by A K Blake
Luca zoomed in again on the screenshot, searching for something significant he might have missed. There was nothing. When he zoomed back out, he saw that the message itself was brief.
I’d be more careful about my search history if I were you. More eyes than mine are watching.
It wasn’t much help. More eyes than mine. But who was “me”? Luca checked the sender again. It was from a temporary account. When he loaded a reply, an automatic alert notified him that the message would fail if sent, as the account no longer existed.
Frustrated, trying to ignore the fear that had begun to build at the sight of the vague warning, Luca threw his spore across the bed, where it bounced to safety in a way that was wholly unsatisfying. He could hardly stand it, to be so close and still so in the dark. Luca felt rage begin to build toward the unknown sender. Who did they think they were? If they weren't going to be helpful, why bother contacting him at all? He wasn’t in the mood for cryptic messages tonight.
Groaning, Luca put his head in his hands. His clothes felt dirty and limp, too small in the armpits and rubbing in all the wrong places. It was too hot. Had he turned up the heater too high? He fell back full length against the bed, stretching his arms over his head as far as they would go. What was wrong with him? Remembering Mykal's message, he was overcome by the need to get as high as possible as quickly as he could.
Sounds great, man. Where should we meet? Also I don’t have any stuff, just a heads up.
He stared at his spore for several minutes, but when Mykal did not immediately respond he gave up and headed to the bathroom. He had intended to shower, but this suddenly seemed like an immense amount of work. Instead Luca leaned heavily on his shoulders with his arms on the sides of the sink and stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes looked feverishly bright, and his hair was greasy and in his face. It was like looking at a stranger who was vaguely related to him. He needed a change.
Throwing open the single cabinet under his sink, Luca scrabbled around until he found what he was looking for. He plugged in the electronic shears and turned them on, the vibration somehow soothing in his hand, a sort of numbing effect. He stared at the humming blades. Taking a deep breath, he shook his head once and then ran the shears through a patch of hair. The result was ugly, like a gaping hole after a forest fire, translucent skin showing through patches of dirty blond bristle. He needed it all gone. He needed it all gone right now.
***
Mykal responded just as Luca was touching up the last bits. He turned off the razor and looked again. His head looked strange without hair. He had never seen himself like this. Luca had always thought his eyes were too pale, washed-out looking. But without anything blocking them, the color looked almost on purpose. His eyebrows could have been more symmetrical, but at least his ears didn’t stick out like an elephant’s.
No worries, I got you. Heading to your place. Message me if ARGAS isn’t up to date on your address.
ARGAS was, unfortunately at this moment, up to date. Luca had no idea how far away Mykal was, but his apartment was a disaster. There was now hair all over his bathroom, which hadn’t been cleaned in a few months before that. There were dirty dishes cluttering the tiny galley kitchen, and everything smelled. He threw the cleanest of the dishes in the dishwasher and just dumped the worse off ones into a trash bag that he tied very tightly and hid in a cabinet. He swept up the hair and sprayed some air freshener before throwing himself into the shower.
This, however, was where his energy once again ran dry. Luca stood underneath the water, hands pressed against the cool surface of the wall under the spigot. He noticed without comment the strange feel of the dripping on his bare scalp. The water felt good against his closed eyes. He breathed in and out, the water flowing past his mouth disrupted each time, like a waterfall over a whistling cave. Luca thought about nothing as hard as he could.
***
Mykal knocked on the door what felt like hours later. He answered in a towel.
“Luca? Wow, you look...different. Looking good, I like the haircut.”
“Oh, thanks. I actually did it myself. Just...just now.”
“Seriously? Just now? Well...cool. Have you been working out?”
“No, I work at the arena now. It’s pretty...physical.”
“Not bad, not bad at all.”
Mykal came in and slouched gracefully into Luca’s only comfortable chair, dwarfing it with his large frame. Luca appreciated the view as Mykal set his backpack down, his biceps thick beneath the orbs of his shoulders.
