by Rob Hart
It was an honest smile.
“It feels good,” he said.
“What?”
“Being in their good graces again. Does that make me a bad person?”
Zinnia shrugged. “We’re hardwired for approval. It’s all anyone wants.”
“Yeah, but these are the people who destroyed my company,” he said. He was silent for a bit, and said, “Well, Dakota didn’t. Dobbs didn’t. I guess when it comes down to it, Gibson didn’t either. He didn’t come and personally…” He waved the glass around. “Smash up my shit. The market did. I tried my best. But the market dictates.”
“It does tend to do that,” Zinnia said, sipping at her vodka.
Paxton furrowed his brow, looked at her a little harder. “You okay?”
No.
“Yeah,” she said. “Tired.”
“Ever hear anything back from the Rainbow Coalition?” he asked.
“Not a peep.”
“Well, things are working out with Dobbs, so maybe I can put in a good word with him, get you onto security.” He put his feet up on the counter, trying to find room in the cramped space. “Way you handled yourself back in that town with those loony toons, you’re well suited for it.”
Zinnia huff-laughed. Sure. Can you get me on by tomorrow afternoon?
“Maybe,” she said. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”
“I keep thinking about them,” Paxton said. “How sad that must be. Living in squalor. Squatting in broken towns. They’d been doing it for a while, right? You could tell. The way they smelled. They hadn’t seen a shower or a clean piece of clothing in a long time. I know what we have here….” He paused, looked at his vodka, lifted his head a little so he could sip from the glass. “I know what we have here isn’t perfect, but it’s something, right? We have jobs.”
Zinnia didn’t know who he was trying to convince. But she’d take the wasteland. She was sick of this place. The brutalist surfaces and the cramped spaces and the digital scales and scarves and books and flypaper and flashlights and staplers and tablets. The mini-marathon she ran every day at work so that when she came home her knees ached. And worst of all: the prospect of doing that every single day.
She’d take the wasteland.
“I was thinking,” Paxton said.
Zinnia thought he was going to go on from there but he didn’t. “What were you thinking?” she asked.
“I was looking into it, and if it’s weird, we can just drop it,” he said. “It was just an idea. But, if we were to get a two-person apartment, it would be a little pricey, but we’d get a little more space, and I just thought…” He looked at his feet, the only way to hide his eyes that didn’t involve completely covering his face. “I thought it might be nice. You know. Bigger bed, especially.”
Zinnia took a big chug of vodka, and as the alcohol poured down her throat she felt her heart crack in two. Maybe years of trying to make it hard had made it brittle. Maybe that was all it would take, one solid smack of a hammer.
Every day the monkey job, then coming home to, what, read books? Watch television? Sit around and wait to run the marathon again? How was that supposed to be “nice”?
Zinnia sipped her vodka, thought about it.
About whether it was nice.
She’d worked hard for a very long time. Like, very hard. Her body carried the memories of her work. Scars Paxton’s fingertips would linger on, but he would never ask about, and she liked that about him. That and his smile. And he was funny sometimes, too.
She thought about the wasteland. The hot sun and the fight for water. The emptiness outside the cities and the cool air circulating in this room, and she would give this to Cloud, there were a great many things about this place she didn’t like, but at least it was quiet. Tomb quiet, and after years of the kinds of things she’d gotten used to—from the crack of gunfire to the raspy voices of interrogators to the deep thrum of explosions—she found that quiet was another thing she liked.
If she stayed, tomorrow she would wake up and report to the warehouse floor and pick shit out and put it on conveyor belts and send it off to whoever.
Could she even stay without finishing the job?
“I’m sorry,” Paxton said, his voice heavy. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, it’s not that,” she said. “I’ve never lived with anyone before.” She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. “I thought it was expensive.”
Paxton shrugged. “I’m still waiting for my patent on the egg to come through. Once it does…I’ll make some money selling it to Cloud.”
“You really want to do that?”
Another shrug. “Not like I can afford to start another company.”
“Okay,” Zinnia said. “Let me think about it for a bit.”
Paxton smiled; reached his arm to the floor, where he put down his glass of vodka; and then put his face where Zinnia had wanted it to go in the first place, and as she dug her nails into his scalp and arched her back, pushing herself into him, she thought, well, maybe this kind of life wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was like a kind of retirement.
PAXTON
Paxton returned from the bathroom to find Zinnia sprawled on the futon, half-tangled in the top sheet. He closed the door; dropped her robe, which had just barely fit him for the walk down the hall; and climbed onto the futon beside her.
That feeling reared up in his stomach again. Like he wanted to tell her that he loved her. So easy to say, but also a bell that couldn’t be unrung. He rolled onto his back and looked up at the tapestries hanging from the ceiling. Told himself: Be happy she’s thinking of moving in with you. Leave it at that.
