by Brian Parker
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Duster
By Brian Parker
Mike tapped his foot in time with the beat, tearing serious notes out of his guitar as he and his bandmates practiced their most ‘popular’ song, Death Metal Fuck Slave. He wasn’t sure about the title, thinking maybe it held the song’s potential back a little bit, but Mustafa, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, insisted that if they were going to stay true to their music then the title had to remain.
The song reached a crescendo of violence, bass, and screeching chords, and then stopped suddenly.
Mustafa held a finger to his lips for a full five seconds and then shouted, “Holy shit, man! Tell me you got that, Randy!”
“I got it, bro,” Randy replied, running the fingers of his left hand over the soundboard while he jabbed at the holographic display with his right. “You guys are—”
“Fucking awesome. I know,” Mustafa cut him off. “Shit, boys. With that demo, we’re gonna make it. We’ll make it out of this fucking slum town and we’ll be bigger than fucking Slice Machine!”
Mustafa looked around the cramped space they rehearsed in. His parents had reluctantly agreed to let them use the spare bedroom when he and the rest of the ‘boys’ from Wrecking Earballs needed to practice their music—on the strict condition that they didn’t rehearse while the elder Abadis were at home.
Then, his eyes fell on Mike. “What the shit, Soriano?” he shouted, using Mike’s last name, like he did most of the time.
Mike scratched vigorously at his neck. “My skin’s crawlin’ bro. I need a fix.”
“Goddamn it, Mike!” Mustafa groaned. “Your fucking dust problem is going to tear this band apart before we even get our shot.”
Mike grimaced. “Sorry, Mustafa. I just need a hit and a couple of hours in the Sphere.”
The Sphere was the shortened name of the Cybersphere, once known as the Internet, and before that, the World Wide Web. The Cybersphere was an immersive alternate reality that millions of people were addicted to. Their real lives sucked, but in the Sphere they could be whomever and whatever they wanted to be.
That was okay, in and of itself, and that sort of online gaming had been around for a century. But Mike was also a Duster, a junkie that used dust, a mind-altering amphetamine inhaled from extended-release capsules that were placed in the nose. Worse, he was a VR Duster, a cyber junkie who lost themselves completely to the simulation.
Stupid Dusters died while they were in the Sphere because they were so high that they forgot to eat or drink. Their weakened bodies couldn’t take the combined effects of the drugs, the graphic realism of the virtual reality, and the lack of water and nutrients. Those who didn’t die outright of dehydration often had heart attacks while in the simulation.
But Mike wasn’t a stupid Duster. He took controlled doses and limited his time in the Sphere so he wouldn’t end up starving.
Mustafa shook his head. “Soriano, you’re one of the best guitar players I’ve ever seen, and Wrecking Earballs is lucky to have you, but we don’t need you.” He glanced around at the other three members of the band, all of whom nodded slightly, and then to Randy at the soundboard.
“Mike,” Mustafa finally said after a long pause. “We’re giving you an ultimatum. You either get clean or you’re out of the band and we’ll find someone else to shred.”
“What?” Mike exclaimed, surging to his feet and closing the distance between them in two giant steps. “You can’t edge me out of Wrecking Earballs. You and me, we formed this fucking band.” He jabbed his fingers at the others. “These dumb fuckers weren’t even around back then.”
Mustafa and Mike had been best friends since elementary school, both lovers of metal rock and distrustful of authority. Wrecking Earballs was formed when they were in 5th grade. They were only eleven when they dedicated their lives to the band. Six years later, Mike’s dust use was a problem that was too big to ignore anymore.
“Look, Soriano,” Mustafa said. “I love you like a brother. Hell, man, you are my brother. But we can’t let the band go down before we even get our break. If an agent or producer got wind of the fact that we got a Duster in our group, nobody’d touch us.”
“Fuck off,” Mike growled.
“No, man,” Mustafa retorted. “You fuck off. In fact, fuck off right now. Get the fuck out of my house.”
Mike recoiled as if he’d been slapped. “So that’s it then?” he asked, looking between the others. They all nodded their heads. “I’m not a junkie.”
“You may not think you are, Mike,” Randy said carefully. “But you are. We all see it.”
“Fuck you, Randy,” he hissed, shoving past Mustafa to cram his guitar into its water repellant case.
“Mike!” Mustafa yelled as he pinballed from wall-to-wall down the hallway. “Mike, it doesn’t have to be this way. Just get help and you’re back in, man.”
Mike lifted his middle finger over his shoulder as he walked through the front door into the pissing rain.
“Mike, go get the door. Delivery’s here.”
“Wha?”
“Food, Mike,” his mother screamed, her voice echoing down the hallway to his bedroom where he lay on a gel chair, it’s material wrapping closely around his body to conform to every contour.
“Come on, mom. I’m plugged in too,” he protested.
“You get your skinny ass off that chair and answer the door or I’m cutting your subscription, young man.”
He grunted angrily and then took off his goggles. The dim lighting of his bedside lamp was like a thousand suns burning his retinas. He’d been building an underwater kingdom for several hours in the near darkness of the depths. The light from the lamp was torture.
