by Sean Wallace
You think, by now, we’d have invented something more glamorous.
In the nightclub bathroom, I bent over the white porcelain of the sink. I pinched off one nostril, inhaled the line of white powder.
And then . . . just once? Just many times? Was this even me?
“Jesus, look at the state of him.”
I don’t remember who said it. It was hard to concentrate on things like that. My attention jumping from shining object to shining object. The straps on the pilot’s seat. A pretty technician’s face. The beeping of a cockpit dial. The desire to punch that man right in his eye.
“Screw you, you pen-pushing prick. I’ll kick its ass.” No idea who I was yelling at.
“He’ll be fine.” Was it Adam Grant who said that? Lila? Did I know who was there propping me up even back then?
“Jesus. Just strap him in.”
I don’t even remember the proxies I had fighting those Leviathans. They were there to stop the mech from pushing me out of my own skull, and I’d already done the job. Some chemical substitute of me that ripped and kicked and split skulls.
I remember reaching my fist down one Leviathan’s throat, turning its head inside out. I remember stomping, stomping, stomping one into paste on the seabed. I remember them quoting how much damage the waves I made did to the seawall. I don’t remember caring. The crowd still cheered. For every crash there was another high.
I loved fighting monsters while I was high. Truth be told, I miss it now, even after all the rehab and the therapy. I don’t do it any more. But I miss it.
More recently again. This is important. I want to get this right.
Adam Grant caught up with me in the council hall lobby.
“Jesus, Tyler.” He shook his head. “That was not the smart play. You have to understand the situation.”
I cocked my head. “Really?” I asked him. “What the hell do you think I don’t understand about them scrubbing my wife’s memory clean? About her not knowing who I am? What part am I missing, Adam?”
“Jesus.” He shook his head again. Looked out at the crowd surrounding the building. I thought I could see the word “Lottery” on a placard. “Not here,” Grant said. He dragged me to a bar.
“It’s over.” He was intense over a tumbler of whiskey. “The party is done. No more free drinks. No more getting people out of the lottery.”
I felt the urge to punch him again. Add to his scars. “You’re telling me that if Marburg’s daughter gets a ticket, he won’t get her out of it?”
“I’m telling you that if he does there will be riots. There’ll be a damn revolution. The lottery . . . the proxies . . . it’s a damn mess. There’s too many people who don’t remember the world we’re fighting for any more.” The creases in his brow deepened. He glanced at the back of the crowd, still visible through the glass in the bar’s door. I looked too. They did not seem like happy people.
“The council have to appease the mob, Tyler. They’ve drunk too deep from the well, and now they need to make a sacrifice to fill it back up again.”
And then I saw. There in that shitty little bar. It wasn’t random chance. That ticket had been signed and sealed and addressed to Lila. They’d decided to do this to me.
I realized then the fight I was in.
“You have to help me. You have remind them of everything I’ve done for them.”
“Remind them?” Incredulity broke his stony façade. “Your show just now reminded them all of why they picked you. You’ve pissed off too many people. And you know as well as I do that you fight for shit now you’re clean.”
A dirty truth. An ugly truth. But a truth. It left me with nothing else to say.
“Hey,” he offered the thinnest of smiles. “If you’re lucky one won’t come this year. She’ll be clear of it.”
“They come every year.”
He nodded. “Go home, Tyler,” he said. “Enjoy the time you have left together.”
Drifting back in time again. To one memory that still shines bright.
I’m a teenager. Fourteen years old. Sitting in the bleachers while the football team runs its drills. Watching old Bruce Lee flats and trying to memorize the moves.
“Hey.”
She startled me. I almost dropped the screen. I spun around.
“Sorry.” She was half laughing, half nervous. Embarrassed maybe.
The new girl. Transferred in. I didn’t know from where. Kind of pretty. Dark hair that she wore long and a red shirt she wore loose.
“Studying?” she asked.
“Erm . . . ” I wasn’t sure why she was talking to me, not sure what angle to take. “Kind of.”
She shrugged, sat down on the row of chairs behind me. “I feel so behind. You guys are all so far ahead of my old school. It’s all so different here.”
She looked more frustrated than anything else. Her honesty disarmed me. I ventured some of my own.
“I wasn’t studying, like, school stuff,” I say. I show her the screen.
“Who’s that?”
“His name’s Bruce Lee. He was, like, this actor back a hundred years ago or so. That’s why it’s a flat. But he was amazing. It’s all wires and special effects now, but back then it was real. He did all this stuff.” I let the flat play for a minute. She watched without comment, without judgment.
“You like fighting?” she asked when I paused it.
“Erm . . . ” I hesitated. This was where conversations usually went wrong. “Kind of,” I said.
She nodded. “My dad does thai-jitsu, or something.”
“Tae Kwon Do?”
She smiled. “Yeah, that’s it.”
She was prettier when she smiled. “I do that too,” I said. “That and a bunch of others.”
“What others?”
I listed them. After the third, she counted off on her fingers. “So,” she said from behind eight raised digits. “Kind of?”
