by Rob Hart
“We…waste processing has its own dorm.”
“So like a whole separate workforce?”
“There are only a few hundred of us. We’re kept away from most of the facilities here, yes. We get paid better. Nicer…nicer apartments. It’s a sacrifice.”
She let him go and made sure to block his path to the door. He put his hands up and moved toward the rear of the room, looking for protection, for a place to hide, finding none. Zinnia looked around the room for something to tie him up with, her brain spinning, trying to make sense of it.
She forced herself to look on the bright side: if her employers wanted Cloud taken down, this was worth a hefty bonus. This would probably do the job all by itself. Whatever hoodoo was powering this place could not be nearly as bad as human shit burgers.
She had to think of it like that, as a bargaining chip potentially worth something. It helped her to not think about how many CloudBurgers she’d eaten.
About the greasiness of them.
She shuddered.
“Tell me exactly how to get to the energy processing facility from this room,” she said to the man, who had his hands up to protect his face.
PAXTON
Gibson paused, like he was mentally preparing himself for the journey up the eight steps to where Paxton stood. No one between them now. Everyone had moved behind him, letting him go first, and Paxton was the welcome party.
In a flash, a memory of his first day as CEO of the Perfect Egg came back to him. Filling out reams of paperwork for the patent, for the business, sitting at his desk, alone and afraid, but also free. No more waking up at six fifteen a.m., driving an hour and a half to wander cell blocks while criminals screamed and wept and gnashed their teeth.
Gibson lifted his foot onto the first step, his head down, concentrating. Someone reached out a hand to help—Paxton couldn’t see whose hand in the scrum—but Gibson batted it away.
That first official product-ready cast of the Perfect Egg, the first one he was supposed to sell, broke the 3-D printer. The tests had all come out fine, but he changed a calibration and suddenly the whole thing seized up, so that it was stuck, a third of the way down a block of plastic, only the top of the egg-shaped device finished. In that moment, he was convinced he’d made a mistake.
Gibson was halfway up the stairs now. The most powerful man in the world. His arms shook. From this close his skin had a yellowish tinge. His neck and the back of his hands and the parts of his arms that were showing were covered in brown liver spots.
Paxton’s feet twitched. He wanted to run. Wanted to throw his foot out and trip the man. Wanted to grab him and shake him and ask, Do you know who I am? Do you see me?
Gibson reached the top step, breathing in hard, then exhaling, his head down. Paxton took a step back, to allow him some room, and then Gibson looked up. His eyes were the eyes of a young man. In them, independent of anything else, there was vibrancy. Energy. That way you look at someone and see wheels turning ceaselessly, and you wonder how they sleep.
Gibson smiled and nodded and said, “And what’s your name, young man?”
He stuck out his gnarled hand.
Paxton grasped it. Involuntary reflex. The polite thing to do. They shook and Gibson’s hand felt cold and sweaty at the same time.
“Paxton…sir.”
“Please, Paxton, call me Gibson. Tell me, how do you like working here?”
“I…” His heart stopped beating for an instant. He was sure of it. It actually stopped. But then it started again. He tried to say what he wanted to say but the words were glued to the inside of this mouth.
Finally, he said, “I like it just fine, sir.”
“Attaboy,” Gibson said, nodding, stepping around Paxton, heading toward the stage, and a great roar went up from the crowd, so loud it sounded like water crashing into rocks, and Dakota was alongside Paxton, leaning close to him, her breath hot on his ear, screaming, barely audible, “I can’t believe he shook your hand.”
And Paxton just stood, staring at his feet. Frozen in the spot. In time. The scream in his head louder than the scream of the crowd.
ZINNIA
Zinnia stepped off the tram car that ran between the three processing buildings, into the energy processing facility, still trying to not think about the CloudBurgers, which would pretty much be impossible for the rest of her entire life.
The lobby had the same polished concrete and sharp angles of all the other lobbies and entranceways at Cloud, with video monitors playing ads and customer testimonials, branching into hallways that led into the bowels of the building.
It was also empty.
Most of the places she had gone today were empty, on account of the ceremony, but this one felt different. There was something off about it. She couldn’t figure out what, but it might have had to do with her nervousness over finally being here, on the precipice.
After a moment she realized it wasn’t completely devoid of life. There was a small table set up at the far end, and sitting at the table was a zaftig young woman in a blue shirt, her brown hair done up in a beehive, her glasses a pair of thick red plastic frames. She didn’t look up from the paperback she was reading.
Zinnia walked through the lobby toward the table, sneakers squeaking on the floor, the sound echoing off the walls, and as she got closer the woman looked up, and Zinnia could see she was reading a worn and beaten copy of A Is for Alibi by Sue Grafton.
“That’s a good one,” Zinnia said.
The woman squinted, like she was confused, like Zinnia wasn’t supposed to be there. It made Zinnia nervous, and she was flipping through her head for viable excuses when the woman gave a little grin. “Read ’em all five or six times. I’m starting back at the beginning of the alphabet. The advantage of there being so many is I always forget who did it by the time I get back to the start.”
