Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

by David Wong

  “I’m sorry that happened to you. And I get that you can’t get out, but I can’t get sucked into all of this. I can’t wind up like you.”

  “What? No. I can get out. We could leave together, right now. Those people all work for me, they all have to do what I say. It’s fine! It’s all fine.”

  Shae was truly thrown for a loop by this.

  “They’re not … making you do it?”

  “Ah, well, yeah, I see why you’re asking that. Not to get into my whole sad history or anything, but if you could see what I had waiting for me back home you’d understand. We had nothing, I lived in a trailer and it had an ant problem so every once in a while you’d go to pour a bowl of cereal and you’d put the milk in and look down at your spoon and see a dozen ants floating in it. So I didn’t have much of a life to go back to, is what I’m trying to say.”

  “Yeah, but … you couldn’t just take the money and leave? You just, took over the Mob instead?”

  Zoey crossed her arms. She suddenly felt like she was on trial. “We really have gotten rid of the bad stuff, I mean, a lot of it is still prostitution and gambling, but it’s not the kind of thing where we’re ambushing people in an alley and stealing their jewels. I wouldn’t stand for that. Hell, that’s why I stayed, to try to clean up the operation. They were doing some pretty terrible stuff before. And my father, he was a monster. His father was even worse, or that’s what I hear anyway.”

  “But you kept all of those same people around? The ones who did all of the bad stuff?”

  “They were the only ones who knew how to run everything! And trust me, they all know the rules, they step out of line and they’re gone. I mean, I really am doing my best here. It’s not easy.”

  It was clear Shae sensed she’d stepped over a line. It was also clear that Shae fully believed Zoey would have her killed and dumped into the river if she persisted. In the course of the conversation, Shae had edged back toward the doors by a couple of steps.

  “Okay, okay,” said Shae. “I believe you. Still, I don’t want your money. I don’t want it to turn into a thing at tax time, or if I could get in trouble for accepting illegal income…”

  “First, it’s not illegal. These are legitimate businesses with thousands and thousands of people on the payroll all around the world, it’s all getting filed with the IRS, it’s all aboveboard. Second, and this is the important part, we’re not doing this as charity. If you stay in the city, you’re going to bump into that guy, Tilley, at some point and who knows what he’s going to do. Plus all the weirdos who were cheering him on out there, maybe they wouldn’t do anything and maybe they would, but, you know, why tempt fate? We can even provide security staff, just for peace of mind. And these doubts you’re having, they’re the same ones I felt last year! But in the end, hey, the money is going to go to somebody, so why not you?”

  “If I take it, can you promise that I’ll never see any of you again? That scary guy isn’t going to show up at my door?”

  “You mean Will? Ha, yeah, I’ll make sure you never have to see him. And he’s not that scary once you get to know him.”

  “He’s terrifying. And if you don’t see that…” Shae abandoned the sentence, apparently sensing that it was heading toward dangerous territory. “Anyway, can I go? Please?”

  “Of course, you’re not a prisoner. Door’s unlocked. One of my people will drive you—”

  “No, I’ve called for a ride already. Thank you.”

  “Are you sure? We can—”

  Shae was already pulling the door open. She slipped through and Zoey heard brisk, nervous footsteps fade into the night.

  5

  Zoey was still agitated from her conversation with Shae when she crawled into bed a few hours later. As she tossed and turned, she thought about a sign on the wall of her old workplace, posted back by the coats and Department of Labor notices. It was a supposedly motivational quote that said:

  [A] flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

  KURT VONNEGUT

  The manager had hung it there because she was always complaining about the staff not cleaning the espresso machines properly and it was probably the only “inspirational” poster she could find that seemed to be scolding people for not taking care of equipment. But Zoey thought about that quote constantly, especially in light of the turn her life had taken in the last couple of years. When you get sick of what’s in front of you, yeah, fixing it is never as appealing as just walking away and starting fresh. It’s the reason the landfills are choked with stuff that could easily be repaired and it’s the reason action movies are always about killing psychopaths instead of helping them get better mental health meds. It’s the reason Zoey’s supposed soulmate, Caleb, had decided to just go find a girl with better genes and it’s the reason, according to Will, that the city of Tabula Ra$a exists.

