Like a Boss

by Adam Rakunas

  I followed her inside her flat. It looked a lot like my old one; they were both built around the same time, during the Union’s heyday when people were coming down the cable faster than they could find housing. Anyone who brought bags of pourform or other building materials with them became immediate best friends with architects and builders. Both of our places had probably come off the same drafting table.

  There was a kitchen and a parlor and a single bedroom off to the left. The bay window looked out over a tiny garden. Rows of tomatoes and cucumbers lined the yard, and ricewheat stalks surrounded a single peach tree. It was bright pink with blossoms. It would be months before it bore fruit, but Sirikit said the peaches were worth the wait.

  On the circular table in front of the window was a single hurricane candle, two rocks glasses, and a triangular bottle made from bumpy, sea-green glass. On the label was a cartoon of a woman’s foot propped up on a lanai railing. Tied to her big toe was a string, the anchor to a box kite flying high near the label’s top. Some shirtless, brawny men sat on a cartoon cloud, great puffs of air coming from their straining cheeks as they kept the kite aloft.

  Sirikit sat down and glanced at the clock. “Almost six. Shall I pour?”

  I nodded.

  She unscrewed the bottle, and poured water into the glasses. Letty had indeed held on to the last bottle, and she’d turned it upside down when the riot foam consumed her. The bottle, though, had escaped unbroken. Soni’s last act before resigning as Chief of Police was to release it to me from evidence. The crime lab had gotten all the prints and chemical analysis it needed. It wouldn’t figure into the trial, anyway.

  Sirikit pulled the blinds closed and lit the candle. We clinked glasses and took a sip. The water was cool and clear and absolutely nothing like Old Windswept rum. But The Fear had kept silent since Sirikit laid out this course of treatment, and I would have to trust in that for the time being. I could feel The Fear lurking in the back of my brain, like a weight inside my skull. Maybe I wouldn’t need to buy from the rebuilt distillery. Maybe I would. We’d see.

  We put down our glasses. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s begin. Where are you?”

  I closed my eyes and saw her tidy home. “In your house.”

  “Where’s that?”

  I pulled back in my mind’s eye to see the little blue house with the red tuk-tuk in the garage. “Off Kripner Lane.”

  “Where’s that?”

  I smiled as I floated above the neighborhood. There was the minaret of the Emerald Masjid, there was the bell tower of Our Lady of the Big Shoulders. There was the lot where my old flat had been, now swept clear of wreckage and ready to be rebuilt. “In Brushhead.”

  “Where’s that?”

  There were the BBQ joints, the tiny theaters, the music conservatory. There were the strip clubs, the machinist shops, the rowhouses. “In the southwest part of Santee City.”

  “Where’s that?”

  There was our city, huddled between the kampong and the ocean. The green cane swayed in the evening breeze, and the crews and farmers made their way home, stacks of cane on their tractors and lorries. There was Thronehill, surrounded by a small army of students and kids. They had turned back everyone who tried to sneak out, even holding down the struts of their patrol craft. WalWa wasn’t going anywhere, and neither were we. “On the eastern edge of the Big Island.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Off shore was Terminal Island, the mess of cargo cans clustered around the ground end of the lifter. The giant black ribbon soared into the sky, and I knew I was going to follow it up into orbit. “Twenty klicks away from the lifter.”

  “Where is it anchored?”

  Up and up and up I went, shooting into the sky until we were at the anchor. WalWa may have paid to move the asteroid into orbit, but they hadn’t done the work. Those first people who dropped the cable had shimmied their way to the ground and breathed that fresh air, gotten themselves windswept. I had started there, screaming my way out of a hibernant bag. Somewhere in my skull, I still might have been screaming. Maybe that’s all The Fear was: my outraged brain demanding to know what I had done to it. “Thirty-six thousand kilometers above the surface.”

  “And what are you above?”

  Oh, Santee Anchorage, you beautiful, messed-up dirtball. All those islands covered in cane, all the sea water pumped into the fuel cans for fusion drives, all us people clinging to the edge of Occupied Space. Soni and Onanefe and Meiumi Greene with an “e.” They were all there, living and working and loving and dying. I never thought I would end up here. I never thought I’d want to stay here. But here I was. Here I would stay. “Santee Anchorage.”

  “And where is that?”

  Back and back we went, away from the sun, away from our stellar cluster, away from our galaxy, out and out until I looked down on the whole of the universe. All those stars, all those worlds, all those hopes and dreams and deaths and dramas. One day, it would all come to an end, long after I was dust myself, long after the Big Three had consumed itself. Maybe they would figure out a way to cheat entropy and crack reality, opening the frontiers of a new market. I hoped not. But I also knew it was something I didn’t have to deal with right now. All I had to do was remember my place in the universe, small as it was. I had to remind myself of how I fit into the whole, in my tiny way.