He thought about an apartment that was full with the two of them together, and that made him think of the emptiness of his notebook. Moving in with Zinnia wasn’t just about his feelings for her. It was an acceptance that the notebook would likely stay empty. That this would be a good enough future. And who knew, maybe inspiration would strike, and he’d have the opportunity to try again, but Cloud was where he belonged, because it was where he was with her.
Zinnia stirred, climbed over him, her body radiating heat, and padded to the sink. Pulled a clean glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water, downed it in one large gulp. “Want one?” she asked.
“Nope,” he said, admiring the curve of her back in the dim light. Hoping she would notice his admiring and want to go for round two. Instead she bent down to pick up her robe and threw it over her shoulders, cinching it tight at the waist. She nodded toward the nightstand.
“Can you hand me my watch? Need to hit the restroom.”
Paxton reached back blindly, grabbed the first one off the charging mat that he felt. It was his. He shrugged and handed it to her.
“C’mon,” she said. “Our bands aren’t even close.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Use mine.”
“I thought the watches were coded to the user.”
Paxton laughed. “Funny story. Turns out they’re not. That feature is broken. Remember when there was that issue with people fooling the tracking? Turns out all you had to do was give your watch to someone else to wear for a bit, then go do what you had to do and come back. Which is crazy, right? They’re working on a fix, but apparently that’s going to take some time.”
“Huh,” Zinnia said.
After a few moments she said it again. “Huh.”
And she smiled.
“Keep that on the down-low,” Paxton said. “Actually maybe you better take your own watch….” He reached back to grab hers, but when he turned, she was already out the door.
GIBSON
This is a tough thing to write about. Must have gone through six or seven versions of this. I’ve never talked a lot about the Black Friday Massacres, mostly beca
use I felt like it wasn’t my place to say anything, but I figure since I’m getting near the end of the road here, I ought to weigh in.
What a terrible day that was. I know, a real controversial stance to take, isn’t it? America always had this uncomfortable relationship with firearms. And, I get it. I was born in a family with a proud hunting tradition. I knew how to strip and clean a rifle before I was ten, and I was always taught to treat guns with the utmost respect. Same goes for anything I shot. I was never one of these idiots out in the Serengeti shooting a lion so that I could prove something.
No, we would hunt moose and elk and squirrel, and we’d eat them and tan the hides. My dad would even whittle tools out of the bones, because it felt important to use as much of the animal as we could. You don’t want to waste.
But at the same time, I know the way I feel about guns is very different from how someone might feel if they live in Detroit or Chicago.
Everyone has an opinion and every opinion is different. That’s the problem. Here’s my opinion: it was a damn stupid mistake to make firearms part of a doorbuster sale. Honestly, and I remember this exactly, I was drinking my coffee and reading the paper and I saw that get announced, and my first thought was, Some poor fool is liable to get shot.
It was a dark thought and I pushed it away. I like to think better of people than that. I hate that I was right. I hate even more how right I was. Who knew that it would happen, and at so many stores? Who knew so many would end up dead?
That’s when I put my foot down and said we weren’t selling guns anymore. Which I had spent years negotiating for the right to do, and they were the only item in our entire store that had to be delivered by a person and signed for by a person.
But I was sick, to my stomach and my heart, and I knew something had to change. Sometimes you got to take the lead. And look what happened. With the brick-and-mortar chains circling the drain and Cloud handling everything else and small shops unable to compete—used to be something like twenty million guns were manufactured a year in the United States and that number is down to less than a hundred thousand. And even then, guns are really expensive, putting them out of reach for most folks, and if there’s one industry I don’t feel bad about hurting, it’s that one.
The Black Friday Massacres were the last mass shooting in America and I am happy to have played a role in that.
The market dictated. By that I mean, Americans voted with their wallets, accepting us as their main retail point, knowing full well we wouldn’t be flying guns out to their front doors.
I’ll say it again, because I know how easy it can be to misrepresent what people say: I mourn those people more than you might think, but I am glad, at least, that America finally came to its senses on this difficult issue.
So, there we go. I’d encourage you all to take a couple of minutes to yourselves, have a good long think. At Cloud, as usual, we will hold a ceremony, and a moment of silence for workers who can’t get off shift. We’ll read the names of the deceased, and we will continue to honor their memory the best we can, by working hard, and by showing compassion for each other.
The other thing I wanted to say, and this is a hard reality to admit but I can’t avoid it any longer, is today will probably be my last visit to a MotherCloud facility. I just can’t do it anymore. I’m barely sleeping. It’s tough to keep food down. I’m trying my best but there are days where I need my nurse—big fella named Raoul—to carry me around a bit. And that’s no way to live.
So today is going to be very special for me. It’ll be another last.
My last tour of a MotherCloud. Claire and Ray are going to join me for it, and we’re going to have a nice little walk around, and then it’s back on the bus, and home. I’ll keep on trying to write, though it might not all make it onto the blog. Not yet. I had to have Molly look this one over for me, and she even took over typing for me halfway through. Say hello, Molly.
Let the record show that Molly just smacked me in the arm. She wants me to take this seriously.