  Mankind, he had told her, had spent much of the twentieth century dreaming of colonizing the stars (why fix civilization when you can just run away and build a brand-new one?), but by the 1980s or so everyone had soured on the idea. Colonizing Mars, everyone eventually realized, would be unbelievably difficult and the only reward for interplanetary trailblazers would be that they’d have to live on goddamned Mars. By the early 2020s, a new and better idea started to take hold among the ultra-wealthy and powerful: just recolonize the earth instead. Go find some sparsely populated area with a weak or disinterested government and just start building a brand-new city that would function under its own rules. Everything could be fresh, new, and efficient, free of the baggage and stagnation that was weighing down the rest of the modern world. And really, what’s the worst that could happen, other than the new city descending into a dystopian hell of poverty, terror, and bloodshed?

  These ludicrously expensive social experiments were often called “charter cities” and soon, every obscenely wealthy and/or powerful clique wanted one to call their own. Scientologists started one in Taiwan, some famous Communists did the same in Northern California, and a bunch of Libertarian tech billionaires were, at the moment, building a floating island nation off the coast of French Polynesia. Tabula Ra$a, by far the most successful and well known of the bunch, had been planted in southwestern Utah by a cabal of flamboyant criminals, apparently over a petty grudge.

  Spearheading the project had been Arthur Livingston, Zoey’s biological father, a self-made crime kingpin. And here, “self-made” means he gave himself a fake, WASP-sounding name to conceal his connections to his own wealthy Armenian gangster father. Arthur’s group had been run out of Las Vegas and, mostly out of spite, planted their flag in a spot positioned to siphon away Sin City’s most profitable tourists and whales. The founders played up the new city’s lawlessness, Arthur doing media appearances telling potential residents and developers alike to stay away if they couldn’t handle it. “Tabula Rasa,” he’d say while grinning and stabbing a finger at the camera, “is not for pussies. If you’re not man enough, well, there’s a loser’s train to Vegas that leaves every hour.” People couldn’t move there fast enough.

  Zoey stared at the ceiling. She really wanted to roll over, but Stench Machine was sleeping in the hammock formed by the blanket between her legs and disturbing him was, of course, unthinkable.

  She didn’t ask Will much about Arthur’s early years; when she did what she got back were anecdotes that everyone at the table thought were hilarious but that Zoey found sickening. She knew that several years after Arthur got Zoey’s mother pregnant, North Korea fell into civil war (the two events are thought to be unrelated). Arthur then used the war as cover for a human trafficking scheme that blatantly violated the laws of the DPRK, the United States, and common human decency. In the process, he encountered Will Blackwater, Budd Billingsley, and Andre Knox, who were doing equally illegal off-the-books PSYOPS work on behalf of the US government. Once back in the States, Arthur recruited all three to ill-defined roles in his organization that would take advantage
of their unique training. Arthur had apparently once confided to Will that if one possessed the skill to craft sufficiently elaborate and convincing lies, then no other skills were really necessary.

  Yet, over the next fifteen years, Arthur apparently began to have some minor regrets about the fact that his business practices had caused untold human suffering across several continents. He joined a church, started charities that actually gave money away instead of just laundering it, and grew an elaborate mustache (that last one may seem unrelated, but he saw it as a crucial part of his personal rebranding). This attempt to go legit, unfortunately, steered Arthur into unfamiliar waters he was ill-equipped to navigate. His enemies closed in, now possessing the power to make bricks shatter like glass and steel melt like wax. Thus, the man whose high school class would have voted him Most Likely to Leave a Giant Smoking Crater When He Dies had such an award or his high school actually existed, did exactly that.