  I opened my eyes. “Here. I’m right here.”

  Sirikit nodded. “Let’s start.”

  I blew out the candle.

  I still haven’t dreamed yet. I didn’t think I ever will. But, what the hell, this would do.

  THE END

  The Good Stuff At The End

  This is the fastest draft I’ve ever written. It’s also the first time I got paid for writing a book before I actually wrote it, so that probably figured into the speed. According to the plugin I use to keep track of how much work I do (because the world is ruled by metrics), I started on December 12, 2014 and finished on June 9, 2015. A lot happened between those two dates: the murders of Freddie Gray and Walter Scott at the hands of the police, Greece’s struggle with the EU’s monied class, the fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage in the United States. They’re baked into this book. How can they not be? I have probably done an incredibly terrible job at incorporating them into Like A Boss, so all the fault is mine. You can yell at me on Twitter @rakdaddy.

  Right now, as I write this little afterthought, it’s July 20, 2015. I’m in my little apartment in Santa Monica, and it feels like we’re at the equator. It’s hot and muggy. Hurricane Dolores has just dumped enough water over the Southwest to wash away a bridge on the 10, and the air feels like it has another foot of rain ready to unload. It’s a slightly better disaster than the one that hit a few days ago, when a brush fire swept across the 15, forcing people to abandon their cars and run for their lives. Rain and freeways are the things that allow for the ridiculous lifestyle we have in our corner of the continent, and they’re not getting along well. I would argue we don’t have enough rain because we have too many freeways (and we also have too many fires because we have too many freeways), but it’s an argument that means engaging with the kind of people who would be all too happy to sign their lives away to the likes of the Big Three.

  Of course, I might, too. Comfort beats the hell out of starvation, but that comfort comes at a monstrous price (environmental degradation, workers living in near-slavery conditions, and the continuing presence of the chattering classes that populate our current political discourse). I would prefer that our generation pay that price as quickly as possible so my daughter and my nieces and nephews don’t have to, and God knows I spend too much time thinking about it. I haven’t come up with a solution. If there’s a third book in this series, I’ll probably have to address all the joy that is the post-capitalist (or pseudo-post-capitalist, or the Oh-God-We’re-All-Screwed) era, though it’s going to need a few jokes to make the whole thing palatable. Laughing at entropy might be the best way to cope with the inevitable. It certai
nly beats punching each other in the face.

  Some people to thank:

  -Joshua Bilmes, Sam Morgan, and everyone at JABberwocky Literary who continue to cheerlead, give good advice, and get me to sing when I’m on speakerphone.

  -Mike Underwood, Phil Jourdan, Penny Reeve, and Marc Gascoigne at Angry Robot Books. Top bants all around, what.

  -Myke Cole, Wes Chu, Greg Van Eekhout, Jenn Reese, and John Berlyne, who all provided invaluable career and writing advice in the last year but I didn’t mention them in the first book so here you go.

  -Molly Crabapple, Teju Cole, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Daniel José Older, G. Willow Wilson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jamelle Bouie, Dahlia Lithwick, and Warren Ellis, none of whom I’ve ever met but whose essays, books, drawings, and Tweets are really, really important for fermenting my brain juices.

  -Sofia Samatar, Kameron Hurley, Ramez Naam, Brenda Cooper, and Madeline Ashby, whom I have met and are also really important in the brain juice fermentation department. You should buy everything they have ever written. Right now.

  -The Freeway Dragons, for their continued awesomeness.

  -Daryl Gregory, even though he hasn’t read this book, but I keep thanking him so why break with tradition?

  -Yuki Saeki, whose name I misspelled in the acknowledgements for Windswept. Sorry about that, Yuki. I am a terrible slef-editor.

  -The staff at La Monarca, who never asked me to leave despite my hogging table space all morning. Thank you for the pineapple danishes and café Oaxaca.

  -My parents, especially my mom, who got Texas Instruments kicked off the campus of UCLA because they wouldn’t interview her because she was a woman. Take that, TI!

  -My brother, his wife, and my niece. Hi, kid! I hope you read this book when it’s age appropriate, because I want to keep getting invited to Thanksgiving.

  -My amazing wife Anne, who has made this all possible. I hope I can pay you back one day, love.

  -Our daughter, Grace, who’s in this book and was impressed when I told her that. I hope she remains impressed.

  -You, because you liked the first book enough to buy the second. Writing books is the only job I ever wanted, and every book is a new job interview. Thank you for hiring me for this job. Go get yourself a taco. You earned it.

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