I was sheepish, felt some explanation was required. “I want . . . ” I almost balked, it was like saying I want to be a movie star, but her eyes didn’t let me go. “I want to be a pilot. Of, you know, a mech and stuff. I want to fight the Leviathans.”
I regretted it as soon as I said it. I tried to read the emotions on her face, to work out if she’d laugh at me or walk away.
I didn’t expect what she actually did. She asked, “What about the proxies?”
“What about them?” I was off guard, still not seeing the angle.
“It seems sad.” She kicked at a pebble perched on the metal seats. “What happens to them. They don’t even know what they did to make themselves forget.”
That seemed like an irrelevant fact. “We have to fight the Leviathans,” I said, “or they’ll kill us. We have to have the proxies. It’s four memories of everyone’s lives.” I shrug. It was the simplest of math.
She shrugged. “I guess. It just seems sad.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. She just sat there next to me. And it was nice actually.
“Hey,” I said after a while. “I’m Tyler.”
She smiled that pretty smile of hers. “I’m Lila.”
Closer. Approaching the now.
Trying to hold the pieces together:
Lila was watching TV when I got home from the bar and my talk with Adam Grant, holding her knees to her chest.
“I was worried you weren’t coming home.”
The drugs. It seemed almost laughable that she was worried about that.
“I’m clean.” I sat beside her, leaned in. “You know that.”
“This is a lot of stress.”
“I’m clean,” I promised.
She put a hand on my cheek. “I need you to survive this fight, Tyler. I need you to be there to talk me back to myself.”
I ran a hand over her cheek, through her hair, round to rest on the back of her neck. I pressed my forehead to hers. “Don’t think like that,” I told her. “One might not even come this year.”
She let out the small
est, saddest laugh in the world as she pulled away. She pointed to the TV. “One already is.”
And after that.
I slipped out of bed when Lila’s breathing grew deep and regular. There was one other solution perhaps. Adam’s talk about riots and revolution had made me think. I’ve seen the downtown slums on the news. I’ve seen the refugees.
I took the car north, close to the seawall. A foot of water swirled around my tires. Everything smelled rotten or worse. Fractured light from neon signs painted the waterlogged streets—logos become abstract and obscure. Street vendors marched around in thigh-high waders. Ragged men stood on floating platforms screaming about the lottery, about the man keeping them all down. Small crowds cheered them on. Deeper in, I watched a man reel out of a bar, drunk, fall into the swill. He emerged with an enormous leech clinging to his cheek. He ripped it away in spray of blood, staggered off.
I couldn’t understand how people could live like that. Then I remembered they didn’t really have a choice.
I try to keep the thread, keep hold of my reasons, my history,
but it’s gone again, and I’m falling back into older times.
“Tyler?” It was some talkshow host whose name I couldn’t remember. “Are you okay?” she asked. She’s didn’t look concerned.
An audience stared at me. Grinning idiots. Screw them. My high was burning out. I felt like shit.
“I’m fine.” Even I could hear that I was slurring. “Can you repeat the question?”
There was a time when I loved this, the attention, the presenter’s bated breath. I would talk and talk, and they would love it. Stories of violence. Stories of me saving them all.
This time I just wanted painkillers and a warm bed.
“I was asking about the proxies in your mech,” the presenter asked. “Do you ever talk to them? Or their families?”
There was something in the way she asked it. Accusatory.
“Look,” I said, “I didn’t come up with the system. I just fight. If you want to have some Leviathan come take a shit on this city, just so everyone can remember it clearly, then that’s your priority.”
A mass inhalation of breath. The presenter’s elegantly plucked eyebrow rose.
“Not a popular opinion,” she ventured.
“Oh screw you,” I spat. “We all know how this works. We messed up Earth, now we pay the toll. Four memories at a time. You don’t want to be a proxy, get on the council and dodge the lottery. You want to be able to sleep at night too, become a pilot. It’s worked out for me just fine.”
Not an inhalation this time. A hesitation.
There was a time when I loved these things. When audiences cheered me. It was as big a high as the drugs.
Even the drugs didn’t do much for me by then.
Then darkness descending, a gaping hole of memory.
And then, on the far side.
Lila woke me. I didn’t recognize her at first. Later, when I saw myself in a mirror, I was surprised she recognized me.
“Three days this time,” she told me once I’d washed the vomit and blood and shit off myself. She didn’t cry. She never cried. Just that same frustrated look she’d given me in the bleachers all those years ago.
“It was those assholes on that TV show,” I said. I was full of excuses back then.
“You missed a fight, Tyler.”
I was at the closet door, hand on a shirt. Something I could wear to my dealer’s. And that stopped me. The whole system shut down around those words. I tried to form a response. A question. A denial. An excuse.
I had nothing.
“They sent Lowry,” she said. I pictured him. Young kid. Scrappy. He was good. He would have fought and won. The city wasn’t in ruins. Of course he’d won.
But no thanks to me.
I still wanted to be a pilot. Beneath everything, beneath even the want for the drugs, there has always been that. Ever since I saw Connor’s mech go critical and wipe out the horizon that has been the underlying, undeniable truth of my existence.
“It’s time to get clean, Tyler,” Lila said. “No more bullshit. No more excuses. Or you’ll never pilot again. You get that, right?”
