chuckled. Put his head down. “If people stop rejecting my damn books, I might actually get somewhere. Had a science fiction agent reject me today, and I’m pretty sure she’s never actually sat down and truly enjoyed a sci-fi book in her life. All just market research and profitability potential. Or freaking vampires. Authors use vampires to target teenage girls who think they’re being rebellious, but I’ll be damned if I’d ever go that route.”
“Mhmm, mhmm.” He nodded like a therapist agreeing with a patient. “Let me ask you a question. About this job of yours you had.”
“Okay, shoot.”
He cleared his throat. “You have a boss?”
“Yeah…”
“You call him ‘sir?’”
“Well, I mean—”
“Do you call him ‘sir’ or not? Just answer the freaking question, please.” He slammed his mug down on the counter and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Some of the beer spilled over the rim.
“Yes.”
He scowled. “Why do you call him that?”
“I don’t know.” Sam shrugged. “Respect?”
“Respect? What respect? Does he call you ‘sir’?”
He shook his head. “No?”
“So he doesn’t respect you?”
Contemplation.
“So, let me get this straight, you have to call him ‘sir’ out of respect but he doesn’t have to say the same thing to you?”
“I guess I never thought of it that way…”
“And that dame who rejected your book, did you thank her after the meeting?”
“Yeah…”
“So she told you that your book wasn’t worth a damn and you thanked her for it?”
“Um, I guess I did…”
Evron shook his head and signaled to Szyslak. “Two more.”
“But I haven’t finished my first—”
“Two more.” He patted him on the back. “You need to learn to relax, Sammy. Now, let me ask you a question: Who decided that you have to respect your boss but he doesn’t have to respect you?”
Hesitance. “I don’t know.”
“Is he a better person than you?”
Silence.
“Or is it because he’s a more important person than you?”
Shrugs.
“Why? What makes him a more important human being than you? What makes his life more valuable than yours? How has he earned your respect?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Let’s look at the facts. You always liked facts, right? Your boss most likely grew up as some upper class brat getting anything his heart desired on his parents’ dime. He got to go to the best schools because he could afford the education you couldn’t. He got the best job because he had the connections you didn’t. You, on the other hand, worked your goddamn butt off just to get by because you were born into a family that had to reach up to touch bottom. You studied, you worked hard, you busted your ass to pay for school and then went out working yourself to death to land a job about ten pay grades lower than the one your boss’s daddy hooked him up with.”
“I guess, but—”
“I’m not done. You made sacrifices for your family so they wouldn’t have to spend Christmas in the dark while your boss was handed a Mercedes for his sixteenth birthday. Your family was mixing stolen fast food ketchup packets with water for tomato soup while your boss’s was eating steak and lobster every night. You had to work and struggle and scrape and earn everything you’ve ever had while your boss had it handed to him on a silver platter. Now look me in the eye and you tell me who deserves more respect. You tell me who should be calling who ‘sir.’”
There was a long pause. Sam wondered how he knew
so much about him. Was it really always that obvious? Had a life of impoverishment left a permanent mark?
Evron leaned in. “Look, kid. I like you. And I want to let you in on a little something.” He looked over to make sure Szyslak wasn’t close enough to eavesdrop. “Me and some buddies are planning something. Something big.” He whispered, “We’re going to take down the Overseer.”
“The Overseer? Who exactly is this guy?”
He laughed. “Guy? Man, he ain’t a guy! He’s a goddamn machine. The one they put in charge. The one who’s turned us all into slaves to order.”
“Oh. I mean, is it really that bad here?”
“Look around you!” He stretched his arms to the purple lights, purple rings. “In Paradiso, everyone’s equally dirt. You can work twice as hard and be twice as smart as someone else and still end up with the same credits. Sure, no man’s deprived. But…” He raised a palm to the sky, “No man can rise. No matter how much he deserves it. Even if it’s someone like you. Someone who’s scraped and scrapped. You’ll always be nothing, here. Just another number.”
Another pause. “So what’s your plan?”