  It was only after his murder that it was discovered he had left his entire empire to a daughter he’d only spoken to once in his entire life. Arthur had not discussed this decision with anyone and, predictably, chaos ensued. On several occasions Zoey nearly joined Arthur in that part of the afterlife reserved for people who die particularly weird and gruesome deaths. But she made it through, much to everyone’s surprise, and that’s how in the autumn of the following year Zoey wound up standing in her foyer trying desperately to explain herself to Shae LaVergne and probably doing a terrible job of it. Why had she stayed there, sleeping in the same home as her infamous father and doing a job with duties so alarmingly vague and varied that the news usually just referred to her as an “heiress”?

  The real reason was one that she rarely articulated even to herself, because it was probably the same reason Arthur had left the business to her in the first place: sometimes, the story of your life gets so jumbled and messy that you just want to erase it completely. Like some kind of a, you know, clean slate.

  Stench Machine found a better spot at the corner of the bed and Zoey rolled over, finally feeling herself drifting off. She thought that she’d dream of superpowered nerds smashing into her room and twisting her head off. Instead, she plunged immediately into the nightmare she’d had a hundred times since moving to the city. She was back in Fort Drayton, Colorado, late for her shift at Java Lodge. She was trying to start her old car and it was giving her that Battery Discharge error and she’d already been told if she was late one more time that she’d be fired and Cassie was managing and Zoey knew she wouldn’t cover for her and she kept hitting the start button over and over and she was crying as she watched the time tick down on the dashboard clock and—

  Zoey jolted herself awake. She rolled over and the last thought she had before drifting off again was that she’d rather die than go back there, to that place she was in her life less than one year ago.

  Literally, rather die.

  THIRTY

  DAYS

  LATER

  6

  Less than a year after promising to do only good with the fortune she’d inherited, Zoey Ashe had spent $4,500 on a Halloween tree for the foyer of her embarrassingly large mansion. In her defense, she thought she had actually done quite a bit of good with the money in the last ten months or so, and the tree provided easily $10,000 worth of holiday spirit. So if anything, she had saved $5,500. It looked like a fir tree that had gotten charred in a forest fire and was covered in little mechanical skeletons that climbed around the branches. Holographic ghosts swirled and moaned all around it, programmed to occasionally shriek and lash out with ghostly hands when sensors detected someone walking too close. The kids would love it at the Halloween party. Yeah, that’s who it was for. The kids.

  Zoey was in a business-y gray skirt and blazer, having just returned from a brutal day of meetings with people asking her for money or permission to do things she didn’t fully understand, trying to appear attentive while her shoes were slowly grinding her toe bones to powder. She wanted out of these clothes before her soul asphyxiated.

  She encountered Carlton, the ancient butler, at the foot of the twin staircase in the foyer and said, “I wish this house had a machine that would make my bra go flying off the moment I walked in the door.”

  “If such a device existed, Ms. Ashe, I’m certain your father would have had one installed long before you moved in. A package arrived at the gates this afternoon. It is marked for your urgent attention. It is currently at the guardhouse.”

  “Well, I think I’m out of attention for today.”

  “Understood, but I must make it clear that it is rather large, the size of a steamer trunk. It also appears to be armored and, in place of recipient information on the invoice, there is only a bloody handprint.”

  Zoey was not as alarmed by this as you’d assume.

  “Thank you, Carlton. Considering there’s a ninety-nine percent chance it’s a box of cow turds or something from my ‘fans,’ I’m thinking Wu can open it tomorrow. Or, you know, never.”

  Zoey’s hate mail was both plentiful and elaborate. The latest thing was to rig packages with cameras to try to stream her shocked/dismayed expression when she opened them, as if she was dumb enough to even open anonymous mail. The only reason Wu examined such parcels at all was to decide if they represented a genuine threat. If someone tried to mail a bomb, that package needed to be traced and the sender paid a visit. But otherwise, Zoey knew the harassers’ game—guys like that weren’t exactly an exotic species. She knew that her attention was their prize, that the idea was to occupy her mind, rob her of peace, to tie her in knots so that she couldn’t live her life. Granted, it had taken a nervous breakdown and two weeks in a very fancy mental health facility over the summer for her to learn that lesson.