I did. I got clean.
Swimming back to the present. Back to the slums, car parked,
water swirling, a lottery ticket in my hand.
I picked a bar at random. The place was crowded, the music loud. People partied with a sense of desperation. Drinking until they could forget that tomorrow was coming—implacable as any sea monster.
I stood in the center of the room. It took a minute before someone recognized me. He stared, pointed. The woman he was with turned and looked. Soon they were all looking.
Apparently I wasn’t popular in that bar. Not in many bars, I suspected. I couldn’t even blame them.
But I didn’t need to be popular. I just needed to be rich.
I held up the ticket.
“How much?” I asked, clear and loud, finally putting all the media training crap they’d sat me through to some use. “How much do I have to pay one of you to take my wife’s place on the lottery?”
From the look I got, my popularity wasn’t going up.
“Five million,” I said. “I’m good for it. Five million and get you and your family out of this life.” I nodded at the water currently ruining my socks and shoes.
The room was very quiet. The music had died. Grim faces all around me. Folded arms. The smell of the wooden bar slowly rotting away.
One man, shorter than me, wider though, tattoos up his arms and neck, maybe in his fifties—he walked towards me. A few rumbling paces. “I think you want to get out of here.”
“Ten million.” Just one greedy soul. Just one. That’s all I needed.
“You ain’t listening.”
“Twenty million.” It would leave me with a pittance, I would have to move, but it’d be worth it. “You won’t care what you forget with twenty million.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Adam Grant had been right. The lottery was a tipping point.
I didn’t recognize the signal, but suddenly eight of them rushed me. More than one held a beer bottle in his hand.
I remembered Adam Grant saying I don’t fight as well now I’m sober. He was right. Still, I can hold my own.
I ducked the first blow, jabbed a fist up under the guy’s jaw, into the soft part of the palate. I spun as I did it, slammed my foot into another man’s groin, sent him crashing to the floor. I came out of the spin, slammed my fist into another man’s nose, dodged a bottle, clotheslined his friend, then slammed my elbow back into the neck of the idiot trying to sneak up behind me.
Three left. One got in a good blow to my kidneys, sent me to my knees, spitting a curse. Another lined up a blow to my jaw. I snatched his arm, slammed a palm into his elbow, watched the joint snap.
The kidney puncher grabbed me behind the arms. I swung my head back, shattered his nose. Then I crushed his kneecap for good measure.
One left.
But the crowd was not cowed. I was breathing hard, and my hands hurt; the pain in my kidney was like a lance of fire. And then they went from one to forty-one.
I got lost in the violence. I took men down with short efficient blows, but for every six or seven I landed, they landed one of their own. A bottle shattered over my skull, blood ran into my eyes. An elbow slammed into my ribs.
I needed to get out. I recognized my actions as a mistake too late. I stopped fighting to win. Started fighting to escape.
It cost me. Two ribs. And I couldn’t lift my left arm above my shoulder any more. But I made it out. It took me two blocks before I realized no one was chasing me.
I remember that fight. For a moment the pain in my side makes sense.
And then it drifts away again. Just is. Then something else swims up.
After the fight.
Lila fetched a fresh ice pack for my ribs.
“You’re an idiot.” The way she said it made it sound like a comp
liment.
“I have to fight,” I told her. “It’s who I am.”
She smiled. “There’s no winning this, Tyler. It is what it is. You fight that Leviathan. You bring me home. And I get to meet you again. Fall in love with you again.”
I swallowed. “What if you don’t?”
She shook her head. “All the shit you’ve done, I’ve stuck with you. You really doubt me now?”
She almost managed to make me laugh. The moment passed. “Maybe afterward you’ll be smarter,” I said.
She kissed me on the forehead. Snuggled in beside me.
They showed the Leviathan on the news that night. It had destroyed three townsteads on its way south. Casualties in the thousands. They said it would be visible from the seawall in two days. They said it might be the biggest in a decade.
They questioned whether I could stop it. For the first time in a long time, I did too.
Almost here. Almost at this moment:
In a vast hangar near the seawall, I stood before my mech. The Behemoth II—named after Connor’s machine. But I had always been safe in the knowledge it outranked its predecessor in every regard. It could tear a Leviathan apart. The original could only explode.
It still demanded the proxies to operate, though. Connor, who thought up a way to win an unfair fight, he couldn’t think his way out of that. They all died when his mech blew.
If I went out there without proxies the sensory overload would wipe out my memory. I would forget to fight. The Leviathan would tear me apart first, then the city.
And then, staring up, up, up at the distant cockpit, almost hidden beyond the curve of the reactor in the machine’s chest . . . the faintest stirrings of an idea.
The Behemoth II. The clue was in the name.
All Connor could do was explode.
The Leviathans always initiate the fights. And a walking bomb doesn’t need to know how to fight. It just needs to go off.
But would I remember what I was doing for long enough to get clear of the city?
Maybe . . .
I would die. There was that.
But the auto-eject . . . No, Connor died.
But hadn’t they improved the radiation seals? Some distant memory of joking with Adam Grant after some tech demo where they talked about it. Not really believing it. Because when would that ever be an issue?