So, in case this is it, I want to thank you all for tuning in. I wish I was able to meet every Cloud employee before I went. I am just full of wishes right now. Things that’ll have to be left undone, but that’s life, isn’t it?
I guess at this point I should try to leave you all with some words of wisdom. As if anything I said could be considered wisdom. But you know, I always lived by a pretty basic principle: work gets done or it doesn’t, and I like when the work gets done.
If you can focus on that, and your family, everything will probably be all right.
Swear to truth, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
It has been an honor to live this life.
ZINNIA
The tram line is officially shut down for Remembrance Day ceremony.
Zinnia put her CloudBand on the charging mat and dressed quickly, pulling on workout clothes—sweatpants and a thick hoodie, something that would conceal her empty wrist. As she dressed she ran through the plan in her head. There were a lot of moving parts. It relied too much on intel she didn’t have. But it would have to be enough.
She pulled down the tapestry in the corner, climbed into the ceiling, and shuffled across to the bathroom. Empty. She dropped to the floor and stepped outside, found a woman at the elevator already, so she jogged to get on before it closed.
Once inside, the woman swiped her wrist and Zinnia stepped to the back and waited. She got off at the lobby and made her way to the gym. She lingered until someone else was coming in—a dudebro with beautifully sculpted arms who opened the door for her so he could very obviously scope her ass.
Inside the gym she threw some light weights around until she was sure there was no one looking, and stuck a ten-pound rubber plate in the front pocket of her hoodie. She exited the gym, keeping one hand on the plate so it didn’t sag, and made her way down the hallway, to the lobby, where she could get a look at the tram entrance.
The place had been emptied out. There was only one blue, an older man who looked bored. Probably everyone else was over at Incoming preparing for Wells and the ceremony. She pressed herself against the wall, out of sight of him, and waited.
He made a long loop of the place, not really letting the tram out of his sight. Which was not great.
She thought about the matches in her pocket, of lighting something on fire in one of the trash bins, which would draw his attention away, but also might attract too much attention. Not the best option, but it would work. Before she could reach for the matches, the guard looked around like he was afraid of being caught and made a beeline for the bathroom.
As soon as he was out of sight, Zinnia popped out and made her way to the tram and slid underneath the arm of the gate. She flattened herself on the platform and reached down, and placed the plate between the wall and the track, careful not to touch the actual lines. It was an octagon, with a flat edge, so she was able to balance it on its side. She paused, waiting for a sensor to go off, but nothing happened. The lines were most likely weight-sensitive to detect debris. Being able to stand up the plate without touching any of the lines—it should go undetected. And it should work to jam up the train.
Should should should. This was sloppy, and she hated sloppy, but sloppy was better than the alternative.
She slid under the gate arm and made her way back to the elevator. As she was waiting, the guard came out, so she busied herself looking at the Cloud map, bouncing from foot to foot like she might go for a jog, not wanting him to wonder why she was standing there.
This stretch of track was a straight shot, and it was where the trams usually picked up a little speed. Since it wasn’t stopping until Live-Play, it ought to be going pretty fast.
Zinnia thought about Paxton. About his standing next to Wells, and the car hitting the plate, and the derailment. Broken bodies and mangled limbs. Lots of blood. She put it out of
her head. Concentrated on the money she’d get. The freedom it would give her. All the things she could leave behind.
A man approached the elevator and Zinnia got on behind him. He swiped, but for the wrong floor. Zinnia yelped, “Oh, damn it, forgot something,” and leapt off. She had to do that two more times over the space of fifteen minutes until finally, someone got on who was going to her floor.
She stopped in front of a door a few doors down from her own and knocked. Her chest buzzed with anticipation. She had seen Hadley earlier this morning, in the bathroom, and Zinnia had asked if she was going to the ceremony, and the girl had said no. After a moment she heard a shuffle and the door opened, and Hadley’s big cartoon eyes peered out from the darkness, from beneath a tangle of hair. She stared at Zinnia like a cat would stare at anything, betraying no particular emotion.
“Can I come in?” Zinnia asked.
Hadley nodded, took a step back. The air in the apartment was thick. Unwashed body and old food. The walls were strung up with Christmas lights but they were turned off and there was a heavy shade over the window, so only a little filtered sunlight made it through. The countertop was piled with paper takeout bags, crumpled up around empty containers. Hadley retreated to the rear of the apartment and sat on the futon, looking up at Zinnia, her hands clasped together. Zinnia leaned against the counter and was about to speak when Hadley cleared her throat.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said, in the bathroom,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “And you’re right. It was my fault.”
“No, no, honey, that’s not what I said at all,” Zinnia said, the bottom dropping out of her stomach. “It’s not your fault, what he did. That’s on him. But you have to swing back. That’s all I meant.”
“I’m having such a hard time sleeping. Sometimes I wake up and I feel like he’s in here with me.” She put her arms around herself, shivered despite the warmth. “I just…I need to sleep.” She looked up. “I want to be strong. Like you.”