“All I had was matra, so I hope that’s what you’re in the mood for.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever. Works for me.”
“Cool.”
Luca threw on his last clean shirt and a pair of pants before falling into the folding chair opposite Mykal. He looked around the room, scanning for anything glaring or embarrassing he had missed.
“What have you been up to since what’s his ass fired you?”
“Not a whole lot, just work.”
“That’s pretty cool you work at the colosseum. So you get discounts and free tickets and stuff?”
“Yeah, uh, I think so. I haven’t really asked about it that much, since I’m so new.”
“Well, you know what you should do if you get free tickets?”
“What?”
“Take me sometime.”
Mykal winked, and Luca’s stomach twisted in a way that was both painful and pleasant. He found himself nodding.
Mykal had removed several of what looked like powdery blue clumps of chalk from a pouch in his backpack, along with a clear plastic object like a telescope with a crystal ball on the end.
“Damn, it’s dry.”
He flashed to the sink and back so quickly Luca hardly registered it. Growing up as the help, he was used to vampire ways. But still, there was always a slight freezing moment, like one’s stomach dropping out, a subtle reminder of just who would win if it came to a fight. Not that Mykal would need his vampire strength to beat Luca. Even if he were human, he looked like he could snap him like a twig. To think what else he could do with that kind of stamina, with those hands like gladiator mitts...
Mykal dumped the matra balls into the crystal ball section of the bong, which was now half full of water, and flipped on the circular heater at the base of it. The clusters began to expand, squishing up against the sides like little blue sponges. Mykal put his mouth over the end of the telescope and breathed in a few short breaths. He held them in for a few seconds before slowing letting them out. Vapor obscured his face.
“Ah yeah, this is a good batch.”
He turned the tube end toward Luca.
Luca had smoked before, though not often. There were always a few kids at the young people’s home he had stayed in that smoked on the back deck when they thought the adults weren’t looking. They were, actually, they just didn’t care. Most of them smoked too.
He’d never particularly liked the high, but he enjoyed the ritual of it. He liked the feel of the smooth, cool sphere against his fingertips and the weight of it in his palm. He liked the soft click of the heater button when it was depressed and the accompanying whoosh of air that spurted into the bowl, generating bubbles that pressed up between the matra clumps like miniature clouds.
Luca put his mouth over the rim and breathed in. The air was warm lower in the bowl, but by the time it reached the top of the bong, it had cooled and thinned. It tasted earthy, of grass and dirt and bit like coal, with a slightly sweet aftertaste. He closed his eyes, holding it in until he thought his lungs would burst before breathing it out all at once. He immediately started coughing, as he held the bong out to Mykal.
“Take it easy. We’ve got all night, you don’t want to burn out too early.”
Luca nodded, eyes closed. Taking a deep breath and expelling it all at once, he forced his eyes open and tried to make his expression normal.
“Yeah, sorry. Rough night at work.”
“I hear you. I quit th
at casino place after you got fired. I’m just kind of bumming around at a friend’s now, sort of on the hunt for another job.”
Luca jerked upright, a bit of an overreaction. The movement left tracers across his vision, lines of dark and light from objects that should have stayed put.
“Wait, you left Vitrondeilli’s? Dieda, Drelen must have had an aneurysm.”
“Yeah, you should’ve seen it. His eyes were bugging out. He was like, ‘How am I supposed to find two fry cooks in the next hour?’ and I was like, ‘Then I guess you shouldn’t have fired Luca, you dumb shit.’ It was hilarious.”
Luca laughed, a bit harder than made sense. Mykal smiled, and when he did Luca found there was something hollowing about the honey brown of his eyes and the angle of his cheeks, a sweet sharpness in the broad expanse of his chest. Someone should paint him, Luca thought.
“Then he put Tardin on the grill for like five minutes. That dude literally burned every piece of meat on there before I could even get out the door.”