“Ha! That’s my boy!” Evron beamed, elated. He wrapped an arm around Sam’s shoulders. “Let’s discuss the details over some drinks! Yo, Szyslak!” The bot floated over. “Get us plastered!”
“Certainly, citizen.”
12
The Mysterious Figure
Delaney stormed into Romano’s, her fists clenched. Angry. She stomped behind the counter and furiously tossed her purse across a table.
“Well, good morning, sunshine.” Giovanni looked up from prepping dough. “Date not go very well?”
“Didn’t go at all. Son of a bitch stood me up.”
“Really?” He looked surprised. “Huh…”
“Ain’t even have the stones to let me know.”
“Don’t get too upset. You know how these things go. Especially here. Win some, lose some.”
“I know.” She almost had a tear in her eye. Her voice lowered to a whisper. “I just had this weird feeling ‘bout this one…”
Gio nodded. Sighed. He wasn’t sure what else to say.
Delaney’s phone beeped.
“Maybe this is the son of a—”
She looked down at her phone. It wasn’t Sam. BABY IM IN TOWN.
Gio stretched his neck. Tried to see. “Is that…?”
“Yeah…” she gulped.
“You’re not actually thinking of…?”
“No! ‘Course not!”
“Alright, just checking.” He went back to kneading dough.
Meanwhile, Delaney hid the phone from view and sent a text back. IM OFF TONIGHT.
Everything was a blur. The music throbbed. The dance floor shook. The laser lights sliced through the nightclub’s fog. Sam could see Evron somewhere nearby. He was laughing, smiling. He felt a woman dancing with him. Or maybe he was just hopping up and down and she was dancing. He wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. He was having fun. One drink after another. Some glowed purple or blue or green. When he drank, for those brief hours, nothing else mattered. Not your class, not your bank account, not your worries. Nothing. The result was always the same. There was just happiness.
Good, clean, pure—
He bent over and threw up. People laughed and clapped as he clutched his chest in pain. Evron smiled and slapped him on the back as the last bits dribbled from his mouth. “You see that down there?”
“Yeah…” He chucked up a little more.
“That my friend, is all that pain, all that anxiety from being cooped up in your little cricket cage all day and forced to lick some asshole’s boots because you didn’t have the fortune of being born with that silver spoon.”
“It looks more like my breakfast…” A Cleaning Bot hovered over and started mopping it up.
“It’s not what it is, it’s what it represents. Flushing the system. Getting rid of all that pent-up BS that controls your life.”
Sam puked some more. Some of it sprayed on one of the little robot’s arms. It looked annoyed.
“Easy now, let it out,” Evron said. “We’ve all got a beast in there somewhere. And the only way to keep it under wraps is to set it free once in a while!”
“If you say so.” Sam wiped some of his spittle off the robot with the arm of his jacket. “Sorry.” His vision started going hazy again. He felt lightheaded. Woozy.
“You all right, man? I’m startin’ to get concerned.”
He toppled over.
Blackness.
“Suction, now!” a doctor shouted to nurses, orderlies, whoever happened to be walking by as he threw a mask over Sam’s unconscious mouth. “It’s in the respiratory tract!” The mask was connected to a pump.
The heart rate monitor screeched. A nurse tripped over some tubing, pulling out cords. It was chaos.
“Get that plugged in! He could asphyxiate!”
Blood spurted from his mouth, spraying the inside of the mask. It was dark red, almost black. He was gurgling. Choking.
Dying.
“We have internal bleeding!”
The nurse shakily plugged the vacuum pump back in. There was a whoosh of air. The crimson liquid flowed through the tube.
A few seconds passed. The young man relaxed. The heart monitor slowed.
“He’s stabilizing.” The doctor wiped sweat from his brow. “Hang on, bud. Hang on.”
“Hang on, bud!” Evron’s words of encouragement were laced with glee as he and Sam stumbled down the alley next to NB4590—Delaney’s—building. They drunkenly staggered into the shadows as people walked by, offering only curious glances and little more. Laughing, they slumped to the ground.