Not for the first time that day, Mike wished he’d been able to find a new dealer willing to take what he had in trade for even just one capsule.
The doorbell rang and he realized that what he’d mistaken for the bells from his underwater city’s clock tower was actually the standard, boring chime of the doorbell.
“Mike!”
He wiggled his way out of the chair, using the railing of his ancient bed for leverage until he was upright. His legs were numb and he had to piss really badly. How long was I in this time? he wondered.
Mike walked down the hallway, past his mother sitting on the couch. She wore her VR headset and spoke softly into the integrated microphone as she shimmied her shoulders seductively.
“Not long enough,” he muttered aloud in response to his earlier question as he crossed the last few feet to the door.
On the info panel, he could see a delivery droid standing patiently outside their modest home, a bag of unknown origins suspended from its arm. “What is it?” he asked.
“Food,” his mother replied. “No, not you, baby. It’s my son… Yeah, I know.” She giggled.
He wondered if her Cybersphere sex sessions were ever going to pan out for her in real life. She was an attractive-enough woman, but some bad things had happened to her in the past in the real world, so online dating was about all she was comfortable with. She’d been doing it for years, never satisfied with the results. Time for a change.
Mike opened the door. The droid attempted to offer a greeting, but it had clearly been damaged recently and the words came out a jumbled mess. The left side of its body was dented in and the chip scanner, normally set in the droid’s chest, was missing. About a foot of twisted, naked wires trailed down its body.
“Damn, somebody got you good, little guy,” Mike laughed. Gangers targeted lone delivery droids for the information stored on their credit chip readers. If they could get the reader to a transfer station fast enough, then they could move the credits from one account to another, and then set in motion a series of automated transfers to lose the trail, until the money finally ended up in the thieves’ account.
&nbs
p; Capitalism. What a gas.
“Credit… eader dam-m-maged,” the droid managed to sputter. “His-his-historic chip recog…ized. En-joyyyyy!”
Mike took the offered bag of food and closed the door on the droid. The company would send it off and have it fixed up as good as new in an hour. Not his problem.
He peered inside the bag. His mother had ordered hamburgers and french fries from Slappy’s Place, which suited him just fine since that was his favorite meal. Maybe his mother had heard him when he said he’d been kicked out of the band. Probably not, though.
Mike took his food from the bag and dropped the remainder in his mom’s lap. She jumped and a small, “Eek!” escaped her lips before she composed herself. “Could’ve warned me, Mike.”
“Here’s your food,” he said, walking around the corner of the couch and back into his room. He heard her mutter something about kids before he slammed his door.
The food disappeared quickly and his system screamed for a hit. Food always made him want to take a hit, even more than normal. He scratched vigorously at an itch near his armpit, stopping only when he feared he’d tear into his skin.
He needed a fix, but his damn dealer wouldn’t take the shit parts he had for trade, so he needed something else to take his mind off the drug.
Mike’s eyes drifted toward his VR rig. He could log back in and continue building his city. No, his mother had ruined that for him. He may never return underwater now and the half-finished city would be discovered by others in time. The idea that a few players would end up searching his city for treasure made him laugh. He’d spent plenty of time exploring a place designed and built by a player because he thought it was part of the game.
The urge for a fix became stronger and his heart beat as fast as if he was using. His eyes dilated and the warm, fuzzy feeling began to affect his toes. Mike grinned dreamily as the feeling of the drugs washed over him.
Then he crashed hard as reality set in.
He hadn’t taken anything. His brain was reminding him of how good it felt to lose himself to his mistress, the dust. Her seduction was complete, both physically and mentally. He had to get a fix.
Mike surged to his feet and tiptoed across the floor to his door. He opened it a crack and peered through. His mother still sat on the couch, a smile visible below the visor as her lips moved slightly while she talked to someone online.
She’d be like that for hours.
He slipped off his shoes and slid across the hallway to his mother’s room. The darkness helped to hide him as he gently opened the bottom drawer of her dresser. He slid his hands between the layers of clothing, knowing that this is where she hid her most precious items. At the moment, he needed some cash.
The back of Mike’s hand brushed against something firm, yet giving and he smiled. It was her wallet. He lifted his hand slightly to create space and eased his opposite hand between the clothes. His searching fingers found the same object and he reached further, closing his hand around what felt like a large, hard rubber stylus.
It wasn’t her wallet, but the shape and texture confused him. He slid his fingers along the length of the shaft, running them against bumps, ridges, and other small features.
“Oh God,” he whispered, dropping the dildo when he realized what it was. “Oh God!” he repeated when he remembered it was his mom’s toy.
He pulled his hands out from between the clothing and frantically wiped them against his pants legs for several seconds, stifling the urge to vomit.
Keep it together, he told himself and inserted his hand between layers of clothing on the opposite side of the drawer from where he’d been searching before.
Tentatively, his hand wrapped around a rectangular object with a similar feeling material as the sex toy. He almost lost it, but then remembered that his mother’s wallet was a faux leather deal that he’d bought her for Christmas a few years back.