Luca burst into another fit of laughter. Then he cackled. Before he knew it, he was in the fetal position on the floor, gasping for breath, his smile so wide it practically split his skull in half. He looked over, and Mykal was halfway off his chair, one knee on the ground, laughing too.
Luca gradually slowed, his breathing evening out, despite the stupid grin still stuck on his face. He uncurled, stretching his torso out along the ground. It felt nice to lay flat, to feel the individual grains of carpet, rough against the fabric of his shirt. He stared at the imperfections in the ceiling plaster intently, as if they were stars.
Presently Mykal's face appeared among them, looming like the moon. Mykal looked at him with those sugary eyes, beautiful eyes like black holes. Luca lifted his hand wonderingly, in no hurry, and gently traced the contours of his face, feeling the rough sandpaper of his stubble. His fingertips made a soft shushing noise as he traced him, moving down along his cheekbones, across his lips. Luca felt want suffuse him, his whole body throbbing like a bruise.
After a moment he leaned upward on his elbow, and Mykal met him halfway. They hovered together, the air tangy like hot metal, their bodies humming, vibrating a million times a minute. The room breathed with them. The walls were sweating, salty and porous.
Mykal leaned a little closer, until their lips were touching. Softly, probing, Luca pursed his lips. Mykal pursed back. And then they were kissing, feeling each other, drinking each other. Luca leaned back, and Mykal came with him, pressing up against him, suddenly furious to close the space between them. He was hot, his skin like hearth bricks where they touched. Luca wrapped his arms around him, drawing him down, wanting more skin against his body, melting into him. Luca thrummed with need. Maybe it would never stop.
***
Luca woke up with a hammer through his skull. At least, that’s what it felt like. He tried to move and immediately regretted it, so instead he lied still and made a mental note of the current state of his parts. Other than the headache, his back felt sore, and his mouth was dry, like it was full of sand. His right arm was not in the most comfortable position, but, on the bright side, this was because it was pinned beneath Mykal.
Luca could hardly believe he was still there. He had slept with a few people before, but always strangers and only on days he barely remembered. He’d certainly never slept with a vampire. It was different. There was never that moment of uncertainty. Everything was smooth and quick, assured...he had a sudden panicked feeling. What if he’d been a bad lay to a vampire, too slow and weak to really get the job done?
Reacting perhaps to the increasingly rapid beating of his heart, Mykal's eyes blearily opened. Seeing Luca, he smiled and rolled over, pulling Luca’s free arm around him, so that they lay curled together. He was warm, like being wrapped inside an incubator. Luca’s racing heartbeats began to calm.
“Are you hungry? I can run and grab us something.”
“Nah, I’m fine for now.”
“Ok.”
But as good as it was to feel the warm, broad expanse of Mykal's back against his chest, Luca was anxious. He needed to be moving, getting something done. He needed to keep the thoughts the drugs had helped him forget the night before at bay.
“I’m just gonna run down and grab us some vis then.”
“Mm.”
***
By the time he got back, Mykal was fully awake, sitting up with his back against the wall and the sheets curled around him. Luca couldn’t help admiring the orbs of his shoulders, the flat planes of his abdomen. Beneath the elegant swoop of his collarbones, subdermal implants twined in leaf shapes, reminiscent of ivy. They lent him an ethereal delicateness Luca would not have expected. He was beautiful. And he was using Luca’s spore.
“Luca, what’s this stuff with these symbols? Don’t tell me you’re one of those conspiracy theory nuts. Dieda take it, do you believe we all came from aliens?”
The calm Luca had so carefully begun to culvate was immediately wiped away. Mykal must have seen the message from the anonymous sender. He didn’t know what would happen if someone found his sphere, but he was quite sure he didn’t want to. Quickly thinking through his options, he decided the best route was to play dumb.
“What are you talking about? Also, why are you using my spore?”
“I was just checking the score of the last gladiator games, relax. But it was already open to this message about that deadwire thing that happened where everybody thought the world was gonna end.”