A synthetic female voice echoed through the city: “Attention citizens of Paradiso, the Violet Period will be ending in [ten minutes]. Please be advised.”
Sam started nodding off. The back of his head tapped the wall.
Evron gently slapped him in the face. “Hey, hey, stay with me now. Gotta get you back inside.”
He moaned.
“Come on now, man, wake up. I don’t want to have to carry you all the way to—”
There was another voice in the night. Unfamiliar. Strong. It was deep. Authoritative. Throaty and gruff. Slow words, one syllable at a time: “That’s enough, Evron.”
“Ah, shit…” Evron said.
“Go home. I’ll take care of him from here.”
“But I just—”
“Leave, Evron. You’ve done enough.”
Evron rolled his eyes. Sam could barely keep his open. He could hear the words, but the Figure behind the disembodied voice was just a distorted silhouette that helped him to his feet, wrapping his arm around his shoulder.
Evron reached the end of the alley and turned around. He pointed. “Don’t forget what I said earlier, Sammy. I’ll get to you with the details. We take this city back from the machines.” A bot floated by, wearing a bus boy hat and a checkered apron. It was handing out little finger sandwiches. Evron knocked the tray from its tendrils.
“My apologies, citizen,” it said.
“Now clean it up!”
“Certainly, citizen.” The little bot did what it was told and Evron vanished.
The Mysterious Figure shook his head. Sighed. “Eventually, he’s going to do quite the bit of damage if he’s not controlled.”
“I think he’s alright.” Sam burped, still in a drunken daze, holding back vomit.
“Come on. Let’s get you back to Del’s.”
“How do you know—” He hiccupped. “—where I came from?”
He chuckled. “I know everything you do.”
“Then you must be pretty smart.” Another hiccup. He lost his grip and fell to the ground.
The Figure looked down and sighed. “Evidently…”
He was wrapped in a towel, shivering on the end of Delaney’s bed, water dripping from his hair. The lights outside briefly pulsed white then turned neon yellow.
“You always did like it extra sweet,” the man from the alley said as he dumped a packet of sugar into a metal cup. “And cold.” Ice cubes appeared out of nowhere. He handed Sam the cup of tea. He was tall, powerful, and old. He wore a long khaki trench coat. African American. Curly white hair. Looked familiar. Like some famous actor.
Sam sipped the tea. “It’s good.” He sipped some more. “Really good. Like my grandma’s.”
“Just as good as you remember, I might add?”
He looked up. Suspicious. “Yeah…”
“Would you like to know why?”
Lightning crackled outside. The report of its thunder wasn’t far behind.
“It is because that specific cup of tea is built from your memories,” the Figure explained. “The sweetness. The soothing taste that used to let you know that everything was going to be okay, no matter how angry you got.”
“What are you talking about?” Sam shook his head, snickered. “Are you as crazy as I’m going right now?”
“Not particularly. In fact, I’m the little bit of you that hasn’t gone crazy, yet.” He pulled up an aluminum chair that seemed to coalesce from the ether. He sat down, crossed his legs, and folded his hands in his lap.
Sam stared. Studied him. “Who are you?”
“Where do you think you are right now, Mr. Pierce?”
He looked around. “Delaney’s apartment?”
“In the middle of…”
He paused. “A big weird city.”
“That isn’t New York City? How’d that happen?” His tone was patronizing. He wanted Sam to figure it out for himself.
“I…I don’t know…I’ve stopped thinking about it.”
He waggled his finger. “No, no, no. That’s rule Number One. Don’t lose yourself. Now,” he leaned forward, “where are you?”
“Paradiso…”
“Good, good. Now, doesn’t Paradiso seem a bit…familiar to you?”
More thunder. More rain. He half expected the lights to flicker, but they never did. His mind was blank.
“My, my, you really have no idea, do you?” the Figure said.
Sam shrugged. “I might if someone told me.”
Farewell from Paradise Page 7