“That’s good though, right?” Zinnia asked. “You get to be surprised all over again.”
“Hmm.” She held the paperback open against her ample chest. “Can I help you, dear?”
“Yeah, just have to head in and talk to someone.”
Her eyes narrowed, in a way that made Zinnia feel like she’d said the wrong thing. “Talk to who?”
“Tim.”
“Tim…”
Uh-oh. “I forget his last name. Something Polish. No vowels.”
The woman stared at Zinnia for a moment, the corners of her mouth pushing downward. She placed the paperback on the table, raised her wrist, and pressed the button on the side of her watch. “We have a situation in energy processing.”
Zinnia leapt forward, grabbed the woman’s arm. She yelled out, “Hey!,” the paperback tumbling to the floor. Zinnia maintained her grip while she scurried over the table, then brought the woman down to the ground.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“Sorry,” Zinnia said as she thumbed the oblivion container out of her pocket. She had enough leverage that she could hold the woman down with one arm, and with the other she opened the container and slid out a tab, then, as the woman was yelling for help, shoved it in her mouth. The woman bit down hard on Zinnia’s finger and she had to yank hard to free her hand, but after a moment, the woman sagged.
She waited for some kind of reply to come through on the woman’s CloudBand. None did. Good. Probably everyone was still wrapped up with the day’s festivities.
But then it crackled to life.
“What kind of situation?”
Zinnia stood and bolted.
PAXTON
“Thank you, thank you.”
Gibson said it a dozen times, trying to get the crowd to quiet down so he could speak. When he’d spoken to Paxton his voice had wavered, but standing up there onstage, in front of all those people, he’d found a hi
dden store of energy. There was a bass note to his voice. He drew on the energy of the crowd.
“Thank you so much for that warm welcome,” he said as the applause died down. “Now, look, I have to be honest with you. I can’t speak for long. But I just wanted to come up here and say thank you. From the bottom of my heart. It has been my great pleasure and honor to build this place, to see so many smiling faces out there. It’s…” He paused, his voice growing thick. “It’s humbling. It truly is humbling. Now, I’m going to sit over there”—he motioned to a series of chairs set up for him and his entourage—“for the reading of the names. And then I want to walk around a bit before we head out. This is a very special and important time for us to remember how lucky we are to be here, with each other.” He glanced over at Carson and his daughter when he said this. “How lucky we are to be alive.”
He put his hand up and the crowd roared again. He walked to the seats, where he was joined by the rest, and no one sat until he sat first, heavily, dropping his weight onto the chair. A woman in a white polo went up to the microphone and a hush fell over the crowd, and she began to read names.
Josephine Aguerro
Fred Arneson
Patty Azar
Paxton felt his heart tug a little. It always did on this day. The Black Friday Massacres felt like a real thing and a fake thing at the same time. It was easy to forget, even though people were always saying you shouldn’t forget. And it wasn’t that you forgot it, not really, it just became a part of the background noise of your life. Like, Paxton could remember seeing it on the news when it happened. All those bodies. Blood gleaming red on white linoleum floors under fluorescent lights. But it became part of the landscape. It was a piece of history, and just like everything else in history, after a time it began to gather dust.
Days like today were a chance to run your hand over it, wipe off that dust, take a good look at it. Remember what it was that made it stand out so much in the first place. He wished he could turn it off. Think about something else. But he couldn’t. So he stood there, hands folded, head bowed.
After all this time, some of the names he still recognized.
When it was over, Gibson and his small group stood and milled about, before making their way down the staircase on the other side of the stage, toward the tram car that would take them on the ride around campus. This time, Gibson let Claire help him down the stairs.
Carson, though, stood back, letting everyone get ahead of him. He looked around, surveying the crowd, curling and uncurling his fist. It got to the point where he was lagging so far behind Paxton was worried it would hold up the tram, so he came up behind Carson and asked, “Sir?”
Carson shook his head, snapped out of a trance. “Nothing, nothing.” He waved his hand without looking Paxton in the eye and followed along with the rest.
Paxton took up a rear position as Gibson walked down the empty lane that had been cordoned off. He stopped every few feet, walked over to the divider, shook hands and smiled. Leaned in and cupped a hand to his ear so he could hear what the people were saying. His people were made nervous by this, like Gibson was approaching a pack of wild dogs while holding a dripping steak. They glanced at each other, getting closer, some of them moving like they were going to get between Gibson and the crowd, but then stepping back, unsure of the right answer in this scenario.
A few times Gibson turned toward Claire and waved her over. Claire seemed more content to stand off to the side, left arm limp, right hand over her elbow, hugging herself. The first few times, Gibson smiled, but soon he grew annoyed. Not that he betrayed it on his face. It was his hand. It started with friendly waves but soon his hand turned into a blade, slicing the air.