“Deadwire thing?”
“Yeah, you don’t remember that? Somebody posted a bunch of weird symbols and claimed they were deadwire programming language or something and threatened to release all the rest unless some laws about GroundCom and GenCom got changed. Their demands were really technical and boring. Nobody really cared about them, except that everyone was sure the rest of the symbols were going to get out, and then all the blood dispensers and ARGAS machines and everything would get hacked.
“It was pandemonium until they caught the guy. Typical government shady shit, though, they wouldn’t say who it was...I can’t believe you don’t remember that. It was only...I guess it’s been like ten years or something?”
Luca’s heart pounded. There was a rushing sound in his ears, and he couldn’t focus. Ten years, that seemed right.
He heard himself say, “I was just a kid, I guess I didn’t understand.”
“Oh, right, I forget you’re so young. Damn, I must be like a million times older than you. Cradle robber over here…”
Luca forced a laugh. “Well that sounds...crazy. I don’t know, I just saw that last night. I guess it’s one of those weird spam messages.”
“Ugh, I hate spam. I’ll delete it for you.”
Luca’s heart sank, but he knew he could recover it later. Not all things had only one life.
“Well here’s your vis. There’s chili and choco packets, I wasn’t sure how you liked it.”
“Thanks.”
Mykal was already back to looking at Luca’s spore and simply waved his hand toward the table to indicate that Luca should set the vis down there. Luca felt a flash of annoyance. He waited, but Mykal didn’t seem to be finishing with his spore any time soon.
“You reading anything good on there? You know, you can use my charging beam if you your spore is out of juice…”
“Nah, that’s alright. Just checking on the payouts from the games.” Mykal swiped through a few more screens before closing out and setting down the spore with an air of finality. “Not bad, not bad at all. I could even take us to lunch. Disosati’s?”
Disosati’s was a middling restaurant chain, popular for their inexpensive brunch buffet.
“Sounds great, let me grab my stuff.”
***
The first thing Luca did upon returning home was swipe open his spore and move the mysterious message back to his inbox. He’d been anxious all through lunch, torturing himself with thoughts that it had somehow been permanently erased in
the last hour and wanting to take a closer look at what the strange sender had wanted him to see.
He’d thought about trying to pump Mykal for more information, but he wasn’t confident in his ability to seem nonchalant, particularly because the mood of their date had been somewhat strained. Luca didn’t know how to act after sleeping together. He had no experience with this kind of situation, since most of the other men had left practically without saying goodbye. The way Mykal was acting, it was almost as if he’d already forgotten anything happened. He must have remembered on some level, though, because he surprised Luca with a hard, deep kiss when they said goodbye.
“I’ll message you later.”
He felt a rush of endorphins. Watching Mykal walk away, his messy hair ruffled by the wind, shirt tight across his back, left Luca with a familiar ache in his gut and a buzzing sensation that stayed on his lips until long after he was gone.
This lasted through getting back to his apartment, but now, as he sat on the edge of his bed, half dressed, all he could think about was the sphere. He tried the link again but only confirmed the page would not load. Why send it at all if the link didn’t work? Perhaps it had been shut down between when the message had been sent and received. If that were true, who had shut it down, and did they know who it had been meant for?
There was a pain in his chest that wouldn’t go away. It had started when Mykal mentioned deadwire, and it had only gotten worse. What if the government was already watching him? Luca wasn’t familiar will the specifics of the laws related to GroundCom, but he was fairly certain now that his master had gone to jail for releasing only a few symbols. What then would happen to him if he had the complete set? How long did he have before he wound up on the inside of the arena instead of cleaning up outside of it?
This was all senseless worrying, though, since the screenshot could easily be a hoax, or it could still be unrelated. He hadn’t recognized any of the symbols in the message off-hand, and he hadn’t actually checked that they were a match, so it was entirely possible that they were not among any of the thousand characters generated by the spore.