  The trolls couldn’t be ignored, her therapist had said, but they could be contained in her mind, locked in a little room until she chose to address them. For example: this scary package, which was undoubtedly from some bored sadists who’d adopted her torment as their hobby, was intended to ruin her Friday night and hopefully her whole Halloween weekend.

  Carlton said, “I would suggest Wu give it a look sooner rather than later, the scan at the gate revealed no presence of known explosives, toxins, or remote detonation mechanisms. But this being Tabula Rasa, I believe the key word there is ‘known.’”

  “Sure, when he gets back from parking the car let him know to do that and to dispose of whatever’s in there and never speak of it.”

  Zoey laboriously made her way up the stairs. She was going to submerge herself in her brand-new bathtub, one designed with an amazing set of incredibly precise pulsing jets. Her fling with that tub had actually been one of the most satisfying intimate relationships of her adult life. Zoey told the bath to start while she was still walking down the hall and left a trail of clothing outside her bedroom.

  She was still soaking a half hour later, promising herself she wouldn’t watch any street streams tonight. Tabula Ra$a was a hotbed for that genre, commentators narrating live Blink feeds of gunfights and Mob hits, riffing on the action and keeping score of which side held which territory. The feeds had first taken off in cities like Juarez, Jakarta, and Miami, but none of those cities had deviants who could pick up a car and chuck it into an oncoming train. If you liked watching real-time chaos, there really was no competition. It was an odd thing to take pride in, but the locals definitely did.

  Zoey’s phone chimed and a holographic text message hovered above it, Wu telling her he’d scanned the box and that it was important, to get back to him right away. Stench Machine, who was terrified of holograms, jumped up onto the toilet and hissed.

  Zoey ignored the message.

  She instead turned her attention to the monitor above the tub, which was still paused on the video she’d been watching (a haughty heiress in a marble mansion and her filthy, wiry, olive-skinned gardener) and brought up a street stream called Blastphalt, hosted by a quick-talking guy named Charlie Chopra. He was bald, with a two-foot-l
ong beard twisted into elaborate braids. He was walking the streets, talking into his Gadfly, the little bobbing drone recording his face.

  “So I know what you’re asking, you’re asking, ‘Charlie Chopra, you golden beacon to mankind, why does a routine stickup make this week’s Worst Ten List? Did you actually have less than ten crimes this week, and try to fudge some boring ones in?’ Oh ye of little faith, grant me your attention for just one minute more and ye shall be rewarded. So this one occurred Monday night. Our degenerate approaches the old dude running the Human Bodega—you’ve seen him walking the sidewalks downtown, got the power assist rig with the display box strapped to the back, full of sodas and churros and, oh yeah, plenty of narcotics. And the degenerate’s got some kinda plasma pulse zapper implanted in his palm and intends to burn Bodega’s old-ass face off and then cut his way into the case. And we all know he’s not there for the sodas.

  “So the degenerate goes to fire his zapper and, as so often happens with those implants, it overloads, vaporizing his hand and most of his forearm in a flash, as if the Goddess of Justice herself had summoned a bolt of lightning and declared, ‘Enough! This limb shall sin no more!’ Then the little battery pack implanted next to the guy’s degenerate spine catches fire and those tiny capacitors have got so much juice that once they start burning, they can’t be stopped. My friends, that man’s torso is still burning, five days later. They’ve got him in a special ward at the hospital and if you listen close, you can still hear his screams carried by the night wind. Though I’m sure that through it all, he is still beaming with pride that he has made number two on our Worst Ten List, certain that a mention by the great Charlie Chopra made it all worth it.”