When Claire finally joined him, she would shake hands and bug out her eyes and smile and nod in that way people did when they wanted to be extra sure you knew they were listening. Every chance she got, she would hug herself again, while Gibson was nearly subsumed by the crowd, reaching in deeper to find as many of the hands offered to him as he could, the whole time a smile on his face that lit it up like the sun.
As they approached the platform for the tram, Paxton’s phone buzzed. He reached for it on instinct, realized he shouldn’t be checking it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t important.
But then it buzzed again.
By this point he was at the rear of the pack and all eyes were forward. Even Dakota’s and Dobbs’s. Since no one was looking at him he turned his body away, slid the phone out of his pocket, just enough to see the screen, and found a message from Zinnia.
Don’t get on the tram.
Then:
Please.
ZINNIA
Zinnia ran down hallways and ducked into offices and checked in bathrooms and examined server rooms and found no people. Not a single one in the entire facility, and more than that, it was quiet the way she expected the surface of the moon to be quiet.
No wonder the woman out front had pegged her down. Zinnia had asked to see someone when there was no one to see.
More than its being empty, nothing seemed to be turned on. A few times she stopped, at a computer, or at a bank of servers, looking for blinking lights, and found none. She put her hands on them, feeling for heat or vibration, but everything was dead and cold.
She’d expected a lot of people would be at the ceremony, but they had to leave some workers behind. MotherCloud wasn’t a coffee maker; you couldn’t turn around and walk away and let it do its thing. But it was like everyone had been raptured away from their spots. Everything was open, some of the doors she encountered even sitting ajar. The farther she went, the faster she ran, hoping to outrace the dread bubbling in her stomach.
Yet, despite the fallow nature of the building, she felt something. A static field in the air, like ants crawling on her skin. It pulled her deeper into the facility. Faced with a wide staircase, she went down. The pull felt like it was coming from below her.
As she went, she thought of Paxton.
If all went to plan, they’d be on the tram soon. The tram would hit the plate and it would derail and a lot of people would be hurt or killed. Paxton maybe included. She pictured it in her head. The bodies. The blood. Him, all twisted up in the middle of it, with his goofy face ripped open.
She pushed the image aside. Ignored the gentle eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that was ringing in her ear. Who was Paxton? Some guy. Who cared? People died. That was what they did. People were just sacks of meat with stuff inside. Some of that stuff made them move and talk. But in the end, it was just meat.
And anyway, the world had too many people. Overpopulation had gotten them into this mess, where you couldn’t even go outside, so maybe some depopulation was a good thing. A couple fewer meatsacks expelling carbon dioxide, sucking up resources.
The buzz on her skin picked up. She stopped. The hairs on her arms were standing. She was close. She didn’t know to what, but she could feel it. A thrum.
Ahead of her was a metal door with a big spinning wheel in the center. She ran over, flashed her wrist across the access panel.
Red.
She tried again. Red.
Was she locked out because browns didn’t have access or because security was barreling toward her? In what specific way was she fucked? She wasn’t sure, but no matter what it was, time was short, so she leaned back and threw her heel into the panel, so hard it sent a shock up her leg. Once, twice. On the fifth try, the disc popped out of the wall, hanging limp from a trail of colored wires.
Good-bye subtlety. She mixed and matched the wires, trying to trip the circuit for the door, and after three shocks, the disc turned green. She spun the wheel, opening the door. Got it halfway. Thought about Paxton again.
The way he put his arm around her.
The way he asked about her day and cared.
The way he was there, like a pair of slippers and
a warm blanket.
“Fuck,” she said. “Fucking fuck.”
She slapped the flat of her hand against the door.
Took out her phone. Pulled up her last text exchange with him.
Don’t get on the tram.
Send.
Then:
Please.
Send.
Her phone made a little whoosh noise, and she felt a great relief come over her, like she’d been carrying a bag of sand on her shoulder and just set it down. That was probably a mistake, but on the sliding scale of mistakes, hopefully a good one. She turned the wheel and opened the door.
PAXTON
Paxton stared at his phone, then looked up and watched as Gibson and his entourage filed onto the tram. By the time everyone was on it, it was nearly packed. Everyone was laughing, like it was a big game. How many people could they squeeze on? No matter how full it got, the people crowded at the door were inviting stragglers to join them.
Dakota looked back at him, standing on the platform, and frowned. Then her eyebrows went up and her lip curled when she noticed the phone in his hand. She turned toward him, fists clenched.
What the hell did that mean?
Why would Zinnia not want him to get on the tram?
Dakota waved her hand, down by her hip, so no one would see her make the gesture. Whether she wanted him to come over or stash the phone, he couldn’t tell.
It was silly to think, but he thought it anyway: the text message had a tone. Desperation? Fear? He didn’t know how a text could have a tone, but it did. Zinnia was worried about him. Why would she be worried about him?
She would only tell him to stay off the tram if there was something wrong with the tram.
Dakota was getting closer now, raising her hands, as if to take the phone away from him. He considered asking her about it, but it looked like the people on the tram were just about done, satisfied with the amount of people they’d gotten aboard, and they were ready to depart.