He unzipped it slowly and reached inside, pulling out a square credit card. His dealer could spoof the charge as any establishment in the city. Mike had already determined that he’d tell Marco to spoof the burger joint they’d gotten delivery from earlier. His mom would see two roughly similar charges to the same place within an hour of each other and dispute the charge. It was especially convincing tonight since the delivery droid had been beat up and may have been malfunctioning.
He put her wallet back and closed the drawer. A quick peek out the door showed the back of his mother’s head as she writhed on the couch, reacting to whatever the guy on the other end of VR did to her. He slid back into his room and examined the card. She’d never notice the missing credit card. When she did leave the apartment, she used the matching chip in her wrist, not the card.
Palming the square of plastic, Mike put on his shoes and grabbed his rain jacket. Retrieving his huffer from under the mattress, he opened the door like normal. His mother moaned in ecstasy from the living room, the back of her head buried even further in the couch cushions now.
Fuck this, he thought and went back into his room. He stowed his VR rig in its carrying case and attached it around his waist. He could find a place to hook in while the dust took effect.
He tried not to look at his mother as he passed, but his eyes drifted over on their own accord. Her hand was submerged down the front of her pants, her chest rising and falling rapidly. The unopened bag of food sat beside her on the couch.
“I’m going out,” he said, looking away.
Another squeal of surprise shattered the apartment’s silence. “Mike !” she screeched, the sound hurting his ears. “How many times have I told you to tell me when you’re sneaking around the room?”
He glanced back at her. She’d taken off her goggles and her hand was no longer between her legs. She glared at him, unwilling to ask what he’d seen for fear of his answer.
“Sorry. I’m going out. The band is rehearsing.”
“Oh. Okay. Don’t be gone long.”
He nodded noncommittally and opened the door. A quick glimpse over his shoulder showed him that she was already adjusting her goggles back over her eyes.
“I knew she didn’t hear me about getting kicked out of the band,” he grumbled below his breath, now feeling entirely carefree that he was going to use her credit card to buy drugs. If she didn’t care about him, then he didn’t care about her.
Mike stared down the darkness of the alley for a long time, willing his eyes to adjust. They did, a little, and he was satisfied that he was alone. He went back to the side of the vacant building where he knew a secret entrance lay hidden behind some half-dead bushes just off the alley.
It took a moment to ease the ancient sheet of corrugated steel quietly away from the hole dug directly into the building’s side, but he succeeded and scooted through on his hands and knees. Once inside, he stuck an arm out into the runoff from the roof to collect a tiny bit of water in a small plastic measuring cup he’d taken from a medicine bottle years ago. Then, he pulled the covering back into place and turned to survey the old warehouse.
The building had once housed a manufacturing line that made the neon signs and lights for Jubilee Lane. He knew because there were piles of screwed up lighting projects that he’d discovered the first time he came here, years ago. He even recognized some of the names of the clubs as still being around, though it was mostly the brothels that’d kept their names over time. The thumper clubs tended to change ownership every few years and a place almost always changed its name when new owners took over.
The good thing about a long-abandoned building was the relative security. Both the front and main entrances had giant, rusted padlocks in place, a deterrent against the average thief or junkie. Mike had a spot in the old office where he liked to go. It was a lockable room inside a locked building. The room was perfect for his needs.
He sat at the desk, trying to imagine what the old factory had been like in its heyday. Probably not anything like he imagined. Mike knew that people tended to romanticize the past, to look bey
ond the negative aspects and only focus on the positive. Fuck, wasn’t that why women continued to get pregnant? They forgot about the horrendous experience of giving birth and remembered the helpless little life they’d brought into the world.
Mike imagined workers moving from table to table, heating glass rods to bend them into the shapes their customers required. Others filled the creations with gas that would allow them to light up once electricity was applied. The workers in his mind seemed genuinely happy, laughing together and enjoying the physical labor. He often imagined the people of the past as a hard-working, hard-playing group who did things like lying for hours in the sun on a beach or gathering together for a neighborhood barbeque. Most people today were isolated, lonely, and miserable in the never-ending rain. People he knew would never dream of socializing for the simple pleasure of being in one another’s company.
The past was a different world, filled with fewer problems that needed to be forgotten.
Mike slipped his VR goggles over his head, securing the straps so they wouldn’t come off, but left them in place on his forehead so he could see what he was doing. Next, he made sure his cell phone locator beacon was off. He kept it to that setting normally, but it never hurt to be safe each time and check it. All he needed was for his mother to find him in a drugged out stupor.
He reached in his pocket for the two dust capsules that he’d used his mother’s credit card to purchase. He placed the small baggie containing his two pills carefully onto the desk, not wanting to break them accidentally. They’d still work just fine, but to him, every little bit was more important than gold.
From the pocket of his jacket, he retrieved his huffer. The device was small, barely two inches wide and half as thick, just enough for the battery and a tiny liquid reservoir that he could fill with water from the measuring cup he’d collected before coming inside. Two protrusions with silicone flanges stuck out from one side. The protrusions were spaced nostril-width apart and the flanges would hold the huffer in place